We cheered. With numbers like those, odds were that at least one of the rocky planets circled within the Lifezone.

“Let me see… there’s one littleworld here that has—” Yen pulled his hand from the tank. He popped a finger in his mouth and tasted for a moment, rolling his eyes like a connoisseur savoring fine wine.

“Water.” He smacked thoughtfully. “Yes! Plenty of water. I can taste life, too. Standard adenine-based carbolife. Hmmm. In fact, it’s chlorophyllic and left-handed!”

In the excited, happy babble that followed, Moishe Bok, our captain, had to shout to be heard.

“All right! People! Look, it’s clear none of us are going to get any sleep soon. Lifesciencer Taiga, have you prepared a list of corpsicles to thaw, in case we have found a goodworld?”

Alice drew the list from her pocket. “Ready, Moishe. I have biologists, technicians, planetologists, crystallographers… ”

“You’d also better awaken a few archaeologists and Contacters,” Yen added dryly.

We turned and saw that his hands were back in the holistank. His face bore a dreamy expression.

“It took our civilization three thousand years to herd our asteroids into optimum orbits for space colonies. But compared with this system, we’re amateurs. Every smallbody orbiting this star has been transformed. They march around like ancient soldiers on a drillfield. I have never even imagined engineering on this scale.”

Moishe’s gaze flickered to me. As executive officer, it would be my job to fight for the ship, if Pelenor found herself in trouble… and to destroy her if capture were inevitable.

Long ago we had reached one conclusion. If goodstars without crystalspheres were rare, and dreamt of by a frustrated mankind, the same might hold for some other star-traveling race. If some other people had managed to break out of its shell, and now wandered about, like us, in search of another open goodstar, what would such a race think, upon detecting our ship?