“Depends on how much acceleration you want to put up with,” Rhonda said, her tone a little chilly. Apparently, she wasn’t happy with my comment, either. “At one g, we’re talking an hour or so.”
“You ran two gs lifting off Angorki,” Kulasawa said.
“That was for ten minutes,” I reminded her. “Not thirty.”
“You’re all young and healthy,” she countered. “If I can handle it, so can you. Two gs, Captain. Get us moving.”
It took Rhonda ten minutes to bring the engines up from standby, roughly the same amount of time it took Bilko and me to double-check the Freedom’s Peace’s vector and make sure the Sergei Rock was configured for high acceleration. After that came our half hour of two gs, unpleasant but certainly nothing any of us couldn’t take.
More unpleasant was the subtle but definite chill I could feel all around me. Orders were scrupulously obeyed and reports properly given, but all of it in crisp, formal tones and without the casual give-and-take that was the normal order of the day. I was used to frosty air between Jimmy and me, but for Rhonda and Bilko to have joined in struck me as totally unfair.
And yes, I blamed all of them. Maybe my comment had sounded insensitive; but damn it all, we didn’t have any evidence that were killing or even hurting the flapblacks by pushing them close to the Freedom’s Peace. My personal theory was that there was something about the asteroid that was simply distracting them enough to lose their wrap, and I tried to tell the others that.
But it didn’t seem to make any difference. In their minds, I’d sold out to Kulasawa, and I’d now shown that nothing was going to keep me from getting hold of that money. Not even if it meant slaughtering flapblacks right and left.
The acceleration process seemed to take forever, but at last we had the Sergei Rock up to speed and it was time to go.
Theoretically, we didn’t need to use the flapblacks at all, since the Freedom’s Peace was close enough that boosting our speed a little more would enable us to catch up with it. But that would have meant more acceleration, more delay, and pushing the engines more than we already had, so I told Jimmy to set us up with another program. He wasn’t at all happy about it, but I was long past caring about Jimmy’s happiness. If Bilko and Rhonda had opinions on the subject, they were smart enough to keep quiet about them.
The music started, sparking a wrap/unwrap that was again too fast for human eyes to see, and once again we were flying above and behind the Freedom’s Peace.
Even twenty kilometers away and only glimpsed for an instant, the colony had looked impressive. Now, with us steadily approaching it, the thing was flat-out awesome. It was one thing to read the numbers; it was something else entirely to actually see a huge asteroid driving its way through deep space.
It looked just like the handful of publicity shots that had survived the War of Reclamation: a craggy-surfaced, vaguely ovoid asteroid, roughly eighteen kilometers long and maybe twelve across at its widest point, lit only by the faint sheen of reflected starlight. The glare from the drive washed out any details of the engines themselves, but it was obvious that they were massive. Slightly brighter spots here and there across the surface indicated the presence of antenna or sensor arrays and a couple of rectangles that looked like access hatchways.
“It’s rotating,” Bilko breathed from beside me. Apparently, he was so dazzled by the view that he’d forgotten we weren’t on speaking terms. “Look—you can see that drive nozzle array turning around.”
“Using rotation to create artificial gravity,” I agreed. “They didn’t have false-grav back then.”
“I’m going to take a spectrum off the hull,” he decided, keying his board and swiveling around his viewer. “A Doppler will give us better numbers on the rotation than—yow!”
I jerked against my restraints. “What?” I snapped.
“Something just flicked across the stars,” he said tightly, punching keys on the spectrometer.
“Relax,” Rhonda’s voice came over the intercom. “It was probably a flapblack.”
“Yeah, but it didn’t wrap,” Bilko said. “I’ve never heard of a flapblack coming in but not wrapping.”
“Maybe they can’t wrap this close to the Freedom’s Peace,” I said. “Like I suggested earlier—”
I broke off at the look on Bilko’s face. “What is it?”
“It reads like a flapblack, all right,” he said, his voice low and rigidly under control. “Only it’s not a kind we’ve ever seen before. This one’s spectrum was in the infrared.”
I stared at him. “You’re joking.”
“Check it yourself,” he said, keying the analysis over to my display. “The spectrum’s definitely below the standard flapblack red—let’s call it an InRed.”
I looked at the numbers, and damned if he wasn’t right. “OK,” I said. “So we’ve found a new breed. So we get into the history books.”
“You’re missing the point,” he said grimly. “We have a new breed of flapblacks, all right: a breed that chases other flapblacks away.”
There was a soft whistle from the intercom. “I don’t like the sound of that,” Rhonda said.
“Me, neither,” Bilko said. “Maybe we ought to forget the whole thing and get out of here.”
I gazed out the viewport at the rapidly approaching asteroid below. “But it doesn’t make sense,” I told them. “For starters, if it’s a predator or whatever—”
“If they’re predators, plural,” Bilko interrupted me. “Another InRed just went past.”
“Fine; if they’re predators,” I amended, “then why haven’t we seen them before? More to the point, what are they doing hanging around the Freedom’s Peace in the middle of nowhere?”
If Bilko had an answer, he never got to give it. Without warning, there was the faint flicker of a laser from the asteroid and our comm speaker crackled. “Approaching transport, this is the Freedom’s Peace,” a female voice said. “Please identify yourself.”
Bilko and I exchanged startled glances. Then I dove for the comm switch. “This, uh, is Captain Jake Smith of the star transport Sergei Rock. We, uh… who is this?”
“My name is Suzenne Enderly,” the woman said. “Are you in need of assistance?”
“We were just about to ask you that question,” Kulasawa said, stepping through the hatchway behind me onto the flight deck. “This is Scholar Andrula Kulasawa, in charge of this mission.”
“And what mission would that be?”
“The mission to see you, of course,” Kulasawa said. “We would like permission to come aboard.”
“We appreciate your concern,” Enderly said. “But I can assure you that we’re doing fine and have no need of assistance.”
“I’m very glad to hear that,” Kulasawa said. “But I would still like to come aboard.”
“To study us, I presume?”
I looked up at Kulasawa in time to catch her cold smile. “And to allow you to study us, as well,” she said. “I’m sure each of us can learn a great deal from the other.”
There was a brief silence. “Perhaps,” Enderly said. “Very well.”
And on the dark mass below a grid of running lights suddenly appeared. “Follow the lights to the colony’s bow,” Enderly continued. “There’s a docking bay there. We’ll use our comm lasers to guide you in.”
“Thank you,” I said. “We’ll look forward to meeting you.”