“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.
