“Less is more,” Redwing said. Everyone around him raised eyebrows. “Look, we’re in a tough spot, carrying forward maneuvers nobody trained for—” He nodded at Karl, Beth, Ayaan Ali. “—and exploring a big thing nobody even imagined. We’ve got to do with less until we see our way out of this.”
Everyone nodded. Redwing finished with, “So on to Glory—and let’s eat.”
The moth larvae weren’t all done. The crew watched the chubby white larvae sway and wriggle in delirious fits as the heat took them. Insect protein was simple to raise on algae and, if well cooked, had a zest that the rest of the menu lacked. Fresh from a skillet, they had a kind of fried fritter some called “pond scum patties” to go with them. The ship couldn’t afford the room or resources to raise muscle and sinew. Some crew came from the North American Republic and weren’t used to insect food, or else from experience regarded it as beneath their standards. A few weeks’ exposure to the stored rations usually fixed that. Some things, like the trays of gray longworms, few could bear to look at. Those Beth thought it best to grind into a paste for a fake pancake.
Beth spread the larvae into a frying pan, where they fell into a fragrant, fatty goo Ayaan Ali had made. They squirmed as they sizzled and then went still. She stirred them, thinking Amazing what you’ll eat when you have to … and then recalled things she had gratefully ingested when she had to on the Bowl. Sometimes, admittedly, while deliberately not looking at them …
A zesty aroma rose from the crusty larvae and as soon as she set them out, crew descended on them.
Redwing had saved a morsel for this moment, and now trotted out from his personal stock a bowl of—“Honey!”
That made the dish work. Everyone dug in. “As insect vomit goes,” Karl said, “not at all bad.”
Ayaan Ali asked Karl, “Done with that flight analysis?”
Karl barely slowed his eating to say, “Realigned the simulation, yes. Fitted it to isotope data from the scoop over the last century.”
Beth asked, “Meaning?”
Ayaan Ali said, “We’re still trying to understand why the scoop underperformed. It might help us fly it now in this low-plasma-density regime.”
Redwing said casually, “How’s the detector mote net working?”
Beth knew this was one way Redwing liked to turn social occasions into a loose staff report meeting. Certainly his approach made hearing tech stuff flung about a tad more appetizing.
Ayaan Ali gave herself an extra helping of sauce—much needed, since to Beth the woman seemed rail thin and low energy—and crunched up some more insect delicacies before saying softly to the others, “Karl and I deployed, on the captain’s direction, the diagnostic fliers we’d planned to use when we came into the Glory system. They would give us a good three-D map of the mag fields and solar wind when we came in.”
Redwing said, “So I decided we could send them out on a short leash. They can tell us details about the plasma turbulence, density ridges, things that we can’t get a good reading on inside SunSeeker’s mag cocoon.”
This, too, was a Redwing method—let the crew know there was logic behind his orders, but do so ex post facto. Playing along, Beth asked, “Short leash?”
Karl said, “I’m pretty sure we can reel them back in. They’re marvels, really, size of a coin but able to propel themselves by using tiny electric fields that let them sail on magnetic energy, to sense plasma and measure waves, and report back in gigahertz band. We’ve got them spread over a big fraction of an astronomical unit, sniffing out ion masses and densities, picking up plasma waves, the whole lot.”
Beth was impressed with SunSeeker’s abilities and kept quiet while the others kicked around their lingo. They loved their gadgets the way ordinary people cherish their pets. The thousands of “smart coins” sending back data were working well. That they could be fetched back, told to return home for reuse—amazing stuff. Plus they had useful results right now.
Ayaan Ali waved one of her augmented fingers, and a 3-D vision snapped into view, sharp and clear above their table. Hanging in air, it showed schematics of the Bowl in green, with SunSeeker a tiny orange dot swimming above it. The ship had to stay below the rim of the Bowl to avoid the defensive weapons there. But it also had to skate above the upper membrane that held in the Bowl’s atmosphere. That left a narrow disk of vacuum for SunSeeker to navigate, riding the plasma winds that came direct from the star. But more important, they got plasma spurts from the traceries and streamers that purled off the yellow-colored jet. The churning jet was big in the 3-D view, a slowly twisting nest of luminous threads that drove forward. As the crew watched the display, it shifted smoothly, since the Bridge Artilect tracked human eye movements to display what interested people. They witnessed the jet narrowing further as it flowed out, then piercing the Bowl cleanly at the back, through the Knothole and out into interstellar space.
Deftly Ayaan Ali pointed to the safety zone disk where SunSeeker flew and the 3-D dutifully expanded until they could see bright blue dots swimming in a grid formation all across the huge expanse. They were sprinkled over a distance of about an astronomical unit and when Ayaan Ali waved her hand, they answered with momentary violet flares, a ripple slowly expanding away from the ship’s position.
“They report in steadily, each staying a good distance from the others. We get plasma signatures in ample arrays. The coins feed on the plasma itself and change momentum by electrodynamic steering.” She could not restrain herself, beaming. “Beautiful!”
Karl nodded. “And they got good news, in a way. Remember, before we sighted the Bowl, our scoop underperforming? Turned out it was eating a lot more helium and molecular hydrogen than ordinary interstellar space has. Some of it got ionized by our bow shock and then sucked into the main feeder.”
“Ah, but it doesn’t fuse—got it,” Fred said. This was the first time he had spoken during the entire meal, and everyone looked at him. “Hard to tell from inside the ship that it wasn’t getting the right food.”
Beth didn’t see, but wasn’t afraid to ask, “So?”
“Those useless ions slowed us down, just pointless extra mass—and not fuel.” Fred dipped his head, as if apologizing. “Sorry if I get too technical. My obsessions don’t translate well.”
Everyone around the table laughed, including Redwing’s rolling bark. “Don’t put down your assets, Fred,” Redwing said. “Even that dinosaur idea.”
Beth appreciated Redwing’s methods but wanted to move this along, so she asked, “So our drive’s okay? We’re managing to keep it flying in interplanetary conditions, after all—which it was never designed to do.”
“That’s what the smart coins tell us. We’re actually getting more plasma than we would if we were in near-Earth space,” Karl said. “The jet snarls up some, so we get a bit more blowoff plasma from it.”
“That star isn’t behaving like a main-sequence one, either,” Redwing said. “I had the Astro Artilect look into it. It says we got the spectral class wrong at first because of the hot spot—it swamped some spectral lines. But as well, the whole jet formation active zone makes the star act funny.”
Ayaan Ali asked, “You mean those big solar arches we keep seeing? Big billowing loops. They dance around the hot spot, and every week or two they blow up in huge, nasty flares.”
“Right,” Karl said. “Those help build the jet, somehow—I really don’t see how to build so stable a pillar of plasma from the storm at its feet. Those storms give the jet its power and blow off other plasma, too. The jet’s base storms also spatter out a big, highly ionized solar wind—which helps us scoop up more fusion fuel, too.”
Beth nodded, feeling more than a bit out of it. “Pleasant to have some good news for once.”