Seeker (27 page)

“We’ll want to take
some
stuff. Just a bit.”

“Keep it modest. Can you do that?”

“Of course.”

She looked at me. “I mean it, Chase.”

“I know. It won’t be a problem,” I said.

“Okay.” She tried her drink, but her mind was elsewhere. “The truth about Survey,” she said after a hesitation, “what we don’t admit publicly, is that our prime interest is finding another civilization. That’s not official, of course. Officially, we want to inventory what’s out there. Each system goes into the catalog. Physical details about suns and worlds. Characteristics and arrangements of the planets in each system. Any odd features, and so on.

“But the people in the ships know that most of the information they bring back goes into File and Forget. I mean, who really cares about the surface temperature of one more gas giant?”

“So you’re telling me—?”

“—Inspection of gas giants is generally done at long range and tends to be hit-and-run. Ditto, worlds too close in, or too far out. The ships are required to survey everything in the system, but we generally will not go in close. You know that. You used to work for us. That means, if the
Seeker
is orbiting a planet, the planet would most likely be in the biozone. So you want to start there.”

“We don’t even know for sure it’s in the system.”

“That’s what makes it a challenge.” She took the first bite out of her sandwich. “Good stuff,” she said. “I love this place.”

“Tell me about the telescope.”

“Okay, we’ll need to coordinate getting it for you.” She spotted the flirt and looked bored. “When are you leaving?”

When I got back to the office, I reported the conversation to Alex, who pumped a fist in the air. “I believe we’re in business,” he said.

I also told him about Windy’s call.

“Ollie Bolton.” He made a face. “Why am I not surprised?”

“I don’t think there’s much we can do. Short of physical assault.”

“I don’t, either.”

“You don’t seem all that annoyed.”

“It’s part of the business,” he said. “We got outsmarted.”

“It’s
not
part of the business. It’s bribery.”

“Let’s not worry about it for the moment, Chase. We have bigger things to think about.”

The
Belle-Marie
didn’t have a mount for the telescope, so there was a delay of several days while a cradle was prepared and installed on the hull.

While that was going forward, Alex tried to check on Josh Corbin, the man who’d visited Delia and questioned her about the
Seeker
. But we got no useful information beyond what we already knew: He was an occasional consultant for Bolton.

Meanwhile a package arrived for me at the office. It carried a greeting card:
Chase, I’ve never forgotten you. Letting you get away was the dumbest thing I’ve ever done. I’ll call this evening. Jerry
.

There had been a Jerry Unterkefler in my life a few years back, but he hadn’t struck me as the passionate type.

Last year, during the
Polaris
business, when several attempts were made on our lives, we bumped up to class-A security coverage. I was about to open the package when it paid off. Jacob told me to put it down, gently, warn Alex, and for both of us to get out of the house.

We stood on the lawn an hour later while police carried the box off. “Clearance nanos,” Fenn told us. “They’d have turned the house into a park with three stone benches in about four minutes’ time.” He looked at me. “
You’d
have been one of the benches.”

That was unsettling.

“Who’d want you guys dead?” he asked.

We had no idea who would go so far as to try to
kill
us. We spent an hour with him, answering questions, trying to zero in on suspects. We told him about the
Seeker
, and about Josh Corbin. And about Ollie Bolton.

“You think Bolton’s behind this?”

Alex said he didn’t know. I’m no fan of Bolton’s, but I couldn’t believe he’d try to kill anyone. “How would you get your hands on these things?” I asked. “On the nanos?”

“We’re looking into it. They’re designed for industrial use. Not hard to get. Unfortunately.”

That night they located Jerry Unterkefler and hauled him downtown for an interview. Actually, it was good to see him again. But I knew he wasn’t behind it.

Fenn called to warn us to be careful, take no chances, and not to hesitate to let him know if we felt threatened.

Truth was, we already felt threatened, and we were glad another flight on the
Belle-Marie
was coming up.

Two guys from Tech Support attached the telescope, which they called a Martin, after Chris Martin, who is believed to be the first to use this specific type. Back in ancient times. They connected it to the ship’s AI, ran a couple of tests, and told us we were all set.

This time, of course, Alex was coming. We logged in for a morning departure, but couldn’t get rooms at either of the Skydeck hotels the night before, so we were forced to sleep on board. We had dinner at Karl’s, a sedate Dellacondan restaurant. It’s Alex’s favorite at Skydeck. Whenever we’re there, he tries to schedule time to eat at Karl’s. Afterward, he returned to the ship, while I went looking for a party. I found one, and didn’t get back to the
Belle-Marie
until we were within a couple hours of launch. Not that it mattered. Once we were away from the station, we’d need nine hours to build up a charge, so I’d have plenty of time to sleep. Alex was up when I got there, and he looked at me disapprovingly. But he didn’t say anything.

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 ready-signal 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 class-K, 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?”

I couldn’t lie to him. “Probably. But let’s just relax.”

He shrugged. “I’m always relaxed,” he said. “They don’t make them any more relaxed than I am.”

On the fourth day insystem, Belle reported another hit. “
It’s a terrestrial
,” she said. “
We didn’t see it earlier because it was on the other side of the sun
.”

“Where’s it located?” asked Alex.

“In the biozone.”

Bingo. He jumped out of his chair and squeezed my arm. “Let’s hope.” He peered out the viewport. “Is it visible?”

Belle pointed out a dim star.

“Let’s go take a look.”

Belle acknowledged, and we changed course. We’d need another ten hours or so to recharge, after which we could jump in close.