The Depths of Time

by Roger MacBride Allen

  And all that time and effort had been taken simply to allow the relief ship to send the least information possible. She had signaled her arrival, but it might well be some time before she signaled that she was on station and ready for duty. Whatever ship it was, she had merely reported herself to be in useful range of the downtime relay. She still needed to perform a series of navigation checks, secure from cruise mode, rig for patrol. It was possible, even likely, that she had not yet roused all of her crew from cryosleep.

  Koffield devoutly wished the on-station signal would come soon, before anything else could go wrong. He tried not to remind himself that wishing rarely made it so.

  The duty shifts rotated around through a normal day of ship’s routine, without any further contact from the downtime side of the wormhole. The Upholder watched and waited.

  The second alert came just over twenty-six hours later, at 1311 hours the next day.

  Chasov had just relieved Sentar at detection and comm duty when the traffic contact alert buzzed. Chasov turned pale for a second, then checked his boards and started analyzing the contact. “Incoming traffic, sir,” he reported.

  “Very well,” Koffield said coolly, as if this were normal routine and not a potential crisis. “Keep me informed. Work the contact by the standard procedures.” If the new downtime ship was not yet fully powered up, operational, and prepared for on-station duty, she might not be in position to receive clearances on the ships headed downtime. If they were a bit edgy or trigger-happy aboard the downtime ship, and were surprised by the convoy ships coming through, things could get messy indeed. And considering that the new ship was replacing a craft that had been reduced to subatomic particles, they might have good reason to be edgy.

  Standard operating procedure called for Chasov to summon Sentar back. Chasov did not have to wait long for Sentar to scramble back onto the bridge. But there was little for Sentar to do, other than watch Chasov work the contact and watch him send the standard mirrors back to the convoy ships. Sentar looked inquiringly at Koffield, who remained in the command chair. Koffield shook his head no, very slightly. Let the boy work the contact. It was routine stuff, after all, and if uptime relief was slow in arriving, Chasov might well have to do the job on his own before too long, without any backstop. Live work was always the best training.

  Chasov quickly interpreted the contact and put it on the main displays.

  It was a beacon signal, or rather five beacon signals. The signals carried little more information than that, but the ships’ heading told them more. They were inbound for Glister, coming in straight down the heading from Thor’s Realm. It was plain to see it was the relief convoy, just about on schedule, and inward bound for Glister.

  “Verbal report,” Sentar ordered.

  “Five beaconed merchant ships, inbound on standard heading for Glister,” Chasov promptly replied. -

  “Distance and time, Crewman Chasov?” Sentar asked.

  “Yes, sir. Estimated range one billion four hundred six million kilometers. Doppler ranging shows targets to be decelerating, rendering arrival time uncertain. Using comparison to recorded similar flight paths, I derive estimated time of arrival at timeshaft-wormhole final approach cone at ninety-three hours, fourteen minutes.”

  Sentar nodded in satisfaction, and Koffield allowed himself just the hint of a smile. If Chasov’s report wasn’t word-for-word out of the detection officer’s training manual, it was awfully damned close.

  “Very well,” Sentar replied. “It would seem that we’ll have something to look at for the next four days. So keep an eye on those freighters for us, Crewman Chasov.”

  “Yes, sir!” said Chasov. It was obvious how proud he was of doing his job, of spotting, tracking, and analyzing the detection data.

  Koffield was scarcely less glad himself. If the Upholder hadn’t been so badly damaged, he would have regarded that detection range as scandalously bad. As it was, he was more than pleased. It went beyond knowing one crewman had been trained well enough to do the most routine part of a detection officer’s job. It meant that the ship as a whole had demonstrated her ability to perform at least part of her mission. Spotting ships coming in, and shepherding them through the wormhole, was normal, expected. The simple fact that the Upholder was back on the job was bound to do great things for morale—and shipboard morale could use all the help it could get.

  If he was the only one worried that the downtime relief ship had only four days to declare herself on station and operational before the convoy came through, that was fine as well. He had no desire to wish that worry—or any of his other worries—on anyone.

  The ships came on, moving toward the timeshaft worm-hole, and for the next four days everything went by the book. The convoy’s sealed Chronologic-Patrol-installed transponders sent all the proper authenticator codes to prove the ships had not sent or received any illegal communications during transit. The Upholder acknowledged, and ordered the ships to a standard approach. The convoy ships obediently shifted course, and set themselves up on the proper vector, beads on a string that led straight for the timeshaft wormhole. All routine, all normal.

  Except there was still no further word from the downtime relief ship, nothing at all but silence. Standard operating procedure called for the relief to maintain silence after the initial send-and-mirror until she was on station and fully operational. What had happened to her? Had the relief ship been destroyed in some further disaster? Was it merely some minor communications glitch? Was she sending the on-station signal, while the Upholder was somehow failing to receive it? The comm people checked the primary and backup gear again and again, but never found anything wrong.

  Koffield spent his off-duty hours in his cabin, brooding, worrying over it all. Two days after they had detected the convoy, he was sitting at his desk, reading an historical novel. He gave k up when he realized that he had just read the same passage over a half dozen times, and yet had no idea what it said. He shoved the datapage that held the book away and stared at the bulkhead opposite his desk.

