Echo

TWENTY-SEVEN

“It was a fluxer,” Fenn said. We were in his office.

“A what?” I asked.

“Universal solvent. It was placed on one of the support beams. Held in place by a magnet.”

“What do you carry a universal solvent in?” I asked.

“It gets mixed as it gets sprayed, Chase.”

“I know who’s doing it,” I said.

Both men looked at me in surprise. “Who’s that?” asked Fenn.

“She’s tall, pale, thin. Looks like a mortician. I saw her on the train to Carnaiva, and saw her again the last time I ate at Tardy’s. She was there this morning.”

“You can identify her?”

“Absolutely.”

“All right. Why don’t you look through our files, and we’ll see if we can figure out who she is.”

He turned on a display.

“Before we start,” I said, “I have a question.”

“Sure.”

“The woman who died out there today. Who was she?”

“Her name was Mira Espy. She was twenty.”

Mira hadn’t lived long enough to accomplish much. She looked good, and she enjoyed parties. She was in school, and had a part-time job as a medical receptionist. Judging from the turnout at the memorial service, she had a lot of friends.

The Mortician was Petra Salyeva. She’d been denied a physics doctorate after threatening the life of a young man who hadn’t paid sufficient attention to her. Doctors had diagnosed her with Kalper’s Disease, which severely limits the ability to experience empathy. Authorities were contemplating a mind wipe, but she disappeared while they debated. She was a killer for hire. Current whereabouts unknown. Though not anymore.

She was, by the way, a pilot, although her license had been revoked.

“You’re sure that’s her?” Fenn asked.

“No question.”

“Okay. She’s good at what she does. So we’ll have to assign a security detail. Until we can lock her down.”

So I acquired a guard. Her name was Rhonda.

Entries in the Rainbow Cosmic Tour Contest began to come in, at first occasionally, but by the end of the week, we had more than six hundred, encompassing both stills and holograms, and even an audio that was simply a record of a conversation between a young girl, probably about nine, and a ship’s captain. It was from Barkley Tours, six years ago, and its description of the child’s admiration for the soft glow of a moon illuminated by a blue star was touching. We would, I decided, include it in Cosmic Wonders.

The vast majority of the entries were from recent voyages. Only a handful, about twenty, originated from World’s End and could be placed within the 1402-3 time period. None of those featured Rachel, but usually we didn’t know until we’d looked because hardly any of the tourists remembered what their captain’s name had been.

One woman recalled a flight she’d been on. “It was the ultimate romantic cruise. There were eight of us, four young couples. We went to one world where they had three moons and the most beautiful skies I’ve ever seen. The tour company had four cottages waiting. They cooked dinner for us over an open fire, and we sang songs, and listened to the noises in the woods. And at another place, we were able to swim in a stream—”

Another narrator, in an entry titled “Standing on the Shore,” remembered a world on which life was getting started. It was still confined to the oceans, and he recalled the eerie sensation of standing on a beach on a world teeming with living things, none of which was visible.

The days passed, and entries continued to arrive. And, finally, we got one with Rachel. Dated late winter, 1402.

The accompanying vids were mostly set inside the ship, which was identified as the Silver Comet. People looked out the viewports, stood smiling beside their captain, pretended to study star charts, embraced, offered toasts, danced, and sang. But there were also images of planets, moons, asteroids, and rings. And an enormous world, almost but not quite massive enough, according to Captain Rachel, to ignite and become a star. It threw off occasional jets.

She was easy to like. She paid attention to the passengers, was especially good with the two kids on board, never allowed herself to get annoyed even when the questions were dumb.

They partied, literally cheered when the Comet drew close to an abandoned space station somewhere in the Veiled Lady, raised their glasses to a beautiful blue world that bore a remarkable resemblance to Earth, and drew to within two hundred meters of a real comet. It was a fireball, and Rachel got giggles from the kids when she asked whether anyone would like to go down and look around.

All told, we collected holograms from three of her missions. The other two were dated in 1399, and in the early spring of 1403. We didn’t have an exact date of departure for Rachel’s final mission, but we knew she’d quit in the spring. The system they’d visited had received one of the standard-issue names assigned by World’s End to attract the interest of potential customers. It was Echo, so called, according to the company, because its soft light, on two terrestrial worlds, would “remind you of your youth.” It was billed as the most romantic spot in the Veiled Lady.

