Seeker

by Jack McDevitt

  “But the proposals have been discarded,” said Shara. “We already went over this.”

  “I know,” I said. “But hang on. Before the quantum drive was developed, a Survey ship always computed the shortest total route for a given mission.”

  I saw the perplexed look give way to a smile. “Oh,” she said.

  “And we know that Wescott was interested in G-type stars near the end of their hydrogen-burning cycle.”

  “Okay.”

  “We’re pretty sure they found something in one of the systems and deleted that star from the report. They went somewhere else and substituted that for the one that had been in the original proposal. If we can establish which star was deleted—”

  “—You’ll know where the Seeker is.”

  “Can we do it?”

  “Without having the proposal in our hands—”

  “Yes.”

  “Sure.” Her eyes focused elsewhere. A flock of colbees floated past, riding the wind. Her AI broke in to inform her of an incoming call.

  “Not now,” she said to it. Then: “Chase, let me see what you have.”

  I passed the disk over. She put it in the reader and darkened the room. “Can we assume it probably happened during the final mission?”

  “That’s a good place to start.”

  She directed the AI to bring up a projection of the search area for the 1391–92 flight.

  The office vanished, and we were adrift among the stars. “I’ve blanked everything outside the subject area,” the AI said. “There are thirteen hundred eleven stars in the field.” Most were yellow G-types. One, near the bookcase at the far wall, brightened. “That’s Taio 4776, where they made their first visit.” A line grew out of it and connected to a second star, a half meter away. “Icehouse 27651.” It angled off to a third, near the desk lamp. “Koestler 2294.” And up to a star near the overhead. From there it skimmed along the sofa, touching two more, and turned sharply to cross the room. In the end we were looking at a glowing zigzag. “Distance across the field is thirty-two point four light-years. Total distance covered by the mission is eighty-nine point seven light-years. Ten stars visited.”

  “Mark.” Shara was addressing the AI. “Keep this same field. I want you to show us which stars are near the end of their hydrogen-burning cycle. Say, stars in which helium burning would begin during the next half million years. Blank everything else.”

  “I will require a moment, Shara.”

  “Take your time.”

  “Shara,” I said, “wouldn’t someone have had to visit these systems earlier for Adam to know which suns were at the end of the cycle?”

  “Not at all. Spectrographic analysis would provide everything he’d need to plan the flight.”

  “Ready,” said Mark.

  “Okay.” The stars were beginning to wink out. “Let’s see what we have.”

  We were left with about thirty target stars, including the ten visited by the Wescotts. The track of the Falcon was bright and clear.

  “Store the pattern,” she said.

  It winked off.

  “Okay, Mark. Now I want you to plan a flight to the same ten stars, using minimal total travel time. Start from the same star the Falcon mission used. Taio Whatever. When you have it, put it up.”

  Taio 4776 grew bright, and the line came out of it again, moved to Icehouse, then to the star near the lamp. When it had finished all ten, the zigzag pattern floated in front of us. “Looks like the same one,” I said.

  “Let’s find out. Mark, shrink the pattern and let’s see the first one again. Overlay them.”

  He moved the patterns until they were side by side. Then he merged them.

  Identical.

  “Try the previous mission,” I said.

  We found it in the 1386–87 flight.

  The patterns were almost identical. Again, the mission had visited ten planetary systems. But this time, it had not used the most-fuel-efficient route. The deviation came at the sixth star.

  Tinicum 2502.

  It wasn’t a major change, but it was enough to tell us something was wrong.

  We sat looking at it. Had they remained consistent to the pattern, they would not have gone to Tinicum.

  “Okay,” I said. “Which star should they have visited? Which one fits with the rest of the pattern?”

  Shara put the question to the AI. “Assume,” she said, “that after Tinicum 2502 they returned to the original track.”

  “Here,” said Mark, brightening a nearby star.

  Tinicum 2116.

  “Brilliant, Shara,” I said.

