"They're lucky they weren't fried by the ramscoop fields," Du Bellay commented.
"They damn near were. A few million kilometers over and they probably would have been. Anyway, they recovered from the shock and got a preliminary reading on his course. Then they jumped ahead the shortest distance they could and waited the sixteen minutes it took the Intruder to catch up. They got another decimal in his course, confirmed he was heading toward Sol, and hightailed it here with the news."
"Hmm. Ironic, isn't it, that the great search for intelligent life should be ended by a puddle-jumping business whip whose navigator didn't trust his own computer. Well, what's next?"
"We've sent out a dozen tachships, strung along the Intruder's route, to get better data. They should be reporting in soon."
The Peacekeeper Situation Room was a vast maze of vision screens, holotanks, and computer terminals, presided over by a resident corps of officers and technicians. Halfway across the room was the main screen, currently showing a map of the entire solar system. From its lower right-hand corner a dotted red line speared into the inner system.
A young captain glanced up from a paper-strewn table as they approached. "Ah, General, he greeted Carey. "Just in time, sir: Chaser data's coming in."
"Let's see what you've got, Mahendra."
Mahendra handed him a computer-printed page. Carey scanned it, aware that Du Bailey was reading over his shoulder.
The Intruder was big. Compensating for relativistic effects and the difficulty of taking data at such speeds, the computer judged the alien craft at well over fifteen hundred meters long, two hundred meters in diameter, and massing near the two-hundred-million-ton mark. Its cone-shaped ramscoop fields spread out hundreds of kilometers in front of it. The drive spectrum showed mainly helium,