“We’re getting questions from channel B,” came from Communications. “Specials are requesting to leave quarters. Requesting screen output.”
Taylor’s routine. Taylor had always given the passengers a view, leaving Earth system, entering the mass points, and leaving them…
“No,” LaFarge said harshly. “No image.” A blind man could see it was trouble. “Say it’s a medical on the bridge. Say we’re busy.”
Tanaka had reached Taylor and Inoki, and was injecting something into Taylor, McDonough was aware of that. The passengers were feeling the variance in routine, and the NOT A MATCH hadn’t changed.
SEARCH FURTHER?
The computer had run out of local stars.
“Karly, you prioritized search from default one?”
“From default,” Navigation Two answered. The search for matching stars had started with Sol and the near neighborhood. “Our vector, plus and minus ten lights.”
The sick feeling in McDonough’s gut increased.
Nothing made sense. The backup pilots showed up, asking distracting questions nobody could answer, the same questions every navigator was asking the instruments and the records. The captain told the medic to get Taylor and Inoki off the bridge—the captain swore when he said it, and McDonough distractedly started running checks of his own while Tanaka got the two pilots on their feet—Taylor could walk, but Taylor looked blind to what was going on. Inoki was moving, but just scarcely: one of the com techs had to haul him up and carry him, once Tanaka unbuckled him and unplugged the tube from his implant. Neither of them looked at Greene or Goldberg as they passed. Taylor’s eyes were set on infinity. Inoki’s were shut.
SEARCH FURTHER? the computer asked, having searched all the stars within thirty lights of Earth.
“We stand at 5% on fuel,” the captain reported calmly—a potential death sentence. “Any com pickup at all?”
At this star? McDonough asked himself, and: “Dead silent,” Communications said. “The star’s noisy enough to mask God-knows-what.”
“Go long range, back up our vector. Assume we overshot the star.”
“Aye, sir.”
A moment later, hydraulics whined up on the hull. The big dish was unpacking and unfolding, preparing to listen. V was down to a crawl safe for its deployment—safe, if it was Earth’s own Sun, but it wasn’t. There was no data on this system. They were gathering it, drinking it in every sensor, but nothing gave them even minimal certainty there wasn’t a rock in their path. Nobody had ever come in at a close binary, or a mass as large. God only knew what had happened to the field.
McDonough’s hands were shaking as he punched up the scope of both search sequences, approaching a hundred lights distant in all directions, search negative, past their objective. They still didn’t know where they were, but with 5% fuel in reserve, they weren’t leaving soon, either. They had the miner-craft: thank God they had the miner-craft and the station components. They might gather system ice and refuel…
Except that was a radiation hell out there, except the solar wind that blue-white sun threw out was a killing wind. This was not a star where flesh and blood could live, and if the miners did go out to work in that, they had to limit their time outside.
Or if the ship was, as it might well be, infalling, on a massive star’s gravity slope… they’d meet that radiation close-up before they went down.
“We’ve rerun the initiation sequence,” Greene said, from Taylor’s seat. “We don’t find any flaw in the commands.”
Meaning Taylor had keyed in on what navigation had given him. A cold apprehension gnawed at McDonough’s stomach.
“Any answer, Mr. McDonough?”
“Not yet, sir.” He kept his voice calm. He didn’t feel that way. He hadn’t made a mistake. But he couldn’t prove it by anything they had from the instruments.
A ship couldn’t come out of hyperspace aimed differently than it had on entry. It didn’t. It couldn’t.
But if some hyperspace particle had screwed the redundant storage, if the computer had lost its destination point and POINT ERROR was the answer, they couldn’t run far enough on their fuel mass to be out of sight of stars they knew.
Two stars, in any degree near each other, both with spectra matching the charts, were all they needed. Any two-star match against their charts could start to locate them, and they couldn’t be more than five lights off their second mass point, if they’d run out all the fuel they were carrying—couldn’t be. Not farther than twenty lights from Earth total at most.