Foreigner

“So where are we?” Miyume asked, the first words she’d said. She was asking him, or anyone, and Neill didn’t know how to answer that—he didn’t see how they could miss T-230 if they had gotten to any star at all… by what he knew, by the education he’d had, ships just kept going in the directions they were going, that was a basic law of physics… wasn’t it? You aimed and you built your field and you went, and if you had fuel enough you got there.

And meanwhile his hardware-biased brain was thinking, Could we have overshot? How far off could we be, on the fuel we’ve got?

“ This is Capt. LaFarge…”

That was the general address, and people shouted urgently for quiet.

“… unfortunate circumstance,” was all that got through, that Neill could hear, and he was desperate to hear what the captain said. Miyume’s nails bit deeply into his hand, people were talking again, and Miyume shouted, “Shut up!” at the top of her lungs, at the same time others did.

“… positional problem,” was the next clear phrase. Then: “ which does not pose the ship any imminent danger… ”

“That’s a blue-white star!” a tech shouted. “What’s he think it is?”

Someone got the fool shut down. Others hushed the ones that wanted to ask questions.

“… ask everyone to go about business as usual,” LaFarge was saying. “ And assist the technical crew while we try to establish position. We’ll be looking into our resources in this system for refueling. We’re very well equipped for dealing with this situation. That’s all. Stand easy.”

‘Establish position’ sounded comforting. ‘Refueling’ sounded even more hopeful. ‘Well equipped for dealing with this,’ sounded as if the crew already had a plan. Neill clung to that part of it, while a frantic part of him was thinking: This can’t be happening to us, not to us…

Things can’t go wrong with this ship, there were too many precautions, everything taken care of…

They’d been screened, their skills had been tested, they’d had to have recommendations atop recommendations even to come close to this job. They didn’t send foul-ups on a ship that carried Earth’s whole damned colonial program, and disasters didn’t happen to a mission as important as this one. People had planned too long. People had been too careful. Everything had been going so right.

“Establish position,” a tech said. “I don’t like that ‘Establish position.’ Are we talking about infall?”

“No,” a senior tech said. “We’re talking about where we are. Which is clearly not where we’re supposed to be.”

“Refuel, hell,” another tech said. “That’s a radiation bath out there.”

The pusher-craft aren’t shielded to work out there, Neill thought, with a sudden sick feeling, as the dynamics came clear to him. Jupiter was a radiation hazard. This thing… this double sun, with light that made the cameras flare and distort…

The miner-pilots couldn’t survive it. Not for any long operation. The miners couldn’t deploy here, not without an inevitable cost, as the exposure tags went dark, and the hours of running time added up. Pusher-craft were shielded for the environment they had to deal with, and their designated environment had been a mild, friendly G5.

He didn’t say that. Miyume looked scared. Probably he did. The numbers started adding up, that was what the pilots said when things started going wrong: the company might lie, and the captain the company hired might refuse you answers, but the numbers wouldn’t deceive you, no matter what.

They added, and the result didn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t change from what it was. Wishes didn’t count.

IV

«^»

McDonough’s shadow arrived, hovered over Taylor’s chair, saying there hadn’t been a mistake. Taylor processed that datum in the informational void. Things came painstakingly slowly or not at all. Other inputs in his surroundings were irrelevant. His mind refused distraction to trivia. But the navigator he paid close attention to… and tried to ask him, although one had to slow the brain down incredibly to frame a single complex sound:

“What?”

Babble, then, unauthorized people touching him and talking to him. Taylor tuned the voices out until McDonough’s voice came back, telling him in its infinite slowness that they were fueled up.

That was something to process: they’d been at this star some months of realtime, then. Major datum.