Yes, thought MacAllister, there was the mystery. Why were the moonriders interested in a piece of iron? He tried to keep his imagination on a leash. But he found himself considering the possibility that it might contain an inner chamber, perhaps with a ghastly secret. Or maybe Amy was right, and the thing was a fuel depot. Or maybe it was a rest stop of some sort. On the other hand, if any of those explanations was valid, why adjust its orbit? “How long to catch it?” he asked Valya.

She finished climbing out of the e-suit harness and headed for the bridge. “A few hours.”

“And it’s still not going anywhere particular?”

“Not as far as I can see. It’s more or less inbound, toward the sun.”

MacAllister sat back and shook his head. How about that? I was right all the time. There are aliens, and they’re as incomprehensible as the folks in DC.

HE HADN’T APPRECIATED the size of the asteroid until the Salvator drew alongside. His perspective changed, and the long, battered wall outside the ship shifted and went underneath and became a rockscape. They were only a few meters above the surface, close enough that MacAllister could have reached down and touched the thing. Then the rockscape gave way, and they were looking into a gorge. “There’s the depression,” Valya said. Where the moonrider had gone.

She turned on the navigation lights and aimed them into the gorge. It was a long way down, maybe several hundred meters. “We’re not actually going down there, are we?” asked Eric.

“No need to,” she said. “We can see fine from here.”

MacAllister’s imagination was galloping. He half expected to find an airlock. Or, as Amy had suggested, fuel lines. But there was nothing unusual. Below them, the sides of the gorge drew gradually together. The moonrider must simply have wedged itself in, applied power, and proceeded to change the asteroid’s course. It just didn’t look possible. The asteroid was immense.

He looked across to the horizon. The asteroid was so small that all directions seemed sharply downhill.

Valya was still looking into the gorge. “How about that?”

“What do you see?” asked Eric.

“Not a thing.”

MacAllister nodded. “The dog in the night.”

Amy grinned. “It didn’t bark,” she said.

“Very good. I didn’t think kids today read Sherlock Holmes.”

“I saw the sim.”

“What are we talking about?” asked Eric.

“There aren’t any marks,” said Amy. “There should be marks if something wedged itself in here and shifted the asteroid onto a new course.”

“Ah,” said Eric. “You’re right. It does look pretty smooth out there.”

“So what do we do now?” asked Amy.

Valya pushed back her red hair with her fingertips. “Damned if I know. I don’t think there’s anything else to be done here. Unless we want to wait around a bit and see whether they come back.”

“Hide-and-seek,” said MacAllister. “We pull out, they show up. Maybe Amy’s right. Maybe they’re delinquents.”

Amy cleared her throat. Looked mock-offended. “I didn’t say that, Mac,” she said.

Valya sat with her head back, eyes closed. “Bill,” she said. “Where’s the asteroid headed?”

“Sunward, Valya.”

“We know that. Go beyond that. Several orbits if you have to.”

“Working.”

“It’s starting to look,” said Eric, “as if we’ll be going back with more questions than answers.”

“It will in time intersect with Terranova.”

Everyone stopped breathing. “When?”

“In seventeen years, five months. On its third orbit.”

“By ‘intersect,’” said MacAllister, “you mean collide?”

“That is correct, Gregory.”

Eric paled. “My God,” he said, “a rock this size — ”

Amy nodded. “Would cause mass extinctions.”

“Makes no sense,” said MacAllister. “There’s nothing down there except the wildlife. Why would anybody want to wipe them out?”

“Maybe they want to terraform the place,” said Amy.

Valya sat up straight. “Whatever they’re about, it looks as if we can assume they’re not friendly. Bill?”

“Yes, Valya?” “I want to talk to Union.”

The plan is to hang around Ophiuchi for another day or so, on the off chance the moonriders will come back. I’m not entirely sure that’s such a good idea since we have nothing with which to defend ourselves. But Valya suggested it, and of course Amy was all for it. Amy’s for everything. I’m pretty sure Eric had reservations, but he kept them to himself. I think it’s crazy.

Since we now know the moonriders are a potential threat, it’s the courageous thing to do. Right and noble and all that. Still, that doesn’t make it a good idea. The odd thing is I’d bet Valya, left to her own devices, would also not stick around. But nobody wants to look bad. Probably, if the Salvator were carrying four males, or four women, it would be sayonara, baby, we’re out of here.

— Friday, April 10

Solitude is only a good idea if you have the right people along to share it.

