"Now what do you make of this?" Helm was saying.
"It might be a bomb," Gabriel answered.
"It might be nearly anything," said Enda, "but why put a homing device on a bomb? Unless it is so rare a one that you want it back if it does not explode. But what kind of bomb wouldn't explode?" "That logic suggests by itself that it's not a bomb," said Helm. "Do you want to take it on board, or should I?"
Gabriel looked at it, and the words "bomb" and "on board" jarred together uncomfortably in his head.
Still, it had been through an explosion already and hadn't exploded.
"We've got X-ray gear in the hold," Gabriel said, "for mining work, usually."
Helm chuckled. "Hunting the Glory Rock, huh? Will this thing fit in?"
"It should."
Gabriel spent about ten minutes with the remote manipulators, fitting the black egg into the cargo bay against the X-ray apparatus. The metal of the egg's casing was magnetizable, but Gabriel was reluctant to use the electromagnet grapples on the egg in case something inside that casing should react unkindly to a strong magnetic field.
He activated the X-ray projector and aimed it at the egg. where it sat in front of the imaging screen. He then transferred the image to the tank. "Can you see this?" Gabriel asked Helm. "Yeah, getting it through comms."
The now-translucent image of the egg appeared in the tank. "Well, at least it is not opaque," Enda said, leaning in and looking at it curiously. "But what is that in there?"
It was hard to tell. There were two fairly large compartments, each packed full of some solid substance with what appeared to be minor cavities in it, then a smaller cavity full of a liquid. Down at the "small" end of the egg was a smaller cavity still that seemed empty but might just as well have had something gaseous in it. Finally, there appeared a small black object with circuitry spun through it-a data solid of some kind.
"If it is a bomb," said Helm, "I've never seen or heard of anything like it."
Enda was shaking her head. She reached into the tank and brought up the controls for one of the secondary sensor arrays in the cargo hold. "Only residual radioactivity," she said. "There is nothing fissionable in there."
"Do you want to open it?" Helm asked.
"Not a chance," Gabriel said forcefully. "Leave it right where it is."
They all looked at it for a few moments more, and then Enda leaned back and sighed. "Helm," she said, "you have our great thanks. Did Delde Sola suggest to you where we were intending to go?"
"She said you might be heading out into the system," Helm said, sitting back in his own pilot's seat with his arms folded. "She didn't go into detail, but she suggested that you might need someone to watch your backs."
"I confess I would be glad of that," Enda said. "If you require reimbursement for your time-" For some reason, Helm looked genuinely alarmed. "Oh, no, no," he said. "This is payback for a favor Delde Sota did me once upon a time. She does these things for people, with the understanding that she'll call the favor in eventually. My dance card's empty for the next couple of weeks. You just tell me what you need."
"Well," Gabriel said, "we're heading to Rhynchus."
Helm looked bemused. "Rhynchus? There's nothing on Rhynchus."
'That's what we hear," Gabriel said. "Let's have our computers cut a course and head on over there." Helm shook his head, mystified, and bent to his own console to comply. "Strangers well met," they heard him mutter, "with the emphasis on strange." Gabriel grinned a little and started working in the tank.
Three hours later, without sighting or hearing from any other craft, they were in orbit over Rhynchus. Moving in silent tandem, using visuals and sensors, Sunshine and Longshot looked down upon the forlorn world.
The planet was mostly barren-looking. It had little surface water-a few lakes-and any water that appeared within thirty degrees of the poles was well frozen. At the equator, matters were slightly better.
Here and there were some small patches of some stubborn native vegetation, even a small forest or two, but they were few. Mostly the surface was rocky and uninviting, and the color of the exposed parts of the crust was not such as to suggest much in the way of mineral or metallic wealth.
There was no sign of anything else, nothing built, no city, no habitation. The two ships were in ball-of-yarn orbit, the processing orbit that covers a planet's whole surface in a matter of a few hours. They had done one whole pattern for mapping purposes, and the computer was working with the maps. But by eye, there was nothing at all visible, and it was getting frustrating.
'They have to be here," Gabriel muttered.
"Who would 'they' be?" Helm inquired from over on his ship.
"There's a colony," Gabriel said after a moment. "It's been, oh, misplaced." Enda gave him a wry look, but said nothing.
"Well," said Helm, "my sensors are pretty good. Any idea what we're looking for, specifically?" "Not at all," Enda said, sounding more cheerful than Gabriel thought was appropriate. Helm laughed. "Heat be a fair bet, you think?"
"Sesheyans like it between five and forty C, so, yeah, heat seems smart," Gabriel said. "Setting up now."
Gabriel sat back "What I don't understand is the atmospheric situation," he mused. "There's much more air here than was mentioned in any survey the Concord did. None of the briefings mentioned anything significant in the way of atmosphere-otherwise everyone in the system would have been a lot more interested in the planet."
"Well," Enda said. "I suppose one might be able to understand it. Say the Concord comes into the system a few years ago, and the people on Phorcys and Ino say there's nothing on that planet. It's just a cold rock with very little atmosphere, too far out to do us any good, no resources, not worth terraforming."
She shrugged. "At that early date, why would anyone disbelieve them? Then a survey ship takes a quick pass by, finds it as they described it, then goes away again. No one bothers to go back because surveys cost money, and they had already done one and found nothing."
And one small colony is easily hidden, Gabriel thought, especially if it's vital that it stay hidden. "You're probably right," he said, "but what I don't understand is how anyone is surviving there at all, if the place is so cold."
"Domes?" Enda said. "Or some other form of protection?"
"Domes cost a lot of money to build and more to maintain." Gabriel shook his head. "Looking at temperature now," said Helm. "One pass in three axes?" "Sounds about right," Gabriel said. "Let's go."
It took them forty-five minutes. When the pass was finished, Helm spent a few moments working with his computer, then transferred the results to their tank where the data displayed on the surface of a "false- colored" rotating globe.
"It's a lot warmer than it should be," said Helm.
There was no arguing that. The first Concord survey, done twelve years ago, suggested an average planetary temperature of no better than 4° C. This map showed it as being more like 12° C. "Now how did they miss that?" Gabriel asked.
"On the second survey? I think it more than likely that they were just looking to see if the planet was in fact there," Enda replied. "Even if they got a record of the second temperature, who knows who was given the information for analysis, or whether it seemed particularly germane to them? They may have thought that the initial survey was in error." She shrugged.
They coasted around the planet one more time, this time with both Longshots and Sunshine's sensing equipment listening for communications traces of any kind-drivespace relay traffic, even radio. There was nothing.
"Not that I would have really expected drivespace relay," Gabriel said. "There's no surer way to give yourself away."
"There is one thing, though," Helm said. "Oh?"
"Had the machine do a little more fine analysis on that last map, narrowing down the temperature bands a little. Got a little tiny hot spot down there in the northern hemisphere," said Helm. "Almost lost it. There are little pinpricks of volcanism all over the place. You see 'em. But those are diffuse. This one is clear and sharp." "A dome." Enda said.