A week.

That was still a long distance. A starship would cover about 270 light-years in a week.

She marked off the line at that point. Somewhere between the mark and St. Johns, the engines had brought them out of hyper.

“So what?” said Solly, who seemed to be reading her mind. “I mean, we’ve known all along they broke down. What difference does it make where it happened?”

“Let’s go back to square one,” she said.

“What’s square one?”

“‘We struck gold.’ Sheyel’s convinced there was a contact of some kind. Let’s assume he’s right. That the Hunter saw something out there. So the question becomes, where were they when it happened?”

“You tell me: Where were they?”

“Near a star.”

“How do we know that?” asked Solly.

“Has to be. If contact was made either with a ground entity or with an orbiter of some kind, we have ipso facto a star system. If it was made with a vessel, you’d have to ask yourself whether the vessel was in a star system or whether it was out in the void. If it was in the void, what could it have been doing out there?”

“Repairing its engines?” suggested Solly, seeing the point.

“Right. What are the odds against two ships suffering breakdowns and showing up at the same empty place? No, whatever happened, it had to be close to a star.”

She looked at the Hunter’s course. “I count seven stars within a reasonable range along their course line. If they ran into something, it would have been in the neighborhood of one of those seven.”

Solly shook his head. “Okay,” he said. “Suppose you’re right. Suppose there was an encounter of some kind. It was twenty-seven years ago. You think the celestials are still going to be hanging around out there?”

“It doesn’t have to have been another ship” she said. “They may have discovered a living world.”

He sat down on the edge of his desk and considered the possibility. “Yeah,” he said. “That could be.”

“There are only seven stars,” she said again. “Seven.”

“I hope you’re not telling me you’re going to ask for a mission.”

“No.”

“Good,” he said.

“Matt would think I’d gone over the edge.”

“That’s right. And I’m not sure he’d be far wrong. Look, Kim, this is all guesswork, and you don’t have anything more persuasive than a shoe and a crew member who calls home with a cryptic message that may not mean anything at all. That may have been misunderstood for that matter. By the way, did it occur to you that Yoshi might have been talking about the Golden Pitcher?”

“They didn’t get to the Golden Pitcher. They didn’t get anywhere close.”

“Okay.” He shrugged. “I mean, if they found, say, a tree out there, or a city, why not say that? What’s the big secret?”

She had no answer.

He looked at the time. “Got to go. I have some reports due.”

She could see he felt relieved. He’d expected her to go in and make a fool of herself trying to persuade Matt that the Institute should send out a survey team. “Solly,” she said, “when a ship’s logs get sent to the Archives, does anyone actually review them?”

“Under normal circumstances I can’t imagine why they would. But if you’re asking whether anyone has seen the Hunter’s logs from the Golden Pitcher flight, I’d say almost certainly.”

“Because of the disappearances.”

“Right. The police would have looked for any indication that something unusual had happened on the mission. The fact that there doesn’t seem to have been a follow-up, that no one searched Tripley’s place, seems to indicate they didn’t find anything.”

“They might have been bought off.”

“It’s possible.” A long silence drew out between them. “Kim,” he said, “Matt’s right. Why don’t you give this a rest?”

She’d have liked to. Kim had no appetite for challenging her boss, for taking on Tripley, for encouraging Solly to think she had become obsessed. But Emily was lost out there somewhere, and somehow it all seemed to be connected. “I can’t just walk away from it,” she said. “I want to know what happened. And I don’t care who gets offended, or who gets sued.”

Solly looked at her for a long minute, and nodded. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do,” he said.

“There is. How can we get a look at those logs?”

He took a deep breath. “We’d have to bribe somebody,” he said.

Bribe? “Isn’t there a way to do it without breaking the law?”

“None that I know of. So I think where we are is this: You need to decide whether you’re as serious as you say. If so—” He shrugged.

Kim had never knowingly violated the law. “We can’t do that,” she said.

“I didn’t think so.” Solly looked out of the screen at her, trying to suggest everything would be all right. “Gotta go,” he said.

The screen blanked. She sat staring at it, pushed back in her chair, activated it again and brought up the Autumn. Emily with those wistful eyes looked back at her.

Where are you?

She thought about the terrible days after her disappearance while they waited for news. Her parents had tried to protect her, to reassure her that Emily was coming home, that she’d taken a trip somewhere and they’d be hearing from her at any time. But Kim had seen the hollowness in their eyes, detected the strained voices. She’d known.

They must have assumed from the beginning that she would not be found alive. Murders were extremely rare in Equatoria, seldom exceeding more than a half dozen annually, in a population of six million. Homicides were usually domestic, but there was still the occasional maniac. The St. Luke killer, so named because of his penchant for leaving biblical verses pinned to the bodies of victims, had rampaged through the northwest during a two-year spree in which he’d murdered seven people. He had been the worst of modern times.

What must have surprised her folks was that the mystery was never solved. No body was ever found.

Set against that, what was a little bribery?

She punched in Solly’s code and he appeared onscreen, not looking as surprised as she’d expected.

“Can we arrange it?” she asked.

He looked at her disapprovingly. “Is my lovely associate running amok?”

“Yes,” she said. “If that’s what it takes. Can we do it?”

“I know somebody,” he said.

“How much will it cost?”

“I don’t know. Probably a couple of hundred. Let me make some calls, and I’ll get back to you.”

Kim was scheduled to have lunch with a representative of the Theosophical Society, a Brother Kendrick. This time, her objective was not to solicit contributions, but to reassure the Society that there would be no long-term deleterious effects from Beacon, thereby persuading them, she hoped, to remove their outspoken opposition to the Institute.

They ate at Kashmir’s, which specialized in cuisine from the Sebastian Island chain. Brother Kendrick expressed the Society’s concern that the series of novas would make an area of approximately eight million cubic light-years permanently uninhabitable.

Kim pointed out there were no human habitations anywhere close to what the technicians called the target box.

“What about nonhuman habitations?” he asked.

The question stopped her cold.

Brother Kendrick, like almost everyone else on Greenway, was of indeterminate age. But he was inclined to lecture rather than talk. His attitude embodied a barely concealed condescension, his eyes never left her, and it was clear he was speaking through a controlled anger. He wore a neatly trimmed black beard and his hair was cut long. The Theosophists were not among those who adhered to trends.

“There are none in the region,” she said. “We did an extensive survey to assure ourselves—”

“—How many star systems are in the affected area?”

“Several hundred,” she said.

“Several hundred.” He made the number sound as if it bordered on sacrilege. “And we examined the worlds in all these systems?”