Better Safe than Sorry

Painting by Travis. Mayflower Archives.

We exited the Alchibah Wormhole, adjusted course, and headed towards home. Looking at some of the data captured from Ashcroft’s cruiser gave pause. It seemed that the Goonies might be coming after us. We couldn’t be sure if they had the capability but that was one of the things to question Ash about when he came out of cryo.

Aboard the Mayflower we had two of the telescopic observatories left over from those R.J. Hamilton had built to locate the wormhole itself. We left one of them monitoring the exit end of the hole and the surrounding space. It was supposed to be solar powered but this far from a good light source we had to use one of the nuclear batteries intended for the robots. If it detected anything coming through at least we would know long before it could reach us. Still light speed communication but it would beat a ship by 6 months at least. It would have been nice to drop off a picket ship and have it waiting to meet them unawares but we just didn’t have the people or the armed ship to do that.

We planed to leave the other observatory in orbit around our new planet and use it to gather information about the rest of the system. Its’ optics and electronics were actually better than any of the shipboard navigational tool on the Mayflower for a task like that.