Coming Home

Thirty-six

Finally it was time to go. John conducted a briefing for the pilots from a conference room at the Department of Transportation. Approximately thirty people were there. The rest of us watched by HV. “Since we don’t know precisely when it will appear,” he said, “we’ll arrive four days early and maintain the search around the clock. That means you should be on station at 1600 hours on the twelfth. Check in with your squadron commander as soon as you arrive. The formation will be spherical and centered on the Dauntless, which will be placed as close to the anticipated arrival site as we can manage. Unless you’re on the outer boundary of the formation, the six ships closest to you will be at a range of fifteen thousand kilometers. Those will be operating above and below you, fore and aft, and on either side.

“One other thing: Unless you’re carrying lifeboats, we want only the pilot in each ship. If you need an additional person for any reason, check with your squadron or division commander. We need to conserve our life-support capabilities.

“Your position in the formation will be assigned this evening. We don’t expect the Capella to appear before 1600 hours on the sixteenth. But we could be wrong about that. We could also be wrong in our estimate that it will arrive inside the search area. So we need everyone to maintain vigilance in all directions. If anyone locates it, or notices anything out of the ordinary, notify your commander immediately but take no action until you receive instructions.”

A hand went up. “If it doesn’t show up, John, how long will we wait?”

“We’re hoping everyone will be willing to give it three or four days, if necessary. The Dauntless, and the StarCorps ships, will wait as long as it takes. StarCorps, by the way, already has units in place in case it arrives early. In that event, we will probably be unable to load lifeboats, but we will do what we can.

“We anticipate that when it does arrive, it will be accessible for approximately seven or eight hours. If you become part of the contact group, you will likely be closer to the action than the Dauntless. But be careful. It will get busy very quickly. If you do not have lifeboats on board, your mission will be to take off as many people as you can as quickly as you can. Once you have them on board, get clear so someone else can move in.

“Be aware that our principal objective is to get the lifeboats loaded onto the Capella. If we can rescue some people at the same time, that’s good. But do not under any circumstances get in the way of the teams that are trying to transfer the boats. Vehicles with boats will have radio ID’s and blue-and-white blinkers. They will be given right of way.”

Another hand went up. “Do the people on the Capella know they’re in trouble?”

“We haven’t had contact with them, Maureen. So we have no way of knowing. But probably they do. From their perspective, they will have surfaced off schedule and gone down again without initiating the action. So I’d be surprised if Captain Schultz is not aware she’s in trouble.

“I’m sure most of you know that Robert Dyke is among the passengers. We’ll have several teams of physicists and engineers spread around in the rescue force. What we want to do is talk to him. Give him what we have and find out if he might be able to help. Do not, however, initiate contact with the Capella. If they contact you, pass it on to your squadron commander immediately. Since we do not know the situation aboard ship, do not allow yourself to get into a conversation with them. News of radio contact should be passed to the Dauntless, and we will take it from there. Is that clear to everyone?”

I took the shuttle to Skydeck a few hours later. The normal routine for anyone who maintained a ship at the station was that you notified them in advance when you would be using it, and it was waiting for you in one of the eight docks. But under the pressure of the rescue fleet being assembled, traffic was so heavy that they directed me to report to one of the operations offices, from which I was conducted to the maintenance area. There I boarded the Belle-Marie. There were probably twenty other ships, all crowded into a relatively small space. Two freighters and a fleet cruiser were floating outside the station.

I sat down on the bridge, said hello to Belle, and started running the checklist. Outside, a few lights broke through the darkness. “Do you know how to get us out of here?” I asked Belle.

“Yes,” she said. “No problem.”

I finished the preflight and checked in with ops.

“Belle-Marie,” said a male voice, “it’ll be a few minutes. We’ll get back to you.”

“Copy that.”

Sitting on the bridge in a sparsely lit enclosure is different from being under a dark sky. It can become oppressive. I was glad when my link buzzed. It was Alex. “How’s it going?”

“I’m waiting to launch.”

“You have a minute?”

“As far as I know. What’s going on?”

“I’ve been doing some research. Thought you might be interested in what I found.”

“Sure. What is it?”

“I’ve been reading Harvey Foxworth’s Walking Through the Rubble. It’s a history of archeological efforts to reconstruct the major events of the Dark Age. It was written a thousand years ago, but it’s the classic work on the era. Foxworth has some details regarding Dmitri Zorbas that I haven’t seen before. He kept a diary, Zorbas did, but never allowed it to be published. After his death, Jerome Zorbas, his brother, apparently under instructions, destroyed it.”

