The Depths of Time Read online

  “Agreed. Either uncrewed missiles or remarkably well-motivated suicide crews.”

  Other members of the command-center crew were arriving, diving for their battle stations, getting their displays and systems on-line. Sayad paid them no mind. Let them do their jobs while she did hers. She was supposed to do more than see what was happening out there. She was expected to understand it, interpret it. “A saturation envelopment attack,” she said. “Hit the Standfast from all sides at the same time and overwhelm her defenses. They want the ship. They’ve invested half their forces to go after her. That’s too aggressive for it to be just a diversion. At least it looks like—wait a second.” She put her hands on the display controls and checked the backtracks. “No. I was wrong. They want us to think it’s a full-press attack and not a diversion.”

  “They’ve got me convinced,” Koffield said. “But now you think otherwise.”

  “Yes, sir. The blips moving on the wormhole are maneuvering, seeking and zeroing in on the access nexi. That’s not easy to do. But the blips moving on the Standfast are just boring right in, with no attempt to refine or correct their course.”

  “So they just want to keep her busy so their friends can get at and through the wormhole,” Koffield said.

  “Through the wormhole?” Sayad asked. “How the hell do they think they’re going to do that?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea how they’ll do it,” said Koffield. “But it’s plain they think they can do it.” He examined the symbol-logic screen. “Three minutes until they encounter the portal’s event horizon. We’ll find out then.”

  It was a startling thought, but why else would they be pressing home this attack? To hear Captain Koffield himself say the words made the idea seem much more part of the real world, something to consider in terms of practical detail. “They don’t have the codes to open the access nexi,” she objected. “There aren’t any public codes for going uptime. Just the ones we used to move the Upholder uptime.”

  That the wormhole portal nexi codes were unbeatable, unbreakable, was an article of faith in the Chronologic Patrol, and among spacefarers in general. Only the Patrol knew the codes, and therefore only the Patrol controlled the wormhole portal nexi.

  A portal nexus was a massively powerful gravitic distorter that, in effect, pushed aside the singularity’s event horizon, opening up a hole in time through the hole in space. The nexi orbited at the fringe of the wormhole’s event horizon, at hellishly fast velocities. Approach a time-shaft wormhole when a Chronologic Patrol ship had sent the proper code to open a nexus, and you dropped through the nexus, down the timeshaft, into the past. If the CP ship got the code wrong, or failed to send it, when the portal nexus controllers detected your ship approaching they would leave the nexus shut. Your ship would not go through the wormhole formed by the singularity’s warping of space, but instead would spiral down into the black hole itself.

  Koffield flipped on the ship’s intercom, and raised his voice enough so that the bridge staff could hear him as well. “This is the captain. Our sister ship, the Standfast, is under attack, as is the downtime portal. We must work on the assumption that the attacks will succeed. If they do, we will be facing an assault coming from inside the timeshaft wormhole and heading out, rather than an assault from the outside in, toward the timeshaft. In other words, the exact opposite of what we’ve trained for. So let us prepare to face the situation. Bring all weapons to bear on the vicinity of the wormhole, and prepare to track and destroy evasive targets as they exit the timeshaft. You have two minutes. I authorize and order weapons hot and an unrestricted free-fire zone and unlimited target list. If it moves, shoot it. Koffield out.”

  The disorganized, uncertain bustle all about them suddenly gained focus and direction. The news was startling, and even alarming, but the captain had spoken. He had told them what was what, and what to do.

  The crew of the Upholder set to work, making use of every one of the precious seconds they had. Energizers came on-line. The trackers took in the data from the Standfasts datastream, interpolated probabilities on the egress trajectories for the attackers, and set aim at the most likely points in space. Damage-control teams went to standby. Hatches sealed. The battle lighting came on, a dim red glow that permitted one to see, but left one’s eyes adapted to the dark of space and the glow of the display screens.

