Firebird

THIRTY-ONE

The time of the sighting, 1121 hours, was of course our time. What Alex liked to call country-house time. A second message followed moments after I showed up with the champagne:

1127. It just jumped in. Have gone to intercept course.

Then another:

1129. Target vehicle is under power. Am attempting radio contact. Range approx 600 km.

And:

1134. No response to radio call. Or to blinking light.

Alex got up from his chair and moved closer to the display. The view from the Belle-Marie appeared. A sky full of stars. A marker blinked on. This one.

1139. Location as indicated. No details yet.

I sat back. Tried to relax. “We're lucky,” I said. “I didn't think we'd find it this easily.”

“Why not?”

“There's so much empty space.”

“You're saying we just don't have the coordinates down to a sufficient degree.”

“Not exactly. I'm saying that when you're talking about the pit, open space for billions of kilometers in all directions, it's impossible to pin down a location within a few hundred, or a few thousand, kilometers. There's simply no way to measure it. It's like trying to pinpoint a specific butterfly somewhere on the continent when you have only the latitude and longitude.”

“Well, it looks as if we found the butterfly.”

1147. Still no response.

There was nothing visible other than the marker. Then it morphed into a dim ring.

“There it is,” said Alex.

Inside the ring, we began to see a light.

The room grew very quiet. Eventually, the light brightened and broke apart. The ring faded away. And we were looking at the outline of a vehicle.

Lights were fore and aft, and on twin fins. “I wish we had decent communications with Belle,” Alex said. “I hate this long-range stuff.”

1203. It's a Kandor yacht, approx manufacture date mid-14th cent.

Almost a hundred years ago. We'd gone through all the records and had nowhere been able to find a picture of the Firebird. We had no description and had no idea whether it had been a Kandor. But the odds of another vehicle being in the search area were remote.

“Is it at maximum magnification?” he asked.

“Yes.”

1206. I expect to be alongside within two hours. Will send more pictures as situation develops.

The display went blank.

Alex gradually extracted himself from the screen.

He isn't good at sitting still when something's happening. He walked over to the window, adjusted the blinds, wandered off to the rear of the house, came back and asked about a couple of routine business matters, called somebody about the lost comedy shows of Yang Sen Hao and maintained a pleasantly affable manner until he was off-line. Then he grumbled that a little more effort on the part of whomever he'd been talking with would help immensely.

It was almost an hour before the pictures came back.

1251. Interior lights are on. No indication of movement inside.

Alex muttered a barely audible damn. He showed no other reaction.

I decided to put a happy face on things. I should know better, of course. “Major breakthrough,” I said.

“I suppose.”

“Alex, we found the damned thing.”

“I know.”

“Two weeks from now, you and I will be out there.”

“Okay. Are we now in a position where we know exactly where we'll be going? And when we should arrive?”

“There's still a degree of uncertainty about it, Alex. It might take a day or two to get it right.”

“And it's probably only there for a couple of hours. Which means we might not find it at all.”

“That's possible. For one thing, there's no radio signal.”

“Okay. We need more exact data.”

“You want to send Belle a second time?”

“Will that help?”

“Yes. Even if it only tells us where not to look.”

“All right. That's the way we'll do it-” His voice trailed off. He was staring at the display.

I followed his gaze. The airlock was open. Or at least the outer hatch was.

“Can you tell,” he asked, “whether the inner hatch is closed?”

“No. But airlocks are designed so both hatches can't be open at the same time. You can do it, but you need to do an override.”

“So the interior should be secure.”

“I hope so.”

“So do I.” He was quiet for a moment. Then: “Why would they take off and leave it open like that?”

He wandered out and went upstairs. I went back and had some lunch. He skipped it, which was not at all characteristic. I was back in my office when the next message arrived:

1427. Alongside yacht. No response. No sign of activity. Outer airlock hatch open.

The yacht didn't look like something you'd name Firebird. It had originally been designed as a luxury vehicle. That much was obvious enough. But it had a few parts that needed bolting down. And if it had been top-of-the-line in another era, in the current age it appeared pretentious, with pale white struts and ports that resembled teardrops.

Alex, alerted by Jacob, arrived moments later, looked at the message, and lowered himself into a chair.

We were close enough by then to see the yacht's name written in script on the hull. Tai Ling. Robin had never gotten around to changing it.

We had the image for about a minute before Belle cut the transmission again. We couldn't tie up the TDI relay with a two- or three-hour data stream. The cost would have been through the roof, and they probably wouldn't have allowed it anyhow. And there would have been no point to it. Belle continued to send occasional updates, which said nothing had changed.

And, finally:

1619: Beginning to fade.

We began to see stars through it. And, gradually, we simply could not see it at all. It needed just over seventy seconds to submerge. Total elapsed time until the exit process was detected: four hours, fifty-eight minutes.

I responded:

“Move forward to the third target site. Await reappearance.”

We received a transmission from Charlie that evening. The twenty-year-old had been replaced by an elderly gentleman with a neatly shaved beard. He was a scholar now, but he still had the enthusiastic eyes of a kid. “We're at Villanueva,” he said. “In orbit. I'm trying to figure out precisely where we are. But we'll be okay.” He was in the passenger cabin, which, by the standards of the Belle-Marie, was luxurious, with paneled bulkheads and leather chairs. “I wanted you to know how grateful I am. Not only for getting me out of here but for giving me the opportunity to see how beautiful the world is.”

