Behind him, Du Bellay whistled softly. "Talk about your basic Juggernaut! Where'd it come from?"
"We've backtracked him to the 1228 Circini system," Mahendra said, referring to one of his sheets. "He didn't originate there, though—it's a dead system. We're trying to track him further back."
Carey looked up at the main screen. "Why isn't the Intruder's course projected beyond Sol?"
Mahendra frowned. "I don't know, sir." He swung a keyboard over and typed something. "The projection stopped when the course intersected the sun," he reported, frowning a bit harder.
"What?" Du Bellay said.
"Show us the inner system," Carey ordered.
Mahendra punched a key and the screen changed, now showing only out to Mars. Sure enough, the dotted line intersected the edge of the dime-sized image of the sun. Without being told to, Mahendra jumped the scale again, and the sun filled the screen.
Carey squinted at it. "Almost misses. How dense is the stuff he'll hit?"
"The computer says about ten to the minus seventh grams per cc. Not much by Earth standards, but that's almost a hundred trillion times anything in the interstellar medium. And he'll pass through several thousand kilometers of it."
"Like hell he will," Carey winced. "He'll burn to a crisp long before that. I was right after all, Doctor—he hasn't noticed the solar system's in his path."
He glanced at Du Bellay, then paused for a longer look. The archaeologist was frowning into space. "Doctor?"
"Captain, does that console have DatRetNet capability?" Du Bellay asked. "Please look up data on that star you mentioned—1228 Circini. Cross-reference with unusual stellar activity."
Mahendra nodded and turned to the console. "Something wrong?" Carey asked Du Bellay. The other's expression worried him.
"I don't know. I seem to remember hearing about that star a few years ago...." He trailed off.
"Got it, Doctor," Mahendra spoke up.
Both Du Bellay and Carey leaned over to look at the console screen. "I was right," Du Bellay said in a graveyard voice, pointing at the third paragraph.
" 'Planetary studies indicate a giant solar flare occurred approximately one hundred years ago, causing extensive melting patterns as far out as one point eight A.U.,' " Carey read aloud. " 'Such behavior in a red dwarf is unexplainable by current theory.' I don't see the connec—" He broke off in mid-sentence.
Du Bellay nodded grimly. "1228 Circini is ninety-six light-years away. It's too close to be coincidence."
"Are you suggesting the Intruder deliberately rammed 1228 Circini? That's crazy!"
Du Bellay merely nodded at the main screen. Carey gazed up at the dotted line for a long minute. Then he tapped Mahendra's shoulder. "Captain, get me Executor Nordli. Priority Urgent-One."
—
Orofan woke to hear the last wisp of sound from his intercommunicator. He reached for the control, noting with some surprise that the shading of the muted wall light indicated half past cin—he'd been asleep less than an aarn.
"Yes?"
It was Pliij. "Shipmaster, we have a problem. You'd best come up immediately."
Was something wrong with his ship? "I'll be right there."
Pliij was not alone when Orofan arrived on the bridge. Lassarr was also there. "Greetings, Voyagemaster," Orofan said, giving the required salute even as his eyes darted around the room. No problem was registering on any of the displays.
"The trouble is not with the Dawnsent," Voyagemaster Lassarr said, interpreting Orofan's actions and expression with an ease the Shipmaster had never liked.
"Then what is it?"
"Here, Shipmaster." Pliij manipulated a control and an image, relativistically compensated, appeared on a screen. "This is the system we're approaching. Look closely here, and here, and here."
Tiny flecks of light, Orofan saw. The spectrometer read them as hot helium....
Orofan felt suddenly cold all over. Fusion-drive spacecraft! "The system is inhabited!" he hissed.
"You understand our dilemma," Lassarr said heavily.
Orofan understood, all right. The Dawnsent's scooping procedure would unavoidably set up massive shock waves in the star's surface layers, sending flares of energy and radiation outward....
"How is our fuel supply?" Lassarr asked.
Orofan knew, but let Pliij check anyway. "Down to point one-oh-four maximum," the Pilot said.
"We can't reach our new home with that," Lassarr murmured.
"Correction, Voyagemaster," Orofan said. "We can't reach it in the appointed time. But our normal scooping gives us sufficient fuel to finish the voyage."
"At greatly reduced speed," Lassarr pointed out. "How soon could we arrive?"
There was silence as Pliij did the calculation. "Several lifetimes," he said at last. "Five, perhaps six."
"So," Lassarr said, short tentacles set grimly. "I'm afraid that settles the matter."
"Settles it how?" Orofan asked suspiciously.
"It's unfortunate, but we cannot risk such a delay. The sleep tanks weren't designed to last that long."
"You're saying, then, that we continue our present course? Despite what that'll do to life in this system?"
Lassarr frowned at him. "I remind you, Shipmaster, that we carry a million of our fellow Sk'cee—"
"Whose lives are worth more than the billions of beings who may inhabit that system?"
"You have a curious philosophy, Shipmaster; a philosophy, I might add, that could be misunderstood. What would the ancestors say if you came among them after deliberately allowing a million Sk'cee to perish helplessly? What would those million themselves say?"
"What would they say," Orofan countered softly, "if they knew we'd bought their lives at such a cost to others? Is there honor in that, Voyagemaster?"
"Honor lies in the performance of one's duty. Mine is to deliver the colonists safely to their new world."
"I'm aware of that. But surely there's a higher responsibility here. And we don't know the sleep tanks won't survive the longer journey."
Lassarr considered him silently. "It's clear you feel strongly about this," he said finally. "I propose a compromise. You have one aarn to offer a reasonable alternative. If you can't we'll carry out our fuel scoop on schedule." He turned and strode out.
Pliij looked at Orofan. "What now?"
The Shipmaster sank into a seat, thinking furiously. "Get me all the information we have on this region of space. Our own sensor work, Farseer charts and data—everything. There has to be another way."
—
The group sitting around the table was small, highly select, and very powerful. And, Carey thought as he finished his explanation, considerably shaken. Executor Nordli took over even as the general was sitting down. "Obviously, our first order of business is to find out why our visitor is planning to dive into the sun. Suggestions?"
"Mr. Executor, I believe I have a logical explanation," an older man sitting next to Du Bellay spoke up. Dr. Horan Roth, Carey remembered: chief astrophysicist at the Chiron Institute.
"Go ahead, Dr. Roth," Nordli said.
Roth steepled his fingers. "The speed of a ramjet is limited not by relativity, but by friction with the interstellar medium. The mathematics are trivial; the bottom line is that the limiting speed is just that of the ship's exhaust. Now, if you use a magnetic scoop to take in hydrogen, fuse it to helium, and use the energy liberated to send this helium out your exhaust, it turns out that your velocity is only twelve percent lightspeed."
"But the Intruder's moving considerably faster than that," Assembly-Prime Wu-sin objected.
"Exactly," Roth nodded. "They're apparently using an after-accelerator of some sort to boost their exhaust speed. But this takes energy, requiring extra fuel."
"I see," Nordli rumbled. "They have to carry extra hydrogen which can't be replaced in the interstellar medium. So they periodically dive into a star to replenish their tanks?"