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Xin came to his feet a little too quickly. His wife caught his hand and he stood on the floor, facing them. Gonle tried unsuccessfully to catch Rita's eye, but the woman's entire attention was on Jau.I bet they kept her on iceuntil he was back; that was the only thing that would have kept her mouthshut about this. Rita's expression was one of vast relief. Whatever this news was, it couldn't be bad.
"Yes, sir. Per your instructions, I was brought on-Watch early, to undertake a close approach of Arachna." As he spoke, Qiwi passed around some Qeng Ho–quality huds. Gonle mouthed a buy offer at Qiwi as she passed; the other gri
"My pilots and I took the last functioning pi
Pham Trinli's voice came from beyond the dark, an incredulous hoot. "I bet you got spotted!"
"They pinged us. Show the defense radars and native satellites," he said to the display. A cloud of blue and green dots blossomed in the space around the planet. On the ground, there were arcs of flashing light, the sweep of the Spiders' missile radars. "It's going to be more of a problem in the future."
A
"Hunh! That must have been something motherloving important."
"Oh Pham, tas. Tas." Jau stepped to one side of the consensus image, and jabbed his hand deep into the haze of satellites, marking one blue dot with the labelKINDRED GROUND RECON SATELLITE 543 followed by orbital parameters. He glanced in Pham's direction, and there was a quiet smile on his face, as if he were expecting some reaction. The numbers didn't mean anything to Gonle. She leaned to one side, looked at Trinli around the edge of the image. The old fraud looked just as mystified as any, and not at all happy with Xin's smile or Silipan's smug chuckle.
Trinli squinted into the display. "Okay, so you matched orbits with Recon543." Beside him, Ezr Vinh sucked in a surprised breath. This made Trinli's frown even deeper. "Launch date seven hundred Ksec ago, booster chemical, period synchronous, altitude..." His voice trailed off in a kind of gargle. "Altitude twelve thousand damn-all kilometers! That must be a mistake."
Jau's gri
The significance finally percolated through to Gonle. In Supplies and Services, she dealt mainly with bargaining and inventory managment. But shipping was a big part of price points, and she was Qeng Ho. Arachna was a terrestroid planet, with a 90Ksec day. Synchronous altitude should have been way higher than twelve thousand klicks. Even for a nontechnical person, the satellite was a magical impossibility. "It's stationkeeping?" she asked. "Little rockets?"
"No. Even fusion rockets would have trouble doing that for days at a time."
"Cavorite." Ezr's voice was faint, awed. Where had she heard that word before?
But Jau was nodding. "Right." He said something to the display, and now the view was from his pi
"Good flying, man." That from Pham Trinli, acknowledging someone almost as good as himself.
"Ha. Tas even tougher than it looks. I had to run my zipheads near the edge of a nonrecoverable panic all through the rendezvous. There were just too many inconsistencies in the dynamics."
Silipan interrupted cheerily, "That will change. We're reprogramming all the pilots for cavorite maneuvers."
Jau killed the imagery and frowned at Silipan. "You screw up, and we'll have no pilots."
Gonle couldn't take much more irrelevant chitchat. "The satellite. You have it here? How did the Spiders do this?"
She noticed Nau gri
He spoke to the air. "Douse the fireplace, cut ventilation." He paused, and the room became very quiet. Over by the wall, Qiwi closed a tall window that had drawn a taste of moistness in from the lake. The park's fake sun peeked between breaks in the clouds, and streamers of light glittered on the water. Gonle wondered vaguely if Nau's zipheads were so good that they could orchestrate his world for these moments. Probably.
The Podmaster took a small case out of his shirt. He opened it, and held something that glittered in the lowering sun. It was a small square, a tile. There were flecks of light that might have been cheap mica, except that the colors swept in coordinated iridescence. "This is one of the cladding tiles from the satellite. There was also a layer of low-power LEDs, but we've stripped those off. Chemically, what is left is diamond fragments bound in epoxy. Watch." He set the square down on the table and shined a hand light on it. And they all watched....And after a moment the little square of iridescence floated upward. At first, the motion looked like a commonplace of the microgravity environment, a loose paperweight wafting on an air current. But the air in the room was still. And as the seconds passed, the tile moved faster, tumbling, falling...straight up. It hit the ceiling with an audible clink—and remained there.
No one said anything for several seconds.
"Ladies and gentlemen, we came to the OnOff star hoping for treasure. So far we've learned some new astrophysics, developed a slightly better ramdrive. The biologicals of the Spider world are another treasure, also enough to finance our coming. But originally, we expected more. We expected to find the remains of a starfaring race—well, after forty years, it looks like we have succeeded. Spectacularly."