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“What about the conductive sheath?”

“That may represent a problem. We will have to see when we get there. We have enough copper mesh onboard to bond the whole damned hull if we have to, but it will be time consuming.”

He nodded. To establish the drive field, the ship’s hull had to be unbroken and electrically conductive.

The damage done by the Broan warship meant that they would have to patch all the holes. They would bond copper mesh to any point on the hull that produced a “hole” in the drive field. Such a hole would concentrate energy as they flew superlight and vaporize the ship.

“Chief Douglas, how are the supplies?”

“We have rearranged the cargo in the holds for quick offloading, Captain. We’ll have consumables for six months, though we will be on suit rations for the last three months if it comes to that.”

“Ensign Palmer, communications?”

“We will have full communications with
Magellan
within an hour of boarding, sir.”

Landon continued down the table. They were a young crew, but eager. He had chosen them with an eye toward their intelligence and ability to stand up to the hardship this voyage would entail. They had neither the time nor materiel to make the alien ship luxurious. He would settle for livable. As he quizzed his department heads, he was satisfied that they were as ready as they would ever be.

Finally, he nodded. “Very well, people. We arrive in eleven hours, twenty-two minutes. I want you all in your vacuum suits and assembled in the hangar bay at least an hour before arrival. Any questions?”

There were none, not even from the stardrive specialists.

“Dismissed!”

#

“
Deja vu, all over again,
” Lieutenant Harlan Frees thought, echoing a sentiment first spoken by a philosopher lost to history. Frees lay in his acceleration couch encased in his vacuum suit and watched the squat cylinder with gaping holes in its hull grow slowly in his viewscreen. When last he had made this approach, he had not known whether he would be met by aliens firing the blasters so beloved by purveyors of space adventure. In that respect, nothing had changed. Again, he was being sent to scout a potentially hostile alien craft. There was
one
difference, of course.

“Looks clear enough, Captain.”

“Right,” Landon said from Scout Two’s right couch where he had displaced Frees’s copilot. “If the Broa have laid a trap for us we will know in a few minutes.”

“We have you on screen, Scout Two,” Commander Scott Heinrich, Landon’s executive officer, reported over the command circuit.

“Acknowledged,
Magellan
. Everything looks clear so far. Nothing to report.”

Frees turned on his close approach radar and watched as the derelict’s picture was painted on an auxiliary screen. Except for the false colors supplied by the boat’s computer, there was little difference between radar and visual images.

“We just closed to twenty kilometers, Captain.”

“Right. Slow to final approach velocity,” Landon ordered.

Bright attitude jets flared out in front of Scout Two, making their characteristic popping noise as Frees issued the command. The tug of deceleration sent both men rebounding into their restraining straps.

“Get ready,” Landon ordered over the intercom. In the passenger compartment were a dozen armed spacers. They were jammed in so tightly that the shoulders of their suits rubbed one another across the narrow aisle. In the back of the cabin was the large square box that contained the destruct device. There had been several attempts at black humor about being so close to an atom bomb. Most had fallen flat.

As before, in preparation for boarding the hulk, the atmosphere was pumped out of the scout’s cabin, causing everyone’s suit to puff up. Over the next several minutes, Landon reduced the magnification of the screen image as they continued their approach.

“We detect no artificial energy sources within range of our sensors,” Commander Heinrich reported from
Magellan
. “You are cleared to board.”

“Roger,” Landon responded before turning to Frees. “All right, Lieutenant. Take her in.”

The reaction control jets flared again as Frees slowed the ship, then turned her sideways. The approach was like watching a collision in slow motion. The ragged coffee can of a ship grew until it filled the sky, then came the popping sound of jets, and it was suddenly stationary a dozen meters off their port quarter.

Several more bursts of jets caused the scout to drift until a bare meter of empty space separated it from the derelict. Somehow, during the past several months, the alien had picked up a slight tumbling motion.

Frees fired the jets to compensate before chinning the intercom.

“First party, disembark!”

