“Funny.” I came around to the front of the board and pulled down a jumpseat. “I wanted to talk to you about this little side trip we’re making. You really don’t like it, do you?”
“No, I don’t,” she said. “I have no quarrel with locating the Freedom’s Peace or even going there, though reneging on a contract is going to damage that clean record you mentioned in the dayroom.”
“I know, but we’ll make it right,” I promised. “Kulasawa’s given us more than enough money to cover that.”
“I know,” Rhonda said sourly. “And that’s what’s really bothering me: your motivation for all of this. Altruistic noises aside, are you sure it’s not just the money?”
“If you’ll recall, I turned down the money when she first offered it,” I reminded her.
“But was it the money or the fact you didn’t know anything about the job?” she countered.
“Some of both,” I had to concede. “But now that we know what we’re doing—”
“Do we?” she cut me off. “Do we really? Has Scholar Kulasawa thought through—I mean really thought through—what she intends to do once we get there? Is she going to volunteer the Sergei Rock passenger cabin to take them all back to Earth? Make grandiose promises of land on Brunswick or Camaraderie or somewhere that she has no authority to make?”
She waved a hand in the general direction of the passenger cabin. “Or maybe she doesn’t intend to bring them home at all. She could be planning to leave them out there like some lost rain-forest culture for her academic friends to study. Or maybe she’ll organize weekly tour groups for the public and sell tickets.”
“Now you’re being silly,” I grumbled.
“Am I?” she countered. “Just because she’s a scholar and has money doesn’t mean she’s got any brains, you know.” She cocked her head slightly to the side. “Just how much above our expenses is she offering you?”
I shrugged as casually as I could. “Seventy thousand neumarks.”
Her eyes widened. “Seventy thousand? And you still don’t see anything wrong with this?”
“There’s prestige involved here, Rhonda,” I reminded her. “Prestige and academic glory. That’s worth a lot more to any scholar than mere money. Remember, we know next to nothing about the Great Leap colonies—all that stuff went up in dust when the Ganymede domes were hit late in the war. We don’t know what kind of astrogation system they had, how you create a stable ecosystem that compact, or even how you set about hollowing out eighteen kilometers’ worth of asteroid in the first place. Scholars go nuts over that sort of thing.”
“Yes, but three hundred thousand neumarks worth?”
I shrugged again. “It’s the bottom line of being the ones who go down in history,” I reminded her. “And remember, the Tower’s own records showed that we were the only transport headed for Parex for over a week. If her competitors have their own ship, then we’re her only chance to get there first.”
Rhonda shook her head. “I’m sorry, but I find that utterly incomprehensible.”
“Frankly, so do I,” I readily admitted. “That’s probably why we’re not scholars.”
She smiled lopsidedly. “Besides being from the wrong end of the social spectrum?”
I shrugged. “Besides that. So I guess we’ll just have to concentrate on the fact we’re going to be helping to rescue some people who’ve been marooned in space for the past century and a third.”
“And hope Kulasawa isn’t planning to renege on her deal if we lose the race,” Rhonda warned. “I don’t suppose that topic happened to come up in conversation, did it?”
“As a matter of fact, it didn’t,” I said slowly, feeling my forehead wrinkling. “Maybe I’d better introduce it.”
“You can do that when you ask about her cargo,” Rhonda suggested helpfully. “Incidentally, assuming we get it, I trust you’ll be spreading that seventy thousand bonus around equally?”
“Don’t worry,” I assured her, standing up and stepping to the hatchway. “What I’ve got in mind will benefit all of us.”
“New engines, maybe?” she asked hopefully, her eyebrows lifting.
I gave her an enigmatic smile and left.
Bilko’s materials scan on Kulasawa’s crates was quick and not terribly informative. It revealed the presence of electronics components, some pretty hefty internal power supplies, magnetic materials, and some stretches of rather esoteric synthetic membranes. The sonic deep-probe was more interesting; from two directions on each of the crates the probe signals got bounced straight back as if from solid plates of conditioned ceramic.
Kulasawa’s explanation, once I asked her, cleared up the confusion. The crates, she informed me, contained a set of industrial-quality sonic deep-probes. Though tradition said that each of the Great Leap Colonies had consisted mainly of a single large chamber hollowed out of the center of the asteroid, there was no solid evidence to back up that assumption; and if the Freedom’s Peace proved instead to be a vast honeycomb of rooms and passages, it wouldn’t be smart for us to start exploring it without first mapping out the entire network.
The first four-hour program ended, Jimmy chafed and groused his way through his regulation-stipulated break, and then we were off again. The transit time to the spot Bilko and I had calculated came out to be a shade over one hour forty-eight minutes, and Jimmy had worked up a program that nailed us there dead center on the nose.
The music stopped, the flapblack unwrapped itself, and Bilko and I gazed out the forward viewport.
At exactly nothing.
“Where is it?” Kulasawa demanded, leaning over our shoulders to look. “You said we were here.”
“We’re where your data took us,” I said, resisting the urge to lean away from her in the cramped space. Her breath was unpleasantly warm on my cheek, and her lip perfume had clearly been applied with a larger room in mind. “We’re running a check now, but—”
“My data was accurate,” she snapped. From the suddenly increased heat on my cheek, I guessed she had turned a glare my direction. Fortunately, I was too busy with my board to turn and look. “If we’re in the wrong place, you’re the ones to blame.”
“We’re working on it, Scholar,” Bilko soothed in the same tone of voice I’d heard him use on card partners suddenly suspicious by how deep in the hole they’d gotten themselves. “In any astrogate calculation there’s a certain margin of error—”
“I don’t want excuses,” Kulasawa cut him off, the temperature of her voice dropping into the single digits. “I want results.”
“We understand,” Bilko said, unfazed. “But those results may take time.” He threw her a sideways glance. “And we do need room to work.”
Kulasawa was still radiating frustration, but fortunately common sense prevailed. “I’ll be in the passenger cabin,” she said between clenched teeth, and stalked out.
The flight deck door slid shut behind her, and Bilko and I looked across at each other. “The lady’s deadly serious about this, isn’t she?” Bilko commented. “I’ll bet you could bargain us up a little on the deal.”
“I’d say she’s at least two stages past deadly,” I countered. “And I think trying to shake her down for more money would be an extremely poor idea right now. Rhonda, are you listening?”
“I’m right here,” Rhonda’s voice came over the intercom. “I presume you’ve both figured out the problem, too?”
“I think so,” Bilko said.
“It’s obvious in hindsight,” I agreed. “Her location was based on raw observational data from Zhavoronok and Meena, both of which are ten light-years away from here.”