In the year 2175, the colonists of the Kuiper belt mounted a rebellion against the Central Directorate's leadership. They drew their ideals - and slogans - from an ancient rebellion that had occurred on Earth, not coincidentally, exactly 400 years prior. Under rallying cries of "no taxation without representation," the colonists rounded up all the resident officials from the Home Planets, stuffed them onto a System-class transport ship, and deported them back to the inner solar system with a swift kick in the rear and a message: take your trade embargoes and stuff them.

After that brazen and public display, war was inevitable. Even though all the colonists in the Kuiper belt combined barely numbered eighty thousand, they had the home-field advantage. Nobody understood the icy expanse of comets and planetoids that extended beyond Neptune better than its own inhabitants. Their warships were faster, lighter, and piloted by veteran captains who had pioneered the techniques of utilizing the comets' own gravitational fields to compliment the movement of their ships. When the Central Directorate's massive warships breached Kuiper space thirteen months after the initial act of rebellion, each ship carrying sixty thousand trained soldiers, the Kuiper force attacked immediately and without mercy, like wasps defending their hive.

The Kuiper Wars, as they later became known, were long, brutal, and costly. Books written about the war told of the corpses of fallen soldiers cast into space when their warships exploded, still floating out across the galaxy - mankind's first emissaries to distant stars.

In the wake of the conflict, humanity fractured by mutual agreement. For the first time in history, humans lived under the rule a governing body untethered to the Earth.

"And that's why we're here - because the human spirit dictates that we always distance ourselves from tyranny," Ra'am Aiden finished, scanning the room of grade-school children, some of whom were staring at him with open mouths. After a brief silence, one boy timidly raised his hand. Aiden nodded for him to speak.

"But sir," the boy said, "We've broken our allegiances with the Kuiper colonies, just as they broke free from the Central Directorate in your story. Why do we need to learn of their victories?"

Several of the children giggled, and the boy's face grew red. Aiden smiled reassuringly at the boy.

"You just asked the very question I'd hoped to raise here. Our home, Sita, is positioned beyond the outer rim of the Kuiper colonies, forty astronomical units from the nearest planet, Neptune. You all know what an astronomical unit is, I assume?"

"One astronomical unit is the distance from the Earth to the Sun." Every child in the room recited the answer in a droning monotone, word for word. They might as well have said, "Duh, we've known that since Prelim Grade, since we were practically babies."

Aiden nodded. "Sita is a completely self-sustaining habitat vessel, the type Kuiperians have dubbed a pirate colony. Out here, we have no contact with the Kuiper settlements. We are our own colony, filled with physicists, astronomers, farmers, technicians, and - most importantly - dreamers. On Sita, we are all the seeds of the future.

"Barely a century after the Kuiper Accords recognized their colonies as a free state, the new government fell prey to the same problems which had led to its emancipation from the Central Directorate. Fortunately, we didn't need to go to war to leave that corruption behind. We had Sita. All we had to do-"

"Sir."

Ra'am Aiden turned to see a young ensign, Oliver Haumea, standing in the open doorway to the classroom. He frowned at the interruption. He was only able to spare time for these personal lessons in the Coeus sector every few months, and he cherished the few short hours he got to spend with the schoolchildren.

"You're needed on the bridge, sir," Haumea said. He appeared nervous, and after a moment, Aiden realized that he wasn't nervous about interrupting the Admiral in the middle of a lesson. No...this was something else.

--

The bridge of the Sita was a frenzy of activity when Aiden arrived. He stood at the edge of the wide, domed room where dozens of technicians and astronomers were shouting at each other and waving papers covered in esoteric mathematical calculations. There were no viewports on the bridge, no windows to the outside void of space. Rather, the domed shell of the room could be transformed into any number of viewscreens, both two-dimensional and holo, to display whatever information was relevant at the time.

