From the outside there was no evidence of damage or repair. Part of the heat shield hung below the cutter’s nose like a great shovel blade, exposing the control room blister, windows, and the snout of the cutter’s main armament: a laser cannon.
In battle the cutter’s first duty was to make observations and reports. Sometimes she’d try to sneak in on a torpedo run on a blinded enemy warship. Against Motie ships with no Field, that cannon would be more than enough.
Cargill inspected the cutter’s weapons with more than usual thoroughness. Already he feared the Moties. In this he was almost alone; but he would not be so forever.
The second alien ship was larger than the first, but estimates of its mass had a high finagle factor, depending on the acceleration (known), fuel consumption (deduced from drive temperature), operating temperature (deduced from the radiation spectrum, whose peak was in the soft x-ray region) and efficiency (pure guesswork). When it was all folded together the mass seemed much too smalclass="underline" about right for a three-man ship.
“But they aren’t men,” Renner pointed out. “Four Moties weigh as much as two men, but they don’t need as much room. We don’t know what they’re carrying for equipment, or armament, or shielding. Thin walls don’t seem to scare them, and that lets them build bigger cabins—”
“All right.” Rod cut him off. “If you don’t know, just say so.”
“I don’t know.”
“Thank you,” Rod said patiently. “Is there anything you are sure of?”
“Oddly enough, there is, sir. Acceleration. It’s been constant to three significant figures since we spotted the ship. Now that’s odd,” Renner said. “Normally you fool with the drive to keep it running at peak, you correct minor errors in course… and if you leave it alone, there’s still variation. To keep the acceleration that constant they must be constantly fiddling with it.”
Rod rubbed the bridge of his nose. “It’s a signal. They’re telling us exactly where they’re going.”
“Yes, sir. Right here. They’re saying to wait for them.” Renner wore that strange, fierce grin. “Oh, we know something else, Captain. The ship’s cross-sectional profile has decreased since we sighted it. Probably they’ve ditched some fuel tanks.”
“How did you get that? Don’t you have to have the target transit the sun?”
“Usually, yes. Here it blocks the Coal Sack. There’s enough light bouncing off the Coal Sack to give us a good estimate of that ship’s cross-sectional area. Haven’t you noticed the colors in the Coal Sack, Captain?”
“No.” Blaine rubbed at his nose again. “Throwaway fuel tanks doesn’t make them sound like a warship, does it? But it’s no guarantee. All it really tells us is that they’re in a hurry.”
Staley and Buckman occupied the rear seats in the cutter’s triangular control cabin. As the cutter pulled away at one gee, Staley watched MacArthur’s Field close behind them. Against the black of the Coal Sack the battle cruiser seemed to go invisible. There was nothing to look at but the sky.
Half that sky was Coal Sack, starless except for a hot pink point several degrees in from the edge. It was as if the universe ended here. Like a wall, Horst thought.
“Look at it,” said Buckman, and Horst jumped. “There are people on New Scotland who call it the Face of God. Superstitious idiots!”
“Right,” said Horst. Superstitions were silly.
“From here it doesn’t look at all like a man, and it’s ten times as magnificent! I wish my sister’s husband could see it. He belongs to the Church of Him.”
Horst nodded in the semidarkness.
From any of the known human worlds, the Coal Sack was a black hole in the sky. One would expect it to be black here. But now that Horst’s eyes were adjusting, he saw traces of red glowing within the Coal Sack. Now the nebular material showed like layer after layer of gauzy curtains, or like blood spreading in water. The longer he looked, the deeper he could see into it. Eddies and whorls and flow patterns showed light years deep in the vacuum-thin dust and gas.
“Imagine, me stuck with a Himmist for a brother-in-law! I’ve tried to educate the fool,” Buckman said energetically, “but he just won’t listen.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more beautiful sky. Dr. Buckman, is all that light coming from Murcheson’s Eye?”
“Doesn’t seem possible, does it? We’ve tried to find other sources, fluorescence, UV stars deep in the dust, like that. If there were masses in there we’d have found them with mass indicators. Staley, it’s not that unlikely. The Eye isn’t that far from the Coal Sack.”
“A couple of light years.”
“Well, what of it? Light travels farther than that, giver a free path!” Buckman’s teeth glowed in the faint multi-colored light of the control panel. “Murcheson lost a golden opportunity by not studying the Coal Sack when he had the chance. Of course he was on the wrong side of the Eye, and he probably didn’t venture very far from the breakout point… and it’s our luck, Staley! There’s never been an opportunity like this! A thick interstellar mass, and a red supergiant right at the edge for illumination! Look, look along my arm, Staley, to where the currents flow toward that eddy. Like a whirlpool, isn’t it? If your captain would stop twiddling his thumbs and give me access to the ship’s computer, I could prove that that eddy is a protostar in the process of condensation! Or that it isn’t.”
Buckman had a temporary rank higher than Staley’s, but he was a civilian. In any case, he shouldn’t be talking about the Captain that way. “We do use the computer for other things, Dr. Buckman.”
Buckman let go of Staley’s arm. “Too damned many.’ His eyes seemed lost; his soul was lost in that enormous veil of red-lit darkness. “We may not need it, though. The Moties must have been observing the Coal Sack for at their history; hundreds of years, maybe thousands. Especially if they’ve developed some such pseudoscience as astrology. If we can talk to them…” He trailed off.
Staley said, “We wondered why you were so eager to come along.”
“What? Do you mean jaunting off with you to see that rock? Staley, I don’t care what the Motie was using it for, I want to know why the Trojan points are so crowded.”
“You think there’ll be clues?”
“Maybe, in the composition of the rock. We can hope so.”
“I may be able to help you there,” Staley said slowly. “Sauron—my home—has an asteroid belt and mining industries. I learned something about rock mining from my uncles. Thought I might be a miner myself, once.” He stopped abruptly, expecting Buckman to bring up an unpleasant subject.
Buckman said, “I wonder what the Captain expects to find there?”
“He told me that. We know just one thing about that rock,” said Staley. “A Motie was interested in it. When we know why, we’ll know something about Moties.”
“Not very much,” Buckman growled.
Staley relaxed. Either Buckman didn’t know why Sauron was infamous, or… no. Tactful? Buckman? Not hardly.
The Motie pup was born five hours after MacArthur’s cutter left for the asteroid. The birth was remarkably doglike, considering the mother’s distant relationship to dogs; and there was only the one pup, about the size of a rat.