— Gregory MacAllister, “The World in the Sky”

Neither Eric nor Amy wanted to leave. “This is where the action is,” Amy said, after they’d watched a grim-faced Peter Arnold tell them to get well clear of 36 Ophiuchi. Put as much distance as you can between yourselves and the moonriders. Don’t talk to them. Don’t answer if they say hello. “How do we ever find out about them if we run?”

Valya put an arm around her shoulder. “No choice, glyka mou. We have to do what they tell us.”

When he was able to speak to MacAllister alone, Eric explained that the Academy was protecting Amy. “If she wasn’t on board,” he said, “nobody would really care about you and me.” He tried to make it into a joke, but MacAllister could see he believed it. The three adults were expendable.

That sort of perspective would never have occurred to MacAllister. And he readily dismissed it. Of course the Academy didn’t want to take any chances with Amy, but they also knew he was on board.

Valya kept her feelings to herself. She simply shrugged when the message ended and told them to buckle down. “Vega’s next,” she said. “We’ve backtracked a bit, so the jump will take longer than it would have from Origins.” A bit under two days, she added. Minutes later they were accelerating away from the asteroid.

Seventeen years.

How did these creatures think? Were they going to come back to watch the fireworks?

MacAllister disliked bullies. And people who were cruel to animals. Here were these malevolent sons of bitches, with all that technology, and they were like kids stomping on an anthill. Pathetic. He wondered whether they were related to the idiots who’d devised the omega clouds.

Whatever, he wasn’t unhappy to get away. The prospect of sitting around waiting for the moonriders to come back was not appealing. Who knew what they might be crazy enough to do? Still, with Valya on the scene, he tried to look dismayed that they were leaving. It was safe because he knew Valya, like a good captain, would listen seriously to the protests of her passengers but follow her instructions.

“What’s particularly annoying,” Eric said, “is that we came so close. If we’d stayed here the first time, we might have been able to wave them down. Say hello. Or tell them to go to hell. Something.”

Go to hell, MacAllister thought, would have made a great opening in a dialogue with another species. That would look inspirational in the schoolbooks. He immediately began thinking of other moving first lines. Stick it in your ear, you nitwits.

Get your sorry asses on the next train out of town.

Sorry, boys, but we don’t cotton to strangers here.

He sighed. Imagined himself as a sheriff in the long ago, standing quietly in the dusk with a six-gun on his hip, watching three horsemen slink away.

ERIC WAS GENUINELY frustrated. All his life he’d been watching other people come back on the Academy’s ships after scoring triumphs. We found an ancient city here. And a new type of bioform there. We rescued the Goompahs. We did this and we did that. And there’d always been a world of acclaim waiting. Eric had led the cheers. Now first contact with a technological species was, finally, within reach, the golden apple, the ultimate prize, and he was being pushed aside.

He thought about getting on the circuit to Hutch and demanding she change the directive. But he knew she would not. She wouldn’t risk the girl under any circumstances.

At this moment, they were scrambling at the Academy to staff another mission and get it out here. Somebody else, a bunch of overweight academics who had spent their lives in classrooms, would get the assignment, and they’d be the ones to say hello. And they’d come back afterward and everyone would shake their hands.

And once again, it would be left to Eric to ladle on the praise.

VEGA IS LOCATED in the Lyra constellation, twenty-five light-years from Earth. It’s a main sequence blue-white dwarf star, roughly three times Sol’s diameter, and almost sixty times as luminous. It’s much younger, only 350 million years old. But because of its size, and the rate at which it’s burning hydrogen, it will exhaust its supply in another 650 million years.

It has a pair of Jovians in distant orbits, both more remote than Pluto. There are several terrestrial worlds, including one in the biozone, which is seven times farther out than Sol’s, but it harbors no life.

Vega was a popular stop on the Blue Tour because of the presence of Romulus and Remus, a pair of terrestrials of almost identical dimensions, both with atmospheres, locked in a tight gravitational embrace. Technically, they, too, were in the biozone, but they barely qualified, out on the farther edge, where the winter never really went away.

Also lifeless, they were nevertheless beautiful worlds, only 160,000 kilometers apart, half the distance between Earth and the moon. Both had oceans and continents. Snow covered most of the land; the oceans were a concoction of ice and water, prevented by tidal action from freezing completely. The system had an ethereal, crystal quality, like a cosmic Christmas ornament.

The tour ships, in their souvenir shops, carried graphic displays, vids, and models of the system. It easily outsold everything else on the shelves.

Valya waited until she was close enough to get the full effect before putting the twin worlds on the displays. They were a compelling sight. Predictably, Amy squealed with delight, and MacAllister admitted she had a point.