Bev Bora was not popular with the audio engineers at first, she was an amateur. They didn’t quite see why command had saddled them with a moonlighting lieutenant best left to her real skills, whatever those were.
That typical professional resentment lasted about 20 minutes not their first meeting.
“So I’m fairly certain with a proper model the Doppler shift combined with the known longship acceleration can give us a fairly precise limit on the light-year distance of the Zima. I just don’t,t have the math.”
All five audio engineers sat quietly starting at her then at each other.
“We’ll I do,” one coughed, ” excuse me, do. I do. I can calculate it.”
Bev smiled with relief. “Great! Uh, how long do you need?”
“Lady, you’re impressive. You already did all the hard work,” another engineer interjected. “It’s all the data points that are tedious. Given what you collected, I think anyone of us would be embarrassed if it took us an our.”
Be looked surprised, then smiled. “Fantastic! Well. Let me know we you have something. I’ll be at ,y post.”
Without dropping. Her smile, she turned and left, rather fled, the meeting.
In 35 minutes working with Bev’s data set, the engineers not nay had the location of the Zima, they also pinpointed its heading and found that it must have been deflected from its original trajectory. It was headed at an angle back towards the path of the Primavera. Eventually the Zima would pass behind the Primavera within 5 less than a light year.
Bev developed a 25 year program to send detailed communications to the Zima, or whoever would be left 50 years after the lady in red.
