Hutch understood Beth hadn’t recovered yet from the shock of the previous day. Probably none of them ever would really get away from it. But they were all reacting differently. Beth had had enough. Wally, she thought, understood that Derek would have his way, that they’d chase the thing down, and he just wanted to get it over with. Ken knew what it would mean for book sales.

•  •  •

After they’d finished eating, they got into their harnesses, Hutch turned the ship in the direction of the object and, using Barry’s estimate, set the jump for forty million kilometers. Then she activated the Locarno. It was a run of only a couple of minutes. They surfaced, the stars came back, and the AI informed her they’d arrived almost directly on target. Just more than three hundred thousand kilometers. For a drive system that had an extremely long reach but was notorious for missing destinations by millions of kilometers, it came as a major surprise. “Why is it so consistently off?” Beth asked as they all shook hands and congratulated the captain.

“It’s not so much the system,” Hutch replied. “The Locarno gets used primarily for exceedingly long jumps. The basic problem is that we don’t usually have an accurate range to the target. Like when we came out here. Seven thousand light-years is a rounded-off guesstimate. If we actually knew how much ground we had to cover on any given jump, we’d do much better.”

“Let’s get the scopes on it,” said Derek, “and maybe get it on screen?”

She complied and put it up for them. It started as a glowing line, but it got progressively larger as they drew closer. And became a blade. The crosspiece Barry had mentioned was a handgrip. Ken’s voice came through the open doorway: “It’s a sword!”

ARCHIVE

Walter Esmeraldo’s Log

We were all sitting watching the screen, waiting for the picture to show up. We didn’t know what we were expecting. We’d heard something about it being maybe a cross. And I thought maybe that’s just what we needed at a time like that, because everything was starting to seem absolutely crazy. We’d spent the previous day looking at a world where probably everybody died. You don’t think much about the end of the world. That’s something for fantasy, but you never really see any possibility of its happening. But it did for those poor people, or whatever they were, dragged out of orbit and frozen. If there was any time that I would have wanted to see a cross, that was it. And don’t ask me to explain that. I don’t know what I’m talking about.