At 03:17 in the morning, the ship changed its course.
Nobody touched the controls.
Captain Mercer was the first to notice it. He watched the thin green line on the navigation screen drift slowly away from the plotted trajectory, as if the ship had suddenly remembered a destination that no human being had entered into the computer.
“Autopilot,” he said.
The machine continued to hum.
Outside the observation port there was nothing but stars — cold, impossibly distant points scattered across the blackness.