The Black

Ten

Joseph sat on the bridge of the small scout ship. It was about 100 yards long and maybe 50 yards around, so was small for any ship. These were easily produced, and did not have to have good power, just enough to run life support, and move it slowly through a system, as the instruments that packed most of it would buzz. Each of them normally had a crew of four, this was more physiological than need. Still on the bridge sat him Andrea and Jason.

Jason asked, "you feel the beacons from the stars we have visited?"

Joseph had his eyes closed, and said, "yes and I see the positions of the stars that they are close to. But all of them are so close."

Jason did not say anything to that. What could you say when with your power you could not even see them all, some were so far away. There were beacons that were 80 light years away, getting close to the edge of what the telescopes on Earth could see enough of to see the planets there. He simply said, "Can you feel the stars out farther, the gravity." That was what they were feeling, they knew it now.

Yes some are so strong, others so weak, and so many, thousands of them. Andrea had been out and was a level over Jason, she could feel a few thousand, and she could not go out to the edge of where humanity had started to explore. Still Jason said, "pick up one, just pick one, and then bring it with where we are and fold through it."

The scout ship was sitting someplace between Earth and Mars, and well out of the way of any major gravity wells. So this test jump should be safe. No one knew how much the machine had taught Joseph, not as much as it could have was the thought, but no one knew for sure. The higher ups wanted to know what he could do, and if the others could be activated safely.

Jason said, "Ok, now fold and lets move there."

Joseph did not move, he did not make any motions, he was sitting in Sol System, then suddenly he was a long way away. He knew it had been a long jump, he also had not gone nearly as far as he could have, he wanted to go only a moderate distance to get a movement under his belt. He opened his eyes, and the entire control room had lite up. There were alarms going off, the ones that told Jason that the computer did not have an idea of where they were. Another was telling him that they had jumped in too close to a system, but the collision alarm was NOT going off, so they were not near death. Jason and Andrea worked for almost 15 minutes, to get the alarms and computer demands pulled off and the computer working on where they were.

Andrea found that they were in orbit around a very large star, with 20 masses of the Sun, and they were where Neptune orbited the Sun, but it was still pretty close to this star. They would normally come out much farther away from the star. She did not know of any stars this size close to the Sun either, but she was a pilot, not a astronomer. Jason was busy telling the computers to reset for the system, that they had not be to. It was not normal, most systems they went to were checked out by other methods before they went. Going in blind was pretty new, Jason had done six of the jumps he knew of, but he had placed the ship far enough away that when they went in they had all the instruments reset for the system.

Joseph closed his eyes and looked at the system with his power. He saw that the star was older, but not unstable, that there were clearly eight planets, and where they were at this point. One was close to the mass needed for a second star. It was the most remote too. It however was just a little too small to ignite or turn into other exotic satellites. He felt for other gravity wells, finding smaller ones for asteroids and smaller rocks around the system. He put the data into the computer that he had modified to do this with, from instructions in the Halls. He then downloaded the data, about the time that Jason got the computers satisfied.