The antiquities business had begun to boom. We were getting more clients than we could handle. And the people who'd sworn they would never deal with us again because of the boxes came back. At least, most of them did. Alex made a comment that it doesn't much matter what you do, whether you are discovered in a public scandal, or make misjudgments that get people killed, or say impossibly silly things. As long as you attain a degree of celebrity, people are willing to forgive anything.

And so it seemed to be. The situation got so out of control that we had to recommend some of our competitors to people who wanted our services. A book appeared, Destiny's Thief\ purporting to do an analysis of Alex's career, and attacking him for not only a life dedicated to robbing tombs, but also involvement in various conspiracies that had made him look like a hero. The latest, according to the author, whom I won't bother to name, was “the very strange business at Salud Afar.”

That got Alex more invitations to appear on the talk shows. The author issued a public challenge and, when Alex declined, maintained that no further proof of the charges was needed. Alex told me he was tired of debating lunatics. The book eventually made the Worldwide bestseller list.

Meantime, Belle settled into her new target area. One week, six days, and nineteen hours slipped past. Then Belle called. Live. “It's here.”

They pinpointed its location, determined that the elapsed time between emergence and the fade-out was six hours, seven minutes.

Alex called Shara to keep her updated. She had news of her own. “I have a couple of graduate students working on the information you got from Winter's notes. And we've been doing some research on the side.” She started digging through images on her display. Picked one and gazed at it for a moment. “I think we're on the right track. Alex, it looks as if we have two sightings coming up during the next few weeks. I'm pretty sure we have the details right.” She shook her head. “I wish we knew more. But it looks as if we're going to get lucky.”

“Two events?” said Alex.

“To be honest, I'd suggest waiting until we have more evidence before pursuing either of them, but there won't be anything else afterward for a long time.”

“How long?”

“Twenty-seven years.” She looked at him, her eyes very round. “At least, that's the earliest one that we know of. There might be others.” Shara got up and came around the front of her desk. “What really strikes me about all this is that the only data we have consists of incidental sightings near stations, or by somebody who just happened to be passing through the area. The odds against getting spotted accidentally during the few hours that one of these ships is visible are so lopsided that the fact that we've seen a few suggests how many lost ships there are out there.”

Alex's mouth tightened. Then he looked over at Gabe's picture. “What's the next event?” he asked.

“Something was seen by a Dellacondan cruiser, 356 years ago. The cruiser was the Banner, and it was operating near Tania Borealis. They watched it for roughly three hours. Got a radio response that no one could understand. Then it faded out.”

“Tania Borealis. Where's that?”

She showed us. Out on the edge of the Confederacy. “Call it the Alpha Object,” she said. “It was a ship, no question about that. But the cruiser could make no real identification. They recorded the direction it was moving. The event rattled the military establishment at the time because of the way it left, fading rather than jumping out. The consensus at the time was that it had to be an alien. The event was kept secret for decades and was eventually uncovered in a document release.

“A second sighting, which was apparently the same object, occurred 178 years later.”

“Why,” I asked, “did anybody think it would be the same object?”

“It was on a line with the original sighting and running the same course. The pickup was made by a deep-space monitor. If in fact both were the same object, another event is imminent.”

“Why?” I asked.

“The second sighting was 178 years ago.”

“When will it happen?” asked Alex.

She checked her notes. “Seven weeks.”

“How precise is the data? If it's there, will we actually be able to find it?”

“The sighting,” she said, “is on record in detail. That means I can give you the exact time of arrival.” She bit her lip. “Well, maybe not the exact time of arrival. But we can get a pretty close approximation of the date. And we know how long it was visible to the observer in each instance before it faded out.”

“How long was that?”

“Five hours and seven minutes on one occasion, four hours and fifty-six minutes on the other.”

“Were you able to trace it back?”

“Yes. The black-hole track takes it to Cormoral. Twenty-three hundred seventeen years ago. Or at least it takes it to the place where Cormoral was at the time. I think we can assume that's where it launched.”

Cormoral.

It was one of those moments when I could hear the air vents. Alex's eyes slid shut. “Was there a report of a lost ship at the time?”

“I couldn't find anything on the record. But we're talking two thousand years. Cormoral was still in its early development stages.”

“What's the second event?”

“It'll occur in eleven weeks.”

“Were you able to track that one back, too?”

“It appears to have originated near Epsilon Aquilae. Its next appearance will be deep in the Karim Sector.”

“The which?” asked Alex.

“The Karim,” I said. “It's a long ride. In the general direction of Antares, but well past it.”

“If we're right about Epsilon Aquilae, it would mean it launched originally from Brandizi.”

“So the thing would date back at least to the sixth millennium.”

“The time line puts it at the fourth. That's why I'm a bit doubtful. If that's correct, this ship is old.”

“Shara,” I said, “how long did that event last? The sighting?”

She shook her head. “I've no way of knowing, Chase. The data's not complete. We haven't seen anything that was longer than six hours, though.” Shara gave us a big smile. “So,” she said, “are we going out to look at any of this stuff? “

“We?” said Alex.

“Well, naturally you'll want an expert along.”

He laughed. “Well, okay. If you insist. We've got something else going that you might be interested in.”

“You found the Firebird?”

“Yes.”

“Wonderful. When are you going after it?”

“After we lock it down a bit more. You want to come?”

She considered it. Shook her head. “I think I'll pass on that one. Got too much black-hole research to do.”