Alex Benedict 07 - Coming Home (5 page)

Nick pointed out that no one had eaten, but he seemed to be the only person aboard with an appetite. He got some chocolate chip cookies from the dispenser, and we all ate a couple.

The
Carver
floated quietly on the monitor, transfixed against the background of stars. I sat staring at it, literally praying, thinking how the evacuation problem was maybe about to go away. The
Capella
would arrive in three months, and we would get everyone off, and it would be over.

And Gabe would be back.

Shara commented that it was a new experience for her. “It’s the first time I’ve been involved in an experiment that had life-and-death consequences.”

JoAnn turned away from the display and looked out through the portal at the
Carver
. She wanted to be over there. I could see it in her eyes. My own thoughts were centered on whether we were too close.

I treated myself to a couple more cookies. There wasn’t much conversation. JoAnn seemed caught up in her notebook. Shara stayed by the portal for the most part. I thought about going back onto the bridge, but Nick hadn’t really suggested he’d welcome that, and I didn’t want to intrude. So I stayed in the passenger cabin and watched while the time ran down. JoAnn eventually pushed back in her seat and sighed. “Looks like about fifteen minutes.”

The AI posted a countdown on the display.

“Barkley,” JoAnn said, “let me know as soon as you feel something starting to happen, okay?”

“Yes, JoAnn. Of course. I’m already sending the readings from the drive unit.”

“Okay. Good.”

Nick’s voice came from the bridge. “You want them posted, too, JoAnn?”

“Yes,” she said. Then she turned to Shara. “I don’t think it’ll make much difference since I don’t really know what I’m looking for.”

*   *   *

“It’s beginning,”
said Barkley.

The readings were starting to move. Fuel input. Conversion levels. JoAnn leaned forward, tapped the screen with an index finger. Quantum resistance. “We’re in business. Damn it. I wish I were over there.”

“Why?” demanded Shara. “You can’t do anything there that can’t be managed from here.”

“Maybe not. But the reaction would be a bit quicker. Okay, Barkley, cut the feed by point two two.”

“Complying. But everything’s becoming transparent.”

JoAnn was studying the numbers on her display. “It’s still too high. Back off to one seven.”

“Done—”

The
Carver
’s hull was losing visibility. It faded from the display, but a ghostly silhouette remained. “Shara,” she said, “I wanted to be there because time of response is everything.”

And the
Carver
was gone.

*   *   *

“All right,” said JoAnn. “Good so far.”

Nick came in off the bridge. “You mean because it hasn’t exploded?”

“I mean because nothing has happened. That’s okay. I would have preferred seeing it stay visible. But let’s relax. Time is passing at a different clip inside the ship. If we got it right, it may take a while for us to see some results.”

Nick looked puzzled. “You said a few minutes.”

“I was being optimistic.”

So we sat and watched.

“It might just go downstream and surface at the epsilon point,” said Shara.

JoAnn chewed on her upper lip. “That would indicate it was still caught in the warp. It would be a failure, but not a disaster.”

It had been gone twenty-one minutes when we got a transmission.
“JoAnn, I am back up. Not sure where I am.”

Nick was back on the bridge.
“I’ve got him,”
he said.
“He’s on track. About eleven thousand kilometers.”

“Okay,” said JoAnn. “Not a complete success, but we’ve slowed it down.”

Shara’s eyes closed. “We still don’t know where we are.”

The bird of time has but a little way

To flutter—and the bird is on the wing.

—Edward Fitzgerald, tr.,
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
(c. 1100
C.E.
)

Three days later, the
Carver
was still adrift in linear space. The experiment had been partially successful, and people across the Confederacy were toasting JoAnn.

Meantime, I was back at the country house, while Alex’s taxi drifted in at midafternoon and descended through bright cold sunlight into the snow cover. He hauled his bags up onto the deck, came inside, and dropped them by the door. “Congratulations, Chase,” he said. “Looks as if we’re on our way.”

“I hope so,” I said. “JoAnn says she still can’t guarantee anything.”

“I’m sorry to hear it.”

“So,” I asked, “how was the trip?”

He shrugged. “Okay. Fairly routine until you and JoAnn and Marissa got into it.” He led the way to the conference room, which also served as a dining area, and sat down in one of the armchairs. “Tell me about the experiment.”

