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“No.”

“Thousands. Still, having a vector to scan will cut down the work. Perhaps we will get lucky.”

Just then, the bulkhead annunciator squawked and the voice of the duty officer issued forth.
“Attention.

Ladies and Gentlemen, attention! Dr. Thompson reports that the gravity observatory trapped a
verified gravity wave about twenty minutes ago. Triangulation is beginning now. We should know
where it came from within the hour.”

“Then again, maybe we just got lucky without the search…”

The main auditorium in Brinks Base was a gallery hacked from the solid rock of the moon. The walls still bore the scars of the digging machines’ circular teeth and the overhead lights were a series of naked glow tubes bolted to the rock ceiling. Each bank of lights was connected to its fellows by long, looping strands of black electrical cable. The seats were actually packing crates -- the same crates that cluttered the corridors of the base -- and the tables had been constructed by spreading flat panels across upended foodstuff containers. These latter gave the auditorium an interesting smell since some of the cases’

hermetic seals had been broken during handling. The aroma of coffee beans and various spices mixed with the smell of machine oil and humanity. Anyone back on Earth shown a picture of the place would have been more likely to guess that it was a junkyard than the main conference center of humanity’s farthest outpost among the stars.

Mark Rykand hurried among the ramshackle tables, distributing briefing books as the first conference attendees came drifting through the door from the main tunnel. That they were arriving nearly fifteen minutes before the scheduled time of the briefing was an indication of their excitement at recent events. It was an excitement Mark felt himself. After months when nothing seemed to have been happening, suddenly there was activity aplenty. Their long delayed mission to a Broan-held star was about to get underway.

It had been more than two months since the gravity wave observatory had first detected a stargate-induced gravity wave. That had come from a star system some three hundred light-years farther from the galaxy’s center than Hideout. The position vector had not been near Sar-Say and Lisa’s estimate as to the direction to the Zzumer sun, but it had been in a direction generally opposite the vector to Earth.

That was potentially good news. It was their second indication that the bulk of the Broan Sovereignty lay outboard of the Crab Nebula. If true, it meant that humanity had no reason to fear that a Broan listening post would one day pick up Earth’s expanding bubble of radio noise. The first radio waves from Earth would not arrive in this vicinity for a span of time longer than the one in which humans had inhabited cities.

On the other hand, one detected system and another presumed one were insufficient data to justify any sweeping generalizations as to the location and extent of the Broan Sovereignty. The location of the Broan stars was one of the most important things they had come to discover.

As he finished distributing the briefing books, Mark noted that the auditorium was filling faster than he had realized. More than half the seats had filled while he concentrated on his task. Up on the dais --

another shipping container, this one for some unidentified piece of oversize equipment -- Captain Landon, Captain Heinrich of
Magellan
, and Captain Erickson of
Columbus
, were conferring with Dr.

Thompson, Mark’s boss.

Mark turned to retrace his steps to the front of the artificial cavern and noticed Sar-Say enter the auditorium. The pseudo-simian moved through the door in his space-eating knuckle walk. Lisa followed closely behind her charge and directed him toward the dais. She answered Mark’s wave with a broad smile. The two of them had not seen much of each other since
Magellan
and
Columbus
returned from their scouting expedition. Both had been too busy at their respective jobs -- Mark assisting the expedition’s astronomers reduce the two ships’ long range observations, Lisa helping Sar-Say transcribe some of their communications intercepts.

Lisa and Sar-Say took their places on the dais at one minute before 10:00 hours, with Mark 15 seconds behind them. Then, precisely on schedule, Captain Landon rose and strode to the lectern, which looked oddly out of place amid the ad hoc collection of boxes and crates. It had been acquired from one of the starships and was constructed of polished mahogany, with built-in lamp and holoscreen controls. The holoscreen was suspended from the rock ceiling. It currently showed a misty cloud of static within its vue-space.

“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” Dan Landon began in a quiet, conversational tone. “We are here to review the results of the scouting mission just completed by
Magellan
and
Columbus
. To start off, I give you Dr. Thompson of the astronomy department. He will set the scene by discussing the target star and its planetary system. Dr. Thompson…”

Willem Thompson was a small, balding man with a facial tic that had become more pronounced over the last three days. The nervous habit was evidence of the strain he had been under since the two starships dropped several terabytes of astronomical observations on his department. Despite the fact that he had been up all night preparing the briefing, he moved to the podium with a spring in his step -- a natural consequence of Brinks’s one-third gravity. As quickly as Dan Landon vacated the lectern, Will Thompson punched up the first holograph. It showed a view of the Crab Nebula and surrounding space out to five hundred light-years. One particular point of light was blinking a bright crimson.

“Here you see the star we have dubbed Orpheus. We detected it some 58 days ago when a gravity wave from its stargate passed through this system. It is currently the only unambiguous jump wave we have identified, although the instruments may have had indications of two others.”

Dr. Thompson paused a moment to gaze at the audience. “Before we go any further, I would like to impress upon each of you the significance of that gravity wave that rolled through this system two months ago. The distance between Hideout and Orpheus is 287 light-years. Like all other wave phenomena in normal space, gravity waves propagate at the speed of light. That means that the jump wave we detected came from a ship that transited the Orpheus system almost three centuries ago!

“Never forget that the Broa had stargates before we humans invented steam engines. It is possible that the first Broan conquerors were contemporaries of Julius Caesar. I hope that thought will give you pause when it comes time to make contact with these aliens. No matter what you think of them, it would be disastrous for our race to underestimate their knowledge and power.”

Thompson touched the holoscreen control. The view changed to show a small, yellow star with six planets around it. A violet-tinged stargate symbol flashed not too far from the third world out from the yellow star.

