However, the main engines aren’t the only spin drives I have.

The attitude-adjustment engines are little spin drives sticking out the side of the Hail Mary. They’re what let me yaw, pitch, and roll the ship. I wonder if the Petrovascope cares about them?

I keep the scope on and do a quick roll to the left. The ship rolls and the scope stays active!

Got to love those edge cases! Though I’m sure someone on the design team thought of this case. They probably decided the comparatively small output from the attitude drives wouldn’t hurt the scope. And, looking at the overall concepts, it makes sense. The engines and attitude drives all point away from the ship and thus away from the Petrovascope. The reason it shuts down when the main drives are on is because of reflected light off small amounts of cosmic dust. The reflected light from the far less powerful adjustment drives was deemed acceptable.

But those adjustment drives are still putting out enough light to vaporize steel. Maybe they’ll be enough to light up the Blip-A.

I aim the Petrovascope parallel to the port-side yaw thruster. In fact, I can see the thruster itself in the bottom of the visible-light mode image. I fire it up.

There’s definitely a visible glow in the Petrova spectrum. A general haze near the thruster, like turning on a flashlight in the fog. But after a few seconds the haze dies down. It’s still there, just not as prevalent.

Probably dust and trace gases from the Hail Mary herself. Tiny particles of stuff drifting away from the ship. Once the thruster vaporized all the ones nearby, things calmed down.

I keep the thruster on, and let the ship rotate on its yaw axis as I watch the Petrovascope. Now I have a flashlight. The rotation rate of the ship increases faster and faster. I can’t have that. So I activate the starboard-side yaw thruster as well. The computer complains up a storm. There’s no sensible reason to tell the ship to rotate clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time. I ignore the warnings.

I do a full revolution and see nothing. Okay. Nothing new. I do a 5-degree pitch adjustment and try again.

On my sixth go-around—at 25 degrees from the Adrian ecliptic, I spot the contact. Still too far away to make out any detail. But it’s a flash of light in response to my yaw thruster. I flick the thruster on and off a few times to gauge the response time. It’s nearly instant—I’d say less than a quarter second. I’m within 75,000 kilometers.

I point toward the contact and fire up the drives. This time I won’t go barreling in willy-nilly. I’ll stop every 20,000 kilometers or so and take another reading.

I smile. It’s working.

Now I just have to hope I haven’t been chasing an asteroid all day.

With careful flying and repeated measurements, I finally have the object on radar!

It’s right there on the screen. “BLIP-A.”