When we observe world affairs, is it not quite plain that fortune cares little for wisdom or foolishness but converts one to the other with capricious delight?
“WHAT IS IT exactly, Bill?” They were gathered in mission control, looking at the white disk floating at the top of Autumn’s atmosphere.
Bill sounded puzzled: “Spectroscopic analysis indicates it’s pure ammonia ice crystals. And a variety of gases.”
“Bill,” said Hutch, “I mean, what is it?”
“It’s a blizzard,” he said.
All right. Let’s start with basics. “Bill, something like this, assuming it could happen—”
“—It is happening—”
“—Wouldn’t it be yellow?”
“That is what I would expect.”
“Why yellow?” asked George.
“Because you get a lot of sulfides and whatnot. But the critical thing is—”
“—that you’d expect,” finished Nick, “to find it inside the atmosphere. Doesn’t take a weatherman to figure that out.”
“So what,” asked Tor, “could cause a snowstorm in outer space? Shouldn’t that be impossible? Bill?”
“It’s clearly not impossible.”
“You’re being evasive. Is it possible in the natural state of things?”
“I would think not.”
They were still a few thousand kilometers away from it. Hutch had not been asked her opinion when the decision to come out here went unanimous. She would, of course, have gone along with it. This was the sort of thing the Academy people loved. And it seemed harmless enough.
She even allowed herself to get caught up somewhat in the general enthusiasm. They were like kids, George coming down on Christmas morning and finding one toy after another under the tree, Alyx always trying to fit the cosmos onto a stage, we can do the snowstorm, get the light behind it, we want the audience to see into it, to feel the strangeness because this is no ordinary storm. Tor was making plans to go out on the hull to paint the thing, and Nick spent much of his time entering philosophical observations into his notebook. “It’ll be a bestseller when we get home,” he said. “The Notebooks of Nicholas Carmentine. I like the sound of it.”
“What are you writing?” asked Hutch.
“It’s a personal memoir. Hell, Hutch, when we get back, we’re all going to be famous. Have you thought about that? We’ve found everything we’d hoped for. And more.”
“Well,” said Tor, “almost everything.”
Even Bill was swept along by the general enthusiasm. “It has to be artificial,” he admitted to Hutch.
The disturbance, whatever it really was, was big, thousands of kilometers wide. It threw off jets and gushers in all directions. Streamers arced halfway around the planet. The central body of the storm was a large glob, filled with winds, driving snow, and slurry. The winds blew at about 80 kph, gusting to 130. Relatively serene for a storm on a gas giant. It was located directly on the equator.
The coffee tasted thick and warm and reassuring. When Hutch had been a little girl at camp and they’d told ghost stories around the fire at night, she remembered that the smell of coffee (which she wasn’t allowed to drink) had always made her feel better, had made the world a bit more solid. It was like that now. And it felt good because there was something of the dark woods about that cloud.
She brought the Memphis in close enough that they could have reached out and collected a bucket of snow. The storm trailed down into the atmosphere, but the big central section was clear of the upper clouds by at least a hundred klicks. Over the rim of the giant planet they could see Cobalt, blue and gold in the distant sun.
“It keeps getting stranger,” said Bill. “I’m reading an explosive effect. The snow is coming up out of the atmosphere. Like a fountain.”
“How,” asked Hutch, “could that be possible?”
“I do not know. But it is happening.”
“Why don’t we go into the storm?” asked George. “Maybe we can figure out what’s doing this.”
The suggestion visibly alarmed his colleagues. Tor frowned and signaled Hutch he didn’t think it was a good idea. “Actually,” she said, “we might want to do that. But later. Let’s get some more information on local conditions before we jump into anything.”
Bill measured the diameter of the storm at roughly four thousand kilometers. “Whatever’s causing it,” said Tor, “it shouldn’t last long. The sunlight’s on it.”
“How long do you think?” Bill kept the mockery out of his voice, but Hutch knew it was there.
“Oh, I don’t know. A few days, maybe. Right, Hutch?”
“It’s a complete unknown, Tor,” she said. “I’d point out though that it’s been there more than a week already.”
“Got something else,” said Bill. One of the screens lit up, revealing a picture of a moonlet. It was approaching the storm. “Looks as if it’s in the same orbit.”
It was a flattened rock. Generally smooth surface, with several ranges of low hills. “I believe it’s going to go inside,” Bill continued. “In about fifteen minutes.”
