Timothy Zahn - Star Song and Other Stories

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."

"Right," Bilko added. "Obviously, she fed us the location directly without realizing that she was looking at where the colony was ten years ago."

"You got it," I said. "Hard to believe a scholar would make such a simple error, though."

"Unless she didn't realize they were still moving," Rhonda offered.

"No, she told me they were still underway," I said. "That's how she knew there was still someone aboard, remember?"

"She's a historian," Bilko said, waving a hand in dismissal. "Or maybe an archaeologist. Probably doesn't even know what a light-year is—you know how rampant upper-class specialization is."

"And someday all of us in the tech classes will take over," Rhonda echoed the populist slogan. "Dream on. Okay, we know the problem. What's the solution?"

"Seems straightforward enough," Bilko said. "We know they were headed away from Sol system, so we figure out how much farther they could have gone in ten years and go that far along that vector."

"And how do we figure out what speed they were making?" I asked him.

"From the redshift in their drive spectrum, of course," he said. "Assuming, of course, that Kulasawa was smart enough to bring some of the actual telescopic photos with her." He smiled at me. "You can be the one to go ask for them."

I grimaced. "Thanks. Heaps."

"Don't go into grovel mode quite yet," Rhonda warned. "Even if she has photos they won't do us any good, because we don't know what the at-rest spectrum for their drive was."

"Why not?" Bilko asked, frowning at the intercom speaker. "I thought it was just a standard ion-capture drive."

"There was nothing standard about it," Rhonda told him. "You can't just scale up an ion-capture drive that way—the magnetic field instabilities will tear it apart. Even now our biggest long-range freighters are running right up to the wire. God only knows what trick the Jovians pulled to make theirs work."

"If you say so," Bilko said. "Engines aren't really my field of expertise."

"Of course." I cocked an eyebrow at him. "What was that again about rampant specialization?"

He smiled lopsidedly. "Touche," he said. "So let's hear your idea."

I gazed out the viewport. "We start with a focused search along the vector from Sol system," I said slowly. "Even if we don't know what the spectrum looks like, we know they can't have gotten too far away from here yet. That means the drive glow will be reasonably bright, and our astrogator ought to be able to pick up on a major star that's not supposed to be there. Right?"

"Sorry," Rhonda said. "Astrogation's not my field of expertise."

"Give it a rest, Blankenship," Bilko growled. "Assuming it's still firing hot enough to look like a major star, yes, it'll work. Then what?"

"Then we head at right angles to that direction for a small but specified distance," I said. "Say, a few A.U. Then we come back out, find the drive trail again, and get the location by straight triangulation."

"Can we do a program that short?" Rhonda asked. "Even at Blue speeds an A.U.

must go by pretty fast."

"A shade under six hundredths of a second, actually," Bilko said. "And no, we can't do that directly."

"What we can do is run a few minutes out and almost the same number of minutes back," I added. "Some of the bigger freighters do that all the time to fine-tune their arrival position. Jimmy should have what he needs to work up that kind of program."

"We assume so, anyway," Bilko added. "But of course musicmastery isn't our field of expertise."

"Look, Bilko—"

"Play nicely, children," I said. "Bilko, get the sensors going, will you?"

The Sergei Rock's sensors weren't quite up to the same ultra-high standard of quality as our legal and financial software was. But they were certainly nothing to sneer at, either—the myriad of transport regulators that swarmed like locusts across the Expansion made sure of that. And so it came as something of a surprise when, thirty minutes later, the result of our search turned up negative.

"Great," Bilko said, tapping his fingers restlessly on the edge of his board.

"Just great. Now what?"

"They must have turned off their drive," I said, looking over the astrogate computer's report again. "That, or else it's failed. Rhonda?"

"Seems odd that they would turn it off," Rhonda said doubtfully. "Certainly not in the middle of nowhere like this. And for it to have run 130 years and just happened to fail now would be pretty ironic."

"Yeah, but about par for the way my luck's been going," Bilko said sourly.

"That last game I had on Angorki—"

"The Universe does not have it in for you personally, Bilko," Rhonda interrupted him. "Much as you'd like to think so. Jake, I'd guess it's more likely they simply changed course. If they shifted their vector even a few degrees their drive wouldn't be pointed directly at us anymore."

Abruptly, Bilko snapped his fingers. "No," he said, turning a tight grin on me.

"They didn't change course. Not from here."

"Of course not," I said as it hit me as well. "All we need is to reprogram the searcher—"

"I'm on it," Bilko said, hands already skating across the computer board.

"Any time you two want to let me in on this, go ahead," Rhonda invited.

"We've assumed they hit this point on the way from Sol," I explained, watching over Bilko's shoulder. "But maybe they didn't. Maybe they headed out on a slightly different vector, paused to take a look at some promising system along the way, then changed course and headed out again."