Alex Benedict 07 - Coming Home

by Jack McDevitt

  Baylee was more than moderately handsome. Even in his later years, his features resisted the usual tendency toward gradual decline and ultimate collapse. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and there was something in his eyes that made it clear he was in charge. I could see a distinct resemblance to Marissa, who also showed no reluctance to take over.

  It was impossible to imagine this guy’s coming up with a major discovery and failing to mention it. I sat there looking at a picture of the transmitter.

  * * *

  The second eruption was delivered by Shara Michaels, who called and invited me to dinner at Bernie’s Far and Away.

  “Sounds like a last-minute operation,” I said. “What’s going on?”

  “I have some news. Will you be there?”

  “What time?”

  * * *

  The Far and Away was crowded. A piano played softly in the background. Shara was seated at a corner table with another young woman, probably in her twenties. She waved me over. “Chase,” she said, “this is JoAnn Suttner.” Suttner had chestnut hair and wore a gold blouse and light blue slacks. She and Shara had already drawn the attention of a couple of guys at an adjoining table. I sat down, and we shook hands. “JoAnn’s working with the SRF,” Shara said. “She’s the top gun in megatemp research.” That was shorthand for time-space structure. SRF, of course, was the Sanusar Recovery Force, a team of scientists dedicated to tracking down the lost ships that had gotten tangled in warps caused by the passage of superdense objects. Sanusar was to have been the final port of call for the Capella on that fatal last flight. “Her husband,” she added, “is one of the top mathematicians in the Confederacy.”

  JoAnn rolled her eyes. “She always talks like that, Chase. Anyhow, it’s nice to meet you.”

  “The pleasure’s mine, JoAnn. What’s going on?”

  Interstellars had been disappearing since they first came on the scene back in the third millennium. It’s probably inevitable, when you have hundreds of vehicles traveling among the known systems, and beyond, constantly. Losses have been attributed to a variety of causes. Engine breakdown. Power failure. Deflector malfunction, causing a ship to emerge from transdimensional space into an area already occupied by rocks and even too much dust. When that happens, when two objects try to occupy the same space, you can look for a large explosion. A few incidents were even attributable to hijackings.

  But it turned out there was another reason for at least some of the disappearances. Black holes and other superdense objects traveling through space tend to leave damage in their wake. Not the kind of damage we’d always known about—disrupted stars, planets ripped from orbit, and so forth—but something else entirely. The space/time continuum itself could become twisted. Warped. The result has been that some vehicles, jumping into or possibly out of transdimensional space, got sidetracked. And lost control. They became wrapped in the time/space distortion, and carried a piece of it with them. It continued to affect the vehicle, moving it along its projected course, but causing it to reemerge periodically in linear space. It was also apparent that, on board the ship, the passage of time also became distorted. It was, scientists had come to believe, what had happened to the Capella eleven years earlier.

  We’d recovered three ships since discovering what was happening. In each of them, crew and passengers had known they’d suffered a malfunction, but they’d been totally unaware that weeks and years had been passing in the outside world. One of the three, the Avenger, was a destroyer that had disappeared during the Mute War two centuries ago. For the crew, only four days had passed between making their jump and being rescued. The first recovery had been the Intrépide, which had, incredibly, left its home port seven thousand years earlier. From the perspective of the passengers, the flight had lasted only a few weeks.

  The lost ships were by then commonly referred to as Sanusar objects, named for the world that was to have been the Capella’s final port of call.

  “I’ll tell you what’s going on,” said Shara. A big smile took over her features. “We think we’ve found the Capella.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “Yes. It looks good this time.”

  They’d predicted an arrival more than a year earlier, but the lost ship hadn’t shown up. “You’re not going to get everybody excited again, are you? And then leave them watching blank screens?”

  “Chase,” said Shara, “I’m sorry. We’re still in the early stages of research on this stuff.”

  They thought they’d known where it would be coming in, but the evidence had never arrived, nor, when they sent out a couple of vehicles just to be certain, had the ship. For Alex and me, it was personal. Gabriel Benedict, my former boss and his uncle, was among the passengers. He’d left a message for Alex, informing him about the Tenandrome, which had seen something during an exploratory voyage that the government wanted to keep quiet. It had been the Tenandrome that had brought Alex and me together. “What makes you think you have it this time?”

  JoAnn picked up the conversation. “I’m sorry, Chase. I can imagine what you must have gone through. We’d have kept it quiet until we were certain had we been able to, but there was just no way to do that. But we should be able to do something positive this time. I know everybody thinks we gave up on it. But we didn’t. One of the things we did was to check the record for every sighting that came anywhere near the Capella’s projected course over the last eleven years. And we got lucky. There was a sighting through one of the telescopes in the Peltian System. We couldn’t be sure that it was the Capella. All we got was a glimpse of radiation, but it was located where we’d expected to see her. We sent a ship out, and they picked up a radio signal. And it was the Capella.”

  “Beautiful,” I said. “What did the signal say?”

  “About what you’d expect. That they were lost and were requesting assistance.”

  “When did it happen?”

