Across the Sea of Suns Read Free Page A

message. Still, they had to be artificial. That killed the super Jovian magnetosphere theory. They kept to a fairly sharp frequency, though, and this proved useful.
    Eight months of careful observations picked up a Doppler shift in the frequency. The shift repeated every twenty-nine days. The logical explanation was that the scattered pulses came from a planet, and that planet moved alternately toward and away from Earth as it orbited the red dwarf star. Optical observations fixed the star’s luminosity, and reliable theory then could give the star’s probable mass. It was 0.32 solar masses, an M2 star. Given the twenty-nine-day “year” of the planet, and the dwarf’s mass, Newton’s laws said the planet was nine times closer to its cool star than Earth was to the sun.
    That was as far as observations from near-Earth could go. The radio teams spent years trying to see a Doppler shift from the revolution of the planet itself. It wasn’t there, but nobody expected it to be. A planet that close to its star would be locked with one face eternally sunward, due to the tidal tug between them. Earth’s Moon and the Galilean satellites of Jupiter were tide-locked to their planets, after all. Mercury would be locked toward the sun, but for the competing pull from the other planets.
    But tide-locked worlds were deadly. Everybody knew that. One side would be seared and the other frozen. Who could survive such a place and erect a radio transmitter? Did they only live in the twilight band?
    The only way to find out was to go and see. In 2029, ISA launched small relativistic probes on near-recon missions to BD +36°2147. One failed in a burst of gamma rays 136 light-years from Earth. The inboard diagnostics told a lot about the flare-up in the fusion burn, before the ship disintegrated. ISA adjusted the burn in the second probe and it survived, to dive past the BD +36°2147 system at 0.99 light speed.
    It spotted a gas giant in the right place to cause the star’s wobble, as seen from Earth. But the radio mumble came from an Earth-sized world nearer the star. The probe had been programmed to pass near the gas giant, since its orbit could be deduced from BD +36°2147’s slight rhythm. The other planet was exactly on the other side of the red dwarf star when the probe shot through, so the automatic devices, in a mad scramble to readjust, did not get much data.
    Small, fast probes were cheap. The International Space Agency favored them. But they couldn’t respond flexibly, and game theory proved they were a bad strategic choice, in the face of unknown risks.
    The best posture, the conflict metricians calculated, was reconnaissance in force:
Lancer.
So the three superpowers used their muscle and appropriated the just-finished Libration Colony project. ISA took the life zone inside the spinning asteroid world, tunneled more rooms in the rock, and added duralith thrust chambers that could bottle a fusion burn. The design was a copy of the
Mare Marginis
wreck and it worked well. They stirred the soils, planted crops, burrowed hallways, sliced rock, and fine-tuned a miniature ecology inside the hollowed-out ellipsoidal dome.
    All this, to fly at velocities a hairline below light. Toward the red beacon of BD +36°2147, now renamed Ra. The word “Nile” in the transmission, while seemingly irrelevant and possibly a mistake—the error bars in the decoding were significant—became a pretext for invoking Egyptian mythology. The transmitting world was named Isis for the goddess of fertility. The outer gas giant was named for her son, Horus. The astronomical community took two years to decide all this, there were letters discussing the matter in the London
Times.
The engineers, of course, didn’t give a damn.
    As they walked on through the fields grain rustled, and the dry rasping was like Kansas on a ripe fall day. Nigel shielded his eyes against the hard glare of the phosphors. The huge squares were regularly spaced in the curving floor