“Any guesses?”
“None that I care to voice. I don’t want people to think I’ve finally flipped my dish completely.”
“A new ship design?” I suggested. “Something on its first trip out here?”
She shook her head quickly. “We would have heard if there was anything that radical in the works.”
“Maybe it didn’t come from Mars or one of the space habitats that support the guild. Could it be that Earth has decided to get back into the mining game?”
“That we would have heard about even faster,” Angie said. Earth had been pretty much shut out of the deep mining business decades before. They couldn’t compete. The depth of Earth’s gravity well imposed too much overhead. Even for the things Earth needed she had to come to the Mars-based mining co-op, and the Miners’ Guild.
“If it’s not ours and it couldn’t have come from Earth, that pretty much only leaves one other possibility,” I said. I was almost as reluctant to voice that alternative as Angie was. “It must be coming from the other side of the cloud.”
We stared at each other. This can’t be happening, I thought. It had been 147 years since Tara Jewel O’Brien, the first child born off-Earth, and people had been looking for aliens for at least 90 years before that. Every search had turned up blank. Most folks had finally started to discount the possibility that we would ever find anyone else.
“There has to be another explanation.” Angie spoke very softly, and there was almost an edge of fear in her voice.
“You’d think so,” I replied. I got back on the radio to Ebbie. “Analyze all of the data about the new ship. Give me your best estimate of its nature and origin.”
Ebbie took more than a minute to respond. The delay told me as much as the words she finally used. “The vessel is of unknown type and origin. It does not conform to any specifications in my database, nor can I extrapolate circumstances which might have contorted any known objects into these figures.”
What I wanted most was the chance to communicate with home, get advice from all of the experts that Mars, Earth, the Moon, and all of the habitats could find. But that would take nearly a year, just for the round-trip communications time, and all we had were hours before the ship, or whatever it was, arrived.
I had just got to the point of deciding that it was time to tell Clay about our mysterious visitor when he came into the habitat and started to strip out of his pressure suit.
“There is an anomalous vessel, or something, approaching,” he announced as soon as his helmet was off.
“We know. We’ve been trying to figure out what it might be. It doesn’t conform to any known pattern.”
“There is a chance that it is of alien origin,” Clay said, words delivered from the Mountaintop.
Angie and I exchanged a glance. “I think we’d better finish the work on Ebbie while we can,” I told her.
Clay never got all of the way out of his suit. He was sealed back in and through the airlock before Angie and I could get suited up.
It was, to understate the obvious, a distraction. I wanted to have Ebbie ready for a hard push home before the alien ship—if that was what it was—reached the shipwreck station. If the ship was following the beacon in and not just passing by. Part of me, a large part, wanted to get the repairs completed, dock Barta to Ebbie, get Angie aboard, and light the wick for home before the newcomer arrived. I had the distinct feeling that history was about to be made… and I would have just as soon avoided it. It might be uncomfortable, if not lethal. I would gladly have given Clay the honors if he had asked. The words would have been out before my brain could censor them.
But Clay was never the cooperative sort.
Angie and I kept links open to the habitat’s instruments through Ebbie. She also kept track of Barta that way. Ebbie ran diagnostics to track the progressive systems failures aboard Barta. Before much longer Angie would have to put her ship in sleep mode, with only the most essential services running, if she wanted to save anything.
“There, I think we’ve got it,” I said after we had been out for eighty minutes. “I’ll tell Ebbie to run her complete preflight checklist. That’ll take twenty minutes. If she says it’s OK, we’ll start worrying about getting Barta docked to her.”
“You want to do that right away?” Angie asked.
I nodded. “I want to be ready to light the wick at a minute’s notice, if we have to.”
“That’s probably wise,” she agreed. She turned, not quite enough to really see Clay, but enough to get me to glance his way. “I think he feels the same way. He might not even wait to see who our visitors are.”
“How do you feel about it?”
“I haven’t made up my mind. If we left first and never found out who or what is coming, it would plague me the rest of my life, but finding out could be even more unpleasant.”
Angie was looking up, out in the direction of the radar contact—not that we could see anything yet—rather than at me, so she couldn’t see my grin. “I know exactly how you feel,” I said. “I’ve been having the same debate with myself.”
We moved into Ebbie to wait for her to complete the diagnostics. As soon as Ebbie gave the OK, we would do the rest of the work. Mating the two candles right at the shipwreck station would be touchy. The easy way, the by the book way, would be to back both ships a dozen kilometers from the surface of the berg, then do the snag-and-hug. But we couldn’t rely on Barta for her half of the work. Ebbie’s thrusters had enough cold gas left for her thrusters to enable us to do the job in close, though.
“Everything checks out nominal, Tim,” Ebbie said after the last test. “We won’t have any difficulty at all getting home with Barta. And I should need only minimal work at Lowell Port to be ready to head out again.”
“That’s good to hear, Ebbie. We’re going to mate Barta and get us ready to leave in a hurry if we have to. You understand?”
“I do, Tim. I have been making my preparations based on that assumption. Will we be leaving before the anomalous object gets close enough for visual identification?”
“Probably not, but that is subject to change. We might get cold feet and change our minds. Just be ready for either.”
“Of course.”
“Angie, do you want to do this from here or go over to Barta for the docking?”
She hesitated. “I’d like to be with Barta, but that might complicate things afterward. I’ll stay here, if you don’t mind.”
“Not at all.”
Before we started docking maneuvers, I warned Clay and gave him time to get inside or on the lee side of his candle, in case something went wrong.
“Do it gentle, Ebbie,” I said once Angie and I were strapped in. It was the first time that the second seat in Ebbie’s control cabin had ever been occupied. It folded out from under the secondary control station. With both seats down and in use, there was hardly room to move between them.
Ebbie backed away from the station as softly as could be, and swiveled until her nose was pointed at Barta’s side. Angie was linked to Barta, making certain that she knew what was going on and didn’t activate collision avoidance maneuvers by mistake. I assume that Ebbie was also communicating with Barta. Ships normally talk with each other like that, even when they’re not getting ready for intimate relations. I sometimes think that the candles talk to each other more than their pilots do.
I watched my monitors and gauges, hands poised to take manual control in the unlikely event that something went wrong with Ebbie’s automatics. I suppose that I held my breath at times as well. I didn’t want anything to go wrong, especially anything that might mean that we wouldn’t be ready to light the wick in a hurry if we had to.