Hutch was hungry. She ordered up some pancakes and joined Alyx, who was just starting on a plate of eggs and toast. Alyx asked whether she thought the storm was in some way connected with the Retreat. “I can’t imagine,” said Nick, “how that could be possible.”
Asteroids come in all sorts of shapes. They are elongated, they are hammered in, they are even broken shards. This one was flat, not unlike a sea ray, and it was symmetrical. Not perfectly symmetrical, but its mass appeared to be evenly distributed along both sides.
“Bill,” Hutch said, “dimensions, please?”
“It’s 16.6 kilometers long,” said Bill, “and 5.1 wide at maximum. Vertical is.8 at the center.”
“Not much of a moon,” said George.
“And we have a surprise,” Bill continued. He waited while Nick got slowly out of his chair and literally gaped.
“What?” said Alyx.
He jabbed his index finger at the satellite. At the trailing end of the satellite. “Look.”
Bingo.
The object had exhaust tubes.
GEORGE WAS ON his feet. They were all on their feet. Nick shook Hutch’s hand and congratulated her.
An alien ship. The first one.
“Record the time, Bill,” Hutch said, as she was swept up and embraced by George. George of all people. “Record everything and mark it for the archives.”
“Yes, Hutch. Congratulations, Mr. Hockelmann.”
“Thank you.” George beamed.
They jacked up the magnitude on the rock. It had antennas. And sensors.
“Some of the dishes,” said Bill, “are aimed back at Icepack.”
Hutch directed Bill to angle the approach so they could get a good look at the vessel, above and below, both sides, front and rear.
The exhaust tubes were enormous. But that figured: The engines had to push a lot of mass.
They watched it move toward the snowstorm. The blizzard. The big Slurpy. Why would it do that? Tor looked across at Hutch for the answer.
“Bill,” she asked, “is it under power?”
Bill’s dignified features came on-screen. “Yes, Hutch,” he said, “they have just made a slight course adjustment. It is not a derelict.”
“They’re moving clear of the storm?” she asked.
“No. They seem to be headed right into it.”
A cloud of objects appeared from somewhere beneath the object, not unlike a swarm of insects. They charged forward, toward the blizzard.
Bill locked on one and went to full mag. It looked like a pair of cylinders connected by a gridwork, an engine housing, and thrust tubes. There were sensors and antennas and black boxes. No viewports, nothing that looked like a passenger cabin. No place she could see that might have been home to a pilot.
Now, moving well ahead of the asteroid, the objects plunged into the Slurpy.
“I’m still tracking them,” said Bill.
“What are they doing?”
“Slowing down.”
Something was happening on the asteroid. Hutch watched as it sprouted wings. On both its upper and lower sides gray-black appendages were rising out of the rock. It was taking on the appearance of a malformed bat. Meanwhile it was closing on the Slurpy, running through the trail of whirling snow that was drifting out from the rear of the storm.
“What are those things?” asked Tor. “What’s going on?”
“It’s going to refuel,” said Hutch.
“Are you serious?”
“We have the same capability. To a degree.”
“How do you mean?”
“I think they’re scoops. We have them too. If we run a bit short of fuel, we can dip into the atmosphere of one of these things and fill the tanks.” She turned back to Bill. “Are we picking up anything?”
“There is some electronic leakage,” he said.
“They’re not saying hello?”
“No. They aren’t reacting to us at all.”
“They have to see us by now,” said George. “Bill, would you open a channel to them for me?”
“You want the multichannel, George?”
George looked at Hutch. “Do I?”
“Yes,” she said.
And Tor grinned. “What are you going to tell them?”
“I’m going to say hello.”
The asteroid was easing into the storm.
“You’re on,” said Bill.
“Hello,” said George. “We come in peace for all humankind.”
“That sounds familiar,” said Nick.
George reddened. “Well, what do you want on short notice? I wasn’t ready for this.”
“Too late,” said Nick. “They’ll be reading that line in every school in the world for centuries to come.”
George turned back to the AI’s screen image. “They answer back, Bill?”
“Negative. No response.”
The asteroid moved deeper into the Slurpy and gradually lost definition.
BILL STARTED A countdown and, on schedule, the object emerged from the storm, followed by the cloud of shuttles. The wings folded back, the shuttles caught up and merged with the main body, the object fired guide thrusters to adjust its orbit, and continued on its way.
“It is currently on course to pass through the storm again on its next orbit,” said Bill.
George got back on his channel and tried again. “Hello,” he said. “Hello over there.” He grinned up at Alyx. “This is us over here. Please blink a light or waggle your wings or something.”
Silence poured out of the speaker.
