To avoid the crowded corridors, she took the emergency tube down to the flight deck, then made her way past the variety of cargo secured there to the admiral’s gig, the Mariposa. It was a compact little craft, with its delta wing and its perky, pointed nacelle, but it would be full of quiet and unoccupied space. Sallah punched the hatch release.

Chapter 2

Sallah shared her next watch, the dogwatch, with Kenjo Fusaiyuki. There was little for either of them to do, bar reacting if a glitch halted the programs. Sallah was hacking around, trying to find something interesting enough to keep her awake, when she noticed that Kenjo had activated one of the smaller screens on his position.

“What have you got there?” she asked before she remembered Kenjo was not generally outgoing and might resent her interruption.

“I was decoding the gen on that eccentric wanderer,” he replied, without looking up from the screen.

“Oh, the one that had the astronomers all excited?” Sallah asked. She grinned, remembering the unusual spectacle of the rather staid, pedantic astronomer, Xi Chi Yuen, flushed with excitement and dancing about the bridge.

“Quite likely,” Kenjo said. “It does seem to have an enormously eccentric orbit, more cometary than planetary, though its mass indicates its planetary size. Look.” He tapped out a sequence that brought up the satellites of Pern’s star system in relation to their primary and to one another. “It computes to come in farther than the usual fourth planet position and actually intrudes on the Oort cloud at aphelion. This is supposed to be an old system, or so the EEC report leads one to believe, and that planet ought to have a more conventional orbit.”

“There was talk that it could be a stray that the Rukbat sun attracted.”

Kenjo shook his head. “That has been ruled out.” He typed out another sequence and the diagram on the screen shifted to another projection. In a few seconds, equations overlaid the system diagram. “Look at the odds against that.” He pointed to the blinking nine-figure probability. “It would have to be a cometary-type orbit, right into the system. But it’s not.” His long, bony fingers reset the screen. “I can’t find a harmonic with the other planets. Ah, Captain Keroon registers the opinion that it might have been captured by Rukbat about ten of its cycles ago.”

“No, I think Xi Chi Yuen ruled that out. He computed it to be just after aphelion right now,” Sallah said. “What did he say? Ah …” She tried to remember.

Kenjo was already accessing that file. “His report actually says that the eccentric planetoid had just exited the Oort cloud, pulling some of the cloud matter with it.”

“He also said, and I remember that distinctly, that in about eight years’ time, we’ll have a rather spectacular meteorite show as our new world goes through the wisps of Oort material.”