  She smiled. “I have my moments.”

  I took her to lunch. It seemed the least I could do. We went to the Hillside, got a table by a window, ordered drinks, and sat back to talk about lost interstellars.

  “Tinicum’s planetary system will probably have a diameter of about eight billion klicks,” she said. “But the sun’s gravitational influence will reach out several times that far. If the Seeker’s orbiting one of the planets, you should have no trouble finding it.”

  “But if it’s in solar orbit—”

  “—You’re going to want to pack a few meals.”

  Yeah. That was the next order of business. It would take the Belle-Marie, which had only basic navigation equipment to conduct the search, a long time. Maybe years. “Can Survey help?”

  “I can let you have a piece of hardware, a telescope, that should move things along nicely.”

  “Shara,” I said, “you’re a warm, wonderful human being.”

  “Right. What do I get in return?”

  “I’ll pay for lunch.”

  “You’re already paying for lunch.”

  “Oh.” I thought about it. “You want to come along? Be there when we find it?”

  She made a face as if I’d just offered a plate of chopped squid. “I don’t think so. I know it’s historically big stuff, but I’m just not an enthusiast. Not enough to spend that much time on shipboard. You’ll probably be out there a month or two.”

  The food came. Sandwiches and drinks. There was a guy at a window table trying to catch Shara’s eye. She seemed not to have noticed. “When you find it,” she said, “you publicly share credit with Survey—”

  “Done.”

  “—And agree to give us access to the discovery. Which is to say you and your boss don’t strip the ship before we get there.”

  “We’ll want to take some stuff. Just a bit.”

  “Keep it modest. Can you do that?”

  “Of course.”

  She looked at me. “I mean it, Chase.”

  “I know. It won’t be a problem,” I said.

  “Okay.” She tried her drink, but her mind was elsewhere. “The truth about Survey,” she said after a hesitation, “what we don’t admit publicly, is that our prime interest is finding another civilization. That’s not official, of course. Officially, we want to inventory what’s out there. Each system goes into the catalog. Physical details about suns and worlds. Characteristics and arrangements of the planets in each system. Any odd features, and so on.

  “But the people in the ships know that most of the information they bring back goes into File and Forget. I mean, who really cares about the surface temperature of one more gas giant?”

  “So you’re telling me—?”

  “—Inspection of gas giants is generally done at long range and tends to be hit-and-run. Ditto, worlds too close in, or too far out. The ships are required to survey everything in the system, but we generally will not go in close. You know that. You used to work for us. That means, if the Seeker is orbiting a planet, the planet would most likely be in the biozone. So you want to start there.”

  “We don’t even know for sure it’s in the system.”

  “That’s what makes it a challenge.” She took the first bite out of her sandwich. “Good stuff,” she said. “I love this place.”

  “Tell me about the telescope.”

  “Okay, we�
��ll need to coordinate getting it for you.” She spotted the flirt and looked bored. “When are you leaving?”

  When I got back to the office, I reported the conversation to Alex, who pumped a fist in the air. “I believe we’re in business,” he said.

  I also told him about Windy’s call.

  “Ollie Bolton.” He made a face. “Why am I not surprised?”

  “I don’t think there’s much we can do. Short of physical assault.”

  “I don’t, either.”

  “You don’t seem all that annoyed.”

  “It’s part of the business,” he said. “We got outsmarted.”

  “It’s not part of the business. It’s bribery.”

  “Let’s not worry about it for the moment, Chase. We have bigger things to think about.”

  The Belle-Marie didn’t have a mount for the telescope, so there was a delay of several days while a cradle was prepared and installed on the hull.

  While that was going forward, Alex tried to check on Josh Corbin, the man who’d visited Delia and questioned her about the Seeker. But we got no useful information beyond what we already knew: He was an occasional consultant for Bolton.