  But none of that was the concern of Alaxi Sayad. Her job right now was to watch the Standfast and her attackers as they did battle, a fight to the death that was happening seventy-nine years in the past, and a heartbeat away, through the wormhole.

  Sayad forced back the irrational wish that they could go look up what happened, and prepare for it that way. After all, the battle had happened nearly eight decades before. There ought to have been a way to know all about it, and be ready in advance to deal with the consequences.

  But there wasn’t, of course. The powers-that-be had quite wisely set things up to make such researches impossible. Indeed, the whole reason the Upholder was on station was to make them impossible. Her job, and the job of the entire Chronologic Patrol, was to ensure that the past knew nothing whatever about the future.

  Their job was to protect causality, to prevent temporal paradox. The Chronologic Patrol went about its work with care and determination, and went to great lengths to keep the future as dark a secret as possible from the past— starting with how the uptime picket ships got to their stations. The uptime ships came from downtime, and thus knew nothing of events in the future of the downtime ship.

  The Upholder might be in the year 5211 A.D., but she was far more connected to the world of 5132, seventy-nine years in the past. She and the Standfast had traveled to Circum Central Waypoint in convoy, relieving, the two Chrono-Patrol ships that had been on duty. The Upholder had gone uptime through the timeshaft wormhole, while the Standfast had remained at the downtime end, but it could have just as easily been the other way around.

  The Upholder had only two communications systems. One was a short-range beacon-interrogator that allowed her to challenge ships that arrived at the uptime end of the timeshaft and sought passage through. The other was the shaftlink comm system that Standfast was sending on. Both systems were, by design, extremely limited. Except in the most exceptional circumstances, the Upholder could not send messages at all, aside from clearances and portal-control commands. For the most part, she could only receive communications, and send them only in carefully proscribed circumstances. Every regulation, every Artificial Intelligence watching over the comm channels, every safeguard in the hardware, was designed to ensure that the Upholder did not send any information about the future into the past.

  One of the most basic precautions was to see to it that she did not receive any information about the future. By design, the Upholder carried no long-range comm system that might pick up transmitted information.

  Timeshaft wormholes could only be located in the depths of interstellar space, far from the time-space distortions created by a star or even by a mid-sized planet. The Circum Central Waypoint wormhole was no exception to that rule. It was three light-years from the colony at Glister, and a good 3.5 lights from Solace, off in a different direction. Without a highly sensitive, precision-aimed receiver of exactly the sort the Upholder did not carry, there was no way to communicate with the worlds on the uptime side of the timeshaft.

  A ship could in theory carry information to the Upholder, or even downtime into the wormhole. However, timeshaft-wormhole ships moved far slower than light, meaning that most information would be out-of-date by the time it reached a wormhole.

  But precautions were taken nonetheless. An uptime picket ship would refuse transit rights to any ship that had been under way less time than half the chronologic distance of the timeshaft wormhole in question. Circum Central Waypoint, for example, was a seventy-nine-year timeshaft. No ship was allowed to enter the uptime end of the shaft until she had been under way for at least thirty-eight and a half years.

  An
d, no matter what, no ship, aside from the arriving uptime picket, was ever allowed to enter the downtime end of a timeshaft.

  Including this bizarre fleet of presumably uncrewed ships that had just appeared out of nowhere. Uncrewed. They would have to be, and it wasn’t just their apparently small size. How the devil would anyone find crews enough to fly thirty-two ships on a secret and criminal mission that was all but suicidal? But if no one was aboard those ships, what was the point of the attack? What value in sending a machine into the future? Why not just put the ships in storage and wait seventy-nine years? Alaxi stared at the sym-log display, trying to will the answers out of the cryptic indicators of heading, speed, projected course, acceleration, and weapons discharge.

  The Standfast had been holding her ground, presenting a stationary target to her attackers. Now, perhaps too late, she got under way, even as she finally blazed away with her heavy weapons, the laser cannon and her steel-shot mag accelerators, firing at the incoming attackers.

  “At last,” Koffield said. “What the devil kept her from maneuvering before now?”