  He did not know what to do. He could order the convoy ships to cancel their approach and simply have them wait until the downtime ship sent the all clear. Or else he could let them continue their approach and send the clearance codes through the wormhole at the proper time, activate the nexi and send the ships through, and simply count on the downtime relief ship to handle her end of things.

  But it wasn’t that easy or that simple. Once he cleared the convoy ships to final approach, and they committed to entering the wormhole, there could be no turning back. Once a ship was on final approach, it was impossible to abort, impossible to come about and escape the singularity. A ship on final approach was falling like a stone toward the singularity, and there was nothing that anyone could do to stop the fall. She would either go through the timeshaft wormhole, or she would impact the singularity that generated the timeshaft.

  Ordering the convoy ships to standby orbits seemed the most prudent course. But they were not ships laden with expensive trinkets or luxury goods. The scale of effort was too great for that, the ships coming and going too quickly for it to be anything other than an all-out relief—or even rescue—effort. Delay the ships a day, a week, a month, waiting for the downtime ship to end its silence, and there would, almost certainly, be people dying on Glister, waiting for the supplies the convoy was bringing. Better to risk the remote chance of the downtime ship taking a potshot at one of the ships before realizing her mistake, than go with the near certainty that slowing the ships would result in greater suffering and death.

  Or was he pushing his guesses too far? He could not know for certain the convoy was even bound for Glister.

  It was a maddening temptation to bypass all the safeties, to order the comm channels open, to send a voice message in clear to the downtime ship, asking what the devil was going on, to hail the convoy ships and ask what their mission was, and how urgent it was.

  But to do either of those things would Be to violate
the very core of the Chronologic Patrol’s mission, its reason for being. The convoy ships had followed all the procedures required to keep them from gaining knowledge of the future before they dropped back into the past. He could not betray their trust. That the Upholder had been contaminated with knowledge of events on the uptime side of the worm-hole, events that the convoy ships and the downtime relief ship did not want to know about, did not matter. It was his mission to ensure that the past remained ignorant of the future, that time paradoxes of any sort did not arise. It was his job, his ship’s job, to see to it that nothing, including his own knowledge of the situation, could reach back from the future and derange the past.

  That was why the Upholder could never go back to her own time. She could not spread that curse of forbidden knowledge to the others. It was Anton Koffield’s sworn duty to prevent any such thing from happening. He could not, dared not, try to make contact with any of the players in the drama.

  And what of the uptime relief ship? Why hadn’t she shown up yet? Had the one courier drone sent out on the uptime side of the timeshaft failed to get through? But it was clear that at least one of the couriers sent through the downtime side had made it. A time-sealed message should have been put in storage for seventy-nine years to let the uptime side know.

  Unless.

  Unless, somewhere in the seventy-nine years that stood between the downtime and uptime ends of the assault, they had learned something. Learned the answer to what the intruders were, and why they had come. Or learned there was no reason to relieve the Upholder, no purpose to be served by the effort of sending a ship. Maybe the people on the uptime side already knew all would be well—-or already knew that disaster of some sort was foredoomed, that any attempt at rescue or relief would fail, and that there was no sense wasting more lives and treasure.

  Or else there was no Chronologic Patrol anymore, on the upside of the timeshaft. Eight decades had passed, long enough time for things to change, to evolve or collapse.

  Or else—

  Hell and damnation! He stood up and began to pace the length of his cabin—something he would never allow his crew to see him doing. There was no end to the or-elses, the what-ifs. He could speculate until the end of time itself and it would do him no good.

  Time itself was the problem. He was caught up in the tangled complexities needed to prevent paradoxes. That irony was far from lost on him.

  His ship was lost in the fog of time, hemmed in by the hidden past and the unknowable future. He and his ship and her crew were marooned on a tiny island of present and known events, but cut off from all other knowledge by the endless expanse of the ocean of years.

  He might as well head back up to the bridge and see if anything had happened. It was pointless, of course. The bridge crew would have summoned him if anything had. But there were limits to how long he could stay in that cabin. Besides, if he were on the bridge when things happened, he would know about them that little bit sooner.

  He stepped out of his cabin and headed toward the bridge, his mind still chasing the problem around and around. Even in the midst of so much uncertainty, there were things of which he was absolutely positive. He had no logical or factual basis for the knowledge, but still it was there, solid and hard. He was utterly sure that, when the time to decide finally came, he would know no more than he did right now.

  And he knew, deep in his heart, deep in his bones, that no uptime relief ship would come.

  The Upholder was on her own.

  Of that there was not the slightest doubt at all.

  CHAPTER THREE Lost to the Past

  Time ground down on them.

  Nothing changed but the time left until the convoy ships would commit to final approach. There was no further word from the downtime relief ship, and no sign whatsoever of an uptime relief ship.

  Nor was there any sign of the intruders, or any clue as to who or what they might be. Koffield checked over every record of events since the first intruder alert and studied all the tracks and contacts and reports and false alarms from detection and comm as they came in. But it did no good, told him nothing he did not already know. There was no brilliant, long-overlooked answer to this problem, no sudden insight.

