“A tugboat’s pulling us into the center of the pool so that we can lift off without damaging other vessels,” Adele said calmly. “The images are of our bow and stern.”
The bow pickup was at the base of Antenna Dorsal One; she could see a tiny image of Daniel’s head and torso, his right arm gesticulating. You had to know what you were looking at for it to make any sense, of course; which was generally true of life. Context was everything. . . .
“There’s not really much to see,” she continued aloud. She chuckled. “Though rather more than there will be as we lift off, since then we’ll be in a cocoon of steam and then hydrogen ions. I wonder—would you care to see what I suggested to, ah, Captain Leary for our first planetfall?”
Adele turned her head to look into the annex, past Sun reclining at the gunnery console. She’d have gotten a better view of the Klimovs by putting their images on her display, but she hoped looking directly at them would seem reassuring. Even as a child she’d been more interested in her privacy than she was in other people, but her present task required that she appear to be social. She supposed she could manage it, at least for the time being.
“There is a planetfall?” said the Count. “But I have not been told!”
“She’s telling you now, Georgi,” his wife said sharply. Adele wasn’t sure they realized they were speaking, even to each other, through the communications system rather by ordinary voice. The helmets they wore projected cancellation waves to save their hearing. She went on, “Yes, all right, mistress. Show us the planet. It can only be better than machines and dirty water, yes?”
“Cuvier Catalogue 4795-C has a sufficiency of dirty water also,” Adele said dryly, her wands weaving a set of images from the corvette’s computer onto the Klimovs’ displays. When Adele had leisure, she slaved whatever computer she was accessing to her personal data unit and used the familiar system as her controls. Occasionally this cost her a few microseconds of machine time, but that was a cheap price to pay for the reflexive assurance she gained. “There are compensations, however.”
The Austines were one-time allies of the Mundy family, though distantly enough that the house had been merely decimated after the Three Circles Conspiracy instead of facing near extermination. They’d provided family documents at Adele’s request.
Ninety years earlier, an Austine had been associated with a colonial survey endeavor. No official reports of the expedition survived so far as Adele could find, but Surveyor Austine’s handwritten journal did. With it was a holocube which projected six separate images depending on which face was pressed.
“It’s a little farther out than Captain Leary had intended for our first planetfall,” Adele continued. “Eighteen days, he estimates. There are no major ports between Cinnabar and the Ten Star Cluster anyway, and 4795-C at least will supply us with reaction mass.”
The first image was of a rolling, misty landscape in which trees dangled serpentine branches. Occasional highlights gleamed above the fog’s monochrome blur, but they were too far away to have shapes.
Surveyor Austine hadn’t used standard notation in her private journal. Adele by herself could no more have identified the planet than she could have flown—but of course she hadn’t been by herself. She’d explained the situation to Daniel, and after only a few minutes at the astrogation computer he’d found the world and begun plotting their course. They made a good team.
“The dominant predator . . . ,” she said, cueing the next image. “Ranges up to thirty-five feet in length.”
“Ho!” said the Count. “Yes, a fine trophy! Yes!”
Austine had called the animal a dragon. For her amusement Adele had checked a zoological database for Cinnabar and its client worlds; she’d found over three thousand species called “dragon” alone or in combination. For all that, the name fit well in this case.
The pictured creature rested on a point of rock, its head turned toward the camera—which must have been at a considerable distance, judging from the lack of image resolution. Its body was snakelike but it had a pair of strong clawed legs at the point of balance and, barely visible, a pair of slender arms folded against the upper body. The eyes were faceted, set to either side of a great hooked beak.