booster still has lots of power stored on board.
"Suppose instead we just left the booster on its current heading and brought it to near-zero velocity relative to CenterStar. Rig it so we could find it again on the way back in. If we had a high-precision lock on its trajectory, and we did get back to CenterStar System with our tanks just about dry, we could order it to home back in on us, redock, use the booster's propulsion, and boost home under our own power, get back a lot sooner, and return the booster not much later than we would have otherwise."
Hannah frowned, then nodded. "Okay, Cap'n Mendez. That makes a lot of sense. See if you can set it up. I like anything that gives us more options. Just don't spend so much time on it that we arrive late at our transit-jump point and have to recalculate. Meantime, I'm going to get back to reading the files before we get to the fun part and start searching the Adler ."
"All right," he said. "It shouldn't take me long." But somehow he found himself wishing it would. It was wholly irrational, of course, but the longer they put off searching the Adler , the longer they delayed going back aboard her, the more he dreaded doing so.
You starting to be scared of ghosts? No, that wasn't it. But it came close. Aside from studying up on Metran and Metrannans, he had also read over the personnel file of Special Agent Trevor Wilcox III as closely as he could.
There was often an odd one-way intimacy between a murder victim and the investigator on the case. Jamie knew things about Special Agent Trip Wilcox that Wilcox's own mother likely didn't know. There was every evidence in the file that Agent Wilcox had been a fine and admirable person--but even a saint commits minor sins on occasion.
It was a violation of Trevor Wilcox's privacy for Jamie to know all about the mistakes on his income tax, his repeated requests for advances on his pay, the small fortune in QuickBeam messages sent back and forth to the fiancee on Earth, the two mental-health days he had been granted when he received the news that she had married the boy next door instead, even a brief report on the ruckus his mother had caused when the former fiancee had refused to return the ring that had belonged to Trevor's grandmother. The file was silent as to how or whether that crisis had been resolved. When he had read that, Jamie had felt torn between desperately hoping the ring had been returned, and a deep sense of something close to shame for knowing such an intimate detail.
In a normal murder investigation, there might have been some purpose in knowing such things. The fiancee might have been a suspect. The financial problems might have served as a warning flag, pointing toward some other difficulty that might in turn point toward motives or suspects. The transcripts of the QuickBeam messages might have had some reference to a time, a place, a person, an event that might be a lead.
But Trevor Wilcox III was found in the depths of space months after dying of old age, alone, billions of kilometers from any human being, and the only reasonable explanation for how that could have happened was that he had been killed by a xeno using some weapon utterly unknown to humanity or, far less likely, by some previously unknown illness. Nothing in Trevor's personnel record could possibly offer any sort of clue as to how that had happened.
Jamie looked up toward the Adler . Except maybe, just maybe, knowing every single thing there was to know about Trev Wilcox was going to be absolutely vital. Maybe he used his ex-fiancee's name on a password. Maybe knowing that Wilcox had consistently misspelled the same word over and over in his love letters would tell them that a log entry supposedly written by Wilcox was a plant, a forgery, because the misspelling wasn't there.
After all, Wilcox must have known he was going to die. He must also have known that Jamie and Hannah, or someone like them, would be sent to investigate--and he would have
"Suppose instead we just left the booster on its current heading and brought it to near-zero velocity relative to CenterStar. Rig it so we could find it again on the way back in. If we had a high-precision lock on its trajectory, and we did get back to CenterStar System with our tanks just about dry, we could order it to home back in on us, redock, use the booster's propulsion, and boost home under our own power, get back a lot sooner, and return the booster not much later than we would have otherwise."
Hannah frowned, then nodded. "Okay, Cap'n Mendez. That makes a lot of sense. See if you can set it up. I like anything that gives us more options. Just don't spend so much time on it that we arrive late at our transit-jump point and have to recalculate. Meantime, I'm going to get back to reading the files before we get to the fun part and start searching the Adler ."
"All right," he said. "It shouldn't take me long." But somehow he found himself wishing it would. It was wholly irrational, of course, but the longer they put off searching the Adler , the longer they delayed going back aboard her, the more he dreaded doing so.
You starting to be scared of ghosts? No, that wasn't it. But it came close. Aside from studying up on Metran and Metrannans, he had also read over the personnel file of Special Agent Trevor Wilcox III as closely as he could.
There was often an odd one-way intimacy between a murder victim and the investigator on the case. Jamie knew things about Special Agent Trip Wilcox that Wilcox's own mother likely didn't know. There was every evidence in the file that Agent Wilcox had been a fine and admirable person--but even a saint commits minor sins on occasion.
It was a violation of Trevor Wilcox's privacy for Jamie to know all about the mistakes on his income tax, his repeated requests for advances on his pay, the small fortune in QuickBeam messages sent back and forth to the fiancee on Earth, the two mental-health days he had been granted when he received the news that she had married the boy next door instead, even a brief report on the ruckus his mother had caused when the former fiancee had refused to return the ring that had belonged to Trevor's grandmother. The file was silent as to how or whether that crisis had been resolved. When he had read that, Jamie had felt torn between desperately hoping the ring had been returned, and a deep sense of something close to shame for knowing such an intimate detail.
In a normal murder investigation, there might have been some purpose in knowing such things. The fiancee might have been a suspect. The financial problems might have served as a warning flag, pointing toward some other difficulty that might in turn point toward motives or suspects. The transcripts of the QuickBeam messages might have had some reference to a time, a place, a person, an event that might be a lead.
But Trevor Wilcox III was found in the depths of space months after dying of old age, alone, billions of kilometers from any human being, and the only reasonable explanation for how that could have happened was that he had been killed by a xeno using some weapon utterly unknown to humanity or, far less likely, by some previously unknown illness. Nothing in Trevor's personnel record could possibly offer any sort of clue as to how that had happened.
Jamie looked up toward the Adler . Except maybe, just maybe, knowing every single thing there was to know about Trev Wilcox was going to be absolutely vital. Maybe he used his ex-fiancee's name on a password. Maybe knowing that Wilcox had consistently misspelled the same word over and over in his love letters would tell them that a log entry supposedly written by Wilcox was a plant, a forgery, because the misspelling wasn't there.
After all, Wilcox must have known he was going to die. He must also have known that Jamie and Hannah, or someone like them, would be sent to investigate--and he would have
Similar Books
