Edward M. Lerner by A New Order of Things Read Free Book Online

requested of Pashwah from the UP’s interplanetary flight-plan database and ship registry. She sought a vessel in the Jupiter vicinity, preferably press-related. “Bingo,” she observed, again ruing her inability to smile. Three possible ships: Samoa , Pallas Guard , and Odyssey .
    Of course, ships often deviated from their filed flight plans, and media-related vessels had more reason than most to obscure their intended routes. It would be best to check that a prospective target was, in fact, near its forecast position. “Coordinates for confirming locations.”
    “Radar safe?” The officer’s voice held a testing tone.
    Because clearly it was a test. “No, human ships reliant upon radar. Ship’s position confirmation with little detection risk via lidar.” Light detecting and ranging.
    “Interrogation pulses en route.”
    And now the most-of-an-Earth-hour wait for the laser pulses to crawl to the suspected ship positions, and any echoes to crawl back. “Anything else?”
    The crewman broke contact without answering.
    If no suitable human ship were located, or the chosen ship failed to play its assigned role, would her captors see that as the luck of the draw, or somehow her fault? If as her doing, would that outcome elicit a rebuke or replacement?
    Inside her sandbox, Pashwah-qith pondered the weak hand she had been dealt.

    “Whoa.” Helmut swung his legs off the ledge of the command console. “ Odyssey , full-power, full-spherical radar scan, out to two light-minutes. Also send out a flight-transponder interrogation pulse. Update by the second, on-screen.”
    A sphere grew in the command 3-V display.
    Corinne, wandering onto the bridge, picked up immediately on his rapt attention. “What’s so interesting?”
    “Big-time RF pulse hit us about thirty seconds ago.” There was nothing nearby … so where had that pulse come from? One of life’s hard lessons to him was to distrust the unexplained.
    Planting her Velcro micro-gee slippers onto the rug behind him, she crouched over his shoulder to peer at his console. “RF. You mean radar?”
    “Don’t know. The pulse was like radar, but it’s not quite using the frequencies of any radar I’ve ever encountered.” Helmut kept his eyes on the monitor. “Our normal safety radar was on. I would have sworn nothing bigger than a grain of sand was within hours travel of us.”
    “How out of the ordinary is this?”
    An unexplained power spike like that? “Very.” His own high-powered pulse had now explored out to about a light minute. Nothing there. In his former life, of course, the unseen ships hadn’t engaged in radio-frequency screaming.
    “Friends of yours?” The hands nervously squeezing his shoulders revealed that Corinne must, indeed, suspect something about his past.
    “Probably not.” He gave a reassuring pat to one of the hands trying to excavate his clavicle. His pat became a gentle but firm grip, and he pried one hand free. The other broke loose as he spun his chair. “Not their MO.”
    She took the other seat. “Who could it be?”
    “Display the direction of the pulse that pinged us,” he told the ship. A green line stabbed downward at a generous angle through the center of the search sphere. “Here’s the thing, Corinne. The horizontal plane through the center of that sphere is the plane of our trajectory, not too different right now from Jupiter’s orbital plane.”
    “Then whatever it is, it’s above us. Is that significant?”
    If whatever was out there were flying stealthed and with its safety transponder turned off, the graphic only told them from what direction death approached. But if that was the case, why the attention-demanding ping ? “To come from that angle and be outside radar range, it must be far above the planetary orbits.”
    “Why would it be there?”
    That was the question, of course. “Check for other indications from that direction, all bands.”
    “I’m getting a strong light signature plus alpha