  “A little over five years ago. The original sighting, that is. Nobody thought anything of it at the time. I mean, we weren’t looking for Sanusar objects then. Nobody really even knew they existed. But when we saw it, we went out and tracked the signal down. It was aimed toward where Rimway would have been if this were still 1424.” The year when the Capella had vanished.

  “So,” I said, “you know when it left Rimway, and when it reappeared. So you know—”

  “—When we can expect it again and where it should be. Yes.” Both of them were beaming. I probably was, too.

  “When’s it going to happen?”

  JoAnn passed the question to Shara, who apparently handled the trivia. “In a bit more than three months,” she said. “It’ll be here on the first day of spring, give or take a day or two.”

  “First day of spring? That sounds like a good omen.”

  The callbox inquired whether we were ready to order. We took a minute to comply, then I asked the critical question: “What are we going to do when it happens? Judging from what we’ve seen with the other vehicles, we’ll only get a few hours’ access. That’s not much time to locate it, get to it, and take twenty-six hundred people off.”

  Shara nodded. “That’s the bad news. We probably won’t be able to rescue everyone this time around. Although JoAnn’s been working on something.”

  Our coffee arrived. JoAnn picked up her cup, looked out at the snow, which had eased off a bit, and put it back down without tasting it. “It might be possible,” she said, “to manipulate the drive unit and shut down the cycle.”

  “You mean to keep the ship from going under again?”

  “Yes. We might be able to stop the process dead in its tracks.”

  “How optimistic are you?”

  “We have a pretty decent chance, actually. Somewhere around a ninety percent probability.”

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s great news.”

  JoAnn nodded, but didn’t look happy. “There’s a downside.”

  “Oh.”

  “There’s also a possibility we could send
the ship out somewhere where we’d lose it again.” Her eyes blazed. “Or we might destabilize everything and destroy it altogether. That’s why we haven’t been making a lot of noise about it.”

  “Is there any way you can eliminate that possibility? I mean, can you run an experiment or something?”

  This time she did taste the coffee. “Unfortunately, there’s a level of uncertainty about all this that we may never get rid of. Not completely. I don’t know. The ranking genius on all this is Robert Dyke.”

  “I’ve heard of him,” I said. “But wasn’t he—?”

  “That’s correct. Like your uncle, he was also on the Capella. He’s maybe the one person in the Confederacy who could work all this stuff out.”

  “So what are we going to do?”

  “Well, you said the right word, Chase. We’re going to run an experiment.”

  “Good. I hope you guys will keep us informed.”

  “We can do better than that,” said Shara. “You and Alex have been a big part of this since the beginning. You can come along if you like. We’re going to put a yacht into the warp, hopefully get it tangled, then see if we can unwrap it. Stabilize it.”

  “That sounds like a good idea,” I said. “And we have an invitation? When?”

  “We’ll be getting set up tomorrow,” said JoAnn. “So figure we leave the day after.”

  Shara smiled uncomfortably. “Sorry about the short notice, Chase. But we just got clearance, and time is a priority.”

  TWO

  The black hole is nature’s ultimate assault on the notion of a reasonable, friendly universe. No advantage can be extracted from its existence. It adds nothing to the majesty of the natural world. And if there is evidence anywhere that the cosmos does not give a damn for its children, this is it.

  —Margaret Wilson, Flameout, 1277

  I called Alex that night and told him about the Capella. “That’s good news,” he said. “I hope they can make something happen. Suttner has a pretty good reputation.”

  “She seemed kind of young for a genius.”

  “That’s the way it usually goes with physicists, Chase. Make your mark before you hit thirty, or you’re out of the game.”

  “They’re running a test of some sort in a couple of days,” I told him, “and they’ve invited us to go along.”

  “In a couple of days? No way I can make that. But you’re going, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay. Everything in shape at the office?”

  “Yes, Alex. Everything’s quiet.”

  “What kind of test?”

  “I don’t really have details. They want to find out whether they can tinker with the drive and stabilize the thing.”

  “Okay. But be careful. Don’t volunteer for anything.”

  “Relax, Alex. Everything will be fine.”

  “I’ll see you when you get back.”

  “There’s something else,” I said. “We might have found a Corbett transmitter.”

  “A what?”

  “A Corbett transmitter.”

  “Would you want to brief me on what that is?”

  That was an enjoyable moment. It’s not often I come in ahead of the boss on an archeological find. “It’s a twenty-sixth-century hypercomm transmitter. This was the breakthrough unit.”

  “You mean for FTL transmissions?”

  “Yes.” What else could I mean?

  “Really? You sure?”

  “According to the Brandenheim.”

  “Where’d it come from?”

  “That’s the really interesting part of the story. Marissa Earl showed it to me.”

  “Marissa?” He grinned. “It has something to do with Garnett Baylee?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “I wasn’t entirely serious, Chase. Baylee? Really?” He scratched his temple. “He’s been dead about nine years.”

  “Eleven, in fact. They found it in one of the closets in his house.”

  “Nobody knew he had it?”

  “Right. His family still lives there, and they came across it by accident. I have a picture of it if you want to take a look.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Of course.”

