INTERLUDE
This is the size-distribution law of the Asteroid Belt: For every body of given diameter, D, there will be ten bodies with diameter d = D/3.
Corollary: As the body you are searching for becomes smaller, the problem of distinguishing it from others of similar size becomes rapidly more difficult.
Conclusion: Personal survival pods, each a couple of meters long, will be lost in a swarm of natural objects, more numerous within the Belt than grains of sand on a beach. Visual search techniques in such an environment will be useless.
Solution: Although the sky in and beyond the solar system glimmers and glows with visible light from stars, planets, diffuse and luminous gas clouds, novas, supernovas, and galaxies, other regions of the electromagnetic spectrum are far less busy. Choose carefully. At the right wavelength for observation, Earth shines brighter than a thousand suns.
The designers of search-and-rescue systems choose very carefully. The available signal energy must be radiated in many directions, travel millions or hundreds of millions of kilometers, and fill an immense volume. The amounts of power available for distress calls are usually just a few watts. No matter. The radio energy needed for signal detection and location is truly minute; the total microwave power received at the solar system's largest radio telescope would not carry a crawling fly up a windowpane.
SAR systems are designed to detect and triangulate a crippled survival pod operating on its last dribble of power. From a single one-minute fix, a ship or pod's position and velocity can be computed. A rescue vehicle will be chosen, and a matching trajectory defined.
What SAR systems cannot do—because no one ever anticipated such a need—is to operate efficiently when wartime battle communications swamp every channel. And when war ends, emergency needs for reconstruction are no less demanding.
The last urgent and one-time call from the Pelagic, giving trajectories for nine small objects, goes unheeded.
The pods drift through space. The sedated infants within them dream on. Their sun-centered orbits carry them steadily closer to the monitored zone of the Inner System, but they move at a snail's pace, too slow for the internal resources of the pods. Life-support systems, intended for at most a few weeks' use, begin to fail. The pods' own calls for help continue, but they, too, weaken, merging into the galactic radio hiss that fills all of space.
Months pass. The pods drift on, interplanetary flotsam borne on sluggish tides of radiation pressure and the changing currents of gravitational force.
No one knows that they exist.