第10章 The First Sight

The command tier has an old optical on the forward gallery wall, and it is a machine for looking at things you are not supposed to be close to, and it is nineteen years older than the captain and it was built to look at the waystation, which is a thing made of metal, and what they put in front of it this time was not metal yet. Juni set the elevation by hand. Half a degree is four and a half million kilometers at this range, and the whole conversation had been at a precision of one and a half degrees, and she had spent four days learning to turn a handwheel without shaking. "Clear," she said. "I have it." Ilse Varga came and stood behind her, and did not sit, and neither did the six other people who had found a reason to be on the forward gallery. There was a rule about crowding the gallery and nobody was observing it, and Juni understood that the rule was about exactly this and had been written by somebody who hoped it would never come up. "Range?" "Eighty-nine thousand kilometers. Light time just under five seconds." "Say the shape." Juni put her eye to the eyepiece. "Intact," she said. Nobody spoke. Behind her somebody made a small sound and stopped making it. "Not broken up. Not scattered. Not a debris field." She worked the controls the way she had been taught to work them, slow, in the dark, with her whole weight on the wheel. "Hull is whole. I can see the forward ring. I can see the tank blisters along the spine. There is no damage I can see and I would be able to see a hole, there is nothing to hide it with, that is the entire purpose of the thing you are looking through." Varga put her hand on the back of the chair and did not say anything. Juni understood, watching the back of her head, that the captain had not expected this. A woman who had been captain for nineteen years, who had signed a loss report forty-one years ago, who had not opened the annex in nine years, had just been handed the one thing she had not prepared a face for. "Forty-one years," Varga said. "A drive failure at hour five thousand. I signed the report that said she broke up. I signed it in a room on Earth and I have had forty-one years to be wrong about that and I am not going to tell you here whether I was." "Captain." "Radiators." Juni looked. "Deployed. Both banks, full extension." Varga stopped breathing for a moment. "That is a burn attitude." "That is a burn attitude," Juni said. "She is under thrust. She has been under thrust for a long time, and she is not slowing down, and whatever she is doing she is doing it with the radiators out where you can see them, which is either the most honest thing a ship has ever done or the cheapest possible invitation." The optical is a good instrument and the sky behind the Halcyon is not, and after about forty minutes of patient work the shape resolved into something that was unmistakably a ship, and the ship was lying in the dark with its fins out and its whole flank turned toward the light of a sun that is four hours behind them, and on the flank there was one window lit. A generation ship has eleven thousand lit windows at a time. It is the only way to live in one. Every hull in the fleet has eleven thousand windows and they burn day and night because the people behind them have to be able to see the faces of the people they live with, and that has been true for as long as there have been generation ships, and it is the first thing you learn if you grow up in one, which is that a ship with a dark hull is a ship where nobody is home. The Halcyon had one window lit. "It is in the wrong place," Juni said. "That is not a habitation window. Habitation runs are on the ring, three to eleven, and that light is on the spine, port side, low, which is not a room. That is a pod gallery." She heard her own voice go flat and technical, the way it went when the alternative was not acceptable. "It is Row Nine." The plot on the bridge was still running and the two marks on it were very close now, and Varga went up there and looked at it for a while with her hands behind her back, and then she came back down the ladder and told the watch what they were going to do. "Belay the burn to a crawl at the next relay," she said. "Kaneka, I want the port loop isolated and the coolant routed through the starboard stack, and I want it routed by someone who has done it before, not by someone who has read about it. Sandoval, get me a two-way on the emergency band with a bearing set, not a wideband burst, a real link, and I want it on the record that we are the ones who opened. Okonkwo." Juni turned around. She had not been promoted. Nobody had promoted her. She had been a maintenance tech on third watch nineteen days ago and she was still one, and Varga had said her name in front of the watch, which was not the same thing and was a great deal more. "The window," Varga said. "Can you see the pulse on it?" Juni put her eye back to the glass and counted, and the light on the spine of the Halcyon was not steady. It came on for four seconds and went out for eleven, and it did it the way a hand does a thing it has done ten thousand times without thinking, and it did it in time with something. "Long and short," she said. "Tell me what it means." "It means somebody is on that ship, and they can see us, and they have a clock." Juni kept her eye to the glass, because it was easier to say the next part without turning around. "And that is the part I cannot put in a report, Captain, and it is why I have not been sleeping. We have had a signal for forty-one years, and we have had it every eleven seconds, and the whole shape of the ship is built to make a receiver ignore that, and somebody built it that way on purpose and then somebody signed a piece of paper saying the ship was gone." Somebody on the Halcyon's spine put their hand on a lamp and made a long tone and four short ones, and the Meridian's own speaker, three meters behind Juni, in a gallery full of people who had gone very quiet, made the same six and four in the same eleven seconds, because the receiver board had a voice on it that had been sitting in a log for forty-one years, and it had been waiting for a signal to answer, and it had found one. Nobody on the bridge moved. "Belay the burn," Varga said. "Now, not at the next relay. Now."