Firebird

TWENTY-FIVE

We wandered back toward the deck and eased into the lounge chairs. “Chase,” he said, “if Robin had figured out a way to send the Firebird forward, however we want to phrase that, he'd want to go back to it at the conclusion of the experiment, if for no other reason than to check the onboard clocks. So they could see how much time had passed on the yacht.”

“I'd think so, yes.”

“Okay so far. Let's assume for a minute that Robin could set the Firebird to submerge the way these other ships did. Accept that he'd figured out how to plot a course. And could control where it would show up again. If you could do that, and you wanted to test the system, how long a jump would you want?”

“Maybe two meters.”

“Of course. When would you want it to reappear?”

“Five minutes later?”

“Good. So we keep everything as short as possible. Maybe two meters and five minutes is a bit too short. They couldn't manage that or they wouldn't have had to go back two weeks later. So that gives us the time span. Roughly.”

“Okay, Alex. But where were they when they began the initial launch?”

“They'd want to get far enough out that Skydeck wouldn't be able to track them.”

“Cermak mentioned, what, two hundred billion kilometers to his brother.” Alex nodded. “Well, that's certainly well out of sight. A lot farther than they'd need to go. But okay. Let's say two hundred billion klicks. Which way?”

“I'd say in the direction of the target.”

“Uriel.”

“Yes.”

I had to stop and think. “All right, Alex. And that would be from where we were forty-one years ago. The sun's moved a considerable distance since then.”

“We are now almost,” said Jacob, sounding amused, “three hundred billion kilometers from that location.”

“Thanks, Jacob.”

“You are most certainly welcome, Chase.”

“Alex, is the Firebird going to continue to emerge, go back under, and emerge again every two weeks, indefinitely?”

“If not,” he said, “we've no chance to find it.”

“Okay. But I still don't see how we can manage this. Every two weeks for forty-one years. How can we begin to figure out where it would be now? We don't even know how far it will go in a jump.”

“We can make a decent guess.”

“Based on what?”

“If you were selecting a length for each jump, would you pick 946 kilometers? Or a thousand?”

“A thousand, of course.”

“Okay.”

“So we're going to assume a thousand kilometers.”

“Yes.”

“Alex, that's pure guesswork.”

“It's a beautiful night.”

I knew that smug tone. “What aren't you telling me?”

“Remember the Carmichael Club? How far do you walk to prove your point?”

Ah, yes. “A thousand kilometers.”

“Bingo.”

“Okay, it sounds reasonable.”

“We'll go out to the launch site, or to what we hope is the launch site, just to make sure it isn't traveling a couple of meters with each jump. Then we'll assume a thousand kilometers. We'll send Belle out to look. Give it two weeks. Then we'll move on.”

“I'm trying to do the math.”

“Forty-one years times twenty-six times whatever we settle on for a routine jump.”

“Twenty-nine times,” said Jacob. “It hasn't been forty-one years to the day.”

“Using a thousand klicks to start, Jacob, how much would that be?”

“Approximately 1,066,000 kilometers.”

“Okay. That's where we look for the Firebird. If that doesn't work, we try two thousand kilometers-”

“Which would put us at about two million one-”

“Yes.”

“Sounds ridiculous.”

“Let's not lose sight of the fact that the Breakwater had to find them, too. That should mean we may hear a radio signal when the ship surfaces.”

I looked out across the grounds. A kara was standing at the edge of the trees, munching something, watching us. “Something bothers me, though, Alex,” I said.

“The two hundred billion kilometers?”

“Yes.”

“I know.”

“If they only want to get beyond Skydeck's ability to observe what they're doing, that's way over the mark.”

“Well,” Alex said, “maybe they were just playing it safe.”

“You don't believe that.”

“I think we're still missing something. But maybe we'll get lucky.”

Alex had questions for Shara, but when we called, her AI answered. “Dr. Michaels is on a field trip,” it said. “May I be of assistance?”

Alex grumbled something. “Can you contact her?”

“She is off-world at the moment, but should be home within two weeks, Mr. Benedict. Do you wish to leave a message?”

“Just ask her to call me, please.”

I didn't really have to go up to Skydeck to program Belle. But I decided I would. It was the first time we'd be sending her out on her own, and it would have seemed a bit cold to just call her and tell her good-bye.

Alex looked at the time and remembered he had an appointment. He hurried off, and I was getting ready to leave for the day when Charlie asked if I was busy. He was speaking over the house system, of course. “Hi, Charlie,” I said, “what can I do for you?”

“I hope you'll forgive me, Chase, but I was listening in when you and Alex were planning the Uriel flight.”

“Yes?”

“I was wondering if I could go along?”

“We're not really going to Uriel, Charlie. It's just-”

“I understand that. But I'd like to go with you.”

“You don't like being inside.”

“I love to travel.”

I pulled on my jacket while I thought about it. “Okay,” I said. “I don't see a problem with it.

“Thank you, Chase.”

I don't think Alex ever really understood how deep my affection for his uncle had been. I met my current boss shortly after the Capella went missing. And we've never talked much about it. You'd think that, with the two of us working together, we'd have laid everything on the table. But we both kept it pretty much bottled up.

I loved Gabe. In the widest possible sense. He enjoyed life and was always telling stories on himself. He never hesitated to give credit to his colleagues, and to me, when he could. He shared Alex's passion for the past although it had taken him in a different direction.