“I’m sure you guys run into folks out here all the time,” he added.
“What now?” asked Tor.
Alyx punched up a couple of pieces of toast. “It’s a chindi,” she said.
What in hell was a chindi?
“Navajo term. A spirit of the night.”
“Dangerous?” asked Nick.
“All spirits are dangerous,” said Tor. He gazed down at Alyx, who was getting out some strawberry jam for her toast. “What’s your Navajo connection?” he asked.
“My grandfather.” She smiled innocently. “He maintains it’s where I got my good looks.”
“But you’re blond.”
“My looks. Not my coloring.”
“So what’s it going to do now?” asked George, bored with hair color and Navajo grandfathers.
“I’d guess,” said Hutch, “it will come around and go through the Slurpy again.”
“Didn’t get enough the first time?”
“Right. As big as they are, I’d expect it’ll take a while.”
“How exactly does it work?” asked Alyx.
Hutch didn’t really know. “Somehow they’ve managed to get the troposphere to cough up a lot of ammonia ice. That’s the Slurpy.”
“Is ammonia fuel?” asked Alyx.
“More or less. They probably break it down into hydrogen and nitrogen. Throw the nitrogen overboard, liquefy and store the hydrogen. That’s the fuel. And maybe reaction mass, as well.”
“It doesn’t sound possible, though,” said Tor. “How do you get the atmosphere to throw off all that ammonia?”
“Don’t know,” she said. “Can’t see past the storm to figure out how they’re doing it.”
“At least it’s not just a hulk,” said George.
“Were you worried that it would be?”
“Frankly, yes.”
Hutch shook her head. “I’d have been surprised if that had turned out to be the case.”
“Why?”
“The grave at the Retreat. The fresh one. And the tracks. These are very likely the folks who left them.”
“And buried the occupants.”
“And buried one of the occupants.” She looked out at the Twins. “Yes. I mean, it’s not as if this is a crowded neighborhood. They may or may not be connected with whoever built the Retreat. That’s a long time ago. Probably, these guys were just cruising through the neighborhood and saw it. Same as we did.”
“It’s an odd coincidence,” said Alyx.
“What’s that?”
“This place has probably only had two visitors in three thousand years, and they come within a few days of each other.”
THE OBJECT GREW progressively larger in the screens. Bill opened the wall panels in mission control so they could look directly at it, could get a sense of the immensity of the thing. As the Memphis closed, their perspective changed, they could no longer see the ship as a whole. Instead they were looking down on a rockscape that stretched away in all directions. It was scarred and battered, covered with snow. Ridges and fractures scattered across the surface, and occasional craters, mixed with clusters of antennas and sensors and other electronic gear, much of which Hutch couldn’t identify.
They were moving more slowly than the object, watching it pass beneath them, watching the rocky surface gradually lose its irregularity, becoming smooth, becoming metal, and rising toward them. The rise became a hill and the hill became cylindrical, became one of two, twin cylinders, gray and cold and pockmarked. Then the cylinders moved ahead and they saw there were four of them, two abreast, and they became tubes, massive thrusters at the rear of the vessel.
“Big,” said Tor.
“What do you want to do?” Hutch asked George.
“What do you recommend?”
“Keep talking to them, and sit back and watch.”
“If they leave,” said Nick, “would we be able to follow them?”
“Depends on their technology. The Hazeltines are theoretically the only way a jump can be made. If that’s true, if that’s what they have, then yes. We just watch where they’re headed, and join them there.”
“We can tell which star?”
“It’s just a matter of following their line of sight. Connect the dots. Yes, it shouldn’t be a problem.”
They went into a parallel orbit, trailing slightly behind, and maintaining a discreet separation. There was no indication that the asteroid, the chindi, was aware of their presence.
But George was becoming restive. “I don’t understand why they don’t answer,” he said. And a thought occurred to him: “When do we expect Mogambo?”
“In about nine days. Why?”
“If somebody shakes hands with these critters, I’d like it to be us.” He had made a fist and was pushing it against his lips. “How about blinking the lights?”
“We could try it. What do you like? Three shorts, three longs?”
“That’s good.”
She did it manually, after they drew alongside the chindi, using the forward navigation lamps.
Blinkblinkblink.
Blaht. Blaht. Blaht.
And again.
The chindi glided through the night. They were on the dark side of Autumn now, away from the Slurpy. Far below, vast towers of cumulus filled the sky. Lightning flickered, massive bolts, some long enough to go round the Earth.
“Try again,” said George.
