5. Kiss The Blade

I

The Explorer Ship Break Even of the Stargazer Clan's Fifth fleet, part of the Zetetic Elench, looped slowly around the outer limit of the comet cloud of the star system Tremesia I/II, scanning beams briefly touching on as many of the dark, frozen bodies as it could, searching for its lost sister vessel.

The double-sun system was relatively poor in comets; there were only a hundred billion of them. However, many of them had orbits well outside the ecliptic and that helped to make the search every bit as difficult as it would have been with a greater number of comet nuclei but in a more planar cloud. Even so, it was impossible to check all of them; ten thousand ships would have been required to thoroughly check every single sensor trace in the comet cloud to make sure that one of them was not a stricken ship, and the best the Break Even could do was briefly fasten its gaze on the most likely looking candidates.

Just doing that bare minimum would take a full day for this system alone, and it had another nine stars allocated to it as prime possibilities, plus another eighty less likely solar systems. The other six vessels of the Fifth fleet had similar schedules, similar allocations of stellar systems to attempt to search.

Elencher ships sent routine location and status reports back to a responsible and reliable habitat, facility or course-scheduled craft every sixteen standard days. The Peace Makes Plenty had signalled safely back to the Elench embassy on Tier along with the other seven ships of the fleet sixty-four days after they'd all left the habitat.

Day eighty had come, and only seven had reported in. The others immediately stopped heading any further away if that was the course they'd been set on; four days later, still with no word, and with no sign of anybody else having heard anything, the seven remaining ships of the Fifth fleet set their courses to converge on the last known position of the missing ship and accelerated to their maximum speed. The first of them had arrived in the general volume where the Peace Makes Plenty ought to be five days later; the last one appeared another twelve days after that.

They had to assume that the ship they were looking for had not travelled at that sort of speed since it had last signalled, they had to assume that it had been cruising, even loitering amongst the systems it had been investigating, they had to assume that it was somewhere within a stellar system, small nebula or gas cloud in the first place, and they had to assume that it was not deliberately trying to hide from them, or that somebody else was not deliberately trying to hide it from them.

The stars themselves were relatively easy to check; microscopic as it might be compared to the average sun, a half-million tonne ship containing a few tonnes of anti-matter and a variety of highly exotic materials falling into a star left a tiny but distinct and unmistakable flash behind it, and usually a mark on the stellar surface that lasted for days at least; one loop round the star could tell you if that kind of disaster had befallen a missing craft. Small solid planets were easy too, unless a ship was deliberately hiding or being hidden, which of course was perfectly possible in such situations and considerably more likely than a ship suffering some natural disaster or terminal technical fault. Large gaseous planets presented a bigger challenge. Asteroid belts, where they existed, could pose real problems, and comet clouds were a nightmare.

In the vast majority of solar systems the spaces between the inner system and the comet cloud were easy to search for big, obvious things and pointless to search for small things or anything trying to hide. Interstellar space was the same, but much worse; unless something was trying to signal you from out there, you could more or less forget about finding anything smaller than a planet.

The Break Even and its crew, like the rest of the fleet, the Clan and the Elench, had no illusions about the likelihood of success their search offered. They were doing it because you had to do something, because there was always just a chance, no matter how remote, that their sister ship was somewhere findable and obvious- orbiting a planet, sitting in a 1/6 Stabile round a big planet's orbit — and you wouldn't be able to live with yourself if you took the cold statistical view that there was next to zero hope of finding the ship intact, and then later discovered it had been there all along, savable at the time but later lost because nobody could be bothered to hope — and act — against the odds. Still, the statistics did not make optimistic reading, indicating that the whole task was as close to being impossible as made little difference, and there was a morbid, depressing quality about such searches, almost as though they were more a kind of vigil for the dead, part of a funeral ceremony, than a practical attempt to look for the missing.

The days went by; the ships, aware that whatever had befallen the Peace Makes Plenty might as easily happen to them, signalled their locations to each other every few hours.

Sixteen days after the first ship had started searching and hundreds of investigated star systems later, the quest began to be wound down. Over the next few days, five of the ships returned to the other parts of the Upper Leaf Spiral they had been exploring while two remained behind in the volume the Peace Makes Plenty ought still to be in, somewhere, carrying out more thorough explorations of the star systems as part of their normal mission profile, but always hoping that their missing sister ship might turn up, or at the very least that they might uncover some fragment of evidence, some hint of what had happened to their missing sibling.

The fact that the ship had disappeared would not be reported outside the fleet for another sixteen days; the Stargazer clan would pass the sad news on to the rest of the Elench eight days subsequently, and the outside galaxy would be informed, if it cared, another month after that. The Elench looked after their own, and kept themselves to themselves, as well.

The Break Even powered away from the last stellar system it had investigated, leaving the red giant astern with a kind of dismal relief. It was not one of the two craft who'd stay to continue the scaled-down search; it was heading back to the volume where it had been before the Peace Makes Plenty had gone missing. It kept all its sensors sweeping on full scan as it moved away from the giant sun, through the orbits of two small, cold planets and, further out, the dark, gelid bodies of the comet nuclei. Its course took it directly towards the next nearest star; on the way it swept interstellar space with its sensors too, still hoping, still half dreading… but nothing turned up. Esperi's single, dim-red globe fell away astern, like an ember cooling to ash in the freezing night.

A few hours later the ship was out of the volume altogether, heading out-down-spinward back to its allotted crop of distant, anonymous stars.