Tor made a face that suggested it was a problem that had been bothering him too. “Maybe it’s standardized equipment,” he said. “Maybe it’s the basic model.”
Herman stood up and leaned against a bulkhead. “Why leave anything here at all?” he asked. “I mean, why would anybody even be interested in this thing?”
“Why were we interested?” asked Pete. “It’s a neutron star. It has some fascinating characteristics.”
“But there are a lot of neutron stars. Why this one?”
“You have to pick one,” said Pete. “Maybe this happens to be it.”
“Or…?” asked George, inviting him to continue.
“It does have a unique quality.” He turned toward Hutch. “Could we get a look off to the port side, please?”
Hutch arranged the picture until he had what he wanted.
“See the red star?” It was dim and quite ordinary. “I don’t recall its catalog number, but it’s a red giant, fourteen known planets. Eleven-oh-seven is headed in its direction. Eventually, it’s going to scramble the system.”
“When’s that going to happen?” asked Hutch.
“Seventeen thousand years.” Pete said it with a straight face. “Give or take.”
“Well,” said Herman, “that’s going to be a long wait for somebody, isn’t it?”
Bill announced another transmission from the Condor and put it up. “Ladies and gentlemen,” said Preach, looking out at them with a puzzled smile, “we’ve found a satellite. We are pulling alongside it as I speak, and will begin taking it on board within the next few minutes. I’ll keep you informed.” A picture of the object replaced the Preacher. It was floating just outside the Condor’s cargo bay doors. It was diamond-shaped, with two dish antennas perhaps four times the size of the core unit. The surface of both the core and the dishes was cut in myriad odd angles. And it had a set of thrusters. Everything was protected by a mirrorlike coating that made the object quite hard to see. “You’ll notice,” he said, “it’s stealth rather than lightbender technology. Plus smart camouflage. The surface is completely covered with sensors and display units. They’re set up so that light falling on a sensor on one side is reproduced in a display directly opposite. We don’t figure the resolution would be very good, but up here, who’s going to notice? The point is that, unless you’re right on top of it, you won’t see it.”
Hutch had never seen anything like it before.
“We experimented with some of this stuff back in the twenty-first century,” Preach said. “The photodetectors are only a centimeter or so in diameter, and the light emitters are maybe ten times that size.”
Hutch asked about the energy source. They had snacks while they waited for the answer to come back.
“We haven’t been able to figure that out, Hutch,” Preacher replied. “It doesn’t seem to have one. But then, we don’t have experts on this kind of thing.”
THEY WATCHED WHILE Preach went out with a go-pack, removed the dishes, and brought them inside. That done, the satellite would fit through the cargo doors. The Condor’s AI fine-tuned the ship’s alignment, turned off the artificial gravity, then fired the thrusters. Hutch and the Memphis team watched the satellite drift slowly into the cargo bay.
Now they were getting close-up pictures. Preacher stayed out of the way as the contact team began removing the mirror coating, then started laying bare the black boxes and turning shafts and fittings of the unit. There were several lines of unfamiliar symbols along the stem.
Hutch could see that her passengers were still torn, delighted that a breakthrough had finally occurred, dejected that they had gotten on the wrong flight.
The team members took turns holding up parts for the imager. Harry Brubaker, using the comic deadpan that had made him famous, showed them a connecting cable; Tom Isako had a black box that did heaven knew what; J. J. Parker, a board member on several major retail corporations, showed them a long silver rod.
The bishop had a pair of sensors, and Janey Hoskin, the cosmetic queen, produced a basketball-sized sphere that housed three scopes. She was laughing and wearing a party hat. A tall, grinning male whose name Hutch did not know was waiting his turn when the screen went dark.
There was an impatient rustling behind Hutch.
“Interrupted at the source,” said Bill.
“Would happen now,” said Alyx.
George laughed. “They’re drinking too much. Somebody probably walked into the—”
It came back on, momentarily. But it was a scene of panic, people stumbling about, lights flickering, someone screaming.
The Memphis people murmured, grew still. Grew frightened.
Then it was gone again.
“Hutch?” Pete’s voice, thick with emotion. “What’s going on?”
“Don’t know.”
The screen stayed dark.
“No signal,” said Bill.
“Plot a course,” she said.
Chapter 9
There are not ten people in the world whose deaths would spoil my dinner, but there are one or two whose deaths would break my heart.
LETTER TO HANNAH M. MACAULAY,
JULY 31, 1833
MASS DETECTORS WEREN’T entirely reliable, and while they might warn a ship that it was about to materialize inside, say, a planet, there was no guarantee. The jump back to sublight always included a degree of breathlessness.
Consequently, superluminals were more likely, and indeed were required by law, to materialize in deep space. Earthbound ships made their jumps out beyond Mars’s orbit, and then spent the better part of several days coasting in.
Hutch could afford no such luxury if she were to arrive in the Condor’s vicinity in a timely manner. She drew a circle with a half-million-kilometer radius around the double planet and directed Bill to aim for the arc.
The odds against catastrophe were so heavily in her favor that she didn’t tell her passengers what she was doing. She used the neutron star to gain acceleration more quickly than she would otherwise have been able to do, and the Memphis therefore made the jump into hyperspace less than forty minutes after Preach’s call for help.
Throughout all this the Condor remained silent.
When she had sent off a message to Outpost, and assured herself no one was closer than the Memphis, she retired to her quarters. They were by then into the early-morning hours. She climbed out of her jumpsuit, got into bed, and killed the lights. But she lay awake staring into the dark, seeing Preach’s face.
Accidents were rare among the superluminals. There’d been a couple of instances of runaway engines and malfunctioning AI’s. That was thought to be the cause of the loss of the Venture, which had vanished into the sack, into hyperspace, at the dawn of the interstellar age. The Hanover had been wrecked when its warning systems had inexplicably failed to notice a rock in its path. There’d been a couple of others. But if one calculated the number of flights and distances traveled against mishaps, the possibility became vanishingly small.
Whatever the Condor’s problem, they had the lander available. It would be a bit crowded, but the lander would sustain them all for the couple of days she’d need to get to the scene.
They traveled through the night and into the morning. At 0600, the interior lights brightened, indicating the arrival of the new day. Everyone came down early for breakfast, each inquiring on entry if anything had been heard during the night. Had Hutch ever seen anything like this before?
She hadn’t. It was her experience that ships never vanished, and only lost their communications when the equipment broke down, or when they ran into a storm of radiation.
“The satellite was booby-trapped,” Nick suggested.