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.”

“Oh, right,” I say. I forgot that’s how it got its name.

I’m 4,000 kilometers away—the very edge of radar range. I bring up the telescope view, but I can’t see anything, even at the highest magnification. The telescope was made for finding celestial bodies hundreds or thousands of kilometers across, not a spaceship a few hundred meters long.

I creep closer. The object’s velocity with respect to Tau Ceti is about right for Rocky’s ship. Roughly the speed he would have gotten to around the time his engines died.

I could take a bunch of readings and do math to work out its course, but I have an easier plan.

I thrust for a few minutes here, a few minutes there, slowing down and speeding up until I match the object’s velocity. It’s still 4,000 kilometers away, but now the relative velocity to me is almost zero. Why do this? Because the Hail Mary is very good at telling me about its own course.

I bring up the Nav console and tell it to calculate my current orbit. After some stargazing and calculation, the computer tells me exactly what I wanted to hear: The Hail Mary is on a hyperbolic trajectory. That means I’m not in orbit at all. I’m on an escape vector, leaving Tau Ceti’s gravity influence entirely.