The Depths of Time Read online

  “All emergency power to shields,” Koffield ordered. Not that there would be much power not diverted to them already. Simply to function at all, the electromags needed nearly all of the Upholder’s power output.

  But the bridge lighting dimmed by half. The ventilators cut off. The ship’s Artlnts were stealing whatever little dribs and drabs of power they could from other systems. If the trivial amounts of power the Artlnts were stealing were what made the difference, then their chances of survival were very slim indeed. But there was nothing they could do but watch their boards and make their time reports.

  “Fifteen seconds shield duration remaining. Shields at ninety-five percent,” Sayad reported.

  “Ten seconds to first possible impact.”

  And the bridge went silent with waiting. Time had been dragging before, but now it seemed to have ground to a complete halt. How long since that first blast of light through the wormhole? Five minutes? Ten? An hour? A day? Any answer seemed possible. It was as if time no longer had any real relation to the clock numbers that were beating down on them.

  “Ten seconds of shields. Shield decay rate increasing. Shields at ninety-two.”

  “First possible impact in five seconds. Four. Three. Two. One. Ze—”

  And it came down on them, a half heartbeat early. The ship lurched violently to one side, the shields holding, but only just, as the first wall of debris ripped past, hitting the shields a dozen times, a hundred times, in the space of a second. The ship fell into a violent tumble, pinwheeling across space. The shields weakened under the drumbeat of blast debris tearing into them, but still they held, diverting, deflecting, slowing the impacts. Something tore off a stanchion and crashed into the floor. The lights died, and alarms began to scream. Then came the horrifying, echoing bangs of impacts directly on the hull as debris penetrated.

  In the darkness came the shriek of tortured metal, the sudden, terrifying first drop in pressure, the sudden cold feel of air being sucked away that told of a hull breach somewhere not far off. Death and terror seemed on all sides of Sayad in the Ughtless compartment. Another shriek of torn metal, another hull breach, and then—

  The rest was dark and silence.

  It was not until hours later, until the damage-control crews had sealed the hull breaches, until power was restored, until the ship’s tumble was slowed and then stopped, that Captain Anton Koffield even had time to realize that Ensign Alaxi Sayad was among the dead.

  He could read the story off the gouges cut out of his ship’s bridge. A ricocheting piece of debris, a wedge-shaped piece of the intruder, a full ten centimeters long, had torn through the hull and bounced around the bridge interior, caroming a half dozen times off the decks and bulkheads before zeroing in on Sayad. It had caught her in the side of the head, stabbed deep into her skull. Death had come to her in the darkness, and in an instant.

  It was not until later still, until thirty hours after the attack, after the initial repairs were complete, and he was sitting in the galley, staring blankly down at a stone-cold meal he could not force himself to eat, and could not remember preparing or ordering, that he realized how close that fragment had come to him. His head had been less than half a meter from Sayad’s when that fragment had torn through the hull and into the bridge compartment. It so easily could have, should have, been him who was killed.

  It took scarcely any imagination at all for Captain Anton Koffield to know there would be times without number to come when he would wish, most devoutly, that it had been him.

  CHAPTER TWO The Fog of Time

  Seven days after the attack, Anton Koffield sat in his working cabin, examining the ship’s department reports with a certain degree of gloomy satisfaction. Things were getting back together. Life aboard the Upholder had returned to a grim version of normality. The hulls were patched, and the last of the “emergency” and “urgent” repairs were complete. Navigation, propulsion, defense, life support, and detection were all reported as operational again, though relying on backup systems in some cases.

  Some damage could not be repaired until and unless the Upholder reached port, if she ever did. But there were still a thousand doable fixes to be made all over the ship, most of them minor things that could be done almost at leisure. Koffield was in a way glad of all those dents and dings and blown circuit breakers and minor breakages that needed attention. Work kept the crew occupied, kept them from brooding on the ship’s near-dire circumstances.

