Addiction ... by Jill B. Hart
Page 2
This mission, his third, had begun normally. He his ship had been outfitted with the interface while orbiting a planet that had been a rural colony when he began his last series of explorations. Now it was a regional administrative hub. Mission Central had built a command and control complex on one of the systems barren outer planets. From there they could communicate with Surveyors more than twenty light years from humanity's central home worlds. After the interface was installed he spent several days at the C&C being briefed on the interface and the planetary systems along his route.
The system toward which he now swam was of special interest. It was ruled by a white dwarf star. Such stars were the dying embers of the type of suns that humanity favored. Had he been approaching it a few billion years earlier, one of its planets might have been suitable for colonization. Now it was little more than a curiosity. Yet, because it might have once shared its light with a world that was host to life, Central wanted him to observe it closely. If anything out of the ordinary appeared he was authorized to conduct a "fly-by" to investigate.
When his ship was ready, and his briefings over, Euzerman was sent on his way. Chemical rockets accelerated him beyond the outskirts of the colony's solar system, then a hydrogen-breathing ramjet accelerated him toward the speed of light. With all systems working normally, he connected the interface and entered Deepsleep.
A human in Deepsleep has no dreams, no sensations, so sense of time or space. Deepsleep sheaths reality. A warm darkness envelops its subject and then there is nothing. It was from that nothingness that Euzerman was awakened early. Through the interface he felt the computer call him. He was aware, at first, only of the dark. Then he felt the voice. It told him it had found something. In his mind Euzerman saw the distant sun, but it was not the yellow sun of a possible colony. It was the dwarf.
Slowly, his focus shifted to a small rocky world, the closest planet to the bright center. It was a dead world, having been subjected to enormous abuse by its star. The planet's surface had been charred, but there was something unusual amid the scorched rock and soil. Euzerman could feel his mind merge with the cybernet, then he saw why the computer had awakened him. He saw the planet as the computer saw it. He saw the wavelengths of light that bounced off the planet. The light betrayed the materials it touched. The light showed, through the proper analysis, the composition of the planet's surface. That analysis made clear, something was there.
.