The Depths of Time Read online

  Timeshaft wormholes—their creation, control,”tuning, and operation—were the exclusive province of the Chronologic Patrol. Before the intruders’ assault, Koffield would have rejected out of hand the notion of anyone’s seizing control of a wormhoie. The idea that any group of outsiders would, or could, interfere with the Chronologic Patrol’s monopoly was absurd, impossible, on the face of it. But the intruders had done a half dozen impossible things already. Koffield was fully prepared to believe they could do one more.

  But. If they had made the uptime run to obtain the calibration data, that meant they intended to use that data in some way. And that clearly implied something that scared the hell out of Anton Koffield. He was the master of a ship that was half-crippled, nearly derelict, and very definitely time-stranded after her first encounter with the intruders.

  And if the intruders were planning to make use of that calibration data—then that meant the intruders were coming back.

  “All right,” Koffield said, walking the circle of the operation stations on the bridge. “That was good—but let’s see if we can do better. We’ll run the simulation again. Reset to startup status and cross-check.”

  There was a low murmur of voices as the bridge crew reset their boards and did their cross-checks. Not to put too fine a point on it, Koffield was lying when he called the results of the last drill “good,” and he knew the crew knew it. But it wouldn’t do to tell them their work was “good under the circumstances” or “as good as could be expected.” It would not do to point out that, if the Upholder had been operating with a normal crew complement, and all systems in good repair and in operation, the results of the last hostile-encounter drill would have been bad enough to put the entire bridge crew on report. But with half the external detectors blasted away, with three of the four laser cannon still out of commission, and a shortage of ammunition for the mass accelerator, there wasn’t much hope of nominal performance.

  Koffield stopped at the patched-together detection control station, where Sayad had been posted—where Sayad had died. Able Crew Member Ander Chasov seemed to be trying to sit at attention in front of the detection station, or what was left of it.

  There were two officially qualified and rated detection officers alive and fit for duty aboard the Upholder, and Chasov was not one of them. But the two surviving watch officers could not keep heel-and-toe watches forever, not without being worn down by exhaustion until they were of no use at all. Koffield had similar problems at other posts. He needed chair-warmers for the detection station and other positions, crew members who, even if not fully trained to deal with an emergency, could at least stand routine watches and summon the trained personnel if and when a real alert happened.

  “At ease, Chasov,” said Koffield. “Do your work, and don’t worry quite so much about your posture.”

  “Yes, sir, Captain,” Chasov replied, as he drew himself up straighter, if such a thing was possible.

  Koffield allowed himself the luxury of a quiet sigh. Chasov was not exactly the most promising candidate for detection officer he had ever seen, but there were precious few alternate choices available at the moment. Koffield didn’t even have enough warm bodies. He had personnel shortages at nearly every crucial position aboard ship. With a half dozen fatalities, and twice that many seriously injured, there were more holes to fill than bodies to fill them with. He was relying on half-trained or untrained crew in every department of the ship.

  “All right,” he said, turning his back on Chasov in hopes of getting the poor devil to relax a bit, “we’re going to take it from the top. Or rather, you are. Lieutenant Sheelton, please be so kind as to take charge of the training session.”

  “Yes, sir,” Sheelton said. “Very well, then. Hostile-contact detection drill. Ship’s computer will generate random simulated hostile contact sometime within the next half hour. This time I want to see sharper handoffs and tighter communications. Commencing randomizer now.”

  Koffield took his chance to slip quiedy off the bridge and make his way back to his office, feeling a mixed sense of relief and guilt at having escaped the endless practice sessions. Koffield had not the slightest idea if the training would do any good at all, for he had not the slightest idea what, if anything, they were likely to face. If Sheelton’s logic held, and the intruders had indeed been on a calibration run, it only made sense that they would be coming back. But logic was merely one tool of reasoning. Maybe they had missed some vital link, some clue that would have led them to a completely different conclusion. Maybe there was no other clue they could have found, but they had still gotten it wrong.

  Koffield’s thoughts went back to Sayad, as they had a thousand times since the raid. She had worked miracles, on the detection board before she had been killed, working the scant data with remarkable speed and skill. Finding the intruders’ far-flung ships in the depths of space, and in the midst of battle, should have been all but impossible. And yet she had done it with preternatural ease. Koffield reached for a record pad, but then pulled his hand back. There was no point in reviewing the action logs from Say ad’s station once again. He had done it a dozen times already, and they had told him all they were going to tell.

  But that same data had told Sayad a great deal more.

  She had spotted some underlying pattern, some framework, even in the first incomplete wisps of data, that had told her where to look.

  What had she seen that everyone else had missed? What could she have told them, if she had lived?

  There was no sense chasing those ghosts again. But neither was there anything more useful that he could do.

