Foreigner: (10th Anniversary Edition) Read Free

trouble or start rumors—either with hopeful lies or the speculations on the worst case that had to be in everybody’s thoughts, like infall, an entry too near the star itself.

    Foolish fear. Robots had been here and fixed T-230’s position with absolute certainty.
Phoenix
’ crew was an experienced, hand-picked lot—
Phoenix
herself had run trade for five years before they diverted her to the stations start-up at T-230, and the U.N. didn’t commit billions to any second-rate equipment or any crew that was going to drop a ship into a star.
    God, infall couldn’t be the trouble up there. That was too remote a chance.
    He could take pusher and miner-craft apart and put them together again. Most that went wrong with an insystem miner ship, a mechanic could fix with a good guess and a screwdriver; but what could go wrong with a stardrive—what could go amiss in the massive engines that generated effects into hyperspace—fell entirely outside his competency and his understanding.
    The STAND BY flasher suddenly went off. A star-view came on-screen and a collective breath of relief went up from the room, chilled by a murmur of consternation from a handful of techs, all standing together in the center of the room. Miyume’s hand tightened on his, his on hers, while the tech staff were saying things like, That’s not right and Where in hell
are
we?
    The white glare looked like a star to him. Maybe it did to Miyume. But techs were shaking their heads. And there was a red glow in the view he didn’t understand.
    “That’s not a G5,” one of them said. “It’s a damn binary.” And when ordinary worker-types started asking what he meant, the tech snapped, “We’re not where we’re supposed to be, you stupid ass!”
    What are they talking about? Neill asked himself. What they were hearing wasn’t making sense, and Miyume was looking scared. The techs were saying calm down and not to start rumors, but the tech who had claimed they were wrong shouted over the other voices,
    “We’re not at any damned G5!”
    “So where are we?” Miyume asked, the first words she’d said. She was asking him, or anyone, and Neilldidn’t know how to answer that—he didn’t see how they could miss T-230 if they had gotten to any star at all … by what he knew, by the education he’d had, ships just kept going in the directions they were going, that was a basic law of physics … wasn’t it? You aimed and you built your field and you went, and if you had fuel enough you got there.
    And meanwhile his hardware-biased brain was thinking, Could we have overshot? How far off could we be, on the fuel we’ve got?
    “
This is Capt. LaFarge
…”
    That was the general address, and people shouted urgently for quiet.
    “…
unfortunate circumstance
,” was all that got through, that Neill could hear, and he was desperate to hear what the captain said. Miyume’s nails bit deeply into his hand, people were talking again, and Miyume shouted, “Shut up!” at the top of her lungs, at the same time others did.
    “…
positional problem
,” was the next clear phrase. Then: “
which does not pose the ship any imminent danger
…”
    “That’s a blue-white star!” a tech shouted. “What’s he think it is?”
    Someone got the fool shut down. Others hushed the ones that wanted to ask questions.
    “…
ask everyone to go about business as usual
,” LaFarge was saying.
“And assist the technical crew while we try to establish position. We’ll be looking into our resources in this system for refueling. We’re very well equipped for dealing with this situation. That’s all. Stand easy.”
    ‘Establish position’ sounded comforting. ‘Refueling’ sounded even more hopeful. ‘Well equipped for dealing with this,’ sounded as if the crew already had a plan. Neill clung to that part of it, while a frantic part of him was thinking: This can’t be happening to us, not to us.… Things can’t go wrong with this ship, there were too