“You think they destroyed it because it revealed the location of the artifacts?”

“There’s no way to know.”

“So what good does it do us if it’s been destroyed?”

“It provides credence to the probability that Zorbas had the artifacts and hid them.”

“Maybe. On the other hand, maybe they destroyed it because he had too many women in his life.”

“I didn’t say it was a confirmation, Chase. But Foxworth thinks he salvaged the contents of the Prairie House. Zorbas came from a wealthy family, so he had resources. We’ve known that. The family maintained a home, according to the book, ‘in a safe place’ well away from their quarters in Union City. Unfortunately, there’s still no hint where that might have been. Foxworth comments that, at the height of the period, there were no safe places. There are a couple of pictures of Rodia, standing with her husband. These were the first pictures I’d seen of Zorbas himself. He always seems to be wearing a backpack. He’s on a horse in a couple of them. And there’s one with him standing with a group of guys beside what appears to be a lander. It’s hard to be sure because the technology was so primitive. But they’re laughing, and everybody’s got a bottle.

“Something else,” said Alex. “About the internet failure.” Terrorist attacks had gradually disrupted it and eventually took it down worldwide. It was one of the causes of the Dark Age. Some historians think it was the prime cause.

“They lost almost everything,” he continued. “I’m talking about books now. A lot of the minor stuff, administrative records and avatars and medical data and whatnot, stuff that was maintained on local data nets, survived. But they lost pretty much every book that didn’t exist as a print copy somewhere. And print copies don’t have a good survival record over time. Anyhow, Zorbas set up a team to rescue whatever books they could. Foxworth has put together a long list of titles that he credits Zorbas with saving.”

The list appeared on my auxiliary screen. It included Cicero and several Greek and Roman plays, Chaucer, Rabelais, two Dickens novels, and three of the six surviving Shakespearean plays. And a book that one of my high-school teachers had used, she’d said, with the hope that it would create a passion for reading: Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles. I remember how disappointed I’d been later when I learned the Martian canals had been pure fantasy.

There were probably two hundred titles in all. They weren’t all classics, but the mere fact that they’d survived gave them considerable value.

“Zorbas,” I said, “must have been one hell of a guy.”

“Yeah. He was. But I suspect he’d be unhappy if he knew how things have turned out with the museum artifacts.”

“Have you had any luck locating Madeleine O’Rourke?” The woman who’d pretended to be The Plains Drifter reporter.

“No. She’s done a decent job of keeping out of sight.”

“Pity. She might be the key to this business.”

“My thought exactly.” He paused. “What are you going to do about Khaled?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you know we’ll be going back to Earth when this business with the Capella is over.”

“Actually, I didn’t know that. Why will we be going back to Earth?”

“Because we haven’t found the artifacts yet.”

“Oh. Does that mean you know where to look?”

“Not yet. But we’ll find out.”

“How will we do that?”

“I’m not sure yet. But Baylee figured it out.”

“Maybe we’re not as smart as he was.”

“Maybe not. Chase, are you still not moving?”

“That is correct. I’m sitting in a basement.”

“Well, enjoy.” He paused. “Listen, keep me informed, okay? And if by any chance you get seriously lucky and have Gabe among your passengers on the way back, let me know. I’d want to be there when you come in.”

I waited almost half an hour before clearance came. Then doors opened, and we passed through into the docking area and out through another set of doors into the night. Belle set course, and, finally, we were on our way.

I made my jump, divided my time between reading and sleeping, and eventually surfaced just outside the target zone. At least that was Belle’s best estimate.

Belle worked to get an angle on our position while I checked in with the Dauntless. When I’d finished, she informed me we’d need thirty-six hours to arrive on station. “Find a good book,” she said.

We had some material about Baylee in the library, and I settled in with it. There were a couple of histories that had information on his assorted treks around terrestrial archeological sites. I sat looking at pictures of him standing with a spade in one hand at an Egyptian dig site, directing excavations at Chicago, examining ancient English inscriptions on a building in the American Southwest, talking with locals near Roman ruins. There were pictures of him and his team working at the Broomar site on Mars. And investigating an early space station orbiting Jupiter.

Lawrence Southwick had obviously spent more time with him than I realized. He was in many of the photos. And there was somebody else. In a picture from the Nevada desert, near the Phoenix ruins, a young woman stood between Baylee and Southwick. A fedora was pulled down to block off the sun. It was hard to make out her face. But I knew her.

“Who is it?” asked Belle.

“It’s Madeleine O’Rourke.”

“The reporter?”

The caption identified her as Heli Tokata.