  I love watching his eyes light up. “Chase, did you say whether the museum’s made an offer?”

  “No, Alex. I don’t know about that. I didn’t really want to ask.”

  He shook his head. Not surprised. “Well, it doesn’t matter. Our clients shouldn’t have any problem beating whatever the Brandenheim would be willing to pay. The whole story amazes me, though. Not much of that Golden Age stuff has survived. People have been looking for it for thousands of years. Baylee spent a substantial amount of his life searching for artifacts from that period.” He was frowning. “I met Baylee a couple of times. He was a nice guy, but he wanted to be the premier archeologist on the planet. I can’t imagine he’d have come up with something like this and stuck it in his closet and forgotten about it. I wonder if he was possibly suffering from delusional problems?”

  “I don’t know. Marissa didn’t say anything to suggest that.” For a moment, we stared at each other. Alex was in a time zone three hours later than I was. He looked tired, and it was obvious he was ready to crash for the night. “So,” I asked, “do you want me to do anything about this? Should I make an offer? Just to make sure she doesn’t let it get away?” Normally, we restrict ourselves to playing middleman in these arrangements. But for something like this—

  “It’s too early. We don’t want to look anxious. Call Marissa tomorrow, though, and tell her not to do anything without checking with us first. Tell Jacob that if she tries to call me, he should put it through.”

  “Okay. But I should probably mention that she didn’t seem to be consulting us about a sale.”

  “Really? What do you think she wanted?”

  “I think she just wanted to get a sense how much it was worth. And maybe talk with somebody who might have an idea why her grandfather would forget he had something like this.”

  “I can’t imagine why she’d expect us to know.”

  “You’ve a reputation, Alex. But anyhow, if you prefer, I can call and tell her we can’t be of any assistance.”

  He laughed. “Ask her to make the transmitter available to us so we can run some tests. Let’s just be sure this is what it seems to be.”

  * * *

  The following morning, I called Marissa and relayed Alex’s wishes. She told me that she wasn’t planning on taking any action for the moment and would wait until we’d had a chance to examine the transmitter. Then, while I was having breakfast, an announcement came over the HV that Ryan Davis, the president of the Confederacy, would be making a statement at the top of the hour. The president was visiting Cormoral, and there was, of course, no way he could speak to us directly from a distance of forty light-years. That meant the message had already been received, and they were trying to expand their audience.

  President Davis was a charmer, with brown hair, brown eyes, chiseled features, and a smile that always gave me a sense that he was talking directly to me. But there was no smile this time. “Friends and citizens,” he said, “we are all concerned about recovering, if we can, the people on board the Capella. I want to assure you that we have a topflight scientific team, the Sanusar Recovery Force, working to bring its twenty-six hundred passengers and crew home. You can be certain that we are doing everything possible to make it happen.

  “Unfortunately, we are in unknown territory. We have not encountered warped space and time before. I know there is much concern across the Confederacy about this lost ship. And about the others that may be adrift out there somewhere. We are told that time seems to pass at a different rate on the lost ships than it does for us. That is, time passes much more quickly for us. Judging from what we have seen on the other three lost ships that have been recovered, it is likely that only a few days will have passed on the Capella since they left Rimway eleven years ago. That’s difficult to grasp, but our scien
tists assure us it is a valid picture of what has been happening. It is, they say, likely to be the case with the Capella. The situation could be even more extreme. We rescued two girls from the Intrépide last year. Cori and Sabol Chaveau. They boarded the ship seven thousand years ago. But while they were in flight, only a few weeks passed. Let me reiterate that we are doing everything possible to protect the lives of the passengers and crew. It is our first priority. We will take no action that will endanger them. And we will do everything possible to bring them home.”

  THREE

  No matter whether we think of lover, gold, or good times, do not cling to that which is gone. That path leads only to tears.

  —Kory Tyler, Musings, 1412

  I rode the shuttle up to Skydeck. Shara and JoAnn had arrived the day before and were waiting in the restaurant at the Starlight Hotel.

  “What actually are we going to do?” I asked.

  “We sent a test vehicle out yesterday,” said Shara. “It’s unmanned, strictly robo. As soon as it gets into the infected area, it’ll attempt a jump. We have the drive set so that, if it gets tangled, it should come back into linear space within a few hours—”

  “Our time,” JoAnn said.

  “And it’ll stay up, we think,” Shara continued, “for about four hours.”

  “And that process will continue?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “How far will it travel between appearances?”

  “We can’t be certain yet, Chase. But we’re estimating about one hundred twenty thousand kilometers. The problem develops due to an interface between the drive unit and the warp. When we get to it, it will already have been through the process a couple of times. What we hope to do is adjust the drive feed so that it is not responsive to the change in the continuum.”

  I was having trouble following. “What does that mean exactly?”

  JoAnn obviously thought it was a dumb question. Her eyebrows rose, and her gaze went momentarily toward the overhead. But she managed an understanding smile. “Change the energy feed,” she said. “The power level of the drive unit has to be within certain parameters for the ship to stay contained by the warp field. If we adjust the feed, we should be able to stop the process.”