Otherwise the Kat's recordbanks will overflow and that might crash the ship.' 'That shouldn't happen,' Karl said. 'And do not hold onto anything that isn't flagged. Gonna get feisty.' 'Just make sure to capture the entire transmission,' Olga said. And I means I never done nothing like it.

I think.' 'You think? 'Karl did not like the sound of that. 'Ain't done this sort of jig before. 'We ready? Data's gonna start coming through any moment.'. The kid nodded. The transmission would start in less than a minute. Olga brushed her infusion-tubes over the back her skull and looked around. 'First ping.' The screen registerd another resonance. Had to be the tracker, the data-noise that went ahead of an actual ] to announce that a transmission was about to start. 'Here we go,' Karl said. Nothing ye-' Before Karl could finish, noise resonated all across the ] bands. 'Only background noise.' 'Keep watching that screen,' Olga said. 'I am. Too little to constitute a broadcast but enough to suggest they were in the ] cone of some faraway inter-stellar transmitter. 'No tracker,' he said. Karlie?' Karl glanced at the ] monitor, which had begun to display minor fluctuations in background noise. 'What?' 'We're nearly there.' Olga snapped a last fiber-cable into her display and looked to the kid, who sat on the floor of the crew compartment.

If anything weird happened, it would occur on the far side of the Divide and that was all Zone Control wanted to know: it was not their problem. 'Karl,' Olga said from the bunk below. With these, and with a little finesse on astronav, it was possible to catch a comet at just the right relative velocity and from just the right angle to snapshot the entire ice-rock with it's glistening tail in one smooth fly-by. Admittedly, comet photography was also the most common excuse for erratic course corrections but, considering the Kitty Kat was burning hard toward the Divide and the Zone Control ship that had inquired was registered to the ], Karl figured they would not care much about the Kat and it's shenanegins. It was the perfect excuse for rash maneuvers as proper comet photography required highly eccentric orbits that often only became available as up-to-date comet maps were replicated across the galaxy. They were nearing the relay and, just to make things that little bit more exciting, Zone Control had hailed a few minutes ago to inquire about Karl's recent course change. He had given the usual excuse: comet photography somewhere far away, in a system that Zone Control most definitely did not have up to date comet maps for.

There were no signals on ] yet but there would be soon. He'd extended the display so he could see it lying down and kept one eye on astronav while he watched the ] monitor with the other. Later that week, Karl lay on his zero-g bunk and watched the Kitty Kat accelerate on the wall screen.

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