She turned the job over to Bill, who blinked front and rear, top and bottom.
“Maybe they don’t see us.”
“That’s not possible, George.”
“Then why don’t they respond? This has to be just as significant for them as it is for us.”
“Don’t know,” she said. “Be careful about assumptions.”
“We’re still not hearing anything on the radio, right?”
“No.”
They kept trying. They passed through the last of the night, crossed the terminator, and emerged into the dawn. And they watched Cobalt rise. The chindi glided across the arm of the world.
Meantime they took to magnifying and enhancing the pictures. It was just a rock with propulsion tubes. And sensor arrays. But here was something.
Tor put his finger on a dot. It was between a couple of low ridges. They went to maximum mag, and Alyx said she thought it looked like a radio antenna.
“I think,” Hutch said, “it’s a hatch.”
THEY CONTINUED TO acquire data on the chindi. The Memphis, which measured sixty-two meters stem to stern would have been barely visible alongside it, less than 1 percent of its length.
Bill took pictures, and they spent hours going over them while the Memphis repeated George’s greeting endlessly. They found other hatches, in sizes varying from about two meters across up to twenty or more, all the same color as the surrounding rock.
“Hutch.” Bill’s voice dropped into its lower ranges. His concerned ranges. “There’s been a launch. Something has left the ship and gone into orbit.”
“On-screen.” It was a bottle-shaped object, neck thrust forward. Its hull was smooth.
“It’s a different design from the objects we saw earlier.”
She could make out exhaust tubes. “How big is it?”
“Almost as long as our lander. Maybe a couple of meters shorter. Three meters diameter at its widest.”
“Okay, Bill,” she said. “Let me know if anything changes.”
Later, he was back with more: “Hutch, I believe I can see how they’re creating the Slurpy.”
Physics and meteorology weren’t her strong suits. Or anybody else’s in that group. But she knew that Bill had expectations. “Explain,” she said.
“A ship as massive as the chindi requires enormous amounts of fuel. If it attempted to use scoops of the type that we have, it would have to stay in orbit for years to collect enough hydrogen, or it would have to do an atmospheric entry and cruise around in the troposphere.
“To do that would require substantial design compromise to reduce friction, and it would waste substantial quantities of its newly acquired fuel getting back out of the gravity well.”
“So what’s the solution?”
Bill appeared in the opposite seat, wearing a soft white shirt open at the collar and dark green slacks. One leg was crossed over the other. “The solution is a percolator,” he said.
“A percolator.”
The Slurpy blinked on. They were looking at it from the side, watching the jet welling up from below, the storm bubbling like a volcano, an enormous explosive mushroom, rising above the clouds and spreading in all directions. A blinking line appeared in the jet, extending into the center of the storm. “That’s a tube,” said Bill. “As nearly as I can make out, it goes about three hundred kilometers down from the Slurpy.” Deep in the troposphere, the blinking line, the tube, metamorphosed into a kind of funnel, a tornado shape, except that it was reversed, widening as it reached down through the atmosphere. The tornado rose and sank in the high winds that blew it first one way and then another. But it held together. It was moving in the lower depths, keeping pace with the Slurpy.
“It’s traveling about 1400 kph,” said Bill.
“And this thing is making the storm?”
“I think so. What they seem to be doing is transferring gas from the troposphere out of the gravity well. The idea would be to create a reservoir of hydrogen out in orbit with which the ship can rendezvous.” Bill was clearly pleased with himself. “They do it by percolating the gas at the lower levels. And please don’t look so skeptical. The engineering would really be quite simple.
“One need only lower a flexible drone, constructed of, say, a lightweight plastic, down into the tropopause. At the equator, by the way. It has to be done at the equator.”
“Okay. Then what?”
“We put an efficient fusion reactor in the drone. About one hundred kilometers below the tropopause, temperatures are just under one hundred degrees Kelvin, the pressure is around one atmosphere, and the composition is primarily ammonia ice. The drone inflates into the big funnel that we see, narrow end up.”
“Wouldn’t it be heavy? What keeps it up?”
“Use light material, Hutch. And some balloons, if necessary. The reactor is turned on. It grabs and heats whatever’s near by. The whole assembly is bottom heavy, so it just bobs around the planet on 1400-kph winds. It has the same dynamic as a plastic fishing bob with one of those spring-loaded plungers at the top.”
A schematic appeared on-screen.
“The reactor is positioned inside the funnel, at the throat. As it heats the surrounding slurry, the ammonia ice and gas is propelled up the tube and expelled into space. And you have your snowstorm. Your refueling station.
