Her baggage and equipment banging awkwardly against her legs, Marikesh rushed down the gangway of the Wings of Justice without a glance at the famous towers of Ange. She paid no heed to the delegation of diplomats there to greet her and her colleagues, and threw open her case and began setting up her telescope on the jetty. It was a warm, clear evening, and the new planet blazed blue-violet in the sky. Planets, actually -- it was now possible to see that there were perhaps a dozen of them, fanned out in a neat line.
"I haven't been able to take a clear observation in two weeks,'' she said by way of apology to the Ange diplomat who approached. Captain Ieasu smiled fondly and smoothly guided the diplomats away. The telescope was a gift from her brother, who had ground and polished the primary mirror with his own paws from a billet of obsidian the size of a bedside table. It was surprisingly light for its bulk, and Marikesh was well-practiced. She had her eye to the peephole and was swiveling the instrument to bear on her quarry before the other scholars from Taleb had finished gathering their baggage on the deck of the frigate.
They were not planets, Marikesh now understood. She pulled out her notebook and sextant and took a sighting on Vo and three of the true planets that hung in the sky this evening. She worked through the calculations for the sidereal time and date, and experienced a little thrill of excitement as she substituted the coordinates of Ange for those of Taleb for the first time since her school days. Then she lined up her sextant on each of the blue-violet dots in the sky, and began her work in earnest. When she was done, she let out a small gasp.
"What is it?'' captain Ieasu whispered into her ear. Marikesh jumped, and the captain saved her precious sextant as she dropped it. Ieasu placed the instrument back in Marikesh's paws, gently folding her fingers over it. A small, private part of Marikesh's mind noted and appreciated the way the pads of the Ri woman's fingers fit into the concavities of her own scales. The rest of her mind plowed past the moment.
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"When we first saw them, they were going to zip past the sun and go back out into the dark forever, like comets. I computed the orbital elements myself. Now, they're on a different trajectory, which will put them into orbit around Vo,'' she said. "A comet can't change its orbit.''
With her eye at the peephole again, she began to sketch in quick, practiced movements. In her telescope, each dot was a cluster of thirty three pinpricks of painfully bright violet, arranged in two concentric rings. She had not been sure before, but now she could confirm that each of the objects had the same number of these lights, in the same arrangement.
As she watched, spheres of glowing fluid seemed to rush away from each of the objects at great speed, like the bursting of enormous bubbles. The bubbles seemed to be lopsided, brighter on one side than the other. At first she thought it must be the angle of her perspective, but sometimes one of the objects would send out a bubble that was lopsided in a different direction. Each event lasted only a few heartbeats, shockingly rapid for an astronomical phenomenon. As Marikesh watched, she began to think the rhythm looked almost purposeful.
During the voyage to Ange, she had spent many hours filling her sketchbook with drawings, mostly of Captain Ieasu. She particularly liked the way Ieasu always seemed to have part of her attention on the sails, adjusting the trim every now and then. She would order a small change, check the heading, make another adjustment, chat with one of her officers for a little while, consult the logbook, and then order another little adjustment. Ieasu would continue in this way for days when the weather was cooperative, keeping the ship on course with little corrections separated by careful observation and thought. Something about the expanding bubbles in her telescope reminded her of that rhythm.
"I think... they must be ships,'' she whispered. "Here, watch the pulses. Tell me if you think it looks like they are keeping a heading.''
"Ships? In the sky?" the captain said, bemused. But she stooped down to peer through the telescope as requested. Ieasu looked for a long time, her focus gradually intensifying. When she stood, the fur of her turquoise crest had gone flat with alarm.