Jack McDevitt - Firebird

I like symphonies. Beethoven, Kurtzweil, Brachter, Yao Kee. It doesn't matter. Give me the soothing rhythm of the music and put some stars in the wraparound, and I'm ready to go.

I drifted off. I'd been out about three hours when Belle's voice woke me. “Chase, the McCandless has something.” Dot's ship.

“Chase, we just picked it up. Everything checks out. It's the Antares.”

“Okay, Dot. Belle, you have the coordinates?”

“They're coming in now.”

“Are we sure this time? Dot, could it be another Wasp?”

There was a delay of about four minutes while the signal crossed to the McCandless, and the response came back. “Whatever else this might be, it is definitely not another Wasp.”

“Okay. Good.” I got on the intercom. “Shara, Alex, we have a hit. We'll be on the move as soon as you get buckled down.” Then back to Dot: “Did you by any chance see it surface?”

“Negative.”

“Could it have been there for hours?”

“Affirmative.”

Alex came out of his cabin, pulling his robe around his shoulders.

The display activated. I got a sky full of stars and a marker.

Shara opened her door. “Give me a minute,” she said.

“Where is it?” asked Alex, sweeping onto the bridge.

“Dot has it.”

He lowered himself into the right-hand chair. “What's the status?”

“We've no idea when it showed up. It could submerge at any time.”

“We don't get a break, do we? Okay, how close is she?”

Usually, the delay in signal transiting is simply accepted as part of the operation. But in an emergency, it can be maddening. Finally, her reply came in: “We can be there in about two hours. I think it's outside the target area. Or maybe just on the edge. Relaying pictures to you.”

“Alex is here,” I told her.

“Have you tried to contact them?” he asked.

“Yes. Been transmitting. No response.”

Shara showed up in a nightgown. She was breathless. “We got it?”

“Right there.” I pointed at the marker.

“Beautiful,” she said. “How long-?”

“Two hours.”

“We can be there in two hours?”

“Dot can,” said Alex. “Chase, how far away are we?”

I hated to tell him. The Antares was on the far side of the formation. “Five hours.”

His jaw tightened. Other than that, there was no reaction. “Okay,” he said. “I don't guess we could do a jump?”

“We can try it.”

“Shara,” he said, “is there any hope of getting more precision in the future?” He sounded as if he thought the current state of the art was her fault.

“We're working on it.” She sounded-and looked-frustrated. “I have a team of people going through the notebook, doing research, doing everything they can. And yes, I think we'll get better-”

“Shara,” I said, “tell me again how long it's been since the last appearance of the Antares.”

“If it's the same one, it's been sixty-seven years.” Her eyes closed, and she stood there, one hand gripping my seat until I suggested she go back into the cabin so we could get moving.

I needed a few minutes just to get turned around. Then I kicked up the velocity. “TDI in fourteen minutes,” I said.

“Is anybody else close?” asked Alex. “Other than Dot?”

“Cal is. He has an outside chance of getting over there, but I wouldn't be too hopeful.”

“Nobody else?”

“Nobody within three hours.”

We were still accelerating, getting ready to jump, when Dot was back: “They're transmitting.” She relayed the signal, and Belle ran it for us. It was a single male voice, sounding panicked. Desperate.

The language was not Standard. “Belle,” I said, “can you translate?”

“It's classical French,” she said. “It's the language they would probably have been using at the original Brandizi outpost. But no, I'm sorry to say I can't. I can read the language, but nobody's too sure what it sounded like.”

Not that it mattered. It was a cry for help. Just like the one from Alpha.

Then we were at TDI velocity. “Ready to jump,” I said. “Thirty seconds. Belt down.”

We came out of it even farther away, and, once again, because we'd gone well past the target, we were headed in the wrong direction.

“Dot,” I said. “We are not going to be able to get there.”

The delay on transmissions was now close to seven minutes. “I can see that,” she said. “But Cal's not too far.”

We sat, talking mostly to ourselves as if we were talking to Dot, exchanging the same warnings over and over-be careful, don't try to board, don't get too close, concentrate on the pictures. “Next time,” Shara promised, “we'll find a better way.”

Except that there wouldn't be a next time. “When do we expect to sight somebody else?”

“Well,” said Shara. “That's changed, thanks to Robin's notebook. There's one that's been seen a couple of times, most recently out near Karasco. Originally, we thought it would be close to two centuries before anything showed up again, but now it looks more like only forty years.”

Alex smiled. “Only forty?”

Belle's voice broke in: “One hour until McCandless makes rendezvous.”

We tried another jump and got within two and a half hours of the Antares. Alex sat staring at the deck, and I was thinking how he shouldn't expect pinpoint accuracy from a star drive. It's designed for serious long-range travel, not hopping around in a relatively tiny area. He wanted to try again, and he got his way. We gained a bit more ground, but not enough to matter. A couple more of those, I told him, and we'd have to arrange for someone to bring us out some fuel.

Eventually, the marker stopped blinking, and we were looking at what appeared to be a star. After a few moments, the star separated, became a string of lights, then became a ship.

It resembled nothing I'd seen previously. Big engines, small hull. Graceless. It might have been a tour ship that would take you to a neighboring moon. It could not have looked more out of place in that vast emptiness.

But, as with the Alpha, it was the lights that caught our attention. Not the navigation lights. They were on, but nobody cared. A row of ports were shining brightly. And there were more lights up front on the bridge. “Alex,” said Dot, “look at that thing.”

“Congratulations, Dot.”

We were much closer than we had been, and the time spent waiting for a response was down to just under two minutes. But when Dot came back, it was with a screech. “There's movement inside, Chase. They're alive. My God, it's really happening. I thought maybe we were talking to an AI, but there's really somebody there.”

The scope was giving us better images now. I could see a hatch. Some antennas. And as the ports got bigger, there were faces. People looking our. Dot was starting to sound frantic. “I know you said there's no way to stop it from submerging again, nothing you were sure of. But is there maybe something we can try? Something that might work? That might keep this thing from going under again?”

“No,” said Alex. “Leave it alone. At this point, we don't have any control over it.”

Alex covered the mike and pointed toward a port near the after section of the vehicle.

A child. A girl about eight or nine looked out until an arm encircled her and drew her away.

“We'll be alongside in about fifteen minutes.”

“You sure you want to do this, Dot?” said Alex.

“Yes, Alex. I've got it. It's dead ahead. Slowing down.”