“This, ladies and gentlemen, is the Orpheus system. There may be more planets than we have displayed here -- the survey was a rather quick one -- but these are the largest worlds in the system and the ones that are inhabited, based on their energy signatures.

“The main inhabited world in the system is the third. That is not very surprising since the third planet is most often the temperate one in G-Class systems with dwarf primaries like Orpheus or Sol. From our long-range scans, it appears that the third planet is definitely Earth-like. That is a lucky break for us. It means we will likely be able to visit with no more protection than suntan lotion or possibly a heavy winter coat.

A hand went up in the second row. It was one of the project scientists, Dr. Roonavong.

“Yes, Padhil?”

“You say you cannot be sure that you located all of the system’s planets, yet our scouts found the stargate. Since it is infinitely smaller than a planet, how did they manage?”

“That turned out to be the easy part. Both
Columbus
and
Magellan
detected a gravity wave shortly after breakout and were able to triangulate the position. In fact…” Thompson reached for the holotank controls, but was stopped by a hand on his shoulder.

“A moment please, Doctor!” Dan Landon said. The commander regarded the audience with the serious expression he reserved for chewing out hapless crewmembers. “Ladies and gentlemen! I appreciate your curiosity about what Captains Heinrich and Erickson discovered. However, we have a great deal of information to impart today and we do not want to become distracted. Please hold your questions until the proper time and allow the presenters to get through their reports first. Thank you.”

If Padhil Roonavong noticed that he was being chastised for interrupting, he showed no sign. After a few seconds, Thompson continued.

“Now, then, having located the planets, we were able to eavesdrop quite extensively on the system inhabitants. I am happy to report that the two ships’ ersatz Broan communications gear worked flawlessly. Our compatriots recorded voice, video, and data signals and analyzed those they could on the spot. The rest they brought back to have you specialists take a crack at them.

“I can tell you that Orpheans have six tentacle-like grasping members encircling the upper portion of their torso about where their necks should be and their heads are immobile. They make up for this with six eyes, each spaced equidistant around the full circle, giving them omni-directional vision. They are tripeds who move with a twirling motion, sort of like a Whirling Dervish. They do not appear to be equipped to sit.

“Here, then, is an Orphean.”

The holoscreen cleared to show an alien figure. The being’s skin was vaguely reptillian. He was pale gray and hairless, with a bullet-shaped head surmounted by six protruding orbs. The being was built on the hexagonal plan, with six eyes, six tentacles, and tripod legs.

“The expedition’s instruments picked up hundreds of hours of communications, much of it in a language that we could not identify. We have enough intercepts in the Broan trade tongue; however, to confirm that this is indeed a world of the Sovereignty.

“We will have an astronomy session following this general briefing. It will take place in the astronomy group’s spaces in Compartment B7, Corridor 9. I would now like to turn you over to Captain Erickson, who will describe the details of the scouting expedition.”

#

The briefing lasted more than three hours. Captain Erickson took one-third of that time to describe the recent expedition. He related how
Columbus
and
Magellan
had dropped sublight well beyond the orbit of the system’s most distant planet, and near the inner boundary of Orpheus’s Oort cloud.

The Oort cloud is a standard feature of every star system. It contains the excess material left when the primordial cloud of gas and dust collapsed to form the star and its planets. The Oort cloud is the source of a system’s comets. Literally hundreds of billions of nascent balls of rock and ice fall constantly inward, but at a velocity so low that they will never reach the star that is pulling them down. They wait with infinite patience for something to disturb their “orbits,” and when that happens, comets by the thousands are sent hurtling into the inner star system. There a few of them encounter planets, and eventually collide with them, bringing death and destruction to entire biospheres. Sol’s Oort cloud sends a storm of comets sunward every 26 million years or so. It was a comet storm that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, and another that murdered the trilobites.

However, the Oort cloud also represented safety for Earth’s starships. It was unlikely that the Orpheans had a space watch system that reached as far as their Oort cloud, but if they did, it would be next to impossible to pick up two starships against such a cluttered backdrop.

Erickson described the excitement when a gravity wave strong enough to rattle cups in cupboards swept through the two starships within a day of their arrival. Triangulating the jump wave, they easily backtracked to Orpheus’s stargate, and from there, to the third planet. Then, with Orpheus’s ecliptic identified, they had found five other worlds in only a single day. Two of those worlds were Jupiter-class giants.

“That jump wave was a lucky break for us,” Captain Erickson told the rapt audience. “It cut our mission time by more than a month.”

Close analysis of the energy emissions of each of the five worlds proved that they were inhabited, or in the case of the two gas giants, that their moon systems were. That was hardly surprising considering that starships had been entering and leaving the system for at least three hundred years.

As tantalizing as the long-range intercepts were, however, they raised more questions than they answered. Both captains would have liked to head in for a closer look, but their orders were explicit in that regard: “No approach to target star or world under any circumstances during initial scouting expeditions.” Humanity’s ships were to emulate black cats in cellars at midnight, except a black cat would have sparkled in the infrared wavelengths, and the ships were shielded far better than that. Each radiated its waste energy into space in a direction opposite Orpheus. On the side of the ship facing the star, surface coolers kept the hull temperature at the same level as the surrounding ice and dust.

The next few speakers were mission scientists briefing their colleagues on the communications intercepts.

Despite the volume of data collected, the last speaker, Sar-Say, highlighted that they had a lot more to learn. Instead of delivering prepared remarks, the pseudo-simian stood on a box behind the lectern and looked out over the sea of expectant human faces. “You have done well, my friends,” he said, his yellow eyes sweeping the audience in a perfect imitation of the human speakers. “I do not know what I can add to the conclusions you have already heard today, but I stand ready to answer questions.”

One of the scientists near the back of the room shouted, “What do you know about these creatures with the octopus-like collars?”