The Depths of Time

by Roger MacBride Allen

  “Risky,” he said. “Not the docking. I’m sure that will go fine. Once we’re aboard, however—well, we’ll be in their hands, won’t we? And, from what I can see of the station so far, I don’t know how comfortable I am with that thought.”

  “Sir?” What the hell was he talking about? What was he seeing that she was not?

  “Proceed, Officer Chandray. Carefully. Just don’t stop being careful once we’re on board.”

  “Right,” she said, utterly mystified. “Absolutely.”

  She checked her displays and confirmed that the Artlnts aboard the Cruzeiro do Sul and SCO Station had satisfied each other’s data requests. The station knew everything it needed to know about the ship, and vice versa. SCO Traffic Control had cleared her to perform the final docking maneuver. She checked her aft radar display, and saw four ships moving in on approach to SCO Station, and a fifth commencing maneuvers even as she watched. All of the ships were moving at far greater accelerations and in far faster flight paths than what she had been assigned. Quite obviously, they had cleared incoming traffic to make room for the fossil-ship that had arrived out of nowhere.

  But that the other ships were now moving told her that even SCO Traffic Control was ready to concede that the Cruzeiro do Sul had made it in, and flown in safely. Now comes the easy part, she told herself. No need to be nervous about it. Nothing to be scared of. Nothing she hadn’t done a thousand times before. The only thing different was that she was light-years from home, and marooned in the wrong century, and the unknown, the future, was waiting for them. Koffield was right. It wasn’t the docking she should be scared of. It was what came afterward, once they were aboard the station.

  Understanding that helped, somehow. Her lips had gone dry, and she ran her tongue over them and swallowed. She gimbaled her command chair around until the ship’s docking probe was over and in front of her left shoulder, right where she could see it. She flipped the main video screen to the probe’s camera, and was rewarded with a straight-on view of the PT Arm. She flipped her thruster controls back from roll to maneuver, and tapped the rear jets at minimum power for a quarter second. The ship moved slowly forward, straight on for the PT Arm’s docking probe at a meter a second.

  She watched her lineup indicators, and saw she was drifting just a hair high in y-axis. She blipped her side thrusters, killing the drift. The y-axis-up adjustment had put her perhaps three or four centimeters out of perfect alignment with the docking probe, but she made no attempt to correct it.

  She was well within tolerance, and any attempt to compensate would likely produce an overcorrection, and lead to repeated over-and-under shots that could lead to a lot more trouble than being off center by four centimeters.

  She drifted in slowly, watching the docking probe move closer. At fifteen meters out, she killed most of her forward motion, bringing it down to a quarter meter per second.

  The PTA’s probe was close enough now that she was no longer seeing it straight on. It was coming in toward her left, toward the Cruzeiro do Sul’s own docking probe. The closer it got, the bigger, the cruder, it seemed to be, its jaws gaping wide to seize at her ship.

  Slowly, she drifted in, tapping out another bit of braking thrust at five meters, slowing to a bare eight centimeters a second. She checked her translations. She noted with a nod that the y-axis-high drift seemed to have solved itself, and they were right on target. If she had tried a correction, she would only have made things worse.

  She pulled her hands away from the controls. She was exactly where she wanted to be. There was nothing to do but look out the port side of the pilot’s station and watch the two probes close in on each other.

  It took just slightly over a minute for the Cruzeiro do Sul to cross that last few meters. Strange to be moving so slowly aboard a ship that could go so fast, that could go from the outer reaches of the system to Solace in a matter of days.

  And strange that a minute could seem so long.

  She watched as the claw of the PT Arm docking probe drew closer and closer to her ship. Terror grabbed her, and she did not know what scared her—and then knew that it was the unknown itself that she feared. The outside world, the present-day universe, was closing in on them. Until they were docked, until they were in the station, they were not truly part of the future. They could at least imagine drawing back, safe into the vanished- past. The last few seconds in which they were part of the past, part of the life and time to which she could no longer return, were evaporating before her eyes.

  The ship’s probe and station’s probe moved closer,closer. They touched. The jaws of the station’s probe closed upon the Cruzeiro do Sul, and the whole ship shuddered slightly at the contact. The docking autostop thrusters killed the last of their forward momentum. The future had caught them.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN Jonah and Pandora

  Anton Koffield watched and listened as an alert tone sounded and lines of text appeared on the Cruzeiro do Sul’s pilot station’s display.