  Koffield made sure to be on the bridge well before final-approach commitment for the first of the convoy ships. Three hours before the last moment when he could order an abort, he was in the captain’s chair, hunched over its repeater displays, monitoring the situation.

  He had to choose, but none of his possible choices was good. Again and again, the conundrum wheeled through his mind. If he ordered the convoy to hold on this side of the wormhole, he would likely be causing further casualties and suffering, in the Glister system. If he let the ships through before the downtime patrol ship signaled that she was ready on station and ready to receive clearance codes, there was at least some danger that a nervous downtime ship would fire on the convoy. And even if he lost his nerve and tried to make unauthorized communications with convoy or patrol ship, it was all but certain the other ships would refuse the contact anyway.

  Koffield knew perfectly well that the act of not deciding was a decision in and of itself. With every second that passed, the convoy ships got deeper into the worm-hole gravity well. With every moment that passed, more thrust would be required for the ships to break free, and there would be less time to apply that thrust. The maneuver that was needed to abort from final approach would grow more violent and difficult with every moment that passed. In the last few moments before final-approach commitment, any potential abort maneuver would be so violent that it would likely wreck any ship that tried it.

  With every passing moment, the simple fact that he had not yet ordered the convoy to bail out put more pressure on him to let them pass. If he ordered a bailout too late, he would be issuing death sentences for all aboard the convoy, and therefore might as well let them through to try their luck on the other side. There would come a moment when he would have decided by default, by not deciding.

  But Captain Anton Koffield did not like the idea of letting things slide, of letting things drift, or allowing decisions to make themselves. He came out of his reverie and looked about him, at the bridge crew, tending to the stations and monitoring the incoming ships, at the silent comm systems, at the Upholder herself. They had all done their jobs. Now it was time for him to do his. He had to decide—and deciding was not going to be that hard. He would make his choice—and then hope.

  He allowed himself one last scan of the repeater displays, and then spoke. “Comm, the five incoming ships have full and final clearance to enter the timeshaft wormhole. Transmit the appropriate signals. Execute and acknowledge.”

  “Aye sir,” the comm officer replied. “Clearances transmitted. Standing by for mirror replies.” There was a brief pause as the comm officer watched his screens. “Mirror replies received.”

  “Very well,” Koffield replied, and leaned back just a trifle in the captain’s chair. That was that. He had decided, as best he could, based on the information he had, and acted on his decision. He could do no better, and no more.

  No more except wait, and watch.

  The last hours of the convoy’s approach passed without incident. Koffield remained on the bridge more out of a sense of duty than out of need. But endlessly watching nothing at all happen seemed a waste of valuable time. Koffield occupied himself with calling up his own personal work on his main repeater display. He caught up on the endless routine items that had gotten stacked up and shoved to one side since the intruders’ attack: repair reports, inventory updates, duty roster changes, and the like. It felt good to work through the routine, normal stuff, to pretend, if only for a little while, that everything was the way it was supposed to be.

  Koffield looked up from his work after a time and wondered, not for the first time, if the crew was pretending at normality as hard as he was. More than likely they were. They were not fools. They had, no doubt, worked out the logic of the situation, just as he
had. Some of them, most of them, maybe even all of them, knew they were never going home, that the only things now left to them were duty and, if possible, survival. The Chronologic Patrol would take care of them—the CP always took care of its own— but even if the CP was generous beyond all imagination, it could not give them back their homes and families. And the crew knew that.

  What scenes had played out, away from his view? Bull sessions in the mess compartment? Heated arguments in the bunk rooms? What had his officers wisely kept from his attention, knowing he would be forced to obey regulations and mete out punishments that could do no good to anyone out here? Koffield knew there could be no justice, no logic, no merit in punishing the crew for feeling the same terror he felt himself, terror that was entirely justified and rational. So long as the fear was kept in check, and his people did their duty, he would gladly turn a blind eye to trivia and trust his officers to bring him word only of things he truly needed to know.

  Just let them all get through this. Let everything stay on an even keel until the convoy was through, and then—

  “Captain, I’m getting something strange on long-range detectors,” Sentar, the detection officer, called out.

  “What is it?” Koffield demanded, snapping out of his reverie.

  “It looks like a fast-moving gamma-ray source, real close in, but that doesn’t make any sense.”

  And Koffield knew. There was no doubt at all in his mind. He had no proof, no evidence at all, but still he was certain, unshakably so.

  “Moving toward what?” he asked, knowing full well what the answer would be.

  “Still getting a vector—it’s—it’s headed straight for the wormhole.”

  Of course. Where else would it be going? “Look for others,” he said wearily. “There will be two others, probably coming in on widely dispersed vectors, driving for the wormhole.” Of course they would come back. And of course they would come back now.

  The convoy. Whatever happened next, those ships had to get clear. “Communications! Flash alert to all convoy ships—abort, abort, abort. Cancel final-approach clearance. Break off approach and take up parking orbits. Send that in clear over all voice and data channels.”