But nobody knew, three decades later, where Echo was, or which star it had been. So we sent the visuals to Shara, who had agreed to try to pinpoint the system.

I took advantage of the opportunity the following day to stop by her office. I was accompanied by Rhonda. Shara said she hadn’t had a chance yet to look at the data. But she was clearly impressed by my security. “The little green men getting that dangerous?” she asked.

I told her about the attack on the river. “I saw something about that,” she said. “I didn’t realize you and Alex were involved.”

Rhonda stayed at a substantial distance. Either because she felt she’d get a better view of the surroundings that way, or she was allowing me a modicum of privacy. “We almost lost Alex,” I said.

Shara motioned me toward a conference room. “It’s more comfortable in here, Chase.”

Rhonda checked the room first, then took up a position at the door.

“Do you think,” I asked, “you’ll be able to figure out where the ship was?”

“Probably.”

“What’s the method? You going to use a spectroscope?” I was showing off a little. I’d expected she’d try to use spectroscopic analyses to identify the sun.

“Wouldn’t work,” she said. “An imaging system doesn’t give you an accurate gauge of the light. It would be easy if we could, but we’re going to have to do some pattern-matching. But we should be able to make it happen. As long as you sent us some decent shots.”

“So how do you do it?”

She got some coffee out of a machine, handed me a cup, and tried to give another one to the guard. Rhonda smiled and declined. “We want wide-angle shots where possible,” Shara said. “Then all we have to do is identify one star. Once I’ve done that, I can put together a spherical 3-D map with that star as the center. The image will give us a kind of pie-slice wedge cut out of the map with the ship at the point of the wedge. There’ll be just one spot in the map that matches the image.”

“Okay,” I said, not entirely sure I got it. But she seemed to know what she was talking about. “Sounds good to me.”

“If we can identify additional stars, it’ll go even faster.” She smiled. “Okay?”

“Absolutely,” I said.

“How about lunch?”

“Where do you suggest?”

Rhonda insisted we eat in the cafeteria.

When I got back to the country house, another Rachel hologram was waiting. But it was dated 1399, too early to be helpful. I watched it anyhow. Watched as she managed the tourists with aplomb and the controls with a steady hand. I got a better close-up of her operational skills with this one than I had with the others. She knew her way around the bridge, and she was as emotionally caught up in the tours as the clients.

Her voice deepened with emotion as she arced her ship around the curve of a terrestrial world while the tourists watched a golden sunrise. She took them over placid oceans, and clouds drifting in moonlight. She descended into canyons on rugged lunar surfaces and glided just above the atmosphere of a gas giant while showing her passengers an enormous, vaporous creature that moved silently through the haze. They watched it suck up gases, and she told them it was a gobble, and they all laughed.

When I got to the country house next morning, Jacob was waiting. “Shara called. She has some results.”

“Good. See if you can get her, Jacob.” He’d already informed Alex, but star positions meant nothing to him, so he’d set it aside until I arrived. Now he came into the office just as Shara blinked on. “Hi, Chase. I’ve sent the details over with the visuals.”

“Thanks,” I said. “What did you get?”

“The system’s catalog number is YL69949. It’s a class-G sun. Located in the Veiled Lady, out toward the Jordanian Cloud.”

“Okay.”

“Margin of error is less than two percent.”

Alex was delighted. “Excellent, Shara. Thank you.”

“My pleasure.”

“We’ll be going out there once we get everything together. You want to come?”

“No, thanks. I like stuff that’s predictable.”

I worked late that evening, doing a survey: None of the touring companies were going to YL69949. None had a record of ever having been there. When I was about to leave, I opened my channel to Alex to say good night, but Jacob alerted me that he was outside the house.

We were keeping the blinds down, as a security measure. I went over and looked through them. Alex was standing in the moonlight near the edge of the forest. Just standing there. I knew his security guard couldn’t be happy about it.

Considering the mood Shara’s success had engendered, I was surprised to see him out there. I hung on until he and the guard came back inside. “You okay?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said. “Just going for a walk.”

“Part of your exercise routine?”

“Pretty much.” The guard retired to his station, which was directly across the corridor from my office. Alex looked at the clock. “What are you doing in here at this hour?”

I told him. Checking to see whether anybody goes out to Echo.

He nodded. “Go home.”

“Okay.”

He stood near the foot of the staircase. “Chase,” he said, “I’m sorry I got you into this.”

“It’s okay. Not your fault.”

“I wish we’d never seen the damned thing.”