“That is acceptable. We will follow. If you deviate from the proper course we will destroy you.”
Peters looked up and rolled his eyes. This guy had obviously not been reading the stories Ander and Alper had told him about; nobody would talk like that afterward. “I understand,” he told the microphone. “Be tolerant. I am not experienced, and my course may not be exact.”
“Just get it right,” the voice growled.
Peters grinned; here was something off script. “I’ll do my best,” he told the mike.
“You had better. End of transmission.” The other ship was now visible, a spark off to starboard and “high” from their current orientation.
Peters looked at it, then back at Ander. “What have you discovered, if anything?”
“I was able to remove most of the covering, but I broke a fingernail in doing so.” Peters growled; she grinned up at him, then looked back at the panel. Alper Gor was leaning over him, trying to see what they were doing, and pressing her anatomy against his shoulder in the process. “The legend says ‘seekers’,” Ander explained. “There are six activators; I take that to mean we have six ‘seekers’, whatever they are.”
“Activate one of them… no, wait.” He rotated the ship, Alper hanging on his seat back as he did so, until the spark of the other ship was nearly centered in the front transparency. There was a circle there, engraved in the material, with four short lines forming a centerless cross at a forty-five degree angle, and he adjusted the sidestick until the other ship was as nearly centered as possible. “Now. Activate a ‘seeker’.”
Ander threw the switch with a click. “Nothing happened,” she remarked after a moment.
“This may take time… no, we are missing part of the procedure. What else do you find in that area of the panel?”
“A lot of things. It’s confusing.”
“Is there anything labeled ‘door’ or ‘opening’ or anything cognate?”
She looked up in surprise. “Why, yes, there is, but it isn’t next to the ‘seeker’ controls.”
Peters rolled his eyes again. “What do the labels say in that area?”
“There are only glyphs. Here is a kh—”
“Are there four of them?”
“Yes, numbered one through four.”
“For the breakbeams, I would imagine. How many ‘seeker’ activators did you say there were?”
“Six.”
“Is there a set of six switches in the ‘door’ group?”
“No. Here is a group of switches, labeled ‘Z1’ through ‘Z3’.”
“Move those three switches to the ‘open’ position, please.”
“The positions aren’t labeled.”
Peters rolled his eyes again. “Then we will assume that the doors are currently closed,” he said patiently. “Move the switches to the opposite position.”
She did so. “Don’t be cross,” she said with a touch of petulance.
“I’m not cross. I am nervous. You have my apology if I seemed cross.” Alper Gor giggled in his ear. A group of indicators illuminated, two rows of three at the bottom of the front transparency. “Ah. We have achieved something.”
“Those lamps are yellow,” Alper pointed out.
“So?”
“Foolish person.” That was a single word; a better rendering might be ‘silly’. “Yellow is the color for something that is working, but has some deficiency.”
“By coincidence we use it the same way.”
“You are straying farther from course than permissible, even for an inexperienced operator,” the radio said. “Correct your vector.”
The planet nearly filled their field of view. Peters operated the stick, adding velocity at right angles to their course, and picked up the microphone. “Is that better?”
“You are still far from the correct course.”
“I told you I was inexperienced. Which way should I add or subtract velocity?”
“If you roll ship so that the limb of the planet is horizontal,” the voice said, “and the present vector is ahead, you should add velocity in a direction two points to the right and one up.” The tone was remarkably similar to that he’d used to Ander Korwits a moment ago, and both girls giggled this time.
Peters complied with the instructions. “Is that better?”
“Much better. Keep your course. End of transmission.”
Peters flexed his shoulders to relieve the tension, and again rotated the ship to center the other one in the reticle. “Ander, activate a ‘seeker’, please.”
“Just one?”
“Yes, please.”
“Here is number three.” One of the lamps, at top center, went out, and a red-orange one beside it came on.
“What does that color mean?” he asked.
Alper frowned. “In normal circumstances it means ‘danger’ or ‘something is wrong’. But these are weapons. Possibly it means that the other party is in danger.”
“Hmm… I don’t care to—” he was about to say “experiment” when the red lamp went out and a blue one came on. “That looks promising,” he noted.
“Yes. Blue is the color of readiness or proper operation.”
“We can hope.” They waited for several moments, but nothing happened. “We are still missing part of the procedure,” Peters said with a frustrated grimace.
“I was thinking,” Ander began.
“Yes?”
She gestured at the panel. “These are called ‘seekers’. In order to seek something, one must be told what it is, isn’t that right?”
“Yes, that’s inherent in the concept.”
“Precisely. I activated the seeker, and the lamp changed from yellow to red. A few moments later the blue light illuminated. It seems logical to me that ‘seeker number three’ has notified us that it now knows what to seek.”
“Ander, you are a brilliantly intelligent person,” Peters said gravely. “I believe you are precisely correct. So what is missing is the command or permission to the ‘seeker’ to perform its function.”
“So I would suppose.”
Peters looked over the controls available at his chair. Navigation instruments, zifthkakik activator and level controls, compensator…
“Perhaps the control is on Alper’s panel,” Ander suggested.
“That wouldn’t make sense,” Alper protested. “The ship operator controls the direction. The control should be available to him.”
There were a pair of pedals or treadles in the floor. Grallt ships didn’t use rudder pedals, and he hadn’t needed any in operating this one… he pressed the right pedal. Nothing. Then the left one. A thump from below their feet, and a small object left the front of the ship at high speed. Simultaneously the blue lamp went out, leaving five yellows glowing.
There was a short pause; then the spark of the other ship expanded enough to see it as a sphere, even at that distance, then faded away to nothing. “That seems to have done it,” he said with satisfaction. “I’ll change our course to head for Llapaaloapalla.”
“Yes,” said Alper Gor in a musing tone. “I wonder who that was.”
Peters looked up in startlement. They—he—had just killed somebody, or several somebodies, the women had known all their lives.
“It sounded like Brendik Jons,” Ander Korwits remarked, her voice devoid of color.
“Yes,” Alper agreed. “I served him a few times while I was in the tuwe… I didn’t like him very much.”
Ander nodded. “So did I… I don’t think he bathed regularly.”
“No… I wonder who else was on board.”
“I don’t see that we had any real choice in the matter,” Peters said gently.
“No,” Ander agreed. She looked up at him, face sober, sidelit by reflected light from the planet.