Infinity Beach - Jack McDevitt [112]
“Time to get to work,” she said, so anxious she could scarcely contain herself.
He reached over and clasped her hand. “We should have thirty hours or so before the signal will be arriving here. But since we can’t trust the clocks, let’s get to it.”
Constellations tend to dissolve when one moves a considerable distance toward them. Stars that appear in home skies to be close to one another are seldom so in reality. But Orion’s Belt was a brilliant exception. Its three superluminous components remained in their classic relationship to each other, except that here, at a range of less than thirty light-years rather than the approximately fifteen hundred across which humans customarily saw them from Green-way, they dazzled the eye and utterly dominated the night.
Mintaka, “The Belt,” is the westernmost. It’s officially Delta Orionus, the least brilliant of the three, with a luminosity 20,000 times that of Sol or Helios. It has a relatively dim companion, not visible at this range, which orbits at about half a light-year.
Epsilon Orionus, in the middle, is also known by its Arabic name Alnilam, “Belt of Pearls.” Its luminosity is twice that of Mintaka. A haze surrounds it, caused by the irregular nebulous cloud NGC 1990, glowing in the way that cloudy skies do when they reflect light from cities.
And finally, on the east, Zeta Orionus. Alnitak.
The Girdle.
She watched it move to center screen in the mission control center as the Hammersmith turned toward it. Alnitak too had collected a haze, contributed by the Flame Nebula and the emission nebula IC434.
“We are on course toward Alnitak,” said the AI. “And accelerating to thirty-four kilometers per second.”
“Very good, Ham,” said Solly.
The ship’s normal operating antennas locked on the giant star. Others emerged from wells around the hull and lined up along the central axis.
“It really amazes me,” said Kim.
“What’s that?”
“I’d always thought of the ship’s captain bent over consoles, punching buttons, making adjustments, doing stuff. You could sit here with a good book and nobody’d know the difference.”
“We’ve got good public relations,” he said. “Maybe you should think about going to work for the pilots’ association.”
The engines shut off and they began to coast.
“Acceleration complete, Solly,” said the AI.
“All right, Ham. Launch FAULS.”
Twin ports that had originally been designed to accommodate probes ejected a pair of communications packages. Eleven minutes later a second pair were launched. And then a third, until sixteen of the devices had been released.
They waited several hours while the packages arranged themselves into a vast field, aimed at the target star. Then they unfolded, one at a time, great white blossoms opening up.
Kim never left the mission control center during the deployment, save for a couple of trips to the washroom and a quick meal. At around eleven P.M., Ham announced that FAULS had come online. They now had a radio dish whose effective diameter was roughly equivalent to that of the orbit of Greenway’s outermost moon.
Solly smiled at her. “Do you want to give the command?”
“Oh yes,” said Kim. “Ham, activate FAULS.”
Lamps blinked on. “FAULS activated.”
A storm of low-volume static spilled out of the speakers.
An auxiliary screen on Kim’s right powered up. The system ID blinked on and stipulated it was working.
“Activate program search,” said Solly.
“Activated.” The static volume lessened.
“Now what?” she asked.
He looked up at the overhead monitor, which was locked on Alnitak, and increased magnification until the star became a disk. “We wait,” he said.
She diverted the input to her earphones and listened for a few minutes. The void was alive with radio waves, a cacophony of whimpers and squeals and murmurs, the fading shrieks of stars plunging into black holes, the staccato clatter of pulsars, the murmur of colliding hydrogen clouds. The FAULS search program would sort out anything that might be a coherent signal. If Hammersmith succeeded in picking up a broadcast from the Hunter (or by