Jack McDevitt - SEEKER

“Kalu, run a check, please.” She looked at me and shrugged. These things happen.

“The display is accurate, Shara.”

“Can’t be,” I said.

“Yeah. It’s nowhere near the system.” She checked the ranges. “This is not the one.

Closest it got was a decent fraction of a light-year. A twentieth.”

I became aware of Alex, standing silently at the hatch, listening.

“Does this mean we got things wrong?” I asked. “Are there two brown dwarfs in the area?”

“Could be.” She sat down at one of the ops consoles and the 3-D images vanished.

“Actually, sixty percent of brown dwarfs travel in pairs.”

“Really?”

“Yes. The companion is usually within a tenth of a light-year.” She put the scope images on the monitors. Views forward and aft, and off both beams. “It’s not very likely that this thing missed Margolia just as another, unrelated, dwarf took the system apart. So there’s probably-”

Against the cosmic backdrop off the starboard side, a bloodred star appeared. First magnitude.

“That it?”

“I’ll get back to you,” said Shara.

It was just under a half light-year from our position, and its radial and transverse velocities were almost identical to the brown dwarf.

“It’s one of your bloodred jobs,” I said.

“Looks like.” She was tapping keys and watching numbers roll down the screen.

Finally, she froze them. We were looking at a set of coordinates. Shara ran the dwarf backward until it intersected with Tinicum. At the point of impact. “That’s your intruder,” she said. “No question.”

“Okay.” Alex took the chair beside her. “Now we can figure out what happened to Balfour.”

“Give me a little time,” she said.

I sent off a report to Windy, then went back to my cabin and tried to read. I was tired, but I just lay there listening to the assorted sounds of the ship. The Spirit was noisier than the Belle Marie. The quarters were more cramped. And it felt more impersonal. I can’t explain that, exactly. Maybe it was the AI. Kalu wasn’t exactly charismatic.

Eventually I gave up, got a shower, and put on a clean set of clothes. Outside, Shara was in the middle of an explanation. And she looked solemn. Alex was pale. Shara waved in my direction. “-Doesn’t mean it necessarily got swallowed,” she said.

Alex took a deep breath. “Shara thinks,” he said, “there might have been a collision.”

“Might,” she said.

“A direct hit?” I asked. “Balfour?”

“It’s possible.”

Nobody said anything.

“Look.” Shara leveled her voice. Let’s all keep calm. “We need to check this out more carefully. I need time to put the numbers together. Then we can get a better idea what actually happened.”

Alex looked at me. “Chase,” he said, “bring Emil up to date. And get us over there.”

“Over where?”

“To the intruder.”

We swung to starboard. The intruder was a distant red glow. We lined up on it, fed the range into Kalu, and belted down.

“Don’t jump in too close,” Shara cautioned. “We want to give ourselves plenty of space with that thing.”

I’ve always been a safety-first kind of person. Because of that, and the inaccuracy of the quantum drive, we came out almost three days away. Close enough.

Again, I was struck by the dwarf’s resemblance to a gas giant. Except that this one was red, with no visible moons and no ring. Its surface churned with tornadoes and cyclones. “That’ll be iron,” Shara said.

“What will?”

“The clouds. And silicates and corundum.” Occasionally, when the clouds parted, hot spots that were even brighter became visible. Shara spent time on the instruments while Alex watched anxiously.

“What are you looking for?” he asked.

“Maybe a surprise. Good news: It did not swallow Balfour. But it did have lunch recently.”

“How do you mean?” asked Alex.

“Probably Balfour’s moon. This thing passed within a few hundred thousand kilometers of Balfour. And I’d bet it took the moon. Do we know whether Balfour had one?”

“No.”

“Okay. I’d bet it did.”

“How do you know?”

She pointed at lines on the central screen. “Its atmosphere is saturated with silicates.”

“Which tells us what?”

“It swallowed a moon. And it happened at about the time of the intersection.”

Alex took a deep breath. “How can you be sure it wasn’t Balfour?”

“It wasn’t a planet.” She spun around to face him. “Terrestrial moons are made of the surface scum skimmed off terrestrial worlds by major impacts. Think of Rimway’s structure. An iron core and a silicate mantle. The moon at home is pretty much nothing but iron-poor mantle material.” She indicated the screen. “Take a look at the lines. You can see there’s no iron.”

I couldn’t see that, and I had no doubt Alex couldn’t. But that was irrelevant. Shara could, and that was all that mattered.

“So where’s Balfour?”

She was smiling broadly. “It got close enough to lose its satellite. So at the very least, it’s trailing behind the dwarf.”

“Can we get pictures?”

“I’ve been trying to. I haven’t seen it yet.”

“Okay. It’s still early.”

“Right. And there’s another possibility.”

“Which is what?”

Bare minutes later, the second possibility materialized when a blue star appeared from behind the dwarf. “Chase,” Shara said, “Alex. Enjoy the moment. Unless I’ve completely blown it, you’re looking at Balfour.”

Use your eyes instead of your brain, and you’ll come to grief every time.

- Delis Tolbert,

The Adventures of Omar Paisley, 1417 “I don’t think there’s any question about it,” said Shara. “That’s your missing planet.”

We were getting a decent picture on the scope. And we saw immediately that it had oceans! And it was green.

Alex looked overwhelmed. “It’s a living world,” he said.

Shara nodded. “Looks like.” And to me: “How close is it to the dwarf?”

I passed the question to Kalu. “It’s about a million kilometers. Maybe a bit more.”

She clapped her hands. “Close enough. Who would’ve thought?”

It was a glorious moment. We danced and yipped and embraced. I got a huge hug from Alex.

“It’s in tidal lock,” said Kalu. “Orbital period looks like approximately two point six days.”

It took a few minutes for us to come back to reality. We broke into the stock cabinet and passed out drinks. We lifted our glasses to Balfour.

“Brilliant,” said Alex.

“How do you mean?” I asked. “Who’s brilliant?”

“The Margolians. Now we know why they moved people to Balfour.”

“You think they knew in advance this would happen?”

“Yes.” Shara looked puzzled. “They figured it out. Maybe they weren’t sure. I don’t know what kind of equipment they had with them. But they understood Balfour might come out of it okay.”

“Why the frown?” asked Alex.

“Well,” she said, “living conditions on the surface, during the event, and for a considerable time afterward, would have been difficult.”

“In what way?”

“During the first few decades after capture by the dwarf, rotational energy would have had to be dissipated.” She ran through a few equations on a notepad. “There would have been lots of earthquakes, tidal waves, typhoons, volcanoes going up. Global warming during the first century. Substantial evaporation. I’m thinking jungle pretty much everywhere.”

“Again?” I asked.

“Yes. Warm, wet catastrophes breed jungle.” She shook her head. “They would have had to be desperate to cross to Balfour, and it’s hard to see how they could have survived.”