At the moment, the entire dome was dedicated to a three-dimensional projection of a smooth, silver, featureless sphere. The projected sphere was easily six meters in circumference and hung in the air over the center of the room, like a giant cue ball poised to drop on the heads of everyone there and crush them like insects.

A deep sense of portent, of coming doom, sank into the pit of Aiden's stomach as he looked at it, although he had no idea just what in the Martian hell he was even looking at.

Slowly, the room fell to a hush as the others noticed Admiral Ra'am Aiden's presence on the bridge.

"Okay," Aiden took a deep breath. "One at a time - what is this?"

The answers came in a flood.

"...no discernable energy signature..."

"...sensors didn't pick it up until a few minutes ago..."

"...clearly manmade..."

"...it was on top of us before we even knew..."

"...or at least made by something..."

Aiden held up a hand and the room again fell silent. "Have we sent a probe? Wait...you." Aiden pointed to the nearest person, a woman with dark-rimmed glasses. "You tell me," Aiden said, heading off another flood of answers.

The woman didn't hesitate. "Four probes are currently en route to the anomaly. Our onboard sensors detected its presence at 11:32, Kuiper Standard Time, at which point it was positioned six kilometers away from Sita's starboard edge. Sensor readings suggest the anomaly has a radius of one and a half kilometers...maybe. It's hard to tell. We..."

"Wait, wait a minute," Aiden stopped her. "Are you telling me a metal ball two kilometers wide just showed up on our doorstep, and we didn't even see it coming? We have this region mapped for three astronomical units in all directions, with active sensors constantly scanning. And you're telling me you didn't see this coming?"

"That's completely correct, sir." The woman seemed unruffled by Aiden's outburst. "Except for one thing. It's not metal."

Aiden studied the projection of the object. It was completely smooth, with a metallic sheen.

"Not metal..." he repeated. "What, then?"

"Some kind of fluid. We've already observed ice fragments impact the object."

"And?"

"...and they seem to be absorbed into it, somehow. We're still gathering data. Here - the probes are nearly there."

Everyone, Aiden included, craned their necks to look up at the massive projection above them. Four tiny, spiderlike robots floated slowly toward the sphere. Trailing behind each one was a digital readout of the data they collected. Well, tried to collect was a better way to put it. Radio waves, infrared, spectral analysis, even reflected light - all the sensor readings were at zero, except for one. Based on the analysis of the sphere's mass, it weighed roughly as much as the Sun. Impossible.

"Are those probes broken?" Aiden asked quietly.

"Four more are launching now to verify this, but to answer your question - no, they're in perfect working order."

"We shouldn't even be able to see it," Aiden said.

"We're still trying to figure that out," the woman replied.

The probes floated closer, until finally the lead probe rotated 90 degrees to attempt a landing. It dropped toward the silver sphere (gravity reading: zero), and touched down...and then sank into it. The sphere closed up around it without a ripple, and the probe was gone. Its incoming signal went dead.

"Jesus..." Aiden whispered. One by one, the remaining three probes did the same thing, until only the sphere remained.

--

Chairman Hirsham Stephanopoulos was sitting at his desk on the Kuiper capital world of 28978 Ixion when his assistant stepped into the room and quietly laid an envelope on his desk. Stephanopoulos sighed, ran a hand through his pearly white hair, and tore open the envelope.

The typed message inside was brief: Lost contact with pirate colony ship Varana at 3:40 KST. This is the third missing colony since Sita. Awaiting your thoughts on the matter. P.

Hirsham Stephanopoulos sighed again, then tossed the letter in the trash. He hefted his bulk out of the large ergonomic office chair and walked over to stand in front of the thick, triple-paned window. These pirate colonies always thought they could hide, but Intelligence always picked them up sooner or later. So they had some new cloaking technology. No matter, Stephanopoulos thought. Just another minor annoyance. Like that metallic sphere that had apparently shown up in the path of 28978 Ixion's orbit...

Just another minor annoyance.