“When the chindi’s tanks are full, the percolator is deflated, stowed, and, I assume, returned to the ship.”
They had all been listening. “It strikes me,” George said, “that it would be simpler to build a smaller ship. Something with less mass.”
“It would be simpler,” said Tor. “There must be a reason they want a big ship.”
THE CHINDI COMPLETED a second orbit and was making again for the Slurpy. The Memphis was trailing, letting the range open to a thousand kilometers. Bill was still directing George’s message of peace and greeting when George abruptly told her to shut it down. He seemed personally offended.
“Do it, Bill,” Hutch said. She was alone on the bridge.
“Okay, Hutch. And it looks as if we’re getting a second launch over there. Yes, there it goes.” He put it on-screen. “Another bottle. And the first one is lifting out of orbit.”
“Can you tell where it’s headed, Bill?”
“Negative. It’s still accelerating. Moving at seven gees and going up fast.”
“Not in this direction?”
“No. Not anywhere near us.”
“Okay,” she said. “George, we could use some fuel ourselves. We talked about going through the Slurpy before. I think this would be a good time.”
He nodded. “Maybe it’ll get their attention.”
“I doubt it.”
Tor and Nick both looked worried. “You really think,” asked Nick, “we can do that?”
“It shouldn’t be a problem. And it beats spending a few days skimming the upper atmosphere. No, we should be all right. They got through.”
“They’re a lot bigger than we are.”
“We’ll take it slow.”
But even Bill seemed doubtful. When she went up to the bridge and he could speak to her alone, he asked whether she was sure it was a good idea.
“Yes, Bill, it’s a good idea. Put out the scoops and retract everything except the sensors.”
“The chindi has just reentered the storm.”
“Okay.”
Her commlink blipped. It was Alyx, who was with the others in mission control. “The displays just went off,” she said.
“Alyx, that’s because we shut the imagers down for the passage through the Slurpy.”
“Is that necessary?” rumbled George.
“It’s a precaution.”
“Let’s take the chance. We’d like to see this.”
“Okay,” she said. “Visibility will probably be pretty restricted once we get into it.” Bill reactivated two of the imagers, one on either beam. She fed the pictures down to mission control and put them up on her own overhead.
“Thank you,” said Alyx.
“Welcome.” She directed her passengers to activate restraints. “Bill, what’s happening with the two bottles?”
“The first one continues on its original course, Hutch. It’s still accelerating. I cannot see any probable destination. The other has just lit its engine and appears to be about to leave orbit. In fact it is doing so now.”
“Where’s it going?”
“Apparently nowhere. It’s aimed in the general direction of Andromeda.”
She looked down on the roiling atmosphere and watched the Slurpy expand as they approached. The chindi was out of sight. The light from the distant sun and the two giants and the rings moved and shifted, providing an ominous cloudscape. It reminded her of the northern hill country on Quraqua, or the Canadian plains, where you could see heavy snow approaching for hours.
“Scoops deployed,” said Bill. “All systems are on-line. We are ready to take on fuel.”
It wasn’t of course an ordinary snowstorm. This was a storm with large slurries and slushes, with water ice and sleet particles.
“Slow to storm rate plus four zero,” she said. Storm velocity plus forty kilometers per hour.
She overheard Alyx comment that the storm was beautiful. She was right.
The Memphis was near the top of the Slurpy, planning to cross only a narrow section, to come out of it with her tanks full after two hours. If she went through the middle of the orbiting fuel station, slowing down sufficiently to play it safe, the chindi could well come around again before she got clear and plow into her rear.
She found a section of the storm front that seemed relatively tranquil and directed Bill to take them in.
The light turned gray. A blast of wind hit them, and a sudden burst of hail rattled across the hull.
“Incredible,” said Bill. “I never thought I’d see anything like this.”
Visibility faded to a few meters. Wet flakes oozed onto the viewports and the two imagers. “We need wipers,” she told the AI.
The winds buffeted them, and then subsided. Sometimes the immediate environment was dead still, and they saw only white veils of mist. The snow swirled over them, and gobs of half-frozen ammonia sploshed across the hull. Their lights played against shadowy forms, insubstantial creatures of the night.
The Memphis could completely refuel in a single pass. Maybe two at most. But the chindi had far more extensive requirements. It would take a lot of power and a lot of reaction mass to get all that rock moving. It might need a couple of weeks to top off its tanks. She wondered how long it had been here.
“We are doing nicely,” said Bill. “Tanks should be full within the anticipated time.”