  Services had been said over the fallen, and the dead were all safely out of sight, the six coffins in cold storage, deep in the hold of the ship. Captain Koffield had briefly considered burial in space, but it had taken very little time for him to conclude it would be very bad for morale. Normally, a burial in space happened in the emptiness between the stars, out where the dead were truly consigned to the infinite and the empty. Inside a star system, however, spaceside burials were always targeted so the coffin and corpse would burn up in a planetary atmosphere or impact into the star itself, vaporizing instantly. That was clean, and quick.

  But Neither choice was possible in orbit of a wormhole. Given the Upholder’s circumstances, the dead would either have to be left in orbit around the wormhole, where the tracking team would be forced to monitor the movements of their dead comrades, for fear of their becoming traffic hazards, or else the bodies would have to be targeted to impact on the wormhole, and be absorbed by it. But it was the wormhole that had killed everyone aboard the Standfast, and destroyed the ship as well. It was bad enough that the crew could regard the wormhole, the thing they were there to guard, as a killer. Koffield did not want their thoughts moving in that direction. Giving them cause to think of the wormhole as a graveyard as well could hardly help matters. Better the dead remain aboard, awaiting a better time and place to be consigned to the dark and the deep. He had no doubt that the Upholder’s dead would be as eager as the survivors to get far, far away from Circum Central Waypoint.

  In point of fact, Circum Central Waypoint was not central to anything, nor on any transit circuit. It had a grand-sounding name, but Circum Central was no Trior’s Realm, no Sirius Power Cluster Farm, with a dozen wormholes cross-linking thirty worlds. All Circum Central handled was the traffic for, and the traffic between, the new, small, and unimportant planets of Solace and Glister. There was not much traffic to handle. Circum Central wasn’t even, properly speaking, a wormhole farm. It was a singleton post, with but a single timeshaft wormhole. Whoever had built it, long ago, had named it for expectations of wealth and growth and prosperity that had never been realized, rather than as an honest description of what it was.

  But that was before the attack. What was Circum Central now? The scene of an invasion? But who was invading, and why? What had the intruders been after? He shoved his report pads to one side and stared sightlessly at the blank bulkhead that faced his desk.

  It made no sense. No sense of any kind. Why raid a timeshaft from the past in an attempt to reach the future.

  Settled Space was full of cryo-equipped ships that could simply wait, cruising through interstellar space as time passed. For that matter, there wasn’t any need for cryosleep. The intruder ships had clearly been robotic. If they had needed to reach the future, all they had to do was put themselves in storage for seventy-nine years. Why attack a wormhole and lose ninety-plus percent of your force in a needless attack? What had it all been in aid of?

  He had gone over it in his mind a hundred times, and still could see no explanation.

  And what of those acceleration rates they had recorded? The intruders had put on speed at utterly incredible rates, and had at least appeared to reach the speed of light, vanishing off the detectors as they did so, as if they had just blown through light-speed and kept going, moving so fast the trackers couldn’t even see them. But faster-than-light travel was impossible. Three thousand-plus years of space travel had taught humanity that much. Was that assumption wrong? Or were they misreading the data, seeing something that wasn’t there, w
hile missing things that were?

  The door comm blipped, and Koffield pressed, down the stud on his desk that opened the door, glad of the interruption. It was Lieutenant Sheelton, the defense systems officer, though today he was handling comm duties. Because Chronologic Patrol ships were deliberately designed to allow precious little communications, the standard patrol ships did not even carry full-time comm officers, but instead swapped the duty around the other departments.

  But at the moment the Upholder had a great deal to communicate, and sending her messages, despite the complexities and difficulties, was a top priority.

  “What have you got for me, Sheelton?” Koffield asked as he stood up. He returned Sheelton’s nervous salute and gestured for him to come forward into the compartment. Koffield forced himself to smile, and forced the smile to look pleasant, sincere. Koffield knew he could not afford to let any member of the crew note his own worries, his own anxieties. He had to create and maintain the illusion that he was calm and confident. He knew damned well that if he crumbled, morale would plummet. And morale was dangerously low to begin with.