  He had directed that all the repairs that could usefully be done, be done. He had juggled the crew assignments and assigned substitutes as best he could. Now he had to hang back and let the crew and officers do their work. Breathing down Chasov’s neck had done no good, and Koffield doubted if that sort of close-in supervision would help elsewhere. It might well do little more than give the crew and officers more of a chance to see through the holes in his performance, in his pretense of being confident. He had no wish for the crew to discover how unnerved their captain truly was.

  He forced all that from his mind and tried to come up with something else to worry about. He smiled to himself. Finding worries wasn’t likely to be a problem for him for a long, long time.

  But most of his worries came down to timing. The odds on all the courier drones getting through were not good. The drones had been kicked around pretty badly in the attack, and they were being sent on long and arduous journeys. However, the odds that at least one of them would make it through were excellent. Koffield found himself wishing, not for the first time, that he had sent more than one drone to a Chronologic Patrol base on the uptime side of the wormhole. His ship needed relief—devil take it, his ship needed rescue. But duty and logic had told him the same thing—it was more important that the people downtime get the word. It was the downtime side of the time-shaft wormhole that had been left unguarded by the destruction of the Standfast, and it was the primary mission of the Chronologic Patrol to guard the past from the future. The downtime side of the timeshaft took priority.

  But still, relief might come from uptime or downtime, and it would be all to the good if it arrived before the return of the intruders, or else—

  Koffield chose not to contemplate the or-else until he had no choice.

  Nor was it simply a race between relief and the intruders. There was another variable to be considered in the timing: the regular merchant traffic that was the main reason for the existence of the timeshaft wormholes in the first place. He might not know when legitimate merchant traffic would be coming through, but Koffield knew it would come.

  No one at a timeshaft wormhole could ever know for sure when a ship might arrive. In the first place, the basic principle of information-denial in and of itself meant no ship guarding a timeshaft was authorized to know anything of events in the future—and that very definitely included ship schedules. Seco
ndly, timeshaft ship schedules were notoriously unreliable in any event, especially concerning arrival at a timeshaft. The distances were so vast, and the travel times so long, that a navigation error of one part in a hundred million could easily translate into an arrival-time error of a month or two.

  Koffield, therefore, could not know for certain when a ship might show up. But all the willful, determined effort to retain ignorance of the future could not keep Koffield, or any good portal-guard captain, from noting patterns in the schedule of ships’ arrivals. And one pattern in particular of ships in transit had stood out from the general flow of craft that came and went through the Circum Central Wormhole.

  Four times in a little more than a standard Earth year, at more or less regular intervals, a flotilla, a convoy, of five cargo ships had come through. Four times the same five ships had arrived on the same trajectory when headed downtime, and then on opposite trajectory when headed uptime. The ships all carried cargo modules on the outbound leg, and towed huge strap-on cryosleep chambers on the return trip. That in and of itself was unusual. Timeshaft-wormhole ships, dropships as they were often called, almost always traveled alone. Aside from that, five ships making four round-trips in less than an objective year represented a remarkable effort. Each trip involved dozens or even hundreds of years of wear and tear, measured in ship’s time, and meant crews kept in expensive, potentially hazardous cryosleep for nearly all of every journey. Someone was making an all-out effort. Judging from their trajectories, it was almost impossible to avoid the conclusion that the five ships were out of Thor’s Realm, and bound for Glister.

  Koffield had done several tours of duty in intelligence analysis before managing to draw command of the Upholder. He could not help but interpret what he was seeing. He knew that conditions on Glister had been deteriorating for years before he had drawn command of the Upholder. The news had been full of accounts of ambitious plans to reinvigorate Glister’s climate. There had been much discussion of the fact that any such effort would put a great strain on resources, because the great Oskar DeSilvo’s terraforming of Solace was not yet complete, and that project was still a net consumer of terra-forming material.

  The five ships that came and went told Koffield that the Glister Reinvigoration project had not succeeded. They were, he was certain, relief and rescue ships, bringing in yet more equipment, more supplies. He knew that much by watching them on their return trips, towing the jumbo-sized cryosleep modules. Nothing but supplies going in, nothing but people coming out. That could only mean things were bad and looking to get worse on Glister.

  And that fleet of five ships was due anytime. They might even be within normal detection range already—except the Upholder’s detection gear was barely functional even at restricted range.

  A great deal could depend on who, or what, arrived first. Koffield devoutly wished that both uptime and downtime relief ships would come before any other craft approached the timeshaft wormhole. He could use all the help he could get in dealing with the situation. Better still, let his relief face things on their own. He would be delighted to be ordered off station and to receive authorization to limp toward the nearest Chronologic Patrol repair yard.

  In the meantime, all he could do was prepare for attack, for battle, for further disaster. While so doing, he would continue praying most devoutly, to whatever gods might be available out in that middle of nowhere that was the Circum Central Wormhole Farm, for nothing at all to happen for as long as possible.

  And so things stood for the next nineteen standard days. The Upholder, while by no means in anything like good repair, held together, and little by little, the thousand small repairs that had to be made got done, each one a tiny lift to morale. Even if the detection systems would never be what they once were, unless or until the ship got to a repair yard, getting hot water back into the enlisted quarters plumbing loop could not help but be a major lift to the spirits.