He was constantly offering to fix me up with one of the younger guys at the dig sites, although, he'd say with a wink, I'd have to be a bit tolerant. “You know how these archeological types are.”

He'd never mentioned Alex to me. So it came as something of a shock when, the first time I saw him, I found myself looking at a guy who might have been Gabe's (much) younger twin.

Alex was haunted by the knowledge that his uncle had been disappointed in him. That had Gabe been around, he would probably have been one of the guys on the talk shows disparaging what Alex had done with his life.

But he was, after all, the real reason Alex and I were together. And I fully grasped the implications: that if we were right about Chris Robin, he might have held the key to retrieving thousands of people stranded in lost ships, and, possibly, to heading off future incidents. Gabe had been lost years after Robin disappeared, so it was possible- Well, best to let it go.

For us, of course, Gabe was the face of the victims. And it left me with a sense of admiration for Robin, that he had invested so much effort in the project even though, as far as we were aware, he had no skin in the game. There'd been no indication anywhere that a friend or relative of his had been among the victims.

You don't like being inside.

I looked up at the country house as I left. I'd be back in two days. But I stopped and gazed at the light coming from Alex's quarters on the second floor. Everything else was dark.

When we'd first heard about the Capella, we had both assumed that Gabe was dead. That they were all dead. Now I had this image of Gabe and twenty-six hundred other passengers and crew trapped, with no hope of rescue, on a ship going nowhere. It would be a grim end, when they ran out of food, or air, or power, or whatever went first. They would know what was coming, and they'd have no idea what had happened.

“Where, actually, will I be?” asked Belle.

I produced a chip and inserted it. “Here's your destination.”

She needed a moment to retrieve the data. Then: “It's in deep space. In the pit.”

“Yes.”

“So what am I looking for?”

“You're going to the launch point for the Firebird. The protocol is included with the new data. Go out to the designated area and wait. You'll be watching for the yacht to appear. And when it does, if it does, you may get a radio signal. Do as wide a search as you can. All we want you to do is determine whether it shows up. If you don't see anything after two weeks, proceed to the next observation point. And so on. Continue until we recall you. Okay?”

“Yes. What are the odds of success?”

“We don't know.”

“You'll get permission for me to depart?”

“That's done.”

“Okay.”

“If you see it, Belle, try to get pictures. Close-ups as much as possible.”

“Very good, Chase. I'll do what I can.”

“I know you will. Something else we need. If you can, get the times of arrival and departure. As precisely as possible.”

“Okay. Anything else?”

“Yes. Try to communicate with it. We think the AI isn't active, but it won't hurt to try. And if anything happens, let us know immediately, okay?”

“Absolutely.”

“One other thing. Charlie asked if he could go along.” I pulled the beige box out of my pocket and started to install him into the comm system.

“You might have asked first.”

The response startled me. “You have a problem with him?”

“No. In fact, I'll enjoy the company. But that's not the point.”

“I'm sorry if I offended you, Highness.”

“Chase-” She sounded hurt. “You're sending me out for who knows how long. If you're going to provide company, at least check with me first. Is that really asking too much?”

Alex was not optimistic. “It's a long shot,” he told me. “But at the moment, it's all we have.”

Belle reported in the first morning. An ordinary radio transmission would have taken more than a week to get to us. So Belle used hyperlink, which works best when you stay with text transmissions.

1717. Negative on the Firebird.

I asked how things were going with Charlie.

1727. Charlie's fine. Fine. We've been discussing human rationality. I never cease to be amazed at the incredible stupidity of many of those who function as leaders. And the willingness of so many to lend support. How else explain the wars, the cruelty, the economic collapses, the religious conflicts?

I thought about asking her how, if she was right, she explained the rise of civilization out of the general turmoil. But I let it go. “Okay. Tell Charlie we said hello.”

When Alex read it, he wondered whether we'd made a mistake sending Charlie along. “I've never heard her talk like that before. I wonder if he's a negative influence.”

“Don't know,” I said. “I wouldn't have thought Belle was that impressionable. She does seem to have changed since we brought Charlie back.”

“She's not the only one.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Have you talked with Jacob recently?”

The hunt for the Firebird became the center of life at the country house. Alex slipped into automatic, taking good care of clients as he always did, but his heart wasn't in it. I waded through the administrative stuff and tracked down a lost gravesite, thereby putting Alex on the trail of the murder weapon used by the infamous Catman during his tenth-century homicidal spree, and discovering in the process who he really was. But that's another story.

Meanwhile, Jacob relayed the same routine calls, clients looking for a lost book, or who'd agreed to sell a chair in which a famous literary figure had once sat and who wanted to know its actual market value (never mind how the official listings read). Or from the local Sigma Club asking whether Alex would be willing to speak at a luncheon and, if so, what his honorarium might be.

I thought the big moment had arrived when Jacob interrupted a dental checkup. But it was something else entirely. He'd heard a report of a white Lance skimmer colliding with the side of a building. And he was concerned it might have been me.

By the end of the week, I'd begun not to think about it so much. When another week passed, I told Belle to move on to the second site, which was at a distance of 1,066,000 kilometers. “Down the line,” which quickly became our catchphrase for failure.