1600, and then went up front and took the pilot's seat. 'Are we ready?'
They were.
'Okay. I'm going to seal off up here. The thing that I'm worried about is that you two and the sixteen hundred are all going to be concentrated on the starboard side. Don't make any sudden changes of position. And if I ask you to shut down, I want you to do it immediately, and move to the other side. Clear on that?
'If the thing does break loose and fall out, don't try to stop it. It doesn't weigh nearly as much as it looks, but neither do you. I don't want any dead people.'
She wished them luck, and closed off the cockpit. Hutch sat down and made herself comfortable.
They would ride with the outer door open, because the unit's housing stuck out of the vehicle. They fastened tethers to their belts.
Angela engaged her engines, and they lifted off. The shuttle circled the three domes, turned east, and glided out over the plateau. The weather had cleared, and a light wind blew out of the north.
'The plateaus were probably carved by methane glaciers,' Angela said. 'It would be interesting to know whether this moon has periodic ice ages.'
She continued in that vein, while Carson and Hutch endured an uncomfortable ride in back. They looked out at the endless snowscape, watched the edge of the plateau fall away, maybe two hundred meters, and they were cruising over the plain. Carsoa's idea was to do the easy ones first. Get the hang of the equipment.
Hutch wondered if Angela had ever flown before with an open cargo door. It was unlikely, but the woman knew her shuttle. It developed a drag, and a tendency to turn to starboard, but they seemed to be compensating.
The least challenging of the four mesas was on the south. It was already a passable rectangle, except that one side had partially collapsed and left a big hole in the symmetry. They'd have to square that off. For the rest, they wouldn't have to do much more than straighten the corners.
The projector's phase controls were set in a bright yellow teardrop case; its black mirror housing looked like a rifle barrel. There was provision for both automatic and manual operation. Rewriting the programming to factor in the shuttle was simply too time-consuming, so they had opted to go manual. 'When in doubt,' said Carson, 'fly by the seat of your pants.'
There was a pair of handgrips, a sight, and a trigger. But the instrument was unwieldy. So they ignored the trigger, and rigged a remote. The plan was that Carson would aim and, on command, Hutch would push the button.
'Coming up on target,' said Angela. 'Let's do a couple of flybys and see precisely how we want to do this.'
Janet was surprised to discover that Harley Costa, whom she knew, had flown the original mission to 4418. At the time they'd met he was en route to Canopus. He was a busy little man who talked too fast, and who could not tolerate anyone who didn't share his passion for astronomy. Janet had taken the time to find out about his specialty, asked the right questions, and they'd become fast friends.
Harley didn't have much use for simple sentences. His energy overflowed ordinary syntax. His ideas sallied out to battle. He trampled (rather than refuted) opposing views, lit off objections with glee, and imposed decisions with crushing finality. Harley never expressed an opinion. He delivered truth. She wondered what sort of person his partner had been, cooped up with him for a year or so.
Reading through the report of his visit to 4418, she could hear his voice. Harley had found things to engage his interest here, as he did everywhere. He found volcanic and seismic activity in unlikely places, and an anomalous magnetic pattern around one of the gas giants. He took a series of measurements of the sun, and entertained himself by calculating the date of its eventual collapse.
They had surveyed the individual worlds, and moved on. Since Bode's Law told them where to look for worlds, they might not have bothered doing an intensive sweep, and it was therefore possible to understand how he might have missed other objects in the system, even objects of planetary dimensions.
Had the two objects been here at that time?
'Okay. Now.'
Hutch punched the button, and a ruby beam flowed from the nozzle. Carson could feel the hair on his arms rise. The beam was pencil-thin. It flashed across the landscape, and bit into the ice.
'That's good,' said Hutch. And, to Angela: 'Ease it around to port just a mite. Okay. Hold it there.' Carson knelt behind the unit, aiming it. He tracked vertically down the face of the cliff. A cloud of steam began to form. Ice, snow, and rock fell away. But the cloud grew, and obscured the target.
Carson shut the projector off. 'This may take longer than we thought,' he said.
The commlink chimed. Channel from Ashley. 'Go ahead,' said Angela's voice. It was Terry.
'Got some more information for you.'
'I'm listening.'
'Neither of the two objects is in solar orbit. They are passing through the system. They are not attached to it.'
'Are you surel' Angela sounded skeptical.
'Yes, I'm sure. And here's something else for you: they are maintaining parallel courses. And they're moving at almost the same clip.'
Carson grinned at Hutch, Maybe we've got the son of a bitch, and the smile widened as they heard Angela inhale the way she might if she were standing in front of an oncoming glidetrain.
Hutch broke in: 'The velocity,' she said. 'What's the velocity?'
'Twenty-eight hundred for the far one and slowing down. Thirty-two and accelerating for the other.'
'The speed of the wave,' Hutch said hopefully. 'They're in the neighborhood of the speed of the wave.'
Carson was trying to keep his imagination under control. 'Janet, what do you think?'
'Just what you're thinking.'
Maybe that was it, that single piece of encouragement from the only other professional archeologist in the area. The old colonel's reserve fell away, and his eyes blazed. 'Terry,' he said, 'how close will they come?'
'To us? One's already past,' he said. 'The other will get within thirty million klicks. Give or take a few.'
'How big did you say it was?'
'It's twenty-three thousand kilometers wide. Sometimes.'
'Sometimes?' asked Hutch. 'What kind of thing is this?'
'We don't know. It isn't a sphere. We get a lot of different measurements. False readings, maybe. Hard to say.'
The steam clung to the cliff wall. 'It sounds as if the dragon might really be here,' said Hutch.
'Premature,' he said. But his expression belied detachment.
'I still think it's a cloud' said Drafts.
'Let's take another look,' said Angela softly.
Thirty minutes later, they had piled back into the shelter, and were studying incoming images. The more distant object was little more than a misty star, a blur seen through heavy rain. But its companion was a thundercloud, lit ominously within, a storm on the horizon just after sunset.
'Well,' said Angela, as if that single word summed up the inexplicable. 'Whatever it is, just the fact that something is there, that anything is there, is significant. The intrusion of an extrasolar object into a planetary system is a rare event. I can't believe it just happened to occur while we're in the area. Since there are two of these things, I'd be willing to bet there are more coming. A lot more.'
'Sounds like a wave to me,' said Hutch.
'I didn't say that.'
'Nevertheless it does.'
'Unfortunately,' said Janet, 'if that's our critter, we're not going to get a very good look at it.'
'Why not?' demanded Carson.
'Thirty million klicks is not close.'
'I wouldn't worry,' said Hutch. 'If Angela is right, there'll be another along shortly. I think we ought to finish making our Oz, and see what happens.'
On the Ashley, Janet and Drafts took turns monitoring the commlinks.
Unlike most of the hard-science specialists she knew, he had interests outside his chosen field. He had a