  “Well, ah, good news, I think, sir,” Sheelton replied, proffering a report pad. Koffield took the pad and sat back down behind his desk. He activated the pad and started to examine it before he glanced up and saw Sheelton still standing there. “At ease and take a chair, son.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Sheelton said.

  Koffield nodded absently as he scrolled and paged through the report pad’s display. “Four serviceable courier drones?” he asked. “That’s all we can manage?”

  “We’re lucky to get that many,” said Sheelton. “I thought for sure we’d lost all eight drones when we did the first afteraction survey. The drone storage bay got hit hard in the last wave of impacts, sir, and that compartment took a big part of the electromagnetic pulse when the shields burned out. Sorry, sir.”

  Koffield didn’t understand the apology at first—but then he made the connection. Sheelton had been operating the shields during the attack. He looked the young officer straight in the eye. “Sorry for what?” he asked. “Because the shields couldn’t absorb and disperse ten times the energy and impact stress they were rated to take? The shields saved this ship, and everyone aboard her. I suggest you remember that, Lieutenant.”

  “Ah, yes, sir. I will.”

  “Let’s get back to the couriers. You report four serviceable drones, assembled by cannibalizing the eight wrecks and by dipping into spare parts. How far into this will I have to read to find how serviceable ‘serviceable’ is?”

  “I can tell you that right off, sir. You’ve got two courier drones that meet all specs and certificates, full backups to all systems. And you’ve two others that work, but with a few subsystems that are running without backup, or where main and backup systems are both a little chancy. They’d probably do fine on a routine flight—but, well sir, I can’t promise you the couriers will have routine flights.”

  Koffield nodded thoughtfully. Considering how badly the Upholder had been chewed up, he was probably lucky to get one good drone, let alone two good and two fair. “Very well,” he said. “Prepare to send all four of them out, at twenty-four-hour intervals. The first we’ll release on this side of the wormhole, with the fullest possible documentation of the attack. Send all our data, copies of the ship’s automatic and manual logs, everything. Use the better of the two substandard drones. Then send the other three downtime through the wormhole, into the past, with nothing, and I mean nothing, more than the allowed operational-rules data. We send to the past only what came to us from the past. That means recordings of the telemetry and other data we received from the Standfast, and nothing else. We do not send analysis, or narrative, or calls for help. Just the Standfast data playback. We clear on that?”

  “Ah, yes, sir. But given how bad this was—”

  “No!” Koffield cut him off. “No matter how bad it was, especially because it was so bad, we do it by the book. Our job here is to defend causality, prevent paradox, protect history from anyone or anything that might try and use the timeshaft wormholes to alter the past or the future. We can’t do that if we start out by violating causality ourselves. I’m sure everyone on this ship has checked the operational rules by now. They allow us to send data from the past back into the past, and nothing else.”

  “Yes, sir,” Sheelton said again, this time with a bit more spirit.

  “Very well.” Koffield didn’t like explaining his orders, but he was no fool. Everything had turned upside down for this crew. Nothing like this assault had ever happened in all the long history of the Chronologic Patrol. There were going to be people in this crew scared enough, shocked enough, that they might try and convince themselves it would be all right to bend the rules. He did not dare let that idea take root. Knowing the rules still applied, that the captain meant what he said—that would help hold them together. “In any event, I don’t think the drones will need to carry much more than the Standfast’s telemetry,” he said in a more gentle tone of voice. “When the folks back home see the attack on the Standfast, they’ll send every kind of support and reinforcement they can.

  What more could any of us say that would make them send more than that?”

  “Yes, sir,” Sheelton said. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

  No, Koffield thought, looking at the young man, and straining not to reveal how old, how worn, he himself felt. You didn’t think of it that way. And it hasn’t really dawned on you, or on anyone else, that we’re never going home. What happens when you realize that?

