Each package was equipped with a pair of jets, which would be used to guide it into one of the Capella’s three cargo decks.
We watched as a member of John Kraus’s team strolled around one of the packaged vehicles. The cube was marked TOP, BOTTOM, FRONT, and REAR. Four tanks were attached to the rear, and a half meter of black cord hung out of the front of the package. He reached for the cord, held it for a moment, then pulled on it.
The cube literally unrolled as it filled with air and morphed into a lifeboat. Two aides attached small jets to the rear and sides of the vehicle. That would enable the AI pilot to control movement.
A section of Skydeck had been set aside to manufacture the lifeboats, but because there was no way to know which ships would reach the Capella during the few hours they expected it to be accessible, thousands of them were needed, and that was far beyond anything that could be done on the station.
Also, operating out of Skydeck, rescue teams were practicing moving the lifeboat packages from rescue vehicles into a replica of the Capella’s three cargo decks.
In a conversation with Alex and Shara, John Kraus admitted that he saw little likelihood they’d be able to get forty-four of the packages on board during the short time they would have. “If they get unlucky,” Alex told me afterward, “they might not get any in there, and the entire project could be pushed back still another five and a half years.”
“That would be a disaster,” I said.
“It would be. But the truth is there’s no way around it. The alternative is to go back to manipulating the drive unit. Nobody wants to do that.”
“No more ships available?”
“They apparently have as many as they can handle. Some Mute vehicles are coming in, too. John says a lot of people are unhappy about that. We still have politicians who think the Mutes can’t be trusted.”
“Alex, what about President Davis? He doesn’t buy into that, does he?”
“If he did, they wouldn’t have been invited in the first place.”
“Good. I’m glad we have somebody with some sense.”
“Absolutely. And I hope he’s got it right.”
“Alex—”
“Just kidding.”
Later that morning, Shara came by the country house. “I was talking to John,” she said. “They’re caught up in another battle.”
“About what?”
She took off her jacket and sat down in the love seat. “I shouldn’t be telling you this.”
“It won’t go any farther.”
“Promise?” I put my hand over my heart. “I’m serious,” she said.
“I won’t say a word. What’s going on? Something about tinkering with the star drive again?”
“Yes.”
“I thought what happened with JoAnn had settled it.”
She laughed. “JoAnn’s responsible for launching the new round.”
“All right,” I said. “What happened?”
“It looks as if she did a lot of research while she was caught in the warp. Years’ worth, I guess. She left the results for us, along with a request it be made available to Robert Dyke.”
“Wow,” I said.
“Right.”
“And John doesn’t want to let him see it?”
“I think he’d be willing to go with it, but if he does, he’ll be bucking the President. Davis has taken a public position, and I don’t really know what’s going on behind the scenes, but I’d be shocked if, after what he said, he’d be giving John a green light. So John will probably not ask.”
“He’ll make the call on his own.”
“Yes.”
“You’re suggesting JoAnn thought she had the solution.”
“I don’t have specific knowledge, except that she wanted her work passed on to Dyke.”
“That tells me something else,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“She understood what had happened to her and Nick. She knew that time outside the ship was moving a lot slower.”
I heard no more about it after that, nor, as far as I could tell, did Shara. As the time wound down, we continued moving ahead with the Lifeboat Project. The Belle-Marie, of course, would be part of the rescue fleet. “So what’s the plan?” asked Alex.
“They want us in place four days before they expect it to appear.”
“Four days?”
“They’re playing it safe, Alex. It would be a little embarrassing if the thing showed up early and was gone before anybody could get to it.”
“I guess so. I don’t think I’ve been paying as much attention as I should.”
“You’re still hung up on Baylee.”
“Well, there’s not much I can do about the Capella. But I’ll go with you when it’s time.”
“Actually, you’re not invited. They’re putting some limits on the yachts. Nobody but the pilot.”
“Because a passenger takes up space?”
“Right.”
“It makes sense. Well, okay. When are you leaving?”
“I’ll give myself three days to get into the area. I don’t want to be charging around at the last minute.”
He nodded. “Okay. How difficult will it be for the ships going out there to pinpoint their own positions? You’ve always said you can’t be too exact about where you are when there’s no star nearby.”
“That’s part of the problem, Alex. Everything’s too far away from any landmarks, so a few million kilometers one way or another doesn’t make much difference in the way the sky looks.”
“Then how—?”
“It’s one of the reasons they need so many ships. There’s going to be some guesswork involved in establishing the location, so they’re trying to flood the area. They want to set up the fleet cruisers first. And the cargo vehicles. Both carry a load of lifeboats. They have to be able to get one of them close to the Capella with at least five hours available to transfer the boats.”
“I hate to say this, Chase—” He didn’t look comfortable.
“I know. We’re going to need some luck.”
“Well, maybe JoAnn’s work will give them a breakthrough.”
I took a deep breath. “Shara tells me they’re beginning to think there might be an uncertainty principle involved that would take any hope of a guaranteed solution out of it. They don’t have a method to analyze the structure of the warp. It can vary, and that makes it impossible to be sure about the details. She thinks the reality is that they’d be very likely to be able to shut down the process, but there’d never be a guarantee.”
“So in the end—”
“Take a chance. Or use the boats.”
Senator Angela Herman showed up on The Peter McCovey Show that afternoon. She was an attractive woman, or would have been had she not been so combative. She obviously had presidential ambitions, and belonged to the Union Party, which was then out of power. She liked to portray herself as one of the “ordinary folks” who were always getting trampled by government stupidity or its deliberate malfeasance. “Who do you think,” she asked Peter, “is going to see to it that this business with Sanusar ships doesn’t happen anymore? It turns out it’s been going on for literally thousands of years, and nobody noticed it until a physicist doing independent research and an antique dealer, for God’s sake, figured it out. And now we have to depend on the government to rescue the people stuck on the Capella. And they obviously don’t know what they’re doing. Look how this business with the Grainger went. Why didn’t they hire a good private corporation, like Orion or StarGate, to work out a solution? I just hope that they get it right this time.”