“What are you going to tell her?” I asked.
“It should be safe enough. It’s been in that case for sixty years. Barber will realize that stealing it would only call attention to it. No, that’s not where the danger lies.”
“You’re talking about Baku Kon?”
“Yes, indeed. She’ll assume that we know. That we’ve figured it out.”
“And she’ll be waiting for us when we get there.”
He pushed back in his chair and folded his hands. “Wouldn’t you?”
Baku Kon was a class-B blue-white star, surface temperature twenty-eight thousand degrees Kelvin. The catalog indicated it was relatively young, only 200 million years old. Like Sol, it had nine planets. And, as if it had been designed by a mathematician, the gas giants were the inner- and outermost, and the third, fourth, and fifth.
The inner giant was in a marked elliptical orbit that would literally carry it through the sun’s atmosphere. The Kang weren’t going to put a station there.
Generally, when you were deciding the location of an outstation, you would want to be close enough to the sun to be able to take advantage of the free energy it supplies, but you don’t want to have to put up a ton of shielding to protect yourself from radiation.
“The third one,” I told Alex.
Finding an outstation after it’s been shut down is not an afternoon at the beach.
If it’s not lit up, if it’s not putting out a signal, you’ve no easy way to distinguish it from the thousands of other rocks that are usually orbiting a big world. So we had to start an elimination process. Pull in close to a candidate, look for antennas, dishes, collectors, whatever, cross it off the list, and move on to the next. You could be at it for a while. And we were. Days and nights began to run together.
Life on board settled into a routine. Alex spent a lot of time reading White’s work, hoping to find something that Belle might have missed. “She tells stories here,” he said, “like being with her father on Rimway when she was a girl, and both moons lined up during a total solar eclipse. It happens at sporadic times, sometimes not for thousands of years. But this was 1338, and it was going to happen again just fourteen years later. They talked about where each of them would be when it did, and she said she wanted to be with him, made him promise. But he died two years early, and she describes watching the event alone, or at least watching it without him.” He nodded and took a sip from a coffee cup.
“Hard to believe,” I said, “someone like that could be part of this.”
“It would take somebody like that,” he said.
We moved slowly through the field of orbiting rocks. They ranged in size from pebbles to moons twice the size of the big moon at home. The planets were recently formed, still in the process of clearing gas and assorted debris out of the neighborhood. Roman Hopkin had not been exaggerating when he described a dusty embrace. Belle did the examinations, of course, while we looked out the windows.
She was far more efficient than we would have been, checking out whole clusters of the things simultaneously. Had it been necessary for Alex and me to do it, we’d still be there.
It took just over a week.
Belle woke me in the middle of the night to say she had a hit. “ Ninety-nine percent probability,” she added. It was a big, misshapen asteroid, craggy, broken, its surface covered with ridges and craters. Communication, sensing, and collection equipment bristled from its higher ground. It had at least six attitude thrusters. We could even see where a section had been cut away to provide easier ingress to docking bays.
“Any sign of another ship?” I asked her.
“Negative, Chase.” She didn’t add, didn’t need to, that this area would be easy to hide in.
“Okay, Belle. I want you to position the ship one kilometer from the outstation.
Match course and speed with it.”
“Complying.”
Outstations are designed so that arriving ships find the docks wide open. You just glide in, tie up, exit through a boarding tube, and you’re inside. That’s all there is to it. The way we did at Meriwether.
But here we were looking at an asteroid that just hung there in the night. No doors had opened on our approach, no transmission informed us of the virtues of the Wong-Ti Restaurant, no lights came on.
It appeared to be in tidal lock, always showing the same face to the big planet.
The surface was a tangle of jagged rock and craters. I could see hatches scattered here and there. Most were designed to provide access to fields of sensors, antennas, telescopes, and/or collectors. That’s what you’d expect, of course. They were service hatches. I found what looked like a main access near the docking area. It would take us right into the concourse.
We’d need extra air tanks. And a laser. In case the airlocks weren’t working.
If Barber were there, she’d probably already been alerted that we’d arrived. So there was no reasonable chance of sneaking up on her at four in the morning. I decided to let Alex sleep, but I didn’t go back to my own cabin. If something happened, I wanted to be on the bridge.
When Alex appeared a few hours later, his first question was whether I’d seen any sign of Barber. No, I said, everything’s quiet.
“Good,” he said. “Maybe we’ll be okay.”
I showed him the hatch I thought we should use.
He frowned. “No.”
“Why not? It’s ideal.”
He indicated a service hatch buried among ridges in a remote antenna field.
“ That one,” he said.
“Alex, that’s a long way from the docks. If we go in there, it’s going to be a major hike into the operating spaces.”
“That’s exactly right.”
“So why are we using it?”
“Because if Barber’s here, she’ll think the same way you do. She’ll expect us to use the hatch by the docks.”
He had a point. “Okay,” I said. “But that’s rough country. I’m not excited about taking the ship in close to those ridges.”
“We’d have to jump, wouldn’t we?”
“Yes, we would.” Maybe twenty meters or so.
Unaccountably, he seemed to think that was good. “We’ll use the lander,” he said. “Or at least, I will.”
“What do you mean? We’re both going over, right?”
He delivered that familiar mischievous grin.
TWENTY-FOUR
The power of illusion derives primarily from the fact that people are inclined to see what they expect to see. If an event is open to more than a single interpretation, be assured the audience will draw its conclusion readymade from its collective pocket. This is the simple truth at the heart of stage magic. And also of politics, religion, and ordinary human intercourse.
- The Great Mannheim
LANDER:
On my way, Chase.
BELLE:
Flight time will be four and a half minutes, Alex.
LANDER:
That checks with onboard data.
BELLE:
Be careful when you get out. Just step across to the airlock. You have the generator, right?
LANDER:
Yes, Chase, I have the generator. And the laser.
BELLE:
When you get inside, we’re going to lose radio contact.
LANDER:
I know.
BELLE:
That means you exercise extreme caution.
LANDER:
Chase, we’ve been over this. I’ll be careful.
BELLE:
Don’t forget you get back to the lander ninety minutes after arrival. If I don’t see you within that time, I’m coming over.
LANDER:
Have no fear, my pretty. I’ll come out and wave to you.
BELLE:
I don’t like this arrangement, Alex.
LANDER:
Just keep cool. Everything’s fine. Did you give the AI her directions?
BELLE:
Yes. Nobody’s going to get on board. If anyone tries, we’ll accelerate, and whoever’s out there will get tossed.
LANDER:
Very good. I don’t think there’s anything to worry about, but…
BELLE: … Better safe than sorry. (Pause.) Target hatch is to starboard.