  Meanwhile a package arrived for me at the office. It carried a greeting card: Chase, I’ve never forgotten you. Letting you get away was the dumbest thing I’ve ever done. I’ll call this evening. Jerry.

  There had been a Jerry Unterkefler in my life a few years back, but he hadn’t struck me as the passionate type.

  Last year, during the Polaris business, when several attempts were made on our lives, we bumped up to class-A security coverage. I was about to open the package when it paid off. Jacob told me to put it down, gently, warn Alex, and for both of us to get out of the house.

  We stood on the lawn an hour later while police carried the box off. “Clearance nanos,” Fenn told us. “They’d have turned the house into a park with three stone benches in about four minutes’ time.” He looked at me. “You’d have been one of the benches.”

  That was unsettling.

  “Who’d want you guys dead?” he asked.

  We had no idea who would go so far as to try to kill us. We spent an hour with him, answering questions, trying to zero in on suspects. We told him about the Seeker, and about Josh Corbin. And about Ollie Bolton.

  “You think Bolton’s behind this?”

  Alex said he didn’t know. I’m no fan of Bolton’s, but I couldn’t believe he’d try to kill anyone. “How would you get your hands on these things?” I asked. “On the nanos?”

  “We’re looking into it. They’re designed for industrial use. Not hard to get. Unfortunately.”

  That night they located Jerry Unterkefler and hauled him downtown for an interview. Actually, it was good to see him again. But I knew he wasn’t behind it.

  Fenn called to warn us to be careful, take no chances, and not to hesitate to let him know if we felt threatened.

  Truth was, we already felt threatened, and we were glad another flight on the Belle-Marie was coming up.

  Two guys from Tech Support attached the telescope, which they called a Martin, after Chris Martin, who is believed to be the first to use this specific type. Back in ancient times. They connected it to the ship’s AI, ran a couple of tests, and told us we were all set.

  This time, of course, Alex was coming. We logged in for a morning departure, but couldn’t get rooms at either of the Skydeck hotels the night before, so we were forced to sleep on board. We had dinner at Karl’s, a sedate Dellacondan restaurant. It’s Alex’s favorite at Skydeck. Whenever we’re there, he tries to schedule time to eat at Karl’s. Afterward, he returned to the ship, while I went looking for a party. I found one, and didn’t get back to the Belle-Marie until we were within a couple hours of launch. Not that it mattered. Once we were away from the station, we’d need nine hours to build up a charge, so I’d have plenty of time to sleep. Alex was up when I got there, and he looked at me disapprovingly. But he didn’t say anything.

  I’d given Belle the target information before we’d gone to dinner. Belle’s maximum range on a single jump was just under a thousand light-years. Tinicum 2116, our destination, was sixteen hundred. So we’d have to stop and recharge. The entire voyage, from departure at Skydeck until our arrival in the vicinity of the target system, would take just under nineteen hours. As opposed to the six weeks the Falcon would have needed.

  I showered and changed and was back in my seat when the fifteen-minute ready-signal came in from ops. The magnetic clamps took hold and moved us into the queue.

  There was a passenger ship in front of us, capacity about thirty. People on vacation, maybe. I watched it launch. Then it was our turn.

  Alex was in the right-hand seat. He’d been unusually quiet, and as we moved forward during those last seconds before departure, his eyes were on me. “You sure you’re awake?” he asked.

  On the way out to our jump point, we ran an action sim and played some chess. I’m not really competitive with him. That’s probably good, because he takes the game seriously. We also enjoyed the theatrical release of the musical Second Time Around.

  By late afternoon, ship’s time, the quantum drive was fully charged. So we made the first jump. It’s actually a bit easier on the system not to go maximum range. In this case, with a target sixteen hundred light-years out, I just divided it in half.

  We came out in the middle of nowhere, of course, in the deeps between the stars.

  I started to recharge and told Alex we’d be ready to go at about 0200 hours. Not the best timing in the world.