Behind them, both doors of the port airlock snapped open and six spacers with riot guns jumped the gap, arrowing for the interior of the alien derelict. Landon watched on the screen, wishing that he could be one of them. Terse orders issued over the radio as the boarding party dispersed to sweep the ship. All of them had been aboard before. They were charged with determining if anyone else had visited the alien in the interim.

Ten minutes later, the boarding party reported no sign of intruders. Landon keyed for the intercom and said, “All right, Johnson. Get the bomb aboard and set up.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

The captain chinned the command circuit in his helmet. “Derelict secure, Scott. Bring up the ship.”

“Aye aye, Captain. We will be there in half-an-hour.”

Landon reached up and began undoing his straps. “Good approach, Lieutenant. As soon as we disembark, move the scout to a safe distance to give
Magellan
room for its approach.

“Aye aye, sir.” Frees watched the captain pull himself through the cockpit hatch and aft toward the airlock. He wondered if Landon’s heart was beating as fast as his had been when he boarded the derelict the first time.

Two weeks after his arrival aboard PoleStar, Mark Rykand stopped in the mess compartment for a late breakfast and discovered Lisa Arden seated at one of the long tables. He arrowed for the auto chef, dialed his order, and then waited 30 seconds for it to heat. When the tray appeared in the slot, he slipped it beneath his chest harness and pulled himself to where Lisa was sitting.

“Hi,” he said as he moved the tray to the steel table top, making sure that its magnetic base stuck before letting go. Then he used both hands to seat himself, wrapping his legs around the anchor frame to keep from floating away. “Eating late, aren’t you?”

She nodded. “Late night again. And you?”

“Same. I was up until this morning’s midwatch running comparisons of spectral types for Professor Bendagar.”

“How is it going? Find any matches yet?”

“Not yet,” he said. “We are making progress, though. Have you seen our art collection?”

She smiled. It had been Professor Bendagar’s idea, but she had helped with it. In addition to possessing a near photographic memory, Sar-Say was a fair artist. He had been using a commercial illustration software package to paint sky scenes for the past several days, scenes from planets with unusual phenomena in their heavens.

“I’ve seen it.”

“One of the paintings has a huge nebula in its sky. Professor Bendagar is wondering if it isn’t the Crab!”

“The what? Remember, you are talking to a near illiterate when it comes to astronomy.”

“The Crab Nebula. It is the remains of a star that went nova some 8,000 years ago. It appeared in the sky in 1054 AD and was seen by Chinese astronomers.”

“What’s so important about this nebula?”

“From the size Sar-Say painted it, the nebula must have been within a few hundred light-years of the world he visited. If the identification holds up, we are well on our way to discovering our first world in the Sovereignty,” He slipped the cover from his tray. She noticed that he had gotten the pseudo-eggs and bacon again. Her mother had overdosed her on artificial eggs when she was a child and the sight and smell made her a bit queasy.

“But Sar-Say tells me he can’t identify where stars are in the sky.”

“True,” Mark replied with a full mouth. “That’s the problem with traveling via star gate. Classical astronomy is of little use to people who use seven league boots. They are far more interested in the sequence of star gates than in where the stars lie with respect to one another. Sort of like the subway maps in a large city.”

“And like subway stations, wouldn’t they string the stars together in more or less the same order they occur naturally?”

“Why should they?”

“Because warping space takes power. At least, Sar-Say says it does. The farther they drive a star gate, the more energy is required to maintain it.”

Mark looked thoughtful. “I didn’t know that. What else did he say?”

“Not much. He is a trader. He really does not know any more science than is necessary to survive in that profession. Still, if the energy needed to hold a star gate open is proportional to the distance being spanned, doesn’t that argue that stars on any particular jump sequence must be relatively near one another? It just makes economic sense, doesn’t it?”

His brow wrinkled as he considered the idea. “You might be right. It would take less energy to connect a series of stars together like beads on a string than it would to connect them at random. There would be less doubling back that way. If the stars in a particular jump series are also in natural order, then maybe we can run a search on their spectral types and find them on our star charts.”

