Ilen removed seven stars from the picture before she noticed that they had removed themselves.
She put them back. The calibration program outlined each expected point in green. Inside the outlines was black.
Dev was asleep behind the partition. His socks hung from the ventilation grille, where they made two slow, accusing gestures whenever she changed the fan speed. She lowered it now so she could hear herself think. One sock stopped pointing at her.
They were eleven hours from their pass by the comet. Dev had been waiting for it since before there was a ship to wait in. He had given Ilen permission to wake him for equipment trouble, course trouble, or a fire. A new object would probably count as course trouble, depending on where it was.
She checked the other camera first.
Six stars missing. Different lens, separate detector, slightly different view. She laid the pictures over each other. The empty places overlapped.
“Dev.”
He answered immediately, which usually meant he had been awake for some time and was hoping she would not notice.
“Is it the heater?”
“Come and see.”
He came through barefoot, fastening his shirt. One side was tucked into his trousers; the other would stay out until she told him. He rested his chin in his hand and looked at the screen.
“Background correction?”
“Off.”
“Both cameras?”
“Separate raw frames.”
He reached past her to move the brightness control. Where the stars should have been, the black remained black. Around it, noise flowered into red and blue.
Ilen loved pictures at this stage, before she cleaned them. Small unearned galaxies, the instrument’s own weather. Her name went on calibration tables in the appendices. The pictures appeared on other people’s walls.
Dev returned the control to its original setting.
“Something between us and them.”
“Or two faults which like one another.”
“You don’t think that.”
“I want to rule it out before you don’t think it either.”
They turned the cameras away, then back. New stars entered the field where the detectors had shown the blank. The dark place stayed in the sky.
Dev pulled his chair closer.
From the ship’s small observation port there was nothing to see. That was the trouble with the discovery. Ilen could find the three bright stars that bordered it, but between them the sky was already too dark for her eyes.
She shaded the glass with both hands. Behind her, Dev opened the mission plan.
They could continue toward the comet while watching the dark place slide behind them. The cameras had been mounted to turn well clear of the hull. Each could look in only one direction at a time. Dev wanted the long approach sequence: jets forming and changing as the comet turned. The nearest pass would last minutes. The approach gave those minutes a history.
“How much time?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
He rubbed the bridge of his nose. She had answered too quickly, almost with pleasure.
“An hour to establish motion,” she said. “Then we decide.”
“An hour loses the first turn.”
“Yes.”
He looked at the screen where his schedule filled every line. For two weeks he had been teaching her what to look for in a jet of dirty ice. He drew them on meal packets when she failed to understand his hands.
“One hour,” he said.
She set an alarm where both could see it.
The dark shape changed slowly as they moved. A star at its edge dimmed, brightened, then vanished. Ilen made a little sound and pressed her fist against her lips. On the raw frame, the star had become a short line before it disappeared.
Dev asked her to play it again.
At forty minutes they had a rough distance from the two cameras and their changing position, assuming the surface itself was moving little. Not a solid number, but enough to place the dark surface far from their course. They were passing beside it. The comet lay ahead, safe from any new decision they might make about pointing a lens.
Ilen put the distance range on the screen. Dev checked her assumptions. He widened the range.
“Still big,” she said.
“Very.”
There was a small lamp mounted on the free-flying inspection camera they used to examine the ship’s exterior. From this distance it would be useless. Their ranging beacon could send a much stronger, narrow pulse. It was meant to find reflective markers on equipment. They could point it toward the missing stars and see whether anything returned.
Dev opened its controls.
“We may get nothing.”
Ilen watched him enter the angle. “Put that in the log.”
He did.
The first pulse went out with no visible beam. There was only a mark on the time line. Both of them watched the screen anyway, as if a line drawn across it might travel somewhere.
Nothing came back.
They tried twice more. Dev lengthened the exposure. Ilen checked for the detector’s response to the beacon leaking through the ship’s own fittings. She had cleaned precisely that false glow from hundreds of approach pictures.
