Earth Song: Etude to War (68 page)

“Lilith,” came a hissed summons over the Kaatan’s intercom.

“Yes, Kal’at?”

“I am getting unusual readings from the sensors. Please check the data I’m sending.”

A part of Lilith’s mind had been preoccupied with memories of her father, almost like a sort of logic loop. She had difficulty in banishing those thoughts. With an effort, Lilith cleared her mind and let the data feed into her analytical brain. “A ship passed through here recently,” she noted. “We are close to Bellatrix. This is worth noting.”

“Are they getting closer to our new home?” Kal’at wondered.

“Not that I have noticed. Our star system is not an industrial one, so of little interest to the other star-faring species of the Concordia.”

Kal’at took his digital leave and Lilith was again floating alone in the void of her CIC zero gravity cocoon. She noted the ship’s course and energy expenditures from the buffer of data in our ancillary mental processors. Had anything been out of ordinary, it would have been moved up in import. The ship’s course traced across her consciousness, a line in space leading from nowhere to home.

Then she realized where her course was taking her near. Just a point in space like so many others, but a place of significance to her, even if she’d never been there. Less than a light-year from her course, it would only cost a couple extra hours. A tiny shifting of the gravitic lens drive and their course changed subtly.

In less than two hours, the Kaatan passed through the Oort cloud of a star system, her shields glowing slightly as it brushed through a storm of particles each thousands of meters apart. At the fantastic speeds of the Kaatan, it was like a semi-solid wall, yet still of no real notice to the powerful ship of the line.

At over two and three quarter trillion kilometers per second, the Kaatan left the outer edge of the solar system behind and dove towards its star. They passed two planets, an ice ball and a tiny gas giant, then two more gas giants orbited. Lilith decreased speed to only a dozen times the speed of light. As the second gas giant fell behind, a massive thing with a curious eye storm three hundred times the size of Bellatrix raging she swept the system for more details.

Her sensors swept the system and found the orbit she was looking for. Lilith altered course again and as she passed a dead planet that never held life she made a final course alteration. She’d been so busy fine tuning her course that the barrage of electromagnetic noise caught her completely by surprise.

The spectrum was alive for huge bands of the kilohertz and megahertz bands, even some in the gigahertz. She struggled to understand for several long moments, until her destination came into range.

“This is not possible,” she said in the darkness of her space. Quickly, she altered course once more. In the depths of space, the Kaatan raced past a world of rich swirling seas and bright white clouds. Its night side was alive with tens of thousands of twinkling lights from the cities of all the teeming billions that lived there.

At twelve times the speed of light, the Kaatan passed completely unnoticed and returned to deep space before accelerating to full cruising speed. Her combat intelligence remained in a confused moody silence for the final two hundred and forty-three light-years to home.

The End