“Taxis are pure automation,” she said. “Nobody minds those.”

“You know how to fly the damned thing yourself if you have to.”

They were easing away from the orbiter, lining up with their marker stars. “Acceleration will commence in one minute,” said the AI.

“Hammersmith, Control.” It was a new voice, deeper, with authority.

“Go ahead, Control.”

“This is the supervisor. You are directed to return to the dock.”

“Solly.” Kim pointed at one of the displays, on which a long ominous greyhound of a ship was moving in close.

“I see it.”

“They know.”

“Sure they know. Our passenger has been talking to them.” He opened the mike: “Control, we are unable to comply.”

“Solly—”

“Ham,” he said, “proceed with programmed acceleration.”

“Proceeding.”

Kim felt a gentle push into her seat as the ship swung around to its heading and began to move forward.

“We’ll be okay, Kim,” he said.

The push became more pronounced and the station slid off the screens.

Another new voice, female, irritated: “Hammersmith, this is Orbital Patrol. You are directed to return to port immediately.”

“Hang on,” said Solly. Acceleration was increasing.

“We better make our jump, right?”

“The jump engines feed off the mains. We need to build more reaction before they’ll kick in.”

“How much? How long are we talking?”

“About twenty-five minutes.”

“Twenty-five minutes?” That was ridiculous. “Damn Worldwide and its paneling. Solly, we don’t have twenty-five minutes.”

“Hammersmith, return to the station or we will take appropriate action.”

“Do they have any way of actually stopping us?”

“Short of blowing us up?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Only a Tursi field.”

“The damper.”

“Right. It would shut down our mains. But it’s a bluff.”

“How do you know?”

“Rev up an engine and then turn it off, just like that, you risk an explosion. Damn near a fifty-fifty chance. They won’t use it without getting permission first from the Institute. And that’ll take time. Anyway Agostino would never agree to it. He doesn’t want to lose a ship.”

The comm system was crowded with incoming voices: the Patrol warning them again to stand down; the supervisor at Marlin insisting they return; and, oddly, Webley, demanding what in God’s name did they think they were doing?

“Just relax,” Solly said, “and enjoy the ride. In the meantime, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to tell me precisely where we’re going.”

“Zeta Orionus. Alnitak. Or rather, I want you to pick a spot twenty-seven and a fraction light-years from Alnitak.” She dug in her pockets and pulled out a data disk. “Here,” she said. “Put us anywhere on the bubble.”

“Alnitak,” he said. The easternmost star in the belt of Orion. “Why? A guess? Or do you know something you haven’t told me?”

“You remember asking if I knew how long the trip would take?”

“Sure. You gave me a fairly specific answer.”

“Forty days, seventeen hours, twenty-six minutes. It’s the total elapsed return-trip time on the Hunter logs.”

“The bogus ones?”

“Yes. But I couldn’t imagine any reason why they’d change the elapsed time from the originals. The time frame, if it’s correct, gives us Alnitak. And there’s something else.”

She showed him a blowup of Kane’s mural. “See this?” She pointed at the Horsehead.

“Yep.”

“It’s visible from Alnitak.”

The Patrol moved into a parallel course on their starboard side, at a distance of only a few hundred meters.

Solly shut down the comm system and the voices died. “Makes me nervous,” he said.

“You think that’s a good idea, right now?”

“Depends on whether you want to listen to the threats.”

He set the timer to count down to jump status. Kim stared at it, willing the numbers to hurry along.

They were still several minutes out when the AI announced an incoming transmission from a new source. From one of the satellites. “From the Institute.”

“It’ll be Agostino,” said Kim.

“You want to talk to him?”

“No,” she said. “We’ll talk when we come back. When we have something to negotiate with.”

The patrol vessel was still there when power began to flow to the jump engines, and Solly took them out of their range.

Solly’s analysts thought the Hunter logs were accurate to the point where the vessel experienced engine trouble. Allow approximately a day or so for Kane’s repair work, and that puts Tripley and his party at Alnitak roughly February 17 or 18. Those estimates also fit with the timing of the return to Greenway. “If all that’s correct,” said Kim, “then getting proof should be easy.”

It was now January 28 in Seabright. Assuming February 17 as the base date for the event, for the contact between the Hunter and the celestials, and assuming further that radio transmissions would certainly have been involved, she had calculated precisely where the radio waves would be at this moment, and had derived an intercept course for the Hammersmith. All very simple.

“There’s really only one feasible scenario,” she told Solly. “They ran into another ship out there. That means there would have been at least an attempt at radio communication.”

“You’re hanging an awful lot on the fact that the turtle-shell showed up in the mural. There could be other explanations. They might have found a ground-based civilization.

Maybe preindustrial, no lights, no radio, nada. Just torches and the local equivalent of horses. In that case—

“It couldn’t have happened that way,” she said. They were seated in the mission control center, chairs angled toward each other, drinking coffee.

“Why?”

“Alnitak’s too young, for one thing. It’s not ten million years old yet. So no local life. And it puts out too much UV. Millions of times what Helios does.”

“Oh.”

“Right. It would fry everything in sight. Anybody they ran into out there would have had to be star-travelers.”

A survey ship had looked at Alnitak two centuries before. As planetary systems went, it didn’t have much: one world, a captured gas giant far out in the boondocks.

“It’s been a long time for a radio transmission,” Solly said. “You get a lot of spread over three decades. FAULS is a good system, but it might not be good enough to pick up a signal that weak. Or to sort it out from the general babble.”

But Kim had spent time with the specs for the flexible array. “If it’s there,” she said, “we’ll find it.”

They spent the first day housekeeping, arranging their quarters, exploring the ship. Solly was already familiar with it, of course, but he enjoyed showing it off to Kim. She wondered whether her initial failure to be impressed with the vehicle might have insulted him. But it did remind her of the Institute’s Special Quarters, where non-VIP visitors were housed.

They wandered from floor to floor, and he demonstrated the features of the recreational facilities and the VR section. They inspected the two sets of engines, the mains, which propelled the Hammersmith through realspace, and the Transdimensional Interface, the jump engines. The TDI was small enough to hold in her hands.

Kim was pleasantly surprised to discover that the transition into hyper had come with no side effects.

She’d never experienced transdimensional flight as an adult. She was aware, as she hadn’t been as a child, that some people got ill during the jump; that others experienced changes in perspective, that walls seemed less solid, that the grip of artificial gravity lessened or tightened, that people claimed to become aware of the thoughts of those around them. There were accounts of unearthly dreams and severe bouts of depression and of sheer exhilaration. Solly told her there was some truth to it. All interstellars, he said, carried a generous supply of antidepressants and sedatives. He had seen people stricken with severe headaches, stomach cramps, toothaches, all deriving from no discernible physical cause. “But it’s never been more than an irritant,” he said. “Like seasickness.”