Free Seeker by Jack McDevitt

grinned at me, looked at the monitor, frowned, and for a moment I thought he was getting suspicious. “I’m surprised Dora hasn’t said something about being probed.” Dora would be the AI.
    “They tell me it’s noninvasive,” I said. “Dora probably hasn’t noticed.”
    “Is that possible?” He looked as if I were introducing gremlins.
    “Anything’s possible these days.” I shut the instrument down. “Well, thank you very much, Hap.” I strolled back into the living room and picked up my jacket. The woman never took her eyes from me. “Nice to have met you, ma’am,” I said.
    Hap got the door. He could have told Dora to open it, but he got it himself. It was a gesture that didn’t get by his companion. I smiled, wished him good afternoon, and slipped into the hallway. The door closed, and I immediately heard raised voices inside.
     
     
    “Hap has a sister,” Alex said after I’d told him I didn’t think Hap had any more pieces from the
Seeker
.
    “Do we care?” I asked. “About the sister?”
    “She might be able to tell us where he got the cup.”
    “That’s a long shot.”
    “Maybe. At the moment it’s all we have.”
    “Okay.”
    “She lives on Morinda.”
    “The black hole?”
    “The station.”
    Interstellar flights had become a lot less inconvenient with the arrival of the quantum drive. It was near-instantaneous travel within a range of a few thousand light-years. After a jump, you had to spend a few hours recharging, then you could go again. Theoretically, you could have jumped all the way to Andromeda in maybe a year or so, except that the equipment would require maintenance and would wear out long before you got there. And you couldn’t carry enough life support, or enough fuel. Nevertheless, the trip is feasible if we’re willing to make some adjustments. But nobody’s come up with a good reason yet to go. Other than a few politicians looking to find an issue to run on that won’t alienate people. The Milky Way is still ninety percent unknown territory, so it’s hard to see the point of an Andromeda mission. Other than to be able to say we did it. But in case anyone in authority is reading this and has plans along those lines, don’t look at me.
    “I take it you want me to go talk to her,” I said.
    “Yes. Woman to woman is best.”
    “We promised Amy we wouldn’t let the family know we’re interested in the cup.”
    “We promised her that Hap wouldn’t find out. Chase, the woman is on
Morinda
. Moreover, she and her brother haven’t spoken for years.”
    “Where’s the mother?”
    “Dead.”
    “And the father?”
    “Dropped out of sight early. I can’t find anything on him.”
     
FIVE
     
There’s something about having a black hole in the neighborhood that leads to sleepless nights.
— Karl Svenson,
Strumpets Have All the Fun,
1417
     
     
    Morinda is one of three black holes known to exist inside Confederacy space. The name also serves the large armored orbiting space station that was home to a thousand researchers and their support staffs, who were measuring, poking, taking the temperature of, and throwing assorted objects into, the beast. Most of them, according to the info tabs, were trying to learn how to bend space. There were even a few psychologists conducting experiments related to the way people perceive time.
    I had never been there, nor had I ever seen a black hole before. If that’s the correct terminology, since you don’t really
see
a black hole. This one wasn’t particularly big, as these things go. It was maybe a couple hundred times the mass of Rimway’s sun. A ring of illuminated debris, the accretion disk, enclosed it, firing off X-ray jets and God-knows-what other kinds of radiation, and sometimes even rocks.
    That’s why the station is armored and equipped with Y-beam projectors. Most of the action is predictable, but the experts claim you never really know. They don’t worry much about the rocks, which they can dissolve.