  “They were taken by surprise,” Sayad replied, though she had been wondering much the same thing. It was damned easy to let things get slack on garrison duty, and it looked as if it had happened to the Standfast. Sayad wondered if the Upholder would have done any better with zero warning. Besides, the Standfast had been watching for an assault coming through the wormhole, out of the uptime end and the future, not from out of normal space.

  The Standfast’s heavy-weapons fire took a heavy toll. Three, four, eight of the blips diving on the ship blazed and vanished from the display. More, dimmer flares of light, flickered through the timeshaft.

  But then the Standfast broke off and started maneuvering at flank acceleration toward the wormhole. The remaining ship-attacking blips did not pursue her, but instead kept on diving straight for the ship’s original position. The Standfast had finally seen what Sayad had seen minutes before. The attack on the ship was a diversion, not a serious danger.

  The diversion had served its purpose. The Standfast commenced firing on the blips moving toward the wormhole, but the incoming ships were already deep enough inside the wormhole’s complex gravity field and moving fast enough that accurate targeting was all but impossible. Space and time were wildly warped and twisted by the wormhole’s intense gravitation, sending laser fire and mass-accelerator fire skewing off in strange, unexpected directions. Even so, the Standfast scored a series of direct hits on the attackers. Whoever was in charge of those guns might have been slow to react, but he or she was a remarkably good shot.

  Five, six, seven, eight of the attackers flared into nothingness as the Standfast raced toward them, all weapons firing. But that still left half the attackers coming on.

  The closer the Standfast got to the wormhole, the more difficult it became to target her weapons. But she had to get closer, and closer still, if she was going to be able to bring her weapons to bear on the remaining targets. Another volley of fire, every shot a clear miss. And another volley, this time taking out two of the intruders.

  “Oh, no,” Koffield said. “Stars in the sky, no!”

  Sayad had been concentrating so hard on the screen that she had all but forgotten Koffield was there. What had he seen that she had missed?

  Then she saw. The Standfast was moving too fast, getting too close. She was going in, all guns blazing. She was redlining, headed down into the black hole’s gravity well, past the point of no return. She would either have to go through the wormhole, or crash into the surface of the black hole.

  And she was nowhere near any of the alignments for a safe transit through one of the approach nexi.

  The Standfast made no attempt to save herself, but instead flew in closer to the intruders, setting up for one last desperate all-weapons volley, getting in under the six remaining targets, firing directly into their paths. She fired everything she had, and then, before her guns and laser even reached their targets, she fell in toward the black hole’s event horizon, far, far away from any of the approach nexi.

  She was too close, going too fast. The datalink died with the ship, but the suddenly blank screen told Sayad all she needed to know about what happened next.

  Within a blink of an eye, the flicker of a moment, the Standfast had been destroyed, torn into a million, a trillion microscopic fragments, every man and woman -aboard ripped apart with shattering speed, down to and beyond the molecular level. They had been ground up, shredded into subatomic nothingness by the gravitational vortex of the black hole before they even had time to know they were dying.

  The rest was silence.

  The crew of the Upholder stared at their screens in horrified, frozen shock. This wasn’t supposed to happen. It made no sense. How could—

  “They’re coming through!” Koffield shouted into the mike. “All weapons, fire at will. The Standfast died trying. Don’t let her down.”

  It was what the crew needed to hear. They shook off their shock and their horror and refocused on their duties.

  Sayad blinked, drew in breath, and tried to do the same. No more data coming from the downtime feed. All right then, work from last positions and trajectories. Factor in projected paths of the access nexi. Feed it all to the battle-projection Artificial Intelligences that weren’t designed to track targets coming up out of the timeshaft, and pray they could do the projections, and that the probabilistics projections weren’t completely smoke and mirrors at the moment. She massaged and routed the data, and saw projected exit trajectories appear on her display. She converted them to firing solutions, and piped them to the weapons consoles.

