Then he was gone and she was left staring desolately at the blank screen.
“What are you going to do, Hutch?” Bill asked.
She had to struggle to keep the rage out of her voice. “I don’t know,” she said.
“Possibly we should start by notifying Barber. Hutch, this isn’t your fault. Nobody can blame you.”
“Maybe you haven’t noticed, Bill, but I’m the front woman out here. I’m the person who gets to tell Dimenna that the flare’s a bigger problem than he realizes.” God, when I get back I’m going to throttle Barber. “We need help. Who else is in the neighborhood?”
“The Kobi is headed to Serenity for refitting.” The Kobi was a contact vessel, funded by the Alien Research Council. It was out looking for somebody to talk to. In more than forty years, it had found nobody. But it did perform a service, training ship captains and other interested persons in how to behave if they actually happened to stumble across aliens. Hutch had been through the course: Make no threatening moves. Blink lights “in an inviting manner.” Record everything. Transmit alert to nearest station. Don’t give away strategic information, like the location of the home world. If fired on, depart hastily. The Kobi’s skipper was Chappel Reese, finicky, nervous, easily startled. The last person in the world you’d want out saying hello to the civilization down the road. But he was a fanatic on the subject, and he had relatives in high places.
“What’s the Kobi’s capacity?”
“It’s a yacht. Maximum is eight. Ten in an emergency.” Bill shook his head. “He’s got a full load on this flight.”
“Who else?”
“The Condor is not far.”
Preacher Brawley’s ship. That brought a surge of hope. “Where is he?”
Brawley was already a near-legendary figure. He’d saved a science mission that had miscalculated its orbit and was getting sucked down into a neutron star, he’d brought back the disease-ridden survivors of the Antares II effort without regard to his own safety, and he’d rescued a crew member on Beta Pac by using a wrench to club one of that world’s voracious reptiles to death.