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.
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