“Especially if we are able to anchor such a sequence to a landmark like the Crab Nebula --” she mused.

Mark lifted his bulb of hot tea and sipped slowly. He was a fast learner and had surprised Bendagar with how much he had picked up since he had come aboard. Even so, this talk with Lisa proved he still had a great deal to learn.

“Look, could we get together sometime and explore what else you know that I don’t?”

She looked at him quizzically. Nearly every male aboard had asked her for a date. She had turned them all down, not wanting to complicate her already overburdened life with a romantic entanglement. Still, if they could identify a new method for finding the Sovereignty in a chance meeting over breakfast, what could they do if they compared notes systematically? Besides, his suggestion did not sound like a pickup line ... not exactly like one, anyway.

“Sure, why not? How about tomorrow night after dinner?”

“Tomorrow will be fine.”

She finished her breakfast and disengaged her legs from the anchor frame. “Unfortunately, it is back to the salt mines for me. I have another raft of questions to ask Sar-Say and he probably has as many for me.”

“Thanks. See you tomorrow, then.” He watched in silence as she arrowed expertly through the mess hatch, bounced off the far corridor wall, and was gone. His thoughts were not solely on his work as he finished his own breakfast. In fact, he hardly noticed that his eggs had gotten cold.

#

“It’s the Crab, all right,” Dr. Bendagar remarked as Mark entered the darkened office. Between them floated the ghostly image that Sar-Say had offered up as Painting No. 3. It showed a turbulent starburst of gas and dust shooting outward from the remnants of a supernova. Beside the image of the painting floated another. The second cloud was smaller and three-dimensional. It was an image of the Crab Nebula.

As Mark pulled himself to a convenient rack, the nebula rotated slightly about its vertical axis and pitched up around one of the horizontal axes in response to Professor Bendagar’s hand on the trackball control. “There, I think we have a match.”

Mark Rykand stared at the side-by-side ethereal projections. “I don’t agree. Look at the difference in these tendrils here, and in this formation. There’s a resemblance I grant you, but nowhere near a match.”

Dr. Bendagar’s face was lit by the light from the holographic projection. His smile was apparent even through the translucent tendrils of the fake nebulas that separated them. “You took four years of astrophysics, my boy. Can you think of anything that might cause the difference?”

Mark frowned, then grinned sheepishly as the truth hit him. Of course, the two pictures were not the same. One was a painting done from memory - though to judge by the detail, Sar-Say’s memory was damned close to perfect - and the other was a computer-generated image done from Earth-based telescopic observations. The differences were the result of the two vantage points. The world Sar-Say had visited (he had called it Zzumer) was probably within a hundred light-years of the nebula, while Earth was seven thousand light-years distant. What Sar-Say’s painting showed was the nebula in near real-time. If accurate, they were viewing the way the Crab Nebula would appear to Earth some seven millennia hence.

“Speed of light delay, of course,” Mark muttered.

“Give that student a passing grade!” Bendagar exclaimed. “We’ll do a computer simulation of the nebula’s expansion pattern to confirm that it will look like that when the time comes, of course. There is also the fact that the Zzumers view the nebula from a different direction. Still, I think we have found a match. Did you run those color checks with Sar-Say?”

Mark nodded. In addition to the fact that it was near this spectacular nebula, they had one other clue as to the location of the Zzumer sun - its color. Mark had shown the alien dozens of star images and asked him to pick the one that most closely resembled the star where he had seen the nebula. The star Sar-Say chose was spectral type G3. It was, in fact, a near twin to Sol.

“He says G3, assuming of course that he sees color the same way we do.”

“He does,” the astronomer replied. “One of the first tests the biologists ran was for color perception. We know that he can pass a color blindness test and does not see any farther into the infrared or ultraviolet than we do. Of course, we figured that out as soon as we saw his eye structure. Wherever the Taff species evolved, you can bet that it was under a star that looked a good deal like Father Sol.”

“Then we have enough for a positive identification of the Zzumer sun.”