"It looks like there's a Rogue planet heading for the Oort Cloud, it will likely be here in the next five years, judging by its speed," Biesty reported.
"Good, with a bit of luck dozens of us will be leaving. Anyway you might as well send the transmission back home to Earth, or Mars 2," Oswin sighed as she struggled walking; the gravity fields of the planetoid that had been quickly hollowed out and made habitable had never been truly stable, and so moving was like floating and walking at the same time. You got used to it, apparently but Oswin had always been a lover of the planet since you could walk across one. She didn't like floating around and breathing artificial air.
"Okay," Biesty replied as he made a note. It took time for the transmissions to be sent back to the inner system. The sooner it was sent, the better.
"How big is the planet, anyway?"
"It's four times the size of Earth, which means we can send off a large population. The sooner we get people out here, the sooner we can pack them off," Biesty answered.
Oswin frowned, unsure how she should feel about the way he said that. It was as if he were describing products and not people. "We've already got a large population out here," she reminded him. "Still, the bigger the population, the more successful it will be. This is the first time we've ever sighted and tracked a rogue planet heading our way."
"And it won't be the last, still we have never done this before, so we don't know what to do," Biesty pointed out.
"I know, but at least we'll be ready by the time the planet comes here. Watch the scanners, Mike, we might find another rogue planet coming our way," Oswin said.
"Right," he said.
Xxxxx
The news of the approaching rogue planet spread like wildfire throughout the asteroid field of the Oort Cloud. The population of the cloud had been growing more and more over the last few years, helped by the use of artificial wombs that people took genetic material to, and allowed them to be incubated for a year before a new child was born, but since more and more people came from Earth and Mars, the Martian moons, and the airship cities of Venus as they realised there was more to the solar system than what they knew.
The fact the Oort Cloud would be the first place any rogue planet would visit made it even more appealing to them. Many people wanted to settle on a planet without elaborate life-support systems to sustain them. And it wasn't just people; some of the ships brought them a massive collection of plants and animals from Earth, locked in suspended animation. Some of the collections were just trees, flowers, different forms of weeds, grasses, and so on, but some of the larger ships and space wheels carried kilometres worth of forests, jungles, and rainforests, and they had animals like the last elephants, tigers, whales, and dolphins in suspended animation. They were going to settle on the Rogue planet, no matter what.