“It was a one-shot intercept. But Bill can’t give us any more than that.”

“Can we hear it?” asked Packwood.

“Bill,” Langley said, “run the record. Audio this time.”

It was about two seconds long, a series of high-pitched blips and squiggles. “We can’t read any of it?” asked Pete.

“No,” said Langley. “Zero.”

The team members looked at one another solemnly. A couple more pushed in. “It has to mean there’s another ship here somewhere,” Pete said. “Or an orbiter.”

“Nothing of ours out here,” said a quiet, very young, female technician who had just come in. Her name was Wanda. “I double-checked.”

Pete nodded.

“What would anybody be doing here?” asked Tora.

“We’re here,” said Langley.

Tora shook her head. “Sensors aren’t picking up anything?”

Langley had already checked the stat board. But he looked again. It was still quiet.

“If there were something out there,” said Stockard, “I’d think we’d be able to see it.” He was gruff, aggressive. A man who, in another age, would have been career military.

“Well,” said Packwood, “conditions tend to be strange in a place like this. Space folded over on itself, time warps blinking in and out. Still—”

“Why don’t we turn around and go back?” said Pete. “Search the same area?”

“Can’t. We can’t spare the fuel for a U-turn. If you want to get back to the same spot, you’ll have to wait until we go around again.”

“How long?”

“Several months.”

They all looked at him, but there wasn’t anything he could do. Langley didn’t think anything out of the ordinary was happening anyhow. He’d been carrying Academy teams into deep space for almost forty years, and he knew if there was one thing about neutron stars a man could be sure of, it was that nobody else was hanging around.

In all the time since the superluminals had left Earth, they’d found only one other living civilization, if you could call it that. The inhabitants of Nok went back about fourteen thousand years, but they were just now coming out of their industrial revolution. They were strong believers in various causes, and they were constantly at war with one another.