  Space around the ship was utterly, endlessly empty. No word came through the signal portal from the downtime side of the wormhole. Either no relief had yet arrived, or else the relief ship was not able to communicate with the Upholder. Koffield ordered all the subsystems for the link to the uptime relay checked and rechecked. Everything seemed to be working, and the relay itself reported in as healthy and as sending and receiving normal test pulses with the downtime relay. If the systems checks and telemetry were to be believed, then they had a solid comm link all the way through the wormhole, but no one had yet linked in to the other end.

  The detection section was not in good shape. The watch officers were still struggling to get the semitrained crew members, who had been drafted into the job, up to some sort of half-acceptable degree of competence. They were just about to the point where they could work a routine ship arrival without direct supervision, and that was all to the good. But by using untrained personnel, they were increasing the odds of missing the beacon on an incoming freighter. It certainly meant they would be more likely to miss any intruder or raider that was so inconsiderate as to fail to transmit a beacon signal.

  There were times when Koffield thought the waiting, the worrying, would drive him around the bend. And there were times, such as when the repair crews got the bridge ventilation system back up to spec, that he thought he could see an end in sight. When they got the main thermal systems back under control, so the officers’ quarters cabin air temperature didnt suddenly spike fifteen degrees higher one hour and then crash down almost to freezing the next, he felt sure they had passed their low point. The worst was over. They were going to hold together until relieved. They were going to be all right. But then he received the chief engineer’s final report on the condition of the main propulsion system, and he knew their troubles were far from over.

  Koffield also knew that the main part of his job at this point was to stay out of the crew’s hair. Once he had made his decisions and given his orders, there was not a great deal of useful work that the captain could do. He was careful to make himself visible. He performed inspections, listened to his crew—but it was easy to overdo that sort of thing. He did not propose to breathe down their necks. He kept himself out of the way, and kept to himself. He did what he had always done when there was little to do but wait for a crisis to mature. He listened to his music, read his books, quietly, alone.

  Throughout Koffield’s career, it had seemed to him as if the crises always hit quite literally at the darkest hour, during ship’s night. As a general rule, things happened at 0200 hours, not 1000 or 1900 hours. They happened when Koffield was sound asleep, or about to sit down to a meal that had already been postponed three times. For once, all such rules were broken.

  It happened at 1107 hours, right in the middle of the dayside shift, with a well-fed and well-rested Captain Anton Koffield on the bridge and at the conn, and Lieutenant Jem Sentar, the ship’s best detection officer, on duty.

  “Signal incoming through wormhole link!” Sentar called out.

  Koffield was out of the command chair, on his feet, and standing over Sentar, right where he had been when a piece of shrapnel had killed Sayad. He half-consciously moved back a step, even as he stared intently at the repaired display screens. Sure enough, there it was. “Identify,” he ordered.

  “Data packet from Chronologic Patrol vessel,” Sentar reported.

  Koffield nodded in agreement. It wasn’t much, but there it was. A minimal arrival signal, a Chronologic Patrol identity pattern on blank signal packets. Aside from saying Here we are, they were sending null data, not even so much as the ship’s name attached. Clearly whoever was on the other end was under strict orders to keep intertemporal-information exchange to a minimum. There had been more than enough in the way of temporal violations already. But no matter how little the signal told them, it was enough, more than enough. They weren’t alone anymore. “Confirm signal,” Koffield ordered.

  “Rechecking—confirmed,” Sentar said. “That’s a Chrono-Patrol identity signal.”

  “Excel
lent. Good to have someone watching the back door. Send mirror-reply signal.” A mirror reply was simply the received signal played backwards and beamed back to the sender. A mirror reply sent no new information, but served to confirm accurate receipt of the sender’s signal.

  “Mirror reply sent,” Sentar said.

  “Very well,” Koffield acknowledged. He returned to his command chair, determined to hide his sense of relief as thoroughly as he had hidden his worries and fears. He wanted to cheer out loud and announce it at once on the ship’s intercom, let the whole crew know there was something to celebrate. But he couldn’t. He dared not encourage them to get their hopes up, or let their guard down. Too much could still go wrong. The news would spread around the ship fast enough, and the crew would be glad to hear it. That way of getting the news would be far more appropriate than what would be touched off by a jubilant shipwide announcement. He sat back down with as much of an air of calm routine as he could manage. “Lieutenant Sentar, log my order that the detection and comm officer is to alert me if and when we get a new signal from the downtime relay. If we get a ready-on-station signal, I want to know the moment it arrives.”

  “Understood, sir. I have logged the order.”

  An incredibly complicated sequence of events had just concluded with the relief ship’s arrival, and the complex motions through time and space that had brought the relief ship to the downtime end of the Circum Central time-shaft as soon after the Standfast disaster as possible. It had taken centuries of travel time to make it happen, but the relief ship had arrived in under three weeks of objective time.