Now take a look at Mars. It is a small, red mote in the sky, its diameter some four thousand miles. Sol is eight hundred thousand miles in diameter. Six million miles from Mars, then, can be crudely expressed by visualizing a point eight times the diameter of the Sun away from Mars, and you have the distance that the Empress of Kolain had come from Mars.
But the ship was heading in at an angle, and the six million miles did not subtend the above arc. From Venus Equilateral, the position of the Empress of Kolain was more like two diameters of the Sun away from Mars, slightly to the north, and on the side away from Sol.
It may sound like a problem for the distant future, this pointing a radio beam at a planet, but it is no different from Galileo’s attempts to see Jupiter through his Optik
