Infinity Beach - Jack McDevitt [122]
“It would help,” said Kim, “if we knew precisely where the incident took place.”
“How do you mean?”
“Altitude. Orbit, if possible.”
“Don’t see how we can determine that,” said Solly. “We can see the rings in one of the sequences, but the planet’s not visible at all.”
“But we know when everything happened,” said Kim. “We know now right to the minute.” Contact had been made February 17 at 11:42 A.M. shipboard time. “We have a picture of the rings during the event, and we have a starry background.”
“The stars would look the same from anywhere in the system,” he objected.
“The stars would,” she agreed.
But not the moons. And surely there was at least one moon in the picture.
There were two.
They ran the sequence again. Hunter floating against the midnight sky, the cargo door opening and lights corning on, splashing out into the void. How warm and inviting the interior looked, Kim thought, especially when Yoshi’s smiling image appeared and invited entry. There was something almost blatantly sexual in all that, and she wondered what the celestials had made of it.
They surveyed the satellite system until they had its mechanics down. Once they’d accomplished that, they ran the orbits backward to 4:12 P.M., February 17, the moment that the open door image had been transmitted. They matched the positions of the moons against the angle of the rings.
“Okay.” Solly put a graphic on one of the auxiliary monitors. “In order for everything to appear as it does in the picture, the Hunter would have had to be here.” He showed her the point, eleven degrees north of the equatorial plane, at an altitude of 45,000 kilometers. “But we only have a couple of minutes on the image, and it’s not enough to track a complete orbit.”
“We’ve got a second picture,” Kim reminded him. The Emily image, which had been taken two hours later.
Solly brought it up, found more moons, three this time, repeated the process, and smiled triumphantly. “I think we’re in business,” he said.
She was delighted. “Good. Let’s get ourselves into the same orbit. But I want to move a bit faster than the Hunter would have.”
“Why?”
“So that we’ll overtake anything that might be traveling at Hunter’s velocity.”
Solly frowned.
“Just do it, okay?” she said.
“Okay, Kim.”
“And let’s do as thorough a search as we can.”
“What exactly do you expect to find?”
“I expect nothing,” she said, feeling like Veronica King, who always said that. “But the possibilities are limitless.” The hope that she entertained, that she did not want to describe, was that the celestial was still here somewhere, a derelict. It was possible.
Solly passed instructions to the AI. “We’ll be going into orbit,” he told her, “later this evening. And we’ll need roughly twelve hours to do a complete search along the orbit.”
There was something in Solly’s voice. “Anything wrong?” she asked.
“I thought about this before we left but it didn’t really seem like something I wanted to bring up at the time.”
“Tell me, Solly.”
“We’re not armed,” he said. “Has it occurred to you that if this thing is here, it may not be friendly?”
“I don’t think that’s likely.”
“Why not?”
She looked out at the star-clouds. “Solly, even if they were an aggressive species, there wouldn’t be any point shooting at someone in a wasteland like this. What’s to gain?”
“Maybe they just don’t like strangers. Something happened to the Hunter.”
“We have to assume they’re rational, Solly. Otherwise they couldn’t have gotten here in the first place.” She enjoyed being with him, alone in all this vast emptiness. It was different now that they could look out the windows and know that what they were seeing was really there. “They didn’t shoot at the Hunter. Or if they did, they’re not very dangerous because the Hunter got home safely.”
“It’s possible,” said Solly, “they’re at war against their own kind. Maybe Ben Tripley got the name right, calling it the Valiant. It could have been a warship.”
“Solly,” she said patiently, “they