J eron was very proud of the telescope his parents had given him two birthdays ago. In the time since then, he had mastered its use and added one accessory after another to the basic unit. He’d spent hours and days photographing the moons of Saturn and Jupiter, working his way out to those of Uranus and Neptune as well as distant nebulae and star clusters.

But this morning he was confused. The tiny section of night sky he had set his scope to automatically scan had come back with an anomaly. It was one of those distant areas of the solar system where nothing was supposed to exist. Which was precisely why he had been scanning it. Amateur astronomers tended to find the most interesting things where nothing was supposed to be, and thus where the professionals did not bother to look.

The sequence of photographs showed a mass of incredibly small objects where none ought to be. Furthermore, they appeared and disappeared over an all too brief series of sequential images. Present and gone, far too rapidly to be wandering asteroids, or cometary fragments, or anything else for which he could think of a reasonable, rational explanation. Despite checking and rechecking his scope and its attendant devices and finding them in perfect working order, he knew that the objects’ appearance had to be the result of a functional irregularity. Had to be, because they could not be anything else. He could just see himself forwarding and reporting to one of the professional organizations that vetted the thousands of reports turned in by dedicated amateurs such as himself a sighting of a tightly packed cluster of baffling, inexplicable objects located somewhere in the vicinity of Neptune’s giant moon Triton.

Especially when the number of them totaled thirteen.