Jack McDevitt - Coming Home

“I did, too.”

“Good.” He was standing off to one side of the kitchen table. “Have a good life, Chase. I’ll miss you.”

Finally it was time to go. John conducted a briefing for the pilots from a conference room at the Department of Transportation. Approximately thirty people were there. The rest of us watched by HV. “Since we don’t know precisely when it will appear,” he said, “we’ll arrive four days early and maintain the search around the clock. That means you should be on station at 1600 hours on the twelfth. Check in with your squadron commander as soon as you arrive. The formation will be spherical and centered on the Dauntless , which will be placed as close to the anticipated arrival site as we can manage. Unless you’re on the outer boundary of the formation, the six ships closest to you will be at a range of fifteen thousand kilometers. Those will be operating above and below you, fore and aft, and on either side.

“One other thing: Unless you’re carrying lifeboats, we want only the pilot in each ship. If you need an additional person for any reason, check with your squadron or division commander. We need to conserve our life-support capabilities.

“Your position in the formation will be assigned this evening. We don’t expect the Capella to appear before 1600 hours on the sixteenth. But we could be wrong about that. We could also be wrong in our estimate that it will arrive inside the search area. So we need everyone to maintain vigilance in all directions. If anyone locates it, or notices anything out of the ordinary, notify your commander immediately but take no action until you receive instructions.”

A hand went up. “If it doesn’t show up, John, how long will we wait?”

“We’re hoping everyone will be willing to give it three or four days, if necessary. The Dauntless , and the StarCorps ships, will wait as long as it takes. StarCorps, by the way, already has units in place in case it arrives early. In that event, we will probably be unable to load lifeboats, but we will do what we can.

“We anticipate that when it does arrive, it will be accessible for approximately seven or eight hours. If you become part of the contact group, you will likely be closer to the action than the Dauntless . But be careful. It will get busy very quickly. If you do not have lifeboats on board, your mission will be to take off as many people as you can as quickly as you can. Once you have them on board, get clear so someone else can move in.

“Be aware that our principal objective is to get the lifeboats loaded onto the Capella . If we can rescue some people at the same time, that’s good. But do not under any circumstances get in the way of the teams that are trying to transfer the boats. Vehicles with boats will have radio ID’s and blue-and-white blinkers. They will be given right of way.”

Another hand went up. “Do the people on the Capella know they’re in trouble?”

“We haven’t had contact with them, Maureen. So we have no way of knowing. But probably they do. From their perspective, they will have surfaced off schedule and gone down again without initiating the action. So I’d be surprised if Captain Schultz is not aware she’s in trouble.

“I’m sure most of you know that Robert Dyke is among the passengers. We’ll have several teams of physicists and engineers spread around in the rescue force. What we want to do is talk to him. Give him what we have and find out if he might be able to help. Do not, however, initiate contact with the Capella . If they contact you, pass it on to your squadron commander immediately. Since we do not know the situation aboard ship, do not allow yourself to get into a conversation with them. News of radio contact should be passed to the Dauntless , and we will take it from there. Is that clear to everyone?”

I took the shuttle to Skydeck a few hours later. The normal routine for anyone who maintained a ship at the station was that you notified them in advance when you would be using it, and it was waiting for you in one of the eight docks. But under the pressure of the rescue fleet being assembled, traffic was so heavy that they directed me to report to one of the operations offices, from which I was conducted to the maintenance area. There I boarded the Belle-Marie . There were probably twenty other ships, all crowded into a relatively small space. Two freighters and a fleet cruiser were floating outside the station.

I sat down on the bridge, said hello to Belle, and started running the checklist. Outside, a few lights broke through the darkness. “Do you know how to get us out of here?” I asked Belle.

“Yes,” she said. “No problem.”

I finished the preflight and checked in with ops.

“ Belle-Marie ,” said a male voice, “it’ll be a few minutes. We’ll get back to you.”

“Copy that.”

Sitting on the bridge in a sparsely lit enclosure is different from being under a dark sky. It can become oppressive. I was glad when my link buzzed. It was Alex. “How’s it going?”

“I’m waiting to launch.”

“You have a minute?”

“As far as I know. What’s going on?”

“I’ve been doing some research. Thought you might be interested in what I found.”

“Sure. What is it?”

“I’ve been reading Harvey Foxworth’s Walking Through the Rubble . It’s a history of archeological efforts to reconstruct the major events of the Dark Age. It was written a thousand years ago, but it’s the classic work on the era. Foxworth has some details regarding Dmitri Zorbas that I haven’t seen before. He kept a diary, Zorbas did, but never allowed it to be published. After his death, Jerome Zorbas, his brother, apparently under instructions, destroyed it.”

“You think they destroyed it because it revealed the location of the artifacts?”

“There’s no way to know.”

“So what good does it do us if it’s been destroyed?”

“It provides credence to the probability that Zorbas had the artifacts and hid them.”

“Maybe. On the other hand, maybe they destroyed it because he had too many women in his life.”

“I didn’t say it was a confirmation, Chase. But Foxworth thinks he salvaged the contents of the Prairie House. Zorbas came from a wealthy family, so he had resources. We’ve known that. The family maintained a home, according to the book, ‘in a safe place’ well away from their quarters in Union City. Unfortunately, there’s still no hint where that might have been. Foxworth comments that, at the height of the period, there were no safe places. There are a couple of pictures of Rodia, standing with her husband. These were the first pictures I’d seen of Zorbas himself. He always seems to be wearing a backpack. He’s on a horse in a couple of them. And there’s one with him standing with a group of guys beside what appears to be a lander. It’s hard to be sure because the technology was so primitive. But they’re laughing, and everybody’s got a bottle.