  I suppose if we’d thought we would be able to make the second jump and immediately home in on the Seeker, we’d have been up and ready to go. But it was going to be a long process and we knew it. So we decided to push the jump back, get a decent night’s sleep, and bump forward to Tinicum in the morning.

  Alex settled in after dinner to watch a panel of experts argue politics. (We’d brought a few chips with us to supplement the ship’s library.) I entertained myself with the VR for a while, one of those interplanetary travel experiences where you sit in your chair and sail through the rings of a gas giant while a voice-over tells you how they formed and why they look the way they do. I descended into a nova, which was somehow less unsettling than dropping into the atmosphere of Neptune. The narrator thought it a gorgeous world. That told me he’d never been there. Actually, I hadn’t either, but I’ve seen places like it, and when you look at them, up close, believe me, you’re not thinking esthetics.

  I read for an hour and fell asleep about midnight, after telling Belle not to wake me. “When we’ve finished recharging,” I told her, “I don’t need to know about it.”

  “Okay, Chase,” she said. She’d appeared beside me looking about twenty years old, demure, attractive, and sporting a pair of wings.

  “Going somewhere?” I asked.

  She smiled. “I always thought people look more exotic with flyware.”

  I didn’t know how to answer that. “Don’t call me,” I said, “unless there’s a problem.”

  But it didn’t do any good. When a recharge is complete, it produces a slight modification in the sound of the engines, and I’m constitutionally unable to sleep through it.

  We made the second jump, as planned, as soon as we were both up and awake. Lights flashed, then went green. My insides churned a bit. They do that sometimes during the transition phase. We had a sun this time, and Belle identified it as Tinicum 2116.

  This was the system the Falcon should have visited but, if you believed their report, had not.

  “We are three point one AU’s out from the central luminary,” said Belle. “Half that distance from the biozone.”

  “Okay. Let’s start the long-range scan. We need to see what the planetary system looks like.”

  “Adjusting course,” Belle said. “Inbound.”

  “And let’s put the Martin to work. See if anything out there looks like a derelict.”

  The technol
ogy for the Martin was simple enough. It used a three-meter telescope to survey squares of sky ten degrees on a side. It did one square every minute in ultraviolet through mid infrared, and recorded the results. Thus the entire sky was imaged in six hours, at which point the process started again.

  That allowed us to build a catalog of all moving objects, planets, moons, asteroids, you name it. The object we were looking for would have a reflective hull. Which meant a high albedo. If it was really out there, we expected to be able to pinpoint it within a few days.

  I invited Alex to punch the button to activate the system, but he declined. “You’ve done all the brute work in this operation so far, Chase,” he said. “You do it.”

  So I did. Lamps flashed, and Belle showed up wearing khakis and a safari hat. “Search is under way,” she said.

  I tied the Martin into the navigational display so we could watch. Alex stayed awhile, got bored, went back to the common room.

  During the next few hours, our long-range scan spotted a gas giant ten AUs out from the sun, and another at fourteen. That was it for the day. Alex was visibly disappointed, but I reminded him there’s a lot of space in a solar system and you can’t expect to find everything right away.

  I spent most of that first day on the bridge, watching the sun grow as we drew closer. Alex drifted between his quarters and the common room, mostly leafing through inventories of antiquities available on the market. After dinner, he joined me up front, as if that would prompt Belle to a greater sense of urgency.

  “Belle,” he said, “can’t we see anything yet?”

  “It’s too soon, Alex.”

  “How much time do we need to spot a planet?”

  “Maybe another day or so.”

  He looked at me. “I don’t suppose we’ve found anything with the Martin?”

  “No,” I said. “When we do, you’ll be first to know.”

  “I can’t believe it takes the Survey ships this long to figure out what’s in a planetary system.”

  “We’re not really equipped to do a planetary search,” I said. “Our gear is designed to find small targets that reflect a lot of light. Derelicts or docking stations or whatever. Long-range scan is okay, but we would have been better off with something more specialized.”