Uh-oh. “Sure.”

His gaze touched her eyes. “I was sorry to lose you.”

She looked down at the console, uncertain how to reply.

“I won’t bring it up again,” he said. “And I won’t do anything to make you uncomfortable. I just wanted you to know.” He looked at her for a long moment. “Good night, Hutch.”

She watched him start for the door. “Tor,” she said.

He turned, and she saw hope flicker. “I know this is hard on you.” She was going to add something about how she was a friend he could always count on, but it seemed dumb so she stopped. “I appreciate the attitude you’ve taken.”

He nodded and was gone. And she realized that her last remark hadn’t been much smarter than the one she’d choked off.

PREACH CAME BACK while they were getting ready to make their own jump. “Still no details. But it’s right in the middle of the biozone. We can see blue skies. Continents and oceans. The bishop has suggested we name it Safe Harbor. The bad news is there’s still no indication of electronic activity, and the scopes show no sign of light on the dark side. Maybe we’re still too far away. But it looks empty.”

The picture on the screen changed to a starfield. The imager homed in on a point of light. Two points of light. “That’s it,” he continued, “as seen from the main scope. It has a big moon.”

“Well,” George said, “he’s probably right. They’re still too far away. Or maybe it’s not even the right world. Aren’t there other places in that system?”

Preach hadn’t said.

“I’ll ask him when I get a chance, George,” said Hutch. “Meantime let’s have everybody buckle up and go see what we have.”

She retired to the bridge. By the time she got there, six green lights had appeared on the transition console. Her passengers were all safely cocooned in their harnesses.

She brought them out into sublight, at long range from 1107. Alyx and Nick both came out of the jump somewhat the worse for wear. Alyx lost her lunch and Nick swayed under a vertigo attack. Those kinds of effects were common enough. Neither had endured a problem on the way out, but transition sickness tended to be unpredictable, a hit-or-miss affair. Hutch herself still became ill on occasion.

“Activate long-range sensors,” she told Bill.

The screens blinked on and showed lots of stars but nothing else. Which was pretty much what you expected to see in the neighborhood of a neutron star.

“Looks dark out there,” said Herman, from the common room. Hutch was relaying results from the telescopes onto the big wallscreens. “How far out are we?” he asked.

“In the boonies,” said Hutch. “Eighty A.U.s from the neutron star.”

Alyx asked how long she thought it would take to find the transmission.

Hutch put an image of the Memphis on-screen, with its outsize antennas. “It would help if we got lucky. The transmission’s narrow, and we can’t maneuver well because it wouldn’t take much to collapse the dishes. But we have a pretty good idea where to look, and that’ll help.”

“How can you figure out where you are? Everything here looks the same as everything else.”

She brought up a picture of one of the satellites left by the Benny. “We use these to establish our position.”

Alyx nodded but didn’t look as if she understood. “You didn’t tell me how long you thought it would take.”

“If we get lucky, maybe only a couple of days.”

“That’s the estimate they were tossing around back at the Academy,” said Pete. “When I was out here on the Benjamin Martin, the signal was damned near impossible to find. What if we don’t get lucky?”

Four dish antennas unfolded from their holding tubes and flowered above the hull of the Memphis. Swivels turned slowly until all were fully expanded and directed toward the neutron star. In Hutch’s mind, the Memphis came to resemble an old eighteenth century ship of the line under full sail.

“Approaching search area,” said Bill.

“There are no guarantees,” Hutch said. “There’s just too much space out here. We can’t cover everything. But George has done a pretty decent job with the sensors and the communications equipment. We also have some satellites to put out. They’ll help us. I think, if it’s here, we’ll find it pretty quickly.”

Bill took them through the maneuvers required by the opening phases of the search pattern with deliberation. Changing directions with the antennas deployed was like trying to turn a flatbed vehicle loaded with bowling balls.

Hutch considered retracting the dishes at the end of each pass, but Bill ran a simulation and they concluded it meant too much wear and tear. “This system,” the AI said when she was alone, “requires some improvement.”

They had a couple of false alarms. The neutron star threw off electromagnetic transmissions in all directions. They were in the process of trying to match several of them with the target signal when Bill announced a transmission from the Condor.

“We’ve found two more worlds,” Preach said, answering George’s question. “But neither is in the biozone. They’re both close, but off the money. One will be a desert; the other’s a chunk of ice and rock.

“By the way, did I tell you Safe Harbor’s moon is almost a quarter the size of the planet? We can make out an atmosphere. It looks thin, but it’s there.

“Wait a second, Hutch.” He turned away, listened to someone standing off to one side of the imager, and looked surprised. Hutch saw him say, You’re sure?

There was more nodding, more conversation. He looked out of the screen at her. “I’ll be right back, Hutch,” he told her. Then she was looking at his empty chair.

He was gone a couple of minutes. When he reclaimed his seat his blue eyes were gleaming. “There’s a lunar outpost of some sort. Hutch, I think we’ve struck gold.”

Hutch relayed the transmission throughout the ship, and a few moments later heard cheers. For his part, Preach was getting slapped on the back, and somebody thrust a drink into his hand. A coil of paper spiraled through the air.

“I’ll get back to you,” he said, “when we have more.”

WITHIN A FEW minutes the excitement had given way to a sense of having been left out. “That’s where we should have gone,” Nick told Hutch. “We backed the wrong dog.”

They wasted no time settling whose fault it was. “I thought this was our best bet,” George said. “We knew that whatever’s here is currently active. I really didn’t think they’d find anything over there.” He looked stricken. “You’re right,” he told Herman. “I blew this one.”

While they were all feeling simultaneously ecstatic and sorry for themselves, one of the dishes tore loose from its mount. Hutch took a go-pack and went outside to do repairs, but she’d just begun to apply the patch when Bill informed her there was another transmission from the Condor. “Allcom,” she said. That would make it available to her passengers, as well.

Preach was visibly excited. “There’s vegetation on the planet,” he said. “And we can see structures. Cities. Canals, maybe. No sign of anything in orbit yet. The moon has water, I think. But it’s probably not a living world.”

She finished up, climbed down, and went inside. They were all waiting for her. They looked as if they’d decided enough was enough. “How long would it take us to get there?” George asked.

“A few hours. Is that what you want to do?”

“Yes.”

“You’re sure?”

“Of course we are.”

Herman looked as if he’d just lost heavily at an all-night card game, Alyx gazed intently at Hutch as if she’d taken them to the wrong place, Tor stared into that middle distance he examined whenever things went wrong. Even Pete, who maybe should have known better, was wearing a frown. Only Nick seemed unfazed. But, she thought, dealing with bad times was Nick’s specialty.

“Okay,” she said. “We’ll get started.”

Bill’s image appeared on an auxiliary screen directly in her line of sight. That meant he was offering her a chance to talk to him privately. But it was getting late, and she was tired. “Yes, Bill,” she asked. “What is it?”