"You can't call it rudderless."

"What?" Max turned away from the press release he was editing and stared at Claire, his intern. "Suddenly you're a hot-shot editor? I was just calling you over to admire my work, not critique it," he grumbled good-naturedly.

She blushed slightly but stuck to her argument. "Spaceships don't even have rudders. They wouldn't do anything in space. It's - unpowered, I guess. Or 'on an unchanging trajectory'".

Max sighed theatrically. "Thirty years ago I would have crumpled up this press release and thrown it into the wastepaper basket, but now everything's digital I guess I'll have to quickly and easily make the minor edit you suggested."

She reached deftly over the mouse before he could finish and deleted the offended word with a couple of clicks. He shook his head. "You know your problem, Claire? You've got no poetry in your soul. No understanding for the way in which an abandoned spacecraft resembles a ghostship adrift on an empty sea."

Not far from where Max and Claire sat dreaming up ways of gently breaking to mankind that they were Not Alone, a far more senior group of scientists were poring over the latest scanning results of the ship - or, to employ the precise, fair-minded, let's-not-make-assumptions terminology they were scrupulously using, 'Anomalous Mass β-416".

As it came closer and closer to the Earth it came within the range of more and more sensors, some official, some not. Even amateurs had started to phone in with reports of an "asteroid".

Whatever it was, it had been coming for a while. A frantic review of the available materials revealed a bright smudge in a photo taken by a probe at the far edge of the solar system. Inconclusive, but from the way it had dodged Jupiter, deflector of asteroids, without changing its course, it was clear the trajectory was either very unlucky or somehow planned.