His only regret, Captain Carl Stewart thought as he stood on the bridge of America's first starship, was that there was no bottle of champagne available to smash against the U.S.S. Aurora's side.

The ceremony would have been impractical, of course, even if the State Department had cleared it. In the airless cold of space, the bottle would have required special preparation to keep it from either freezing solid or exploding prematurely, and that kind of reinforcement might easily have kept it from breaking properly and on cue. With the launching ceremony being beamed live to the entire planet—and the 2016 elections barely ten months away—no one wanted to risk that kind of fiasco. Still, the sea and its traditions ran four generations deep in Stewart's blood, and it seemed wrong somehow to leave home without a proper christening.

The drone from the TV monitor stopped. Stewart brought his attention back to the screen in time to see President Allerton lay a hand on the switch by his podium.

"Stand ready," he ordered, watching the image. An unnecessary command; the Aurora's crew had been ready for hours.

"… and with all of our hopes, prayers, and dreams riding with you, we send you forth to search out the new frontier; to find new worlds, new opportunities, new solutions; to reinvigorate and challenge the human race again to greatness.

Godspeed, Aurora." With a final flourish heavenward, Allerton threw the switch—

And five thousand kilometers above him, the spotlights attached to the workframe scaffolding blazed with light, providing the TV cameras with their first clear view of the Aurora.

Stewart gave the dramatic moment a count of five, and then nodded to his helmsman. "Ease her out, Mr. Bailey," he ordered. "Mind you don't wing the Pathfinder on the way."

Bailey grinned. "Aye, sir," he said. Slowly, moving on its cold-nitrogen docking jets, the Aurora left the workframe's snug confines. It passed well clear of the Pathfinder's work-frame—Stewart noticed peripherally their nearly completed sister ship flashing its running lights in salute—and drifted off toward the barely visible horizon of the dark world rolling beneath them. "Lot of lights showing down there," Reger, the navigator, commented.

"Lot of people down there to use them," Stewart grunted. And the scientists with their fancy telescopes and theories had better be right, he added silently to himself; there had better be more planets out there for the Aurora to find.

"Clear for shift," Bailey announced, looking over at Stewart. "Course vector less than five-second deviation."

"Acknowledged," Stewart nodded, putting his fears for Earth's survival out of his mind. "Make it good for the cameras, Mr. Bailey: shift!"

And with a flash of sheet-lightning discharge through every viewport and vision sensor, the stars vanished into the absolute black of hyperspace. Next stop, Alpha Centauri.

Mankind was on its way.

"It certainly has every reason to be Earthlike," astrophysicist Hashimoto commented, his stubby fingers dancing lithely over the readout screen. "Position should give reasonable temperature, size is within a few percent of Earth's, and we're getting a strong oxygen reading even at this distance."

Stewart nodded, refusing to get his hopes up too high. In the six systems Aurora had so far visited, there'd already been one false alarm. "We'll continue on course; that should get us close enough for better readings. If a landing seems warranted—"

"Captain!" Bailey barked, his voice tight and a half octave above normal.

"Something on the screen—moving fast!"

Stewart spun around in his chair … and froze. Coming out from behind the crescent of their target planet was a slowly moving star. Seconds later it was joined by a second … and a third.

Spacecraft!

"I'll be damned," Hashimoto gasped.

Stewart found his tongue. "Shift, Bailey. To hell with alignment—we can get back on course later."

"Wait a second," Hashimoto said—but with a flash the planet and moving stars vanished. "Captain!"

"As you were, Mr. Hashimoto," Stewart snapped, leaning on the title to remind the scientist of his temporary military position. "My orders are explicit on this point: in case of contact with nonhumans, I am to run if at all possible."

"But an alien race." Hashimoto was clearly in no mood to back down. "Think of the opportunities, the—"

"The Aurora is equipped for neither battle nor negotiation," Stewart interrupted him. "The diplomats can follow us once we've made our report; I hardly think the aliens will disappear in the next two months. I suggest you start analyzing the data we picked up and see if you can figure out just how Earthlike that planet really was. We'll want to know how interested the aliens are likely to be in our real estate before we make contact again."

Hashimoto's glare slipped into a thoughtful grimace; nodding, he left the bridge.

Stewart turned back to the gentle light of the displays, silently mouthing a word he'd once heard a Marine drill sergeant use. So life did exist out here … and if it existed so close to Sol, it must be pretty common, to boot. Perhaps a whole interstellar federation was sitting virtually on mankind's doorstep)—a cosmic club whose members could finally give humanity the answers it so desperately needed.

It wasn't until much later that the other possible consequence of the "cosmic club" occurred to him.

The hiss of the landing jets died into a ringing silence in Captain Lawrence Radford's ears. Popping the release on his harness, he carefully rose to his feet, feeling awkward after three weeks of the Pathfinder's zero-gee. "Start prelaunch check," he ordered the shuttle's pilot. "And get the atmosphere tester going, too."

"Yes, sir."

Stepping around his chair, Radford made his way to the airlock door, where the rest of the landing party was assembling. "Looks beautiful, Captain," Lieutenant Sherman smiled, reaching up to fasten Radford's helmet to his suit neck. "With all that green out there, it has to be running on chlorophyll."

"We'll find out soon enough." Carefully, refusing to rush, Radford completed his pre-EVA suit check. Then, giving the rest of the team a thumbs-up gesture, he stepped into the airlock. A ninety-second eternity later, the outer door snicked open … and Captain Radford of the U.S.S. Pathfinder stepped out onto mankind's first colony world.

He'd thought a lot about this moment, and he was ready. "In the name of—" He stopped short, the words dying in his throat.

"Captain?" Sherman's voice asked tentatively.

"All outside cameras on," Radford ordered quietly, wondering if the words would be audible over the thunder of his heart. The alien who had risen from the waisthigh grass fifteen meters away was holding an oddly shaped metal device … and if it wasn't pointed directly at Radford, it wasn't off by very much.

"Uh-oh," someone muttered. "Captain—we're surrounded."

"Acknowledged," Radford said. "Kyle, are you getting all this?"

"Perfectly," the clipped voice of the Pathfinder's first officer said. "We're on full alert; no sign of spacecraft up here."

"Yet," Radford said tensely. The aliens—he could see four more, now, in backup array behind the first one—were definitely wearing clothing of some sort, and the devices they held were identical enough to have been mass produced. No primitives, these—and the fact that the Pathfinder had spotted no traces of widespread civilization from orbit strongly suggested the aliens were themselves visitors here. "All right. I'm going to try backing into the airlock. We'll lift as soon as I'm aboard. Kyle, get the ship ready to shift."