  It was guesswork piled on guesswork, but there was no time for anything better—and no way to produce it, no solid numbers to work from. It had taken precisely twelve seconds for her to go from raw data in to firing solutions out, but Sayad doubted she could have done much better work if she had taken twelve years.

  “Well-done, Ensign Sayad,” Koffield said. “Now we wait, if not for long.”

  “No, sir. Projected arrival in fifteen seconds—mark.”

  “Here comes our turn,” Koffield said.

  Right on schedule, a flare of blueshift light blossomed out of the event horizon, and then another, another, another, until all six of the surviving intruders had punched through. Sayad felt a sick knot in the pit of her stomach— the enemies had known the codes, and the Standfasts last volley of fire, the one she had died to make, had been for nothing at all.

  But then there was no time.

  Weapons section took the conn, and the Upholder came about hard, placing the cylindrical ship’s long axis at right angles to the wormhole, so as to bring the most possible firepower to bear. Her main weapons opened up at once, directing laser and railgun fire at the twisting, dodging intruders. Sayad checked her instruments and got her first direct mass, size, and acceleration readings on their uninvited guests. No doubt about it—those had to be uncrewed ships. They were too small and too dense to carry both crew and any sort of acceleration shielding, and they were accelerating hard enough to squash any human passenger into red paste with or without shielding, accelerating faster than any ship she had ever seen or heard of. It was precious little comfort that her tracking projections had proved accurate enough that the weapons systems were able to start targeting the moment the intruders emerged.

  The Upholder’s lasers locked on to the first target, and chased it relentlessly as it dived and twisted and pinwheeled through a complex evasive-action sequence. The target held together far longer than it should have under main-laser fire, but whatever its very impressive shielding was made of, it couldn’t protect the intruder indefinitely—not from the multigigawatt intensity of the Upholder’s firepower. A second bank of the main lasers locked on the target, doubling the energy being pumped into the intruder’s hull. It flashed over, blowing up in a spectacular blaze of glory that blinded half the Upholder’s sensors and detectors for three very long seconds before the
damper systems could recover.

  The position-predictors did their best, but the surviving five targets were performing evasive escape maneuvers. Even three seconds of sensor-blinding was enough to make the old tracking projections worse than useless.

  The weapons systems lost five more irreplaceable seconds as they tracked and scanned for the surviving intruders. Sayad slaved her screens to the weapons display and watched their frantic search. Koffield stayed with her, watched the battle off her screens. No sense rushing to the weapons boards. He had already given all the orders he was going to give. All he could do was sit back and watch. He could do that just as well from Sayad’s stations, without distracting the gunnery teams. But the gun crews weren’t finding anything. Sayad flipped back to her own tactical search algorithms and ran them against the weapons-sensor data.

  And found the intruders again. Or maybe the intruders had found them. “Bloody hell!” Sayad cried out. “Bogie, coming straight at us, right through the wormhole blind spot!” She thought at first it was a variant on diving out of the sun, one of the oldest dogfight tactics there was. The intruder had the wormhole directly astern, and was barreling straight for the Upholder.

  But no. No, not straight for the Upholder. But near enough, only two or three degrees up-Y from straight-line on the wormhole. And almost certainly, the intruder had no detection gear capable of finding the Upholder. If the intruder had known where the Upholder was, it either would have revectored to ram, or aimed for just about any other spot in the sky. In fact, the intruder she was tracking had ceased evasive action. Either it expected that the Upholder’s detectors would not recover in time, or its automatic-sequencing system had told the intruder to do so. In either case, the intruder had not spotted them. Chance, damned-dumb chance, and nothing else, had sent the intruder flying right across the Upholder’s bow.

  She checked range and rate on the new target. It was coming almost straight for them, all right, but it still had a long way to go before it reached them. It could be tough to fire on a target that was coming straight on, as opposed to traveling laterally. They had a good ninety-five seconds until it was within a prime firing solution. Sayad relayed the new tracking to weapons control, and saw by her boards that they had just located an intruder themselves.