“Mr. Cameron,” Sabin said, and to someone elsewhere: “Put the transmission through to station fifteen.”
Station fifteen was the console nearest. That screen display changed and became a set of numbers and geometrical figures. It looked like navigational problems.
“We’re instructed to come ahead and hard dock at the masthead,” Sabin said. “Ordinary procedure. Guild authority says, quote, that there’s been an observer lurking out there for years doing very little. Unquote. It’s waked up on our approach, made its first active assay of the station in a long time. They’re receiving that output, too. Passive input and long-range optics would be just as efficient observation for its ordinary operations. It was sitting out there listening, it heard us pass, and heard station answer—and woke up. We’re not sure why whoever it is needed first to come alive and betray their presence if they don’t mean to talk. If it’s targeting, and if there’s something on its way, it’s likely going to have fired on the expected path toward docking. Which we’re behind. There’s no reason, either, why they wouldn’t just fire at the station if they were going to—take it all out. What’s your best observation of the situation, Mr. Cameron?”
Good question.
“How many pings?”
“Single.”
“Single output. Last time, three blinks. If it was the same entity.” He dealt with atevi so exclusively he began to think the numbers themselves had significance. And one couldn’t assume that. Daren’t assume it. “A, they’re a robot. B, they’re more interested in watching than in destroying. C—they’re wanting our attention and they want to see if we’re smart enough to have learned anything in ten years.”
Sabin nodded slowly. “Captain Graham would agree. Next question. A’s possible. Why B?”
“Why B? To see what kind of traffic this place gets… one ship, two, a hundred… and where those ships come from, and where they go.”
“The atevi planet,” Jase said in a low voice. “They’ll have that pegged, at least what vector we’ve come in from. Long range optics can do way too much once they start looking.”
“How long can have they been here?” Bren asked. “Were they here, for instance, when Phoenix did her last lookover and left toward Alpha? Is that possible?”
“Good question,” Sabin said. “I don’t know. If they were, they weren’t in our pickup. But I wasn’t on the bridge that day.”
“C, captain. C. Have we learned anything ? I advise we go toward them. Slowly. Go toward them.”
Sabin shot him a dark and frowning look, then turned her back and started away from him.
He wedged himself past a seat, past her, and firmly blocked her path. “On review of the log, captain, my conclusion. My best advice. Issue a signal. Approach them. It’s exactly what the Guild hasn’t tended to do. It may be the one thing you ought to do. Be forthcoming.”
Sabin turned, glanced from him to Jase. And around them, not a single tech had taken eyes from their work to see argument around the senior captain.
“I agree with him,” Jase said in a low voice.
“Then what?” Sabin asked. “Do we have a conclusion for this adventure? Perhaps we rush over there and stir up something we don’t know how to deal with.”
“Your predecessor stirred something up, got a signal, refused to respond, left on a diversionary track, and they didn’t take one of those manuevers kindly. Atevi say—and I asked them—that Ramirez gave a hostile appearance in his behavior, simply by remaining mute. Then by leaving and trying to deceive. So let’s at least do something else.”
Sabin looked at him. Poised, on the brink.
“So maybe they’re going to ignore us,” she said. “By station’s information, they’ve ignored the station for years.”
“Imitating Ramirez? Imitating his actions?”
“After blowing hell out of the station,” Sabin muttered.
“Maybe preparatory to blowing hell out of us if we just cruise over to the station, dock, and sit.”
“So we’re going to go over to the alien ship and do what ?”
“Play it as we meet it, captain. It’s why we’re here. I’m not afraid to board them, myself, if that’s what it comes to.” Not afraid was a lie, but it was an offer he saw no recourse but to make. “Get me over there. I’ll do it.”
“The hell you say. Get you there, but we’re all there in the same ship.”
“Don’t ignore the contact we just had. My best advice. We were touched. They asked a question. Give back the same. Three blinks. Same frequency, same pace as before. You want to bet it doesn’t have a record of the last encounter? Or that there’s no cultural logic behind that output? I’d rather bet on that course of action than on going into dock right now.”
Sabin stood still, at least, gazing dead at him. “You’re crazy.”
Bren shook his head. “An opportunity. An opportunity. What do we do? Go in there, tie ourselves down at dock and diminish our range of responses? Including getting out of here, captain, as I understand is still a possibility right now.”
A long, long stare. “You think so.”
“You asked my opinion. I base it on all the information I have. Can we see this ship? Do we know how it’s shaped, what it looks like, how it’s configured?”
“Not damned informative. C3. Give us image, central screen.”
A dim image flashed up. It could have been a rock. If it had color, it was brownish black, a collection of irregularly arranged panels suspended around a core of indefinite shape, showing no lights at all at the moment.
“Does it tell you anything?” Sabin asked him.
“No,” he had to admit.
Sabin folded her arms, gazed at the screen. Then at him. “And how are you going to talk to this ship once we engage it?”
“I’ll have to find out,” Bren said. “ That’s what I do, captain. That’s what Ramirez trained Jase to do, and Ramirez made a fatal decision when he decided to back off and wait for another try, when his translator was older and better prepared. This is that next opportunity. If we don’t take them up on that invitation to communicate—if there’s any symmetry about their actions—who knows? They may hit Alpha, the way they hit here.”
Sabin looked at him, a sidelong glance, on that last. Looked away, then. And back. “A basic rule of intelligence, Mr. Cameron—you can chase just one more certainty and one more piece of information just one fatal step too far. At a certain point you have to quit listening and go with best guesses. We don’t know the situation on the station, do we? And we don’t know the situation out there.”
“We need answers,” Jase said. “We’re not going to get them on the station. If we get that far.”
“Oh, I’m in favor of answers, second captain. We’re on our original course, not quite on the original schedule, so if that ship out there fired a few minutes ago, we’ll more likely be spectators to a fire show. If we do get a strike, Mr. Cameron, at the first sign of a siren, dive under the nearest console and brace, because we’ll move long and hard; and you haven’t felt movement yet. Not in this entire trip. Not in your life , Mr. Cameron. Right now you have time to get to a takehold and time to get granny to shelter, and I advise you do that.—Mr. Carson. Docking spot number one, three bright flashes toward our spook. Stand by for braking, Jorgensen.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Bren said. And moved, not even pausing for a glance at Jase. The ship was acting—God save them, Sabin was taking the action Ramirez had ducked.
He reached the shelter and repeated that warning in Ragi, for the company. “Prolonged strong movement. Everyone must stay in the shelter, nadiin-ji. This situation may continue a while or change suddenly.” Five-deck would hear. Trust Asicho for that.