Death of a Neutron Star - Eric Kotani [6]
"That issue will be settled later," Janeway, said. "I'm sure we can come to some agreement how long were you in flight?"
Tyla started to say something, then snapped her mouth shut Her face turned almost as red as her hair. Janeway knew right at that moment the woman was going to be trouble.
Janeway maintained eye contact until Tyla finally answered. "One full day, at top speed."
"So at least two full days for Qavim to get back to his base, regroup, and come back to this location with more ships."
Tyla nodded. "At least. If he doesn't get executed for failing when he reports back. It is a Qavok tradition. Kill all failures."
"Couldn't happen to a nicer guy," Paris said.
Chakotay frowned at him and Janeway ignored the comment.
"Anything else you can think of that might help us in a fight with the Qavoks?"
Tyla shook her head.
Janeway nodded and turned. "Okay, Doctor, it seems we have a little time. It's your turn. How about starting at the beginning so we follow you?"
Dr. Maalot nodded, swallowed hard, then said, "This might be a little technical"
"We'll manage," Janeway said, glancing at where Seven sat, staring at the doctor.
He glanced at Seven also, and then started. "Two weeks ago I was on a medium sized asteroid near the outer edge of our home system, tinkering with a signal enhancing device attached to a large array of radio antennae. I detected weak, rapidly variable, periodic signals from a binary pulsar."
"Binary pulsar?" Janeway asked, leaning forward. "Those are very, very rare."
Dr. Maalot could only nod. "From its extremely short orbital period of barely eight seconds, I immediately deduced the nature of this neutron-star pair. Judging from the binary system's high relative velocity with respect to the local stars, the pair might have been ejected from a triple-star system through a cataclysmic event of some sort"
Maalot sounded quite proud of his discovery, as he had every right to be, as far as Janeway was concerned. What he had found was one of the rarest things in known space.
"A pulsar binary with such a short orbital period?" Seven asked. "Are you certain?"
"Yes," Maalot said. "Its orbit must be decaying rapidly through gravitational radiation."
"Allowing for the light transit time to your homeworld," Janeway said, "the period would already have to be much shorter at the source now."
"Correct," Maalot said, clearly delighted with the knowledgeable questions. Janeway understood such delight. For one thing, most people did not understand that what one observed with a telescope was what had happened at the source some time ago; if the star was located a dozen light-years away, what you were observing had already happened there a dozen years before.
"The distance to the binary pulsar," Maalot said, "from my original observations, turned out to be a little over ten light-years."
"Ten light-years?" Janeway said.
Maalot smiled. "The discovery was thanks mainly to my new signal-enhancing device, at that."
Janeway nodded. "Go on."
"The orbital period was already down to about a second at the source. That shocked me, I must say, Captain. As you can understand, we are facing a possible imminent disaster."
Janeway glanced at Seven, who seemed puzzled at the doctor's fear of disaster.
"The rate of decrease naturally depends on individual masses," Seven said. "You must have determined the masses of the component stars."
Maalot allowed himself to look a little smug before answering the question. "Yes, indeed, I did. What with such a short period, I had the radial velocity curves for each star almost as soon as the discovery was made. The binary system's orbital inclination was also easy to determine; as the two stars eclipsed each other, the orbit was edge-on toward our solar system. It was simple then to calculate the absolute masses; it was one solar mass for the massive star and a tenth of the solar mass for the secondary. The rate of its orbital decay is accelerating