But any sense that the ship was a haven, a place of sanctuary, was now gone. Every glimpse of the scrimshaw suit was a reminder that Jasmina had pushed her influence into his fief dom. There would be no second chances. Everything that mattered to him now depended on the system ahead.
“Bitch,” he said again.
Quaiche reached the command deck and squeezed into the pilot’s seat. The deck was necessarily tiny, for the Dominatrix was mostly fuel and engine. The space he sat in was little more than a bulbous widening of the narrow companionway, like the reservoir in a mercury thermometer. Ahead was an oval viewport showing nothing but interstellar space.
“Avionics,” he said.
Instrument panels closed around him like pincers. They flickered and then lit up with animated diagrams and input fields, flowing to meet the focus of his gaze as his eyes moved.
“Orders, Quaiche?”
“Just give me a moment,” he said. He appraised the critical systems first, checking that there was nothing wrong that the subpersona might have missed. They had eaten slightly further into the fuel budget than Quaiche would ordinarily have expected at this point in a mission, but given the additional mass of the scrimshaw suit it was only to be expected. There was enough in reserve for it not to worry him. Other than that all was welclass="underline" the slowdown had happened without incident; all ship functions were nominal, from sensors and life support to the health of the tiny excursion craft that sat in the Dominatrix’s belly like an embryonic dolphin, anxious to be born.
“Ship, were there any special requirements for this survey?”
“None that were revealed to me.”
“Well, that’s splendidly reassuring. And the status of the mother ship?”
“I am receiving continuous telemetry from Gnostic Ascension. You will be expected to rendezvous after the usual six- to seven-week survey period. Fuel reserves are sufficient for the catch-up manoeuvre.”
“Affirmative.” It would never have made much sense for Jasmina to have stranded him without enough fuel, but it was gratifying to know, on this occasion at least, that she had acted sensibly.
“Horris?” said Morwenna. “Talk to me, please. Where are you?”
“I’m up front,” he said, “checking things out. Everything looks more or less OK at this point, but I want to make Certain.”
“Do you know where we are yet?”
“I’m about to find out.” He touched one of the control fields, enabling voice control of major ship systems. “Rotate plus one-eighty, thirty-second slew,” he said.
The console display indicated compliance. Through the oval view port, a sprinkling of faintly visible stars began to ooze from one edge to the other.
“Talk to me,” Morwenna said again.
“I’m slewing us around. We were pointed tailfirst after slowdown. Should be getting a look at the system any moment now.”
“Did Jasmina say anything about it?”
“Not that I remember. What about you?”
“Nothing,” she said. For the first time since waking she sounded almost like her old self. He imagined it was a coping mechanism. If she acted normally, she would keep panic at bay. Panicking was the last thing she needed in the scrimshaw suit. Morwenna continued, “Just that it was another system that didn’t look particularly noteworthy. A star and some planets. No record of human presence. Dullsville, really.”
“Well, no record doesn’t mean that someone hasn’t passed through here at some point, just like we’re doing. And they may have left something behind.”
“Better bloody hope they did,” Morwenna remarked caustically.
“I’m trying to look on the optimistic side.”
“I’m sorry. I know you mean well, but let’s not expect the impossible, shall we?”
“We may have to,” he said under his breath, hoping that the ship would not pick it up and relay it to Morwenna.
By then the ship had just about completed its rotation, flipping nose-to-tail. A prominent star slid into view and centred itself in the oval. At this distance it was really more a sun than a star: without the command deck’s selective glare shields it would have been uncomfortably bright to look at.
“I’ve got something,” Quaiche said. His fingers skated across the console. “Let’s see. Spectral type’s a cool G. Main sequence, about three-fifths solar luminosity. A few spots, but no worrying coronal activity. About twenty AU out.”
“Still pretty far away,” Morwenna said.
“Not if you want to be certain of including all the major planets in the same volume.”
“What about theworlds?”
“Just a sec.” His nimble fingers worked the console again and the forward view changed, coloured lines of orbits springing on to the read-out, squashed into ellipses, each flattened hoop tagged by a box of numbers showing the major characteristics of the world belonging to that orbit. Quaiche studied the parameters: mass, orbital period, day length, inclination, diameter, surface gravity, mean density, magnetospheric strength, the presence of moons or ring systems. From the confidence limits assigned to the numbers he deduced that they had been calculated by the Dominatrix, using its own sensors and interpretation algorithms. If they had been dredged out of some pre-existing database of system parameters they would have been significantly more precise.
The numbers would improve as the Dominatrix got closer to the system, but until then it was worth keeping in mind that this region of space was essentially unexplored. Someone else might have passed through, but they had probably not stayed long enough to file an official report. That meant that the system stood a chance of containing something that someone, somewhere, might possibly regard as valuable, if only on novelty grounds.
“In your own time,” the ship said, anxious to begin its work.
“All right, all right,” Quaiche said. “In the absence of any anomalous data, we’ll work our way towards the sun one world at a time, and then we’ll take those on the far side as we head back into interstellar space. Given those constraints, find the five most fuel-efficient search patterns and present them to me. If there’s a significantly more efficient strategy that requires skipping a world and returning to it later, I’d like to know about it as well.“
“Just a moment, Quaiche.” The pause was barely enough time for him to pick his nose. “Here we are. Given your specified parameters, there is no strongly favoured solution, nor is there a significantly more favourable pattern with an out-of-order search.”
“Good. Now display the five options in descending order of the time I’d need to spend in slowdown.”
The options reshuffled themselves. Quaiche stroked his chin, trying to decide between them. He could ask the ship to make the final decision itself, applying some arcane selection criteria of its own, but he always preferred to make this final selection himself. It wasn’t simply a question of picking one at random, for there was always a solution that for one reason or another just happened to look more right than the others. Quaiche was perfectly willing to admit that this amounted to decision by hunch, rather than any conscious process of elimination. But he did not think it was any less valid for that. The whole point of having Quaiche conduct these in-system surveys was precisely to use those slippery skills that could not be easily cajoled into the kind of algorithmic instruction sets that machines ran. Intervening to select the pattern that best pleased him was just what he was along to do.