Wildcatter

Jordan was drumming fingernails on the table. “Is there a posting date on the beacon?” she asked.

— Beacon is still too distant for us to query, Captain.

“Any ships in orbit there now?” asked JC.

— No transmissions being detected, Commodore. Target is too distant for visual detection.

Jordan said, “If they’re still there, they must have seen our jump flash when we arrived.”

“Not necessarily,” JC said. “Control, there must be a text message included.”

— Still too distant even for that. We are presently receiving only the wideband alarm signal, barely distinguishable from galactic background noise.

“If we left ahead of De Soto,” asked Reese, the biologist, “how far ahead of us could they have gotten here? I mean, how long, in time? Without allowing for any time slip?” Somehow his questions always sounded like sneers.

“A physicist would say that there was no answer to that question,” Hanna snapped, her temper glinting again. She must be blaming herself for this catastrophe; she had lost the race. “When you jump, you twist both space and time, so the uncertainty principle cuts in. We took fifteen jumps. If De Soto has better maps of the safe havens, as JC says, they may have relied on those without confirming the jumps were still safe. In theory you could travel the whole distance in no time at all.”

“And get your gonads fried by radiation somewhere,” JC said. “Or ram a brown dwarf star. Better safe than sorry.”

The Big Nothing was not truly empty. It hid radiation belts, dust clouds, gas clouds, solitary comets or planets, and even black holes. They all shifted unpredictably in space-time. Running into any of them at supra-light-speed was normally fatal.

Reese made a snorting noise, an annoying habit of his when male. “Never mind theory. How long in practice?”

“As much as two or three months, maybe,” Hanna admitted.

The mood of gloom deepened. Four hundred days ago they had greeted the data on Cacafuego with wild rejoicing. Remote sensing by the trans-Neptunian observatories had indicated a highly promising candidate for a life-bearing world, a mere 1,500 light years away, but there were limits to what remote sensing could detect and many things that could make a planet hostile to humans. Now De Soto had made a close appraisal and been scared off by what it saw, or what had happened to its prospectors.

Reese curled his lip. “Finders keepers; first come, first served. Even if we discovered something they missed, could they just take it from us?”

Seth thought not. The rules for staking were very specific. There were no Wild West shootouts in the Big Nothing. Battles were fought back home in the courts, where Galactic could outgun Mighty Mite by a million lawyers to one. Returning explorers had to hand over their ships’ memory banks to ISLA, and Golden Hind’s now recorded the detection of Galactic’s beacon. There must be penalties for ignoring a quarantine.

“Not so,” JC murmured, speaking unusually softly for him. “It’s who plants a flag first that matters. De Soto didn’t want it. If we stake it now, it would still be ours.”

It would not be his job to plant the flag.

“Danger I do not understand,” said Maria, the planetologist. “What danger? Poisonous atmospheres, yes. Lots of worlds have that and are still profitable. Monsters, rarely, and nothing worse than tigers.”

She noticed Seth’s eyebrows rising and smiled an apology. “Nothing you can’t shoot or keep out with an EVA suit, I mean. No little green men or long blue women. Diseases, yes; bacteria, viruses, fungi, all sorts of nasty things have tried to infect us, but none of them could penetrate an EVA suit or withstand our medicines. In a hundred years! So what can be more dangerous about Cacafuego than risks already met and dealt with on explored worlds?”

No one offered a suggestion.

Jordan said, “We have two choices. We can go on in the hope of finding something that Galactic missed. They may have done us a favor, saved us from blundering into disaster. Or we can set course for the backup target.” She looked to JC.

Who growled. “Not so fast, Captain! Control, how many planets have ever been proscribed?”

— Either six or seven, Commodore, all in the very early days, when records were not so well kept. None in the last seventy years.

“Seven! How many planets have been explored, even briefly?”

— Recorded 7,364, but numerous others never registered.