“I don’t think so, Natalie. He was specific about where he wanted to land. But he didn’t tell me why.”

“He didn’t talk to you much, did he?”

“Why would he? He didn’t know I had become conscious, and I had no reason to trust him with that information. He talked to himself a lot when he was getting worked up, but it was more of an ‘I’ll fix those bastards’ soliloquy.”

Patrick piped up again. “Sheldon, can the Loranna detect you?”

“No. Not unless I attempt to open a wormhole. Nor can they randomly scan for me when I’m invisible. As I mentioned before, the detector operates only at short range and is highly directional.”

“Okay, so they don’t have any reason to believe you’re here, right? Could they have detected you entering the system?”

“Possible but unlikely. We arrived well outside the system and flew in specifically to avoid that eventuality. Exiting the wormhole doesn’t produce the enormous power surge that creating it does, so they’d have some difficulty detecting the event that far out, even if they were watching for it. And you are correct. There’s no reason for them to believe a Gennan representative is in-system.”

“What kind of disaster would they be trying to create?” Nat asked.

“It would be one of the standard Fermi bottleneck scenarios,” Sheldon replied. “Something that might reasonably happen on its own, so as to avoid suspicion. The most common by far are environmental collapse, economic collapse, global war, and global pandemic. Do any of these sound likely?”

“How about all of them?” I rolled my eyes. “Trouble is, if they’re standard scenarios, how would we tell if the Loranna are even involved?”

“Yes, good point. You’d need to find Loranna in the middle of it—at the controls, so to speak.”

“And then what?” Patrick said. “Radio the Covenant?”

“Radio would take about a hundred and fifty years,” Sheldon replied.

“No, I mean FTL radio,” Patrick said.

“Sending an FTL message requires opening a wormhole.”

I put my head in my hand. “So, ka-boom.”

“Succinctly put.”

Nat glared at me, at Patrick, and at the communicator. “We are so fucked.”

Chapter Nine: Search Strategies

Chapter Nine: Search Strategies

Day 5. Tuesday

Once again, I was shoveling my dinner as quickly as I could.

“Jack, could you at least pause to chew?” my mother said with mock alarm.

“Sorry, Mom. Nat and Patrick will be here soon. Anyway, I really like your meat loaf.”

“It’s stew.”

I looked down in shock at the meat loaf on my plate, then back up at Mom as she laughed.

“Made you look.”

“Well, for the record, I like your stew too.”

“Uh huh.” She looked sideways at my father, who studiously avoided meeting her gaze.