“Success!” said Richard quietly, but his voice trembled with excitement. “Captain Marks-Owens will now initiate the program that will unify the probes into a single system. At the same time, she will enter a program that will allow the system to read the gravitational forces attendant upon every object within its range. The known asteroids and other heavenly bodies and the scheduled flights of spacecraft will be filtered out. What will be left will be the positions of unknown craft and any uncharted natural objects.” As he spoke, the web began to shimmer in dozens of places, each the site of an object with enough mass to ripple the gravitational-detecting field of the net.
“Ah! Now the known ships are being filtered out,” Richard observed as many of the ripples disappeared. In a moment, he leaped to his feet.
“There it is! There it is!” he shouted. He ran to the screen. “Look! Here are the pirates’ ships that attacked Robert’s freighters yesterday!” He pointed to a small ripple in the pattern and scanned the readings at the bottom of the screen. “Yes, eighteen ships. Here are their masses provided down here. And over here,” his finger swept across the screen to a large ripple in the upper center, “is the asteroid coming our way!
“Computer! Extrapolate the course of this object”—he gave the particulars—“and provide information on its trajectory.”
In eight seconds the voice of the computer spoke. “Object is a natural body of approximately 20,625 trillion tons, currently traveling at a rate of approximately 280,000 miles per hour. If present speed and course are maintained, object will fly by the Earth. Closest approach will be attained in 15 days, 8 hours, 3 minutes, 14 seconds at a distance of approximately 10,689 miles.”
There was silence in Richard’s office for over a minute. Then someone said, “It’s going to miss.”
18: Collision Course!
EXHAUSTED with relief, the party broke up. The men from Space Command left the Starlight Enterprise plant and returned to their headquarters. Robert Nolan and Beowulf Denn lifted off from a launching deck not far from Richard’s office and set course for the space station that was the central facility for Nolan Mining Enterprise.
Richard had already given orders that ships from Starlight Enterprise be assigned the immediate task of pursuing and capturing the eighteen pirate ships that had destroyed NME’s decoy freighters the day before. The SE freighters that had actually carried the probes into space had been joined by SE ships gathered quietly from various sources during the previous week. They had converged during the journey so that many were in place throughout the area of the search, ready to respond to any orders that might come.
Inside many of them were the Firewasp fighters SE produced for use in the Asteroid Belt. The Firewasps were small, tremendously fast and amazingly maneuverable one-man ships that had been concentrated in several SE bases in the Asteroid Belt. They had been named after a menacing insect found in certain hostile swamps on Mars. The tiny craft served mostly as a deterrent, since smugglers and other lawless types avoided any settlement that showed it was ready to defend itself against marauders.