I’d given Belle the target information before we’d gone to dinner. Belle ’s maximum range on a single jump was just under a thousand light-years. Tinicum 2116, our destination, was sixteen hundred. So we’d have to stop and recharge. The entire voyage, from departure at Skydeck until our arrival in the vicinity of the target system, would take just under nineteen hours. As opposed to the six weeks the Falcon would have needed.
I showered and changed and was back in my seat when the fifteen-minute readysignal came in from ops. The magnetic clamps took hold and moved us into the queue.
There was a passenger ship in front of us, capacity about thirty. People on vacation, maybe. I watched it launch. Then it was our turn.
Alex was in the right-hand seat. He’d been unusually quiet, and as we moved forward during those last seconds before departure, his eyes were on me. “You sure you’re awake?” he asked.
On the way out to our jump point, we ran an action sim and played some chess. I’m not really competitive with him. That’s probably good, because he takes the game seriously. We also enjoyed the theatrical release of the musical Second Time Around.
By late afternoon, ship’s time, the quantum drive was fully charged. So we made the first jump. It’s actually a bit easier on the system not to go maximum range. In this case, with a target sixteen hundred light-years out, I just divided it in half.
We came out in the middle of nowhere, of course, in the deeps between the stars.
I started to recharge and told Alex we’d be ready to go at about 0200 hours. Not the best timing in the world.
I suppose if we’d thought we would be able to make the second jump and immediately home in on the Seeker, we’d have been up and ready to go. But it was going to be a long process and we knew it. So we decided to push the jump back, get a decent night’s sleep, and bump forward to Tinicum in the morning.
Alex settled in after dinner to watch a panel of experts argue politics. (We’d brought a few chips with us to supplement the ship’s library.) I entertained myself with the VR for a while, one of those interplanetary travel experiences where you sit in your chair and sail through the rings of a gas giant while a voice-over tells you how they formed and why they look the way they do. I descended into a nova, which was somehow less unsettling than dropping into the atmosphere of Neptune. The narrator thought it a gorgeous world. That told me he’d never been there. Actually, I hadn’t either, but I’ve seen places like it, and when you look at them, up close, believe me, you’re not thinking esthetics.
I read for an hour and fell asleep about midnight, after telling Belle not to wake me.
“When we’ve finished recharging,” I told her, “I don’t need to know about it.”
“Okay, Chase,” she said. She’d appeared beside me looking about twenty years old, demure, attractive, and sporting a pair of wings.
“Going somewhere?” I asked.
She smiled. “I always thought people look more exotic with flyware.”
I didn’t know how to answer that. “Don’t call me,” I said, “unless there’s a problem.”
But it didn’t do any good. When a recharge is complete, it produces a slight modification in the sound of the engines, and I’m constitutionally unable to sleep through it.
We made the second jump, as planned, as soon as we were both up and awake. Lights flashed, then went green. My insides churned a bit. They do that sometimes during the transition phase. We had a sun this time, and Belle identified it as Tinicum 2116.
This was the system the Falcon should have visited but, if you believed their report, had not.
“We are three point one AU’s out from the central luminary,” said Belle. “Half that distance from the biozone.”
“Okay. Let’s start the long-range scan. We need to see what the planetary system looks like.”
“Adjusting course,” Belle said. “Inbound.”
“And let’s put the Martin to work. See if anything out there looks like a derelict.”
The technology for the Martin was simple enough. It used a three-meter telescope to survey squares of sky ten degrees on a side. It did one square every minute in ultraviolet through mid infrared, and recorded the results. Thus the entire sky was imaged in six hours, at which point the process started again.
That allowed us to build a catalog of all moving objects, planets, moons, asteroids, you name it. The object we were looking for would have a reflective hull. Which meant a high albedo. If it was really out there, we expected to be able to pinpoint it within a few days.
I invited Alex to punch the button to activate the system, but he declined. “You’ve done all the brute work in this operation so far, Chase,” he said. “You do it.”
So I did. Lamps flashed, and Belle showed up wearing khakis and a safari hat.
“Search is under way,” she said.
I tied the Martin into the navigational display so we could watch. Alex stayed awhile, got bored, went back to the common room.
During the next few hours, our long-range scan spotted a gas giant ten AUs out from the sun, and another at fourteen. That was it for the day. Alex was visibly disappointed, but I reminded him there’s a lot of space in a solar system and you can’t expect to find everything right away.
I spent most of that first day on the bridge, watching the sun grow as we drew closer.
Alex drifted between his quarters and the common room, mostly leafing through inventories of antiquities available on the market. After dinner, he joined me up front, as if that would prompt Belle to a greater sense of urgency.
“Belle,” he said, “can’t we see anything yet?”
“It’s too soon, Alex.”
“How much time do we need to spot a planet?”
“Maybe another day or so.”
He looked at me. “I don’t suppose we’ve found anything with the Martin?”
“No,” I said. “When we do, you’ll be first to know.”
“I can’t believe it takes the Survey ships this long to figure out what’s in a planetary system.”
“We’re not really equipped to do a planetary search,” I said. “Our gear is designed to find small targets that reflect a lot of light. Derelicts or docking stations or whatever.
Long-range scan is okay, but we would have been better off with something more specialized.”
“Why didn’t you get something more specialized for this part of the work? I mean, we have the Martin to hunt for the Seeker. Why not get something that finds worlds?”
“I don’t know,” I said, trying to keep the edge out of my voice. “I was thinking about the derelict, and I guess I never gave much consideration to trying to map a solar system.”
“Well,” Alex said, “no harm done, I guess. Whatever’s out here, we’ll find.” He looked dispirited, and it seemed to be more than simply having to wait around.
“You all right?” I asked.
“I’m fine.” He looked away from me.
“Something’s bothering you.”
“No,” he said. “Not really.”
He’d expected we were going to ride in and, within the first few minutes, spot a classK, a world with liquid water and gravity levels that people would find comfortable.
When it didn’t happen, he began to suspect it wasn’t going to be there.
We were not really looking for an ancient wreck. He wanted Margolia.
“You don’t find these things right away, Alex,” I said. “Have a little patience.”
He sighed. “Chances are, if there were a class-K world in the biozone, we’d have seen it by now, right?”