"There's nothing to help with. We're their eyes and ears—and we're at the scene."
"Yes, but they still want to help."
"That's ridiculous! Tell them that they ... "
Sharita broke off when Pearl Laneaux, first officer of the Palenque, stepped up next to her and rested a hand on her arm. Pearl towered over Sharita by more than a head.
"What is it?" Sharita snapped.
"Don't do it." Pearl gazed at Sharita with doe-eyes. The two women seemed polar opposites. With her military bearing and spotless uniform, Sharita might have passed as an overeager cadet on a battlecruiser in the League of Free Terrans fleet—but the LFT didn't offer many opportunities to seventy-four-year-olds. Pearl, by contrast, seemed like gentleness personified, a delicate beauty completely at odds with the stereotype of the rough-and-ready prospector.
Their contrasting personalities could have put the two women at loggerheads all day long. And sometimes, like now, they were. But in Rhodan's view, every quarrel between the two top-ranking officers seemed to clear the air like a good storm. When the thunder and lightning faded away, the intelligence of both women had contributed to a decision.
"What?" Sharita demanded, her eyes flashing with anger.
"Don't brush off the crawler crews. Of course they can't help with the search—they know that as well as you do. The gesture is what matters to them."
"Feh! Gestures!"
"Sharita, you know how close the crawler crews are to each other. Don't make it harder for them by denying them the chance to even try to help."
Rhodan saw Sharita's neck muscles strain against the tight-fitting collar of her uniform. For a moment, there was a distinct possibility of violence. Instead, Sharita pushed Pearl aside and called: "You heard her, Alemaheyu! Let the crawlers come. But tell them that the lost time will of course be deducted from their shares. We aren't out here for the fun of it."
The search got under way as one crawler after another materialized near the Palenque. The flying laboratories shot back and forth like a flock of birds, performing their task with an agility that surprised Rhodan.
It was no use. The Palenque and the smaller craft accompanying it covered the entire sector without finding a trace of the crawler.
"I'm sorry," the hyperdetection officer finally said, rubbing his hands with a helpless look. "The sector has been swept clean. There's some cosmic dust here and there, but otherwise nothing."
"But that's impossible!" Sharita retorted vehemently. "The crawler can't have gone far!"
"Why not?" Rhodan interjected. "It could have accelerated, or even activated its faster-than-light drive. The FTL dematerialization energy signature could have been lost in the hyperstorm."
"I gave no order permitting them to do so. But ... " A grim smile appeared on Sharita's face. "But that doesn't mean much. Who here listens to my orders?"
No one in the control center dared laugh.
"Widen the hyperdetection sweep!" Sharita ordered. "Make it a radius of one light-year. I want a close look at every speck of dust!"
The control center crew went to work. Every man and woman bent over the console instruments in their niches. Every ship in the LFT fleet possessed sound and optical isolation fields in the control center that allowed each station to perform its work without interruption or distraction. On most ships, these fields ran almost constantly, with holos ensuring that the control center crew remained aware of the current situation at all stations.
On the Palenque, a contrary culture had evolved. The prospectors enjoyed the close contact with each other, and Rhodan suspected that someday they would tear out the screening field systems entirely, considering them useless junk.
Now, the prospectors worked in silence, focused on their own tasks yet perfectly aware of their fellow officers. Rhodan heard the occasional muffled curse and heavy breathing, but the report they were hoping for didn't come.
Rhodan caught himself tapping his fingers nervously on the arm of his chair. He wasn't used to sitting inactive in moments of crisis. But the seat he had been given allowed only passive viewing of the data; he could not access the ship's syntron and its subsystems.
Sharita cleared her throat and paced. The fingers of her right hand tapped heavily on the grip of her uniform's holstered beamer. Rhodan felt each tap like a heavy drumbeat.
"Hyperdetection!" Omer Driscoll exclaimed. It was a cry of joy. "Object at distance of just one light-hour. Mass ... "
"Yes?"
"Mass triple that of a crawler," the hyperdetection officer replied tonelessly. "No idea what it is, but it isn't our people."
"Is the syntron getting a visual of it?"
"Just now coming in. The outliers of the hyperstorm are still interfering with detection. And whatever it is, it's moving damned fast. But we've got something."
"Put it up!"
In the middle of the control center, a holo taller than a man appeared, like a window into the blackness of space.
The object shown in the holo was nothing more than a dark shadow racing through space, blocking the stars in sections as it flowed past. The blunt, stocky shape reminded Rhodan of a thumb. It lacked any hint of the flattened appearance to which the crawlers owed their name.
At their first sight of the object, the control crew broke out in angry curses. Rhodan felt relieved at their reaction: he had wondered if the crew of the Palenque would ever release its tension.
But at what cost ... ?
"Let's take a closer look at that thing," Sharita ordered.
Rhodan felt a vibration under his feet as the Palenque's engines accelerated to maximum and sent the ship after the object.
In the control center holo, the rotating shadow grew ever larger, its outlines becoming increasingly sharper. Rhodan thought he saw metal reflecting the dim light of the stars. Long, regular lines, and at one end ... a black abyss, framed by sharp-edged tongues of metal that twisted in all directions. One prominent spike looked like it was being pulled back and forth by the rotation of the object, almost as though it was waving. What an absurd thought.
"Hey, that thing is waving at us!" Alemaheyu exclaimed. Apparently, he had no concerns about expressing even the craziest interpretations out loud.
"Can the chatter! That thing out there is just a piece of dead metal, nothing else."
Dead metal ... Rhodan thought there was a grain of truth in what Sharita said.
The Palenque made a short hyper-light jump. When it reentered normal space, the object was immediately in front of it—at a distance of a quarter-million kilometers.
It was unmistakably a technological artifact. It reminded Rhodan of the rockets used by the human race during his time with the U.S. Space Force nearly three thousand years ago, before man discovered the Arkonides.
Except that this rocket had been torn in half. They were looking