The alarm sounded.
Dev stopped reaching for the controls.
On the other display, the comet’s predicted turn continued without them. Ilen could no longer ask for the first hour; it had been spent. The second would cost something new.
“One camera on the comet,” she said. “Keep the wide camera here.”
“I won’t see the whole plume.”
“You’ll have the jets at the surface.”
He closed the beacon panel.
“And you won’t have a second detector.”
She looked at the blank place. Her discovery, if that was what it became, would have one good instrument watching it and one turned away.
“We can turn it back if something happens.”
“Then we miss something there.”
They sat with this for a while. The ship continued on its course. Neither object required an answer from them.
Dev turned the narrow camera toward the comet. Ilen logged the exact time.
The first curl of light appeared when she was squeezing paste onto a cracker.
She let go of the packet without closing it. A yellow bead drifted toward the keyboard. Dev caught it with another cracker and held both while she worked.
“There.”
Along the edge of the blank, a thread shone in the beacon’s color. It bent inward, grew two branches, and faded. A second line formed farther down.
Dev looked at the pulse times. The interval between the first and second lines matched the interval between their first two transmissions.
“Late,” he said.
It was much later than the distance estimate allowed for a simple reflection.
Ilen began to say what it might mean. She stopped. Dev was already turning the other camera back.
“We’ve missed the first one,” she said.
“The next may still come.”
They waited through the turn of the camera, then through its settling. The third line appeared. Both detectors saw it.
This one widened. A pale loop unfolded inside the dark, too slowly to be a flash and too quickly for Ilen to decide what edge she was following. It passed across a star. For a moment the star shone through it, long and thin, then returned to a point.
Dev still held the crackers. The paste had reached his knuckle.
“Give me those,” Ilen said.
They ate without looking away.
She sent a fourth pulse, twice as long, and recorded the change. Then they let the beacon rest. The instruments watched while the cameras’ fans made small adjustments in the quiet cabin.
The fourth return was broader. Within it, several fine lines moved in contrary directions. What they had taken for a flat screen of darkness had depth, or folds, or some other arrangement for which Ilen had no useful name. Light travelled through parts of it before it emerged again. She could not tell how much was still inside.
She set the four records beside one another. No two curls matched. The last continued long after the others had faded.
“Again?” Dev asked.
Her hand rested on the control. She wanted a fifth, then a sixth, until the entire thing came into view. She also wanted to see what the fourth did when they left it alone.
“Not yet.”
The remaining light thinned. A loop divided around a darker patch. Tiny points formed along its length, stayed for several frames, and went out in a different order.
Dev brought up the comet in the little navigation image. It was approaching the place on the schedule where he had meant to begin the detailed series. They could still get that. He did not touch the camera controls.
“Take yours,” Ilen said.
“Tell me if it changes.”
“It’s all changing.”
He smiled, tiredly. “Tell me if I should look.”
By the nearest pass, the dark shape was behind them and the comet occupied both cameras. Ilen helped Dev mark the new jet at its base. It had not been there in the last distant survey. Whether it had begun yesterday or that morning was something their pictures could not tell him.
He did not complain. Once, watching the time line, he put his hand over the missing interval as though checking the width of a stain.
After the pass they turned one camera aft.
The fourth pulse was still visible. It had become a loose mesh, so faint that Ilen had to stack several frames to find it. She kept the untouched originals beside the composite. Inside the mesh, a star she had removed that morning shone steadily.
They prepared two reports. Dev wrote the lost approach time into his. Ilen put it in hers too, then entered their joint observation beneath both names. They sent the raw records and a notice of uncertain extent for any later ship planning the route. No answer could arrive before they went to sleep.
Dev began taking his socks from the grille.
“You staying up?”
“A little.”
He left one sock hanging and came back to his chair.
She tilted the display toward him. Neither spoke while the next group of frames assembled. Far behind their ship, in the interval without stars, the light they had sent was still finding ways out.
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