The composition of the seedship’s crew?
No. He did not trust Nenda or Atvar H’sial, but he did not doubt their competence — or their survival instincts. J’merlia and Kallik’s desire to be given orders, rather than acting independently, was a nuisance more than a threat. It would have been better if Dulcimer could have been on board and flying the seedship — Rebka knew he could not compete with the Chism Polypheme on the instinctual level where a great master pilot could operate. But it was even more important to have Dulcimer back on the Erebus, to take it out of the Anfract.
Rebka had learned not to expect optimal solutions for anything. They existed in Darya Lang’s clean, austere world of intellectual problems, but reality was a lot messier. So he did not have the ideal seedship crew. Very well. One took the crew available and did with what one had to do.
But that was not the problem that nagged at his subconscious. It did not have the right feel to it.
Was the world inside the shell of singularities actually Genizee, and would the Zardalu be found there?
He considered that question as the adaptive control system sensed a way through the next singularity and delicately began to guide them toward it. Rebka could override if he saw danger, but he had no information to prompt such action. His warning flags were all internal.
It might be the planet Genizee inside there, or it might not. Either way, they were going in. Once you were committed to a course of action, you didn’t waste your time looking back and second-guessing the decision, because every action in life was taken on the basis of incomplete information. You looked at what you had, and you did all you could to improve the odds; but at some point you had to roll the dice — and live or die with whatever you had thrown.
So his worry had to be arising from somewhere else. Something unusual that he had noticed, and lost when he was interrupted. Something…
Rebka finally gave up the struggle. Whatever was troubling him refused to show itself. Experience told him that it was more likely to return if he stopped thinking about it for a while, and now there were other things to worry about. The ship had turned again and was crawling along a path that to Rebka’s eyes led only to a white, glowing wall. He tensed as they came closer. They were heading straight for that barrier of light.
Should he override? If only human senses included a direct sensitivity to gravity waves…
He forced himself to trust the ship’s sensors. They reached the wall of light. There was a faint shiver through the seedship’s structure, as though an invisible tide had swept along it, and then they were through.
Right through. The innermost shell singularity was behind them. The front of the ship was suddenly illuminated by the marigold light of a dwarf star.
Louis Nenda had been crowded into the rear of the seedship, deep in pheromonal conversation with Atvar H’sial. He squeezed quickly forward past the sixteen sprawled legs of J’merlia and Kallik, to stand crouched behind Rebka.
“Planet!”
Rebka shrugged. “We’ll know if there’s one in a few minutes.” Then he would release a tiny drone ship, designed to retrace their path from the Erebus and provide information of their arrival to the others waiting outside. Whatever happened, Julian Graves and Darya should be told that the singularities were navigable. Rebka ordered the onboard sensors to begin their scan of space around the orange-yellow sun, masking out the light of the star itself.
“I wasn’t askin’, I was tellin’.” Nenda jerked his thumb to the display that showed the region behind the ship. “You can see the damn thing, naked eye, outa’ the rear port.”
Rebka twisted in his seat. It was impossible — but it was true. The rear port showed the same blue-white world with its big companion moon that Darya Lang and Kallik had displayed, back on the Erebus. They were both in half-moon phase, no more than a few hundred thousand kilometers away. Large landmasses were already visible. Rebka turned on the high-resolution sensors to provide a close-up view.
“Do you know the odds against this?” he asked. “We fly through the whole mess of singularities, we emerge at least a hundred and fifty million kilometers away from a star — and there’s a planet sitting right next to us, close enough to spit on.”
“I know a good bit about odds.” Nenda’s voice was an expressionless growl. “This just don’t happen.”
“You know what it means?”
“It means we found Genizee. An’ it means you oughta get us the hell out of here. Fast. I hate welcomes.”
Rebka was ahead of him. He had taken the controls of the seedship even before Louis Nenda spoke, to send them farther away from the planet. As the ship responded to Rebka’s command, high-resolution images of both planet and moon filled the screen.
“Habitable.” Nenda’s curiosity was competing with his uneasiness. He was flanked by Kallik and J’merlia. Only Atvar H’sial, unable to see any of the displays, remained at the rear of the ship. “Five-thousand-kilometer radius. Spectrometers say plenty of oxygen, classifiers say eighteen percent land cover, forty percent water, forty-two percent swamps, imagers say three main continents, four mountain ranges but nothin’ higher than a kilometer, no polar caps. Wet world, warm world, flat world, plenty of vegetation. Looks like it could be rich.” His acquisitive instincts were awakening. “Wonder what it’s like down there.”
Hans Rebka did not reply. For some reason his attention had been drawn not to the parent planet, but to the images of its captive moon. The view that Darya Lang and Kallik had provided on the Erebus was from a long distance, so that all he had seen then was a small round ball, gleaming like a matte sphere of pitted steel. Now that same ball filled the screen.
His mind flew back to focus on Darya’s accelerated-time display, with the moon whirling around and the planet steady against a fixed background. And he realized what had been puzzling him then, below his threshold of awareness: any two freely-moving bodies — binary stars, or planet and moon, or anything else — revolved around their common center of gravity. For so large a satellite as this, that center of gravity would lie well outside the planet. So both bodies should have been moving against the more distant background, unless the moon had negligible mass, which would have to mean—
He stared at the image filling the screen, and now he could see that the pits and nodules on its surface were regularly spaced, its curvature perfectly uniform.
“Artificial! And negligible mass. Must be hollow!” The words burst out of him, though he knew that they would be meaningless to the others.
No matter. Soon they would learn it for themselves. Part of the moon’s surface was beginning to open. A saffron beam of light speared from it to illuminate the seedship. Suddenly their direction of motion was changing.
“What the hell’s going on here?” Nenda was pushing forward, grabbing at the controls.
Hans Rebka did not bother to stop him. It would make no difference. The ship’s drive was already at its maximum setting, and still they were going in the wrong direction. He stared out of the rear port. Instead of moving away from the moon and planet, they were being drawn toward it. And soon it was clear that this was more than a simple tractor beam, drawing them in to a rendezvous with the gleaming moon. Instead their trajectory was turning, under the combined force vector of the beam and the drive, taking them to a different direction in space.
Rebka looked and extrapolated, with the unconscious skill of a longtime pilot. There was no doubt about the result.