Book 2: Chapter 38: Following up
Hal
May 2188
Gliese 877
I was ten months from Gliese 877 when I received Bashful’s final radio transmission. Effectively, I had just watched myself die. It was a freaky feeling, not something I cared to repeat.
How had Bashful been traced? One possibility was that the Others had intercepted his transmissions, since those would have passed through the system once he was on the far side. Between the encryption we put on all our comms and the lack of any format information, I wasn’t worried about them learning anything, but simply detecting the transmissions wasn’t too much of a stretch.
I was more concerned about me joining Bashful as the main course. It wouldn’t take much intelligence to decide to follow the direction of the transmission, if that was what they’d keyed on. In that case, there might be an alien armada coming straight down my throat.
With that thought, I immediately instituted a hard right turn at 10 g. As soon as I was a few light-minutes off the straight line between Gliese 877 and Gliese 54, I fired off a drone along my original vector. At the speed I was still going, the drone wouldn’t need to use its drive. It could operate on minimal systems, drawing just enough power to maintain a maser link with me. I wanted to know if anything was coming.
I also fired off some commentary and analysis of the situation back to Mario via SCUT. We had to plan for the possibility of them tracing Bashful back to his origin. In principle, if the Others got hold of a space station, they could eventually trace the connection all the way back to Epsilon Eridani. And if they found one that had been upgraded to SCUT, they’d have that, too. If Mario was still back there, manning the station, I suggested that he booby-trap it.
I sat back in my easy chair and looked out the window, lost in thought. The floor-to-ceiling glass showed a winter scene unbroken by anything man-made. Tall evergreens in the foreground gradually dropped into a tree-filled valley. Snowflakes blurred the view into the distance, while lending a postcard feel to the foreground. In a small breach of reality, my VR world never filled with snow, despite never having spring melts. But hey, what’s the point of obsessive realism?