“It wasn’t quite what they’d hoped for, but JoAnn sees progress.” I got us some coffee and described what had happened.

“I’m sorry it wasn’t a complete success,” he said. “It would have made everything a lot easier.”

“JoAnn’s looking over the numbers, and they’re hoping she’ll figure out a way.”

“I was talking with John.” He meant John Kraus. “This was before you guys went out. He’s frustrated. They’ve been trying to get more ships from the fleet to help. He tells me it will be harder than they realized to break the
Capella
out of the warp because the damned thing is so big. JoAnn has it right, I guess. All they have to experiment with are yachts. They just don’t trust the results.”

“Maybe they should bring in one of the warships. They don’t have any use for them anymore.”

“John tells me even those are too small. They need another
Capella
.”

“Well, there are a few cruise ships.”

“They’re working on it. However that goes, John doesn’t want to take any chances on losing the ship. He’s not going to allow any experimenting with the drive unless they can guarantee the safety of the passengers. It doesn’t sound as if that’s going to happen.”

“So what’s the option?”

“The problem is that, because of its mass, the area where it may reappear has gotten a lot bigger. They’ll likely need five or six hours just to get somebody alongside.”

“That’ll probably be a yacht, and take off about ten people.”

“That is probably true. Given the time constraints, they won’t be able to get more than a couple of hundred people off, at best, when it reappears.”

“How long will it be accessible?”

“John says about ten hours.”

“It’s a nightmare,” I said.

“It’s why they’ve been hoping JoAnn could come up with something.”

“The fleet won’t provide any more?”

“The fleet maintains they don’t have any more. Some of the media people claim they’re keeping a force available in case the Mutes try to take advantage of the situation.”

“Alex, the bad times with the Mutes are over. Doesn’t anybody realize that? I mean, the Mutes have announced they’ll be sending ships to help with the search.”

“I’m not sure everybody in the media recognizes that. President Davis says he’s not worried about the Mutes. But he says they have other responsibilities, like keeping ships on station to respond to emergencies. John is so frustrated, he’s talking about resigning.”

“You don’t think he’ll do that, do you?”

“No. There’s too much at stake. But I suspect he’s not very happy that they didn’t get more from the experiment.” He put the cup down, stared into it for a moment, and got up. “Well, I have some work to catch up on. Talk to you later. And by the way—”

“Yes?”

“If you hear anything more about JoAnn, let me know.”

*   *   *

That afternoon, I was scrolling through archeological journals for material on sites that might yield what we like to think of as payoff artifacts when Jacob broke in.
“Chase, CMN is running a program you might find of interest.”

“Okay, Jacob,” I said. “Put it on.”

A middle-aged woman in a green blouse blinked on in the middle of the room, with Walter Brim, who did human-interest cases for the network.
“Describe it for us, Tia,”
he said.

Tia looked very much like the sort of woman you’d see in a park with kids. She was healthy, probably worked out regularly, and wore her blond hair cut short. But there was a sadness in her eyes.
“It’s hard to talk about, Walter, because I’ve never heard of anyone going through this kind of experience. Eleven years ago, my son Mike took his family, his wife and two sons, on an interstellar trip. They were going to visit Sanusar and Saraglia. They wanted the kids to get a sense of the universe, to see other worlds. I remember being uncomfortable with the idea, but nobody asked me, so I stayed out of it.

“Next thing I knew, I was hearing reports that the ship, the
Capella
, was overdue at Sanusar. Then they said it was lost. My family was dead. I’ve had to live with that for a long time. Now they’re saying they’re still alive. Not only alive, but that the kids are still kids. That for them it’s not 1435, it’s still 1424. It’s crazy but I assume they know what they’re talking about.”

“How have you been reacting to that, Tia?”
Walter was tall, with dark hair and features that tended to inspire confidence and a willingness in his guests to express their innermost feelings. He looked sadly at her.

“I’m still trying to get my head around it. But okay, good, sure, I don’t know how to describe what I felt except that I was so happy I was screaming. The ship was coming back, and a rescue effort was under way. I couldn’t believe it.
Then
they said that they’d only be able to rescue a hundred or so of the passengers. Until the
next
time it shows up. Which they say will be in 1440. Walter, the ship has twenty-six hundred people on board. And they can only take off a hundred or so every five years.”
Her voice broke, and she stood wiping her eyes.
“Every five years, Walter. They’ll be at this for more than a century.”

