Timothy Zahn - Star Song and Other Stories

"Passing through this point on an entirely different vector than the direct line from Sol," Bilko added. "OK, here it comes... computer says the only real possibility is Lalande 21185. That would put the vector... right. OK, let's try that focused search again. And keep your fingers crossed."

We didn't have to keep them crossed for very long. Three minutes later, the computer had found it.

"No doubt about it," Bilko decided. "We are definitely genius-class material."

"Don't start making laurel-leaf soup too fast," Rhonda warned. "Now, I take it, comes the tricky part?"

"You take it correctly," I said, unstrapping. "I'll go tell Kulasawa we've found her floating museum. And then go have a chat with Jimmy."

Kulasawa was elated in a grim, upper-class sort of way, managing to simultaneously imply that I should keep her better informed and that I also shouldn't waste time with useless mid-course reports. I escaped to Jimmy's cabin, wondering if maybe Bilko's suggestion of upping our price would really be unethical after all.

As Rhonda had suggested, the tricky part now began. Two successive performances of Schubert's "Erlkonig," the versions differing by exactly point five seven second gave us our triangulation point. Another reading on the Freedom's Peace's drive glow, and we had them nailed at just over fifty A.U. away.

"Not exactly hauling Yellows, are they?" Bilko commented. "I mean, fifty A.U.s in ten years?"

"The engines were probably scaled for low but constant acceleration," Rhonda said. "They would have lost a lot of their velocity when they stopped to check out the Lalande system."

"Just as well for us they did," I pointed out. "If they'd been pulling a straight acceleration for the past 130 years we wouldn't have a hope in hell of matching speeds with them."

"Good point," Rhonda agreed. "Any idea what speed they are making?"

"As a matter of fact, I do," I said smugly, keying for the calculation I'd requested. "I took a spectrum of their drive at both our triangulation points.

Because we were seeing the red-shifted light from two different angles—well, I

won't bore you with the math. Suffice it to say the Freedom's Peace is smoking along at just under thirty kilometers a second."

"About three times Earth escape velocity," Bilko murmured. "Can the engines handle that, Rhonda?"

"No problem," she assured him. "We'll probably pop a few preburn sparkles, though. So what's the plan?"

"We'll set up a program that'll put us just a little ways ahead of them," I told her. "That way, we'll get to watch them go past us and can get exact numbers on their speed and vector."

"Provided they don't run us down," Rhonda murmured.

"They're not hardly going fast enough for that," Bilko scoffed. "Fifty A.U.s means another forward-back program, of course."

"Right," I said, nodding. "You work out the course while I go help Jimmy set it up."

"Right," he said, turning to his board. "You going to give our scholar the good news on the way to Jimmy's?"

"Let's let it be a surprise."

Fifteen minutes later we were ready to go. "Okay, Jimmy, this is it," I called toward the intercom. "Let's do it."

"Okay," he said. "Here goes Operation Reverse Columbus."

I flicked off the intercom. "Operation Reverse Columbus?" Bilko asked, cocking an eyebrow.

I shook my head as the pre-music C-sharp vibrated through the hull. "He thinks he's being cute," I said. "Just ignore him." The pre-tone ended; and as the strains of Schumann's Manfred Overture began the stars vanished, and I settled in for the short ride ahead.

A ride which turned out to be a lot shorter than I'd expected. Barely two notes into the piece, with the music still going, the stars abruptly reappeared.

"Jimmy!" I snarled his name like a curse as I grabbed for my restraints. Of all times to break his concentration and lose our flapblack—

And then my eyes flicked to the viewport... and my hands froze on the release.

Flashing past from just beneath us, no more than twenty kilometers away, was the Freedom's Peace.

And it was definitely cooking along. Even as I caught my breath it shot away from us toward the stars, its circle of six drive nozzles blazing furiously from the stern and dimming with distance—

And then, without warning, it suddenly flared into a brilliant blaze of light.

My first, horrified thought was that the colony had exploded right in front of us. My second, confused thought was that an explosion normally didn't have six neatly arranged nexus points... and as the six blazing circles receded in the direction the Freedom's Peace had been going, I finally realized what had happened. Not the how or the why, but at least the what.

On that, at least, I was ahead of Bilko. "What the hell?" he gasped.

"The music's still going," I snapped, belatedly hitting my restraint release and scrambling to my feet. "As soon as it got far enough ahead of us, we got wrapped again and caught up with it."

"We what? But—?"

"But why are we unwrapping when we get close?" I ducked my head and peered out the viewport, just in time to see us do our strange little microjump and catch up with the asteroid again. "Good question. Let me get Jimmy shut down and we'll try to figure it out."

I sprinted back to his cabin, cursing the unknown bureaucrat or planning commission hotshot who'd come up with the idea of locking out the musicmaster's intercom whenever the music was playing. If these insane little wrap/unwraps were damaging my transport—

I reached the cabin and threw myself inside. Leaning back on his couch with his eyes closed and the massive headphones engulfing his head, Jimmy probably never realized anything was wrong until I slapped the cutoff switch.

At which point his reaction more than made up for it. He jolted upright like someone had applied electrodes to selected parts of his body, his eyes snapping wide open. "What—?" he gasped, ripping off his headphones.

"We've got trouble," I told him briefly, jabbing the intercom switch.

"Rhonda?"

"Here," she said. "Why have we stopped?"

"It wasn't our idea," I said. "We lost our flapblack."

"About six times in a row," Bilko put in tensely from the flight deck. "As soon as we get close enough to the Freedom's Peace, we lose them."

"What's going on?" a voice demanded from behind me.

I turned around. Kulasawa was standing in the open doorway, her gaze hard on me.

"You heard everything we know so far," I told her. "We've lost our flapblack wrap six times now trying to get close to the Freedom's Peace."

Her gaze shifted to Jimmy, hardening to the consistency of reinforced concrete.

"It wasn't me," he protested quickly. "I didn't do anything."

"You're the musicmaster, aren't you?" she demanded.

"It's not Jimmy's fault," I put in. "It's something having to do with the Freedom's Peace itself."

The glare turned back to me. "Such as?"

"Maybe it's the mass," Jimmy spoke up, apparently still too young and inexperienced to know when to keep his mouth shut and pretend to be furniture.

"That's why flapblacks can't get too close in to planets—"

"This is an asteroid, musicmaster," Kulasawa cut him off icily. "Not a planet."

"Yes, but—"

"It's not the mass," Kulasawa said, dismissing the suggestion with a curl of her lip. "What else?"

"It could be their drive," Rhonda suggested over the intercom. "Maybe the radiation from an ion-capture drive that big is scaring them away."

"Or else killing them," Bilko said quietly.

It was a strange, even eerie thought, but one which I think had already occurred to all of us. We knew nothing about how flapblacks lived or died, or even whether they died at all. What we did know is that we traveled with them, and the thought that we might have been even indirectly responsible for killing a half dozen of them was an unpleasant one for all of us.