But the other sensors showed no evidence of a solar flare and, once he though about it, Fuchs wondered if a gamma-ray burst would not have registered on the optical receiver.
He ordered the navigation program to move Starpower back to the area where the optical signal had been detected. Turning a ship of Starpower’s mass was no simple matter. It took time and energy. But at last the nav computer reported it was done.
Nothing. The comm system remained silent.
It was a fluke, Fuchs told himself. An anomaly. Still, something must have caused it, and he felt certain that it wasn’t an internal glitch in the communications equipment. Nonsense, snapped the reasoning part of his brain. You’re convinced because you want it to be a signal. You’re letting your hopes overbalance your good sense.
Yes, that’s true, Fuchs admitted to himself. But he ordered the nav system to move Starpower along the vector that the spurious signal had come from.
Hoping that his gut feeling was closer to the mark than his rational mind, Fuchs followed that course for an hour, then two, then—
The comm screen lit up with a weak, grainy picture of what looked to Fuchs like a bald, emaciated Asian.
“This is the Waltzing Matilda. We are disabled and unable to control our course. We need help urgently.”
Fuchs stared at the streaky, weak image for several slack-jawed moments, then flew into a flurry of activity, trying to pin down Matilda’s location and move his own ship to her as quickly as possible while getting off a signal to her on every channel his comm system could transmit on.
Dorik Harbin was furious.
It’s a decoy! he raged. A stupid, sneaking decoy! And you fell for it. You followed it like an obedient puppy halfway to hell!
He had maneuvered Shanidar slightly away from the exhaust wake of what he’d thought was Starpower more out of boredom than any intelligent reason. He’d been following the ship’s telemetry signals for several days, intent on finding where it was heading. His standing orders from Grigor were to wait until a ship takes up orbit around a particular asteroid, then destroy it. Harbin knew without Grigor telling him that HSS then claimed the asteroid for itself.
But after several days his quarry showed no indication of searching for an asteroid. It simply puttered along at low thrust, like a tourist boat showing off the local sights. Except there were no tourists out here and no sights to show; the Belt was cold and empty.
Now Harbin could see clearly in his screens that what he’d been following was not Starpower at all but a crew emergency vehicle, a miserable escape pod.
This was no accident. Fuchs had deliberately set him up while he went off in some other direction. Where? Grigor would not be happy to learn that he’d failed. Harbin swore to himself that he would find Fuchs and destroy the cunning dog.
If he reversed his course it would cost so much of his propellant that he’d need another topping off within a few days. And the nearest HSS ship was at least three days off. Harbin searched his sensor screens. What he needed was a fair-sized rock close enough . . .
He found one, an asteroid that had enough mass for the maneuver he had in mind. Too small for a slingshot move, but Harbin eased close to the twelve-kilometer-long rock and put Shanidar into a tight orbit around it. He checked his nav computer twice before setting up the program. At precisely the proper instant he fired his thrusters, and Shanidar shot away from the unnamed asteroid in the direction Harbin wanted, at a fraction of the propellant loss that a powered turnaround would have cost.
Now he sped back toward the region where Starpower had fired off its decoy. That was easy to calculate: it had to be where
Starpower’s telemetry signals went off for a few hours. That’s when the clever dog transferred his transmitter to the escape pod. He’s been running silent ever since.
Or maybe not, Harbin reasoned. He might be communicating with Ceres on another channel. Or perhaps signaling some other ship.