  The whole system of defense around a timeshaft worm-hole was based on the uptime ship, the ship on the “future” end of the wormhole, being in the future, but not of the future. The uptime ship had no contact, no link, no knowledge of the uptime universe, or of the history of the years between the uptime and downtime ends. That willful ignorance ensured that the uptime ship had no hidden agendas, could not knowingly or otherwise exchange information with incoming ships, could not be suspected of manipulating events and passing the information to someone on the downtime side. A ship that arrived at the uptime guard post from the uptime universe would be utterly contaminated with all sorts of knowledge of the future, as seen from the downtime end.

  But a patrol ship and crew that arrived at the downtime end and moved through the wormhole to the uptime guard post, and followed all the safeguards against receiving contaminated knowledge, could remain safely ignorant of the future during her tour of duty, and then withdraw back through the wormhole and go back home to the past, because her crew would know nothing of the future.

  It was precisely because the Upholder had come from the past, and had prior contact only with the past, that the operational rules permitted her to send a courier drone bearing a sharply restricted report on downtime events. If the Upholder had been an uptime ship, even that limited contact would have been forbidden.

  But the Upholder had seen the future and had acted to change it. She had become part of the future. By the act of doing her duty, she had been contaminated with information that could not go into the past, for fear of scrambling causality. Therefore, the ship could not return to the past, any more than she could send word of what had happened.

  “Keep me informed of progress,” Koffield said.

  “Yes, sir.” Sheelton shifted uncertainly in his seat, but did not stand up. “Sir, there is one other matter ...”

  “What, Lieutenant?”

  “Well, sir—The intruders moved uptime through the timeshaft wormhole, instead of just waiting for seventy-nine years to pass.”

  Koffield smiled sadly. “That one I can’t help you with, Lieutenant. I can’t figure it out either.”

  “No, sir, that’s not it. I mean, I think I have figured it out.”

  Koffield looked at Sheelton in surprise, and then damned himself for a fool. Why assume that he had the only—or the best—mind on the ship? “Go ahead, Mister. Tell me.”

  “Well, sir,
the intruders had the portal nexi codes, or knew how to get around them. That gave them the ability to go through the hole. But why would they want to go through the hole, if they didn’t need to do any time travel?”

  “That’s the question, all right,” Koffield said. “I’d gotten that far by myself. Is there anything more?”

  Sheelton reddened visibly. “Ah, yes, sir. I wouldn’t waste your time if that was all I had. What if it wasn’t travel—space travel, time travel, whatever—that they were interested in? What if it was the wormhole they cared about?”

  That notion hadn’t occurred to Koffield, but now the thought made his insides freeze. Now he could see what Sheelton was after, and he cursed himself again, for blindness far worse than his arrogance. “Go on,” he said.

  “A calibration run, sir. The only way to get exact, perfect data on a wormhole is to go through it, measure all the dynamics, and measure your exact temporal and spatial coordinates at either end. The exact data, down to the nanosecond and the micrometer.”

  Koffield nodded, still half in shock. Sheelton was right. It made sense. It was the only possible reason for making an uptime run through a wormhole. “Thank—thank you,

  Lieutenant. That’s a startling thought. But I do believe you’re right. I do believe you’re right.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Sheelton said, smiling broadly. He stood up and saluted again. “I’ll get to work on the courier drones at once, sin’’

  Koffield absently acknowledged the salute with a nod, and stared at the closed hatch long after Sheelton had gone.

  Calibration run. That had to be it. But if that was it, then there was a world of fresh trouble brewing. No one needed to measure down to the nano and the micro in order to travel through a wormhoie. In the scale of an interstellar trip, being five or ten minutes off in time, or a few hundred kilometers off target in space, was less than trivial. The intruders would only need that sort of precision data if they were planning to retune the wormhoie, reaim it, change it somehow.