Firebird

by Jack McDevitt

  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 The twenty-year-old had been replaced by an elderly gentleman with a neatly shaved beard.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.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  Life is at heart a question of geometry. Approach each issue from the correct angle, and you cannot go far wrong.

  —Mara Delona, Travels with the Bishop, 1404

  We brought Belle back to port and began getting ready, finally, to go after the Firebird. Meantime, the interest in the Chris Robin antiquities continued to surge. The people who’d bought them originally could have parted with them at a considerable profit. And Alex admitted that we’d held the auction too soon.

  Orders and requests came in, sometimes accompanied by complaints about Alex, or cheers from people urging him to continue his “good work.” Many of our new clients seemed to think he was simply an employee, and that he should be promoted or dismissed.

  But the increased activity, somehow, didn’t help the time pass. I kept thinking about that open outer hatch. So, okay, when Cermak and Robin left the Firebird, they’d forgotten to close up. And the AI was not working or it would have done it for them. So it was no big deal. But there was something about it that chilled me.

  Shara reported that the effort to track lost ships, which they were now calling the Firebird Project, was going reasonably well. “The big problem,” she told us one evening over dinner, “is that we don’t really know enough about the black-hole population. How many are there? The only way you can spot them is by the gravitational effects. Estimates are that we only know about ten percent of the total within two thousand light-years. My own feeling is that there aren’t nearly as many of them as most people think. But ask me what I base that on, and it comes down to pure guesswork.” She grinned. “Or maybe pure optimism.”

  Finally, it was time to go.

  I went up to Skydeck to conduct a preflight with Belle. But I went a day early, so I could spend a rare evening at the Pilots’ Club. I love the place. I’ve a lot of old friends there, and more than a few memories. I was in the middle of helping one of them celebrate her escape from a tiresome boyfriend when Alex called. “I’ve arranged to have an extra pressure suit delivered.”

  “Okay.” That induced another chill. We hadn’t really discussed it, but we were both hoping, against all the odds, that we’d find Chris Robin on board. Waiting to be rescued.

  What were the chances? Remote, at best. Probably nonexistent. Even if time on the ship passed only when it had surfaced, six hours out of every two weeks since 1393, he would still have been on board for almost eight months. The air supply for one person might be adequate, but it would have been unlikely that he’d have had enough food and water. So we were, in effect, hoping for a miracle. Which was why neither of us ever mentioned it. And why the open hatch was so depressing.

  And why Alex was bringing along an extra pressure suit.

  “Are you on Belle now?” he asked.

  I knew he could hear the music in the background. “Yes,” I said.

  “Good. They should be contacting you shortly about the suit.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll see you in the morning, Chase.”

  I was on the bridge doing my routine flight check when Alex, carrying a couple of small bags, arrived, trailing a cloud of media guys. Somebody had called them to let them know we were headed out somewhere, and that was all it took. Where are you going, Alex? Does this have anything to do with Save-the-Boxes? With the ancient ships? With Christopher Robin?

  Alex told them we were just going out looking for an artifact, but he refused to say which one. “Sorry, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “but it’s our policy not to reveal what we’re looking for in advance. I’m sure you can understand why.”

  Hands went up. More questions were shouted. But he pushed through into the airlock.

  A Courier reporter was right behind him. “When will you be back, Alex?” he asked.

  “We’ll only be gone a few days, Larry.”

  He closed the outer hatch, sealing them off. Two minutes later, he came through into the cabin, looking relieved. “Love the media,” he said.

  “Hi, Alex,” I said. “How’s it going?”

  “I’m not sure. How in hell did they get up here so early?”

  “Took the early flight, I guess.”

  “How we doing? Ready to go?”

  “We’re scheduled out in about a half hour.”

  “Okay, I’m going to get unpacked.” He looked at me. “Good luck,” he said.

  We had no trouble finding the Firebird. We arrived in the target area, and had been waiting only a few hours when Belle reported a contact. “Directly ahead,” she said. “Range nine hundred kilometers.”

  I noted the time. “It just appeared, Belle?”

  “It would have had to. It wasn’t there a moment ago.”

