Anvil of Stars

"All right," Hans said impatiently. "It's a ship. It's close to us. How close?"

"Four hundred billion kilometers. If we do not alter course, we will pass within a hundred billion kilometers. It is following a course similar to our own, but traveling much more slowly. It is not accelerating."

Hans said. "It seems odd to find such a needle in the haystack. Why is it close to our course?"

Hakim ventured no guesses.

"Maybe it's a reasonable course between the two stars," Harpal suggested. "Give or take a few hundred billion kilometers…"

"Bolsh," Hans said. "They could have swung wide either way. We came up out of the poles… a reasonable course would have been to use least-energy vectors between the planes of the ecliptic. What's our relative velocity?"

Hakim highlighted the figure on the chart: the difference in their velocities amounted to one quarter c, about seventy-five thousand kilometers per second.

"Even if we could change course, we wouldn't want to shed that much speed to rendezvous… We'll just have to pass in the night. You're sure it's a ship?"

"The dimensions are appropriate. It is less than a kilometer long. We were fortunate enough to get a star occultation."

Hans hummed faintly and rubbed his cheeks with his palms. "Why send out a signal? Why not just hide and get your work done? Whatever the work is…"

Nobody had an answer.

"Can we interpret the signal?"

"It is not language of a spoken variety. That much we know. It may be a series of numbers, perhaps coordinates."

"You mean, telling rescuers where it is?"

"I think not. If these pulses are numbers, they are repetitive… There are about a hundred such groups of numbers, assuming that a long pause—a few microseconds—means a new group. Giacomo and Je

"What kind of coordinates?" Hans asked.

"Je

"You mean, television?"

"Digital, not analog—not modulated."

"A crude picture," Martin suggested.

"Perhaps only a few dozen pictures in sequence," Hakim said. "We just can't be sure yet."

"Call me when you are," Hans said.

Je

"Want to see?" Giacomo said.

Hans patted his arm with strained gentleness, impatient. "Show us."

Je

The first picture was difficult to make out, a series of blurs and blocks of shadow. Harpal pointed to a mottled oval white blur and said, "That's a face, I think. It's very low resolution, isn't it?"

"We can interpolate, do some so-called Laplace enhancements," Giacomo said. "But I thought we should see the original images first."

"Enhance. We'll worry about distortions later," Martin suggested.

Giacomo picked out simple enhancements, stabbing with his finger expertly at a menu of selections only he could see. The picture became at once more contrasting and easier to perceive, but reduced to blacks and whites with few shades of gray. "Five faces, I think," Harpal said, pointing them out slowly. Martin nodded; Hans simply looked with hands folded, frowning.

"They're not human, but they're bilaterally symmetric," Harpal said.

"I think there are more faces, but they're too blurred to make out," Giacomo said.

"Eyes," Je

"I don't give a slick what they look like," Hans said, scowl deepening. "What do they mean!"

"Maybe these are the crew of the…" Je

"The crew of the other Ship of the Law. Our future comrades," Martin finished for her.

"If they are, they're awfully stupid, radiating a signal like this for anybody to pick up."

"This could be more of a last testament," Hakim said. "A dying ship, cha

"The moms would tell us at least that much—whether they're still dead, or alive. Wouldn't they?" Harpal asked.

"These aren't our partners," Hans said. "They're just some other poor sons of bitches lost out here."

More faces. Dark interiors with brightly lighted figures. They began to see the overall shape of the beings: round bodies with four thick stubby legs, elongated horse-like heads on long necks, a pair of slender limbs rising from the "shoulders" and tipped with four-fingered hands. They wore harness-like outfits more useful for carrying things than as concealment.

"Centaurs," Je

"They look more like dinosaurs to me," Giacomo said. "Sauropods."

"Tweak it again," Hans ordered.

Giacomo and Je

Hans' scowl did not change. Something new and he doesn't like it, Martin thought.

Giacomo poked the unseen menu and keyboard and spoke short verbal commands, all interpreted by his wand.

The image's contrast became more dramatic, shadows more pronounced, and the scene suddenly took on depth. Five of the sauropod beings floated in an ill-defined interior, joined in a five-pointed star, heads toward the middle, linked by hand-like appendages.

"Group portrait," Martin said.

"Next picture, and tweak it the same," Hans said.

More figures appeared, arrayed with machines as difficult to riddle as the interiors of the Dawn Treadermight have been to fresh Earthbound eyes. The tenth image was a diagram: stars and larger balls against mottled dark sky. Arrays of dots and slashes that might have been labels for the image seemed to be compromised by the enhancements, but when Giacomo removed the enhancements, the symbols made no more sense than before.

Hakim leaned closer to the picture and said, "I can make out a familiar constellation. Familiar to the search team, at least… We have called it the Orchid. It has been with us for a year now. It looks a little different, however… The brightest star, there…"He gestured to Giacomo, who surrendered control of the image to him. Hakim brought up a crystalline starfield, live, and rotated it until he found the constellation he wanted. Then he flash-compared the blurred chart with the fresh image, adjusted for scale, and the corresponding stars jumped in and out, the brightest jumping the farthest.

"Time has passed," Hakim said, "but these are the same stars. Notice that stars in the distant background do not jump."