When asked by the lab people if she’d uncovered a vein, Kim nodded and observed that she and Solly were about to acquire some serious wealth.
The unit tested to a range of about thirty meters for the quantity of gold one would expect to find in a bracelet roughly equivalent to the one Yoshi had been wearing.
Afterward, they caught the Snowhawk, which connected a half dozen cities across the central tier of the Republic, from Seabright on the east, through Eagle Point, to Algonda on the west.
They retired into a first-class cabin and were back reviewing the Hunter logs minutes after the train left the station.
The sun was already down as they eased out of Wakonda Central, picking up speed until the landscape blurred and eventually faded into the darkness. Solly sprawled leisurely in a padded chair; Kim sat on a cross bench, her arms wrapped around drawn-up knees.
They went back to the point at which the Hunter had dropped out of hyperspace, and watched Kane work on the AFS.
They ran the segment again, slower this time.
Kane finished up, notified the AI, and disappeared offscreen. Forty minutes later, scrubbed down and in a fresh uniform, he arrived in the pilot’s room. Emily came up and they surveyed the enormous star-clouds.
“In there somewhere,” Emily said, dreaming of celestials.
“Maybe,” said Kane. He was invariably more forthright with her than with Tripley. “But unless you’re damned lucky, you’ll need more than a single lifetime to find them.”
She sat down in the right-hand seat.
“Eight minutes to jump,” said the ship.
Kane pushed back and let his eyes half close. “We’ve been fortunate,” he said. “This is the first serious technical problem we’ve had in, what, a dozen or more missions? That’s not bad.”
She looked across at him, her spirits visibly sagging. Emily did not want to go home. “A lot more than a dozen. Markis, how long do you think it’ll take to make the repairs?”
He considered it. “They’ll pull the unit and replace it. A couple of days. No more than that. But the ship needs some general maintenance too before it goes out again.”
They continued in that vein while the AI counted down. The minutes ticked off and the conversation subsided while Kane turned his attention to the console. The power buildup that routinely preceded a jump became audible.
At thirty seconds, the main engines shut down and Hunter went into glide mode.
“There’s nothing here,” said Solly, somehow disappointed, as if they hadn’t already seen the sequence, didn’t already know nothing was going to happen. The jump procedure was now too far along to stop. If a celestial had pulled alongside and waved, they could have done nothing.
When the Hunter made its transition to hyperspace, Emily was staring out the window at the stars.
The Snowhawk was passing through a valley. Two of Greenway’s moons were in the sky, drifting among wisps of cloud. Dark slopes rose on either side. Treetops swayed in the blast of the passing train. Away to the north she could see the glow of a town. “Can’t really expect to hit it right away,” said Markis. “You have to be patient.”
“We’ve been patient.”
“Okay,” said Solly. “That does it for the celestials. Now we’re just looking for a motive for murder.” He looked at her. “You think if someone killed them, Yoshi and Emily, he wouldn’t have taken the gold?”
“If it was a burglar, something like that, sure he would have. But Tripley’s the prime suspect. You think he’d kill over some jewelry?”
“You really think Tripley did it?”
“No. But I can’t bring myself to believe they were killed by a robber. Wherever Yoshi is, she’s wearing her gold.”
Kim and Solly fast-forwarded through more conversations, all routine, mundane, what they would do when they got home, how they would spend the unexpected time. Tripley made it clear that he planned to mount the next mission as quickly as time permitted, and that he hoped to retain the services of the current crew. They didn’t hear him say it explicitly, but that the sentiments had been delivered beyond the range of the recording devices was apparent from the conversations in the pilot’s room. Everyone planned to return.
All this took the edge off the frustration, particularly for Yoshi, who’d come as an intern and who must have been worried that she might not be invited back. The weeks passed, and the general morale recovered and was reasonably high when they returned at last and docked at Sky Harbor.
Yoshi told Kane that she would stay the night with Emily at the Royal Palms in Terminal City, and then spend some time with her family until they were ready to try again. There was no indication, no nonverbal signal, that she was not telling the truth.
Tripley promised to hustle the repairs along. He estimated a relaunch in about a month. Was that satisfactory for Kane?
It was.
Tripley informed him that he would receive a bonus for his performance. Then he left Kane alone in the pilot’s room.
The captain spent a few minutes with the instruments, collected his sketchbook, and left. The imager blinked off.
It was over.
“No matter how many times we run it,” said Solly, “it’s going to keep coming out the same way. Nothing happened.”
The flight home had required forty-one days. They went back and looked again, with no idea what they were hoping to find. When Tripley spoke of Yoshi, he showed a genuine affection for her. And he seemed far too gentle to perpetrate either physical or psychological violence against anyone. His clone-son, thought Kim, was a different order of beast altogether.
They reviewed Kane’s conversations with the other crew members, listening, moving on. Kim watched Emily as the days ran down, thinking how luminous her sister looked, how energetic she was, how driven by the great search. And she was within days of losing her life.
But gradually an inconsistency emerged. She watched the interplay between the captain and Emily, went back to their conversations in the first part of the mission, and compared the earlier with the later. “Do you see it?” she asked Solly.
He leaned forward and squinted at the screen. She’d frozen the images, a few days from the end of the voyage. Kane and Emily had been talking about getting more serious about their physical conditioning programs on the next flight.
“What?” said Solly. “I don’t see anything.”
“What happened to the passion?”
“What passion?”
“Do they sound like lovers to you?”
“They never sounded like lovers to me.”
“Solly, they were hiding it before. Maybe from the others, or from the imager. Maybe from each other. Now it’s just not there.”
“Maybe they had a fight. We can’t really see very much, you know.”
“No, it’s not like that. There’s no tension between them on the return flight. This isn’t the kind of behavior you’d see in the aftermath of a breakup. It’s simply a cordial relationship between congenial colleagues. Not at all the same thing.”
The train was pulling into the outskirts of Eagle Point.
“What are you saying?” he asked.
Kim shut down the program but she stared at the screen until the train stopped moving. “I’m not sure,” she said.
They checked into the Gateway and Kim stayed up most of the night replaying the conversations between Kane and Emily. Outbound, the captain’s depth of passion was quite evident. He loved her sister. She could see it in his eyes, in his tone, in his every gesture. She wondered what the interaction between the two was like when they were away from the recording devices.
But it had changed during the return. Not because, as Solly had suggested, they’d had a falling-out. In that event they’d have been cold in each other’s company. The body language would be exaggerated. She’d see resentment in one or the other. Or both.