  “Okay. Alex? We’ve got it.”

  He was in the passenger cabin. “Coming.”

  “We have a visual.”

  “Let’s see it.”

  She put it on the display. It was too far out to get much of an image, but I could make out the lights.

  Alex came in behind me.

  “As soon as you’re belted down,” I said, “we’ll be on our way.”

  “Very good.” He lowered himself into the right-hand seat, and I activated the restraint.

  “Belle, we want to pull alongside.”

  She began to accelerate and adjusted course. We were pressed gently back into our seats. “We should rendezvous in approximately ninety minutes.”

  I squeezed Alex’s shoulder. “Congratulations.”

  “Not yet,” he said.

  “You still want to board the vehicle?” asked Belle.

  “Yes.” Silly question.

  “I will line us up appropriately.”

  Alex took a deep breath. “Open a channel to it, Belle.”

  Status lights blinked. “Done.”

  “We’ve already tried that,” I said.

  “I know.” He took a deep breath. “Firebird, this is the Belle-Marie. Please respond.”

  Static.

  “Professor Robin, are you there?”

  An hour and a half later, we drew alongside. The yacht looked exactly as it had two weeks earlier: The cockpit was dark, but the cabin lights were still on. There was no movement anywhere inside. And watching it from a few meters away was different from seeing it on a screen at the country house. When we were back home, it simply looked empty. Up close, we could feel the emptiness. Not so much empty, maybe, as abandoned. An effect emphasized by the open hatch.

  “You really do think he got stranded here, don’t you?” I said.

  He didn’t reply.

  We eased in alongside. I was looking out at bolts and struts, at the yacht’s scanners, which were rotating slowly, and at the serial number VV4-771 emblazoned on the hull. And that name again: Tai Ling. “We should have a couple of hours before we need to worry about its making another jump,” said Alex. “Still, we don’t want to spend any more time in there than necessary.”

  We were already in our suits. The third one was in a storage bin aft. We left it.

  “We will be braking slightly,” said Belle. “Get hold of something.”

  We did, and there was a slight jar, p
ulling us both forward a step, as we matched velocity. “Okay,” she said. “This is as close as we’re going to get.”

  The Veiled Lady looked brighter, denser, bigger, than it ever had before. Don’t know why. My imagination was going full bore. I felt as if I’d gotten to know Chris Robin, and I was hoping that, yes, in spite of everything, he was over there, asleep in the cabin, waiting for rescue.

  The sky was filled with stars, and I remembered the old Greek line about how they looked like the campfires of an invading army. We were tethered to each other. Just in case. And we wore links so that Belle could follow everything.

  The open hatch was directly across from us, only about fifteen meters away. I pushed off, floated across, and landed inside the Firebird airlock.

  I turned back to Alex. “Okay,” I said. “Whenever you’re ready. Go easy—”

  He stepped out of the airlock. I watched the hatch close behind him as he drifted over, and it’s funny how long something like that seems to take. It was only seconds when I was crossing, but Alex had almost no experience with this kind of thing, and I was concerned how he might be reacting. But I think he became aware that my breathing had picked up, and he told me to relax. Halfway across, he switched his wrist lamp on.

  He arrived in good form, tumbling in, and if I’m making it sound as if it was a clumsy crossing, I don’t mean to. It’s hard to be graceful in zero gravity when you’re wearing a suit. If you get where you’re going, you’ve done pretty well.

  I removed the tethers. Alex turned the lamp on the control pad. I pushed, and the outer hatch slid down while an overhead light came on. The status board began blinking, indicating that air had begun to flow into the chamber. “When we get inside, Chase,” he said, “don’t remove your helmet. In case we have to get out in a hurry.”

  We still couldn’t be certain that the ship might not submerge ahead of schedule. The exit process, the fadeaway, took slightly more than two minutes. I timed the pressurization procedure, and suspected Alex was doing the same thing. When, finally, the hatch slid up, and we looked into the passenger cabin, two minutes and forty-three seconds had passed. Assuming the reverse process took as long, if the yacht started its jump while we were inside, we would not get clear.