I settle into the seat and strap in. I thought something like this might happen. I’m a lot closer to the contact now, but still not in radar range. I just traveled 4 million kilometers. Radar range is less than a thousandth of that. So my precision isn’t 99.9 percent. Big surprise.

Time for another Petrovascope sweep. But this time I don’t have the luxury of a full light-minute between me and the contact, wherever it is. If I’m, say, 100,000 kilometers away, I’ll have less than a second before the light comes back to me. And I can’t use the Petrovascope with the spin drives on.

So now what?

I need to create a bunch of Astrophage light without turning off the Petrovascope. I look through the menu options and don’t find anything. There’s no way to have the scope on when the spin drives are running. It must be a physical interlock somewhere. Somewhere aboard this ship is a wire leading from the spin-drive controls to the Petrovascope. I could spend the rest of my life looking for that and have no success.

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.