WHEN THE REFUELING was completed, Hutch took them higher until they cleared the Slurpy. Bill reported that the chindi remained in orbit.
Over the next few hours they settled in just behind and above it. George began wondering aloud what the chindi would do if the Memphis placed itself directly in its path.
Hutch knew a run-it-up-the-flagpole idea when she heard one. “We don’t want to do that,” she said.
“Hutch, couldn’t we do it in a way that would involve no risk? Just keep our engines running. Maintain enough distance.”
“No, George. It’s really not a good idea.”
“Where’s the risk?”
“For one thing, they’ve shown a tendency not to notice us. At some point, they’re going to accelerate. We wouldn’t want to be in their way when they do.”
He sank into a chair. “Tor, what do you think? Would you be willing to take a run across their bow?”
“It’s not up for a vote,” said Hutch.
“I agree with Hutch,” said Tor.
George switched to his most reasonable tone. “Hutch,” he said, “I wouldn’t want to force you to do anything you don’t want to, but I have to remind you—”
“It’s your ship, but I’m responsible for its safety, George.”
“I can relieve you. Then you won’t have to worry about it.”
Hutch shook her head. “You can’t do that in midflight unless you have a qualified replacement.”
“Who says?”
“It’s in the rules.”
“What rules?”
“Regulations for Ships’ Masters.”
“I don’t see how that binds me.”
“It binds me.” She sat down beside him. “Look, George, I know how you feel about this. I know how much you want to make contact with these guys. But I think a little patience is in order.”
“What do you suggest?”
“For now, we only have two alternatives. Watch and wait, or—”
“—Or what?”
“Go home.”
His eyes locked on her. “That’s out of the question.”
“I agree. So let’s just sit tight for the moment.”
“You know,” said Nick, “it’s possible that the reason they don’t answer is that there’s nobody over there.”
“How could that be?” rumbled George.
“Automated ship,” said Hutch.
“What?”
“It might be automated. Run by an AI.”
“But surely even an AI would respond.”
“Depends on the programming. Don’t forget that AI’s aren’t really intelligent.” Somewhere, deep in the ship, she thought she heard Bill sigh.
George shook his head. It was a cruel-world shake. Defeated, he settled back and closed his eyes.
Tor said, quietly, “But it might be time to take the plunge.”
“Meaning what?” asked Alyx.
“Go over and knock on their door.”
George, without opening his eyes, nodded solemnly. Yes. That was the way to go.
“No,” said Hutch. She wished Tor would be quiet. “That’s extremely dangerous. We don’t know anything about what’s in there. This thing is connected with the destruction of two ships.”
“No,” said George. “We don’t know that. Those attacks were carried out by robots. This is different. We’ve had a chance to look at it. The ship. Do you see any sign of weapons?”
Alyx shook her head. “I think Hutch is right. I think we ought to go slow.”
“You’d be putting your lives on the line,” said Hutch.
“But it doesn’t put the ship in danger,” said George. “It seems to me we can take whatever other risk we deem appropriate.” He glanced at Nick and Tor. “Am I right?”
He was right.
“This is what we came for,” said Tor. “If we have to go up and ring their bell, then I say let’s do it. Alyx, you can stay here with Hutch if you want.”
“Tor, this is not a good idea.” She saw something bordering on disappointment in his face. And it hurt.
Nick had been studying the inside of a coffee cup. Now he looked up. “Hutch,” he said, “may I ask you a question?”
“Sure.” She was losing.
“Why is the Memphis not armed? Why isn’t there a single armed ship in the entire fleet of superluminals? There are, what, twenty-some of them now. And not a weapon to be found. Why is that?”
“Because there’s never been anybody to shoot at, I guess. There has never been a threat.”
Nick flashed his reassuring funeral director’s smile. He’s-gone-to-the-sweet-bye-and-bye. Everything’s-going-to-be-fine. “Isn’t it also because we believe that anybody smart enough to develop interstellar travel isn’t going to be hostile? I’ve heard you say that yourself.”
“That’s so,” Hutch said. “It’s what we assume. It’s not something you bet your life on.”
“You also suggested these guys went in, found the body of the second occupant, and buried him. That doesn’t sound very fearsome.”
“But it’s guesswork, Nick. The reality is we just don’t know. And even if they’re not hostile, what happens if the chindi takes off while you’re knocking on the door?”
Nick frowned. “I don’t know,” he said. “What happens? I assume it wouldn’t be good.”
“Bye-bye,” said Hutch.