“Good,” a female voice said. “If we blow ourselves up, you’ll be the first to know.”
“I thought you were ordered topside,” Pitt said to Gamay.
“She was,” Paul replied. “But she suddenly came down with a case of hearing impairment and missed that order.”
“I understand,” Pitt said. “Whenever you’re ready.”
A few seconds of silence came next, and then Paul’s voice. “Initiating power-up sequence in five… four…”
“Wait!” a voice shouted from Pitt’s outer office. “Wait!”
Hiram Yaeger rushed in with a set of papers in his hands. “I’ve found something.”
“Stand by,” Pitt said into the phone. “What do you have, Hiram? Tell me it’s Thero.”
“Not exactly.” He handed over a printed page with a blue background and a jagged line crisscrossing it. It looked like a game of connect the dots.
“What is this?” Pitt asked.
“It’s a ship’s course over the last forty-eight hours,” Yaeger said.
“What ship?”
Hiram was panting. He’d run all the way up from the tenth floor when the elevator didn’t respond fast enough. “I don’t know what ship exactly,” he said. “But it’s important — I’m sure of it.”
Pitt didn’t doubt his friend but he needed clarity. “What exactly are you talking about?”
“There’s a storm brewing down there,” he said. “Any ships in the area should be getting out of the way, or at least transiting with all due haste, but this one is changing course at odd hours and intervals and all but driving in circles. It’s taken her two full days to arrive where she is now
. Had she traveled straight, she could have done the trip in ten hours. In and of itself, that means nothing. But it is suspicious.”
Pitt didn’t disagree. But there were reasons some ships took odd courses. One in particular came to mind.
“There’s a lot of illegal fishing down there,” he said. “The Aussies are always chasing ships off. Every year, they even capture a few. Those ships trawl for the biggest catch. But they stay out of the shipping lanes, and they don’t stay in one place very long because they don’t want to get caught.”
“My first thought,” Yaeger said, “but this isn’t a fishing trawler, it’s a containership of some kind. And those turns are not as random as they seem. There’s a pattern to them.”
Pitt looked at the jagged line. “I don’t see a pattern.”
Yaeger had a second item in his hand. It was a transparent overlay. He’d printed something on it.
“The angles are slightly off,” he said, “and the legs aren’t exactly the right lengths, but it’s pretty close.”
He placed the overlay down and lined up the edges of the page. The left side of the pattern on the transparent sheet matched closely with the legs and courses the wandering mystery ship had taken.
Pitt recognized the full pattern instantly. “The constellation of Orion.”
Yaeger nodded. “For reasons I can’t begin to guess at, this lost containership has been tracing out half of the constellation. It’s a mighty accurate effort at that.”
“Could it possibly be a coincidence?” Pitt wondered aloud.
Yaeger shook his head. “Ten million to one for a ship to randomly make these turns and steam legs of the proper length. Add in the fact that our Orion just went down hours before this pattern started in the very same area, and the odds might hit a billion to one.”
Pitt nodded. Someone on that ship, someone in control of that ship, was trying to tell the world something. He couldn’t fathom what circumstances might be creating this oddity, but he had a good idea who might be sly enough and intelligent enough to pull it off.
“Kurt,” he said almost unconsciously.
Yaeger nodded. “He’s the biggest astronomy buff in the department. He’s always up on that roof with his telescope.”