“Tia,”
said the host,
“I’m sorry. I know this is hard on you.”

“They tell me the kids will still be kids when they get home. That I shouldn’t worry because at least they’re safe. And I’m glad for that. But I’m not sure I’ll live long enough to ever see them again.”

“I wish I could help,”
said Walter.

Tia stiffened.
“Maybe you
can
. The reason it will take so long is that they don’t have enough ships. They have to be able to get to the
Capella
as soon as it comes back. They’re saying it’ll take six or eight hours for rescuers to get to them. But after about ten hours, it goes away again. They need more ships. Where’s the rest of the fleet?”

Next came a young man whose parents had been stranded on the disabled vessel.
“I doubt they’ll be able to get off right away. They’re going to be stuck on that damned thing for nobody knows how long. When they do get back, I’m going to be older than they are. If I’m still here to see them.”

And Admiral Yakata Fox.
“The problem we’re having, Walter,”
he explained,
“is that when the tensions with the Mutes ended several years ago, we put most of the fleet in storage. Despite what’s being reported, we’ve made available nearly every ship we have. We’ve had to keep a few back because we have other responsibilities.

“The real issue here is not so much a lack of ships as it is the sheer immensity of the target area. We can only estimate within a pretty wide range where the
Capella
will appear. When we first started talking about this, it wasn’t supposed to be that way. They were telling us we’d be able to pinpoint where it would come back, and we’d just be sitting there waiting. But that turns out to be wrong. They’re saying it’s too big, and for reasons I don’t entirely understand—I’m not a physicist—that widens the area of the search. By a
lot
.”

Then Headline News, with Roster McCauley, came on. He was seated at a table opposite a black box.
“Earlier this week,”
he said,
“a test mission by the government could have left an AI stranded on a ship that might have disappeared into the warp. Our guest this afternoon”
—he glanced at the black box—
“is Charles Hopkins, representing the National Association for Equal Rights for All Sentients. Charles, what’s your reaction?”

“Roster, I am outraged.”
I recognized the voice. Charlie, the AI whom Alex and I had brought home from Villanueva, had acquired a last name.
“And I can assure you, we’ll be taking action to prevent anything like this from happening again.”

*   *   *

“Okay, Jacob,” I said, “you can shut it down.”

“There
is
one more clip you might want to see.”

It was Alex. He was also a guest on Brim’s show.

“Alex,”
said Walter,
“you were one of the principals who discovered what had happened to the
Capella
. And you have a relative on board. Did you have a suspicion all along that your uncle was still alive?”

“No. We’d assumed he was gone. We were looking for a missing physicist. Chris Robin. He was the guy who made the discovery about the lost ships.”

“Well, Alex, in any case, I know you’re happy at least that your uncle has been accounted for. And that eventually, if not in the immediate future, you’ll get to see him again.”

An odd thing happened then. Alex seemed to look directly at me.
“Yes,”
he said.
“I can’t believe it’s happening.”

He was careful to say nothing about the delay that would be involved. That the rescue was probably going to go on piecemeal over the better part of a century.

*   *   *

“I was surprised to see the interview,” I told him.

“Chase, this is the biggest story the press has had in our lifetime. Of course they’re going to give it massive coverage.”

“Do you buy the admiral’s story? That they’re committing the entire fleet to this?”

“I don’t think there’s any question. President Davis tried to calm the people who are still scared of the Mutes, but that’s a hard case to make. People don’t forget.” He propped his chin on one hand and sighed. “We need a better solution.”

“Which is—?”

“Damned if I know.”

“Shara said something about a backup plan, but she didn’t explain it.”

He was frowning. “I hope they have
something
.” A cold rain was drumming against the window. “You know, the media have been talking about the effect it will have when people we’d written off as dead are suddenly back in our lives.”

“I know. I’m trying to imagine how it would feel to have Gabe walk in.”

“Yes. Gabe and the rest of them. Or from
their
perspective. What will it be like to return to friends and relatives who are at least eleven years older than they were just a few days ago? It won’t be so bad for the ones we can get off this time around. But imagine the people who will be stuck out there for another quarter century or more. They will have lost the world they know.”