Jack McDevitt - SEEKER

As any single female of the correct age will tell you, there’s nothing quite like living with the possibility that on any given day you will meet The Guy. The one who sets your heart racing and whom you know from the beginning you will never forget. Well, okay. I’ve never seen one of those in the flesh, and there are moments when I doubt they really exist. But then an evening with the right sim, watching Choelo Tabor look into the soul of a Chase Kolpath avatar, watching the two of us fall desperately in love while the rain pours down on the cottage roof and the music swells and carries us away-Well, I can tell you that Choelo could have me anytime. But I knew that I wasn’t going to see him, or anyone else for that matter, out here around Boopsilon Delta, or wherever the hell we were.

We were also beginning to use up our fuel. Short jumps are short, but we were doing a lot of them and they burn just as much fuel as the long-range insertions.

Eventually we transferred the search to the far side of the sun. By then, the plan was to take a quick look around, see if anything presented itself, then rethink our options.

Finally, on the ninth day, Belle announced she had spotted something.

“The moon?” I asked.

“Not exactly,” she said. Another oddly human trait: She loved being in charge of the moment and never hesitated to draw the situation out. “How about that?”

“What?” demanded Alex. “What do you see?”

“Another high-albedo object.”

“Another tracker?” I held my breath.

“No. I don’t think so.”

“Another ship?”

“Possibly.”

“The Bremerhaven?” I said.

“I cannot make that determination. Whatever it is, however, it’s nearby.”

It wasn’t the Bremerhaven. And it wasn’t another visitor. It was a docking facility. It was about a kilometer long, with two enclosed bays for landers, a terminal, something that must have been a storage unit, and a collection of struts, crosspieces, and burst tanks. It was adrift, turning slowly, end over end, trailing spars and broken cables.

The bays were open and empty.

We pulled alongside. Alex was already climbing into his suit. I asked whether we wanted to take a packing container with us.

“Let’s just go look,” he said. “See what we have.” He was still subdued.

I picked up a laser, and we made the crossing. There was a possibility the enclosed sections of the station were still holding air pressure, and that turned out to be the case.

We went through one of the bays and had to cut our way through a bulkhead. There were no human remains this time. For which I was grateful.

We moved into a dark passageway, a bit more relaxed than we had been on the Seeker.

But we didn’t engage in our usual hunt for artifacts. To be honest, there wasn’t much lying around.

Nor was there debris floating through the dark. We found an observatory, a maintenance station, and a galley. There were two boarding tubes. Both had been brought inside and retired to their cradles.

We went back out onto the dock, where, we assumed, the Bremerhaven and the Seeker had once tied up.

“How’d they do it?” asked Alex.

The ships would have dwarfed the station. We found tethers. They were thin, and it was hard to imagine either of the behemoths secured by them. “The dock has magnetic skirts,” I said. “They just locked it in and tied it down.”

“I’d have expected to find something broken,” he said.

“How do you mean?”

“Maybe I’m wrong. But I’ve assumed the Bremerhaven would not have been operational after they removed the parts we saw in the Seeker.”

“I don’t really know for sure, but that’s almost certainly right.”

“So what happened to it?”

I looked at the retracted tethers. Everything was in order. “They released it,” I said.

“Why?”

“Maybe they didn’t want the dock wrecked.”

“Chase, the dock got thrown a long way. You seriously think they didn’t know that was going to happen?”

“I have no idea, Alex.”

He touched one of the tethers. It had lost its flexibility. “Why bother releasing a ship that couldn’t go anywhere?” he said.

“I don’t know. Maybe they didn’t want to have it come down on their heads during whatever it was that was happening. So they got rid of it.”

“Maybe.” He looked at me for a long minute, although I couldn’t see his face inside the darkened helmet. “It doesn’t feel right.”

Belle called: “We have a candidate for the moon.”

As soon as we got within range, we saw that it was the satellite from the holograms.

There was no mistaking the craters and the ridgeline and the mountain range.

Belle usually had a hard time understanding the vagaries of human behavior. She thought the discovery was reason to celebrate, so she showed up dressed in a black off-the-shoulder gown, looking like a model from Sand and Sea. She held both fists over her head while her bosom heaved, and she showered us with congratulations. But the mood on the ship remained gloomy.

Like the Seeker, and the dock, the former moon had gone into solar orbit.

“Circumference at the equator is thirty-five hundred kilometers,” Belle announced.

Big for a moon, even by the standards of Rimway’s oversized satellite. “I do not detect any indication of catastrophic damage.”

You’ve seen one moon, you’ve pretty much seen them all. This one was heavily cratered on one side, the side we’d seen in the hologram. The other was relatively smooth, the product of an ancient lava flow, I supposed. We went into orbit around it and began looking for anything that might tell us how it had gotten there.

Alex took pictures, and we mapped the object. We measured it and scanned it. We hoped to find signs that someone had walked on it. A base, a monument, a wrench dropped in the dust. Something. But if it was there, we didn’t see it.

“Orbital period approximately seven hundred thirty-five years. It is now inbound midway between aphelion and perihelion.”

“We’ve got a dock and a moon,” I said. “We might be able to use them to figure out where and when the event happened.”

He nodded. “Do it.”

My chance to shine. “Belle,” I said, “track the orbits of the moon and the dock back nine thousand years. Do they at any time intersect?”

“Working,” said Belle.

“That’s good, Chase,” said Alex. “You may have a future as a mathematician.”

“That would be a step down,” I said.

Belle was back. “No. They do not intersect. But there is a close approach.”

“How close?”

“They come within two point three million kilometers on March 3, 2745, in the terrestrial calendar.”

“Fifty-five years after they’d first touched down,” said Alex.

“Let’s see what it looks like, Belle. Show us the biozone, too.”

She dimmed the lights. Gave us the sun. Drew a wide circle around it to indicate the biozone. She added a bright yellow arc. “This is the dock.” And a second arc, passing well to one side of the dock. “The moon.” The approach took place on the inner edge of the biozone.

“Belle,” said Alex, “show us where the terrestrial world was on that date.”

“It’s hard to be certain, because the planetary orbit might have been different prior to the event.”

“It would have been different, Belle,” I told her.

“Then what am I looking for?” She sounded annoyed.

“Assume the terrestrial world originally had a standard orbit inside the biozone, near its inner edge. Where would it have been?”

“One moment, please.”

Nobody said anything.

A blinking marker appeared a hand’s width away from the moon. Farther from the dock.