It had left a trail of fire as it passed into earth’s atmosphere. Anyone that happened to be looking up at that exact moment would have assumed it was a meteor passing through the atmosphere, a shooting star.

The object had travelled many miles to get here. It was one of thousands - perhaps tens of thousands - of similar objects launched into this solar system. Many of the objects would pass harmlessly by, never encountering even the slightest gravitational field that would pull it towards one of the eight planets circling an otherwise insignificant sun. Others would smash into hunks of ice speeding through the vast emptiness of space, disintegrating on impact, never to fulfil its purpose. Others yet would find one of those eight planets and discover that with no life, their purpose could still not be fu...