There would be no energy wasted during the long trip. None for moving. None for thinking. None for feeling. The course was set. Nothing else mattered.
Vast blackness extended at a mind-boggling scale in every direction. A profound emptiness interrupted only by sparse suspended points of light. They were too distant and silent to be anything but cold company. It was enough to make even the greatest of beings lonely. No matter.
Stray stellar winds prickled the skin between stretches of true vacuum. A pulsar winked its eye tauntingly over and over. The endless field of sparkling stars crawled by in parallax as they were traversed at relativistic speeds. No matter.
To the right, a towering violet nebula unfurled like a soft cloudy flower taking a hundred million years to blossom. Newly born stars clung to its petals like shining dewdrops. Some of of them would someday have worlds. Some of those worlds would be... no matter.
So it went. How long had this drifting lasted? Hours? Days? Weeks? They were nothing next to the millenia of waiting that had preceded them. But then, just as it was starting to seem like it would never come, it did. The Solar system was in view. That mattered.
The third planet, blue and rocky, was unmistakably Earth. Yet there was nothing on it but small structures; nothing around it but gently swirling white clouds and tiny, flimsy communication satellites. Somehow, it had no planetary or orbital defenses. That mattered.
There was a pair of continents in one hemisphere connected by a thin strand of land near the planet's equator. About halfway toward a pole, on one of the coasts, there was a faint scent.
It smelled like Gems. That matt-