  POWER-OFF ALL ATTITUDE CONTROL, ALL PROPULSION SYSTEMS. EXTEND SHIP LANDING GEAR. WILL NOT PROCEED UNTIL COMPLIANCE DETECTION.

  The syntax was a little odd, but the intent was clear enough. SCO Station didn’t want powered ships flying around inside itself.

  Anton Koffield looked to Norla Chandray, and nodded at her unspoken question. She let out a worried sigh and flipped the appropriate switches.

  COMPLIANCE DETECTION. PT SYSTEM NOW WILL TRANSPORT TO SHIP BAY GAMMA TWO (G2). MAINTAIN PASSIVE STATE.

  Interesting. There had been no noticeable shift in language or context when Second Officer Chandray had been talking with the human controllers. Why would an automatic system use such strange phrasing?

  Koffield looked at Chandray again. The woman did not much like the thought of powering down her ship. Well, he could not blame her. Even under normal circumstances, no pilot liked to cede control of her craft—and these were far from normal circumstances.

  The PT Arm folded back on itself, pulling the Cruzeiro do Sul toward the station. Koffield peered into the station’s central access tunnel and saw their PT Arm’s carrier car starting to roll forward, hauling the arm and the Cruzeiro along. There was a creak and a groan from the docking system’s load-bearing structure as it took up the towing stress. Then the ship started moving slowly forward toward the station.

  Koffield checked his recorders again and confirmed they were working, then concentrated on seeing everything, noting everything, that he possibly could.

  The carrier car moved steadily forward, the PT Arm and the ship trailing along behind. It was hard not to imagine the open end of the central access tunnel as a giant mouth swallowing them up, and the tunnel itself as a gullet of some monstrous beast. Jonah being swallowed by the whale. Well, Jonah had come out of it all right. Perhaps they would be equally lucky.

  The Cruzeiro passed out of sunlight into the shadow of the station, then entered the station’s access tunnel. Without taking his eyes off the tunnel, Koffield removed his bright-tracking glasses and handed them to Chandray. She removed hers and put both pairs back in their storage compartment.

  Koffield’s attention was focused on the interior of Solace Central Orbital Station. The place had doubled in size in the last century. That in and of itself was not remarkable. It was the way that time and use had made their mark that told him what he needed to know, and that gave him reason for alarm.

  They passed by a loading bay that was stripped down to its structural members, wall panels pulled out more or less at random, and some of the structural hardware missing as well. What looked very much like the same type of wall panels had been used to add an extra repair bay in a nearby yard. A beat-up old orbital tug in that repair bay was half-disassembled, but whether it was being taken apart or being put back together was impossible to tell. There were no work lights on, no cables strung, no test equipment running, no workers on duty. Koffield got the very strong impression that no one had worked on that tug, or in that yard, for a long time.
>
  A quarter rotation around the cylinder, a new, bright, gleaming repair yard had all lights on and a full staff in pressure suits, swarming over a gleaming-new atmospheric shuttle.

  That was the pattern, writ small. The old was not preserved, or restored, but left to fall into decline and decay, scavenged and stripped for parts. The newly built sections and systems were not integrated into the old, but simply slapped into place over them. It was not a rational way to do work, or an efficient way. And things would not be the way they were unless someone, probably a large group of someones, generations of someones, benefited in some way from doing things in that irrational way and had the power to make things happen to benefit them.

  In other places, in other circumstances—on the surface of the planet, for example—abandoning one old loading crane where it stood, while building a newer, bigger, more powerful one a hundred meters away would not have held so much significance, or served as a warning sign of larger problems. But things were different in the tighter quarters of even a large orbital station. “They’ve doubled the size of the place,” he said to Norla. “But half the place looks close to abandoned. What does that say to you?”

  “I don’t know, exactly, sir,” she replied. “Maybe they’re bad planners, or maybe it’s just plain old corruption. Or maybe the old guard just refused to rebuild or improve, and the up-and-comers left them where they were and went around them.”

  Not for the first time, Koffield mentally gave Norla high marks. She was not a trained observer, but she was sharp, and she knew how to interpret what she saw.

  As they were drawn in toward the older central disks, the pattern became more obvious and more extreme. Wrecked service bays, no busier than ghost towns, were side by side with bustling supply depots. Brightly lit VIP observation windows stared into the ports of darkened, smashed-out fueling stations. That too seemed to be part of the pattern. Not just the vibrant new next to the impoverished old, but the prosperous luxury establishment next to the bankrupt essential.

  Not good. None of it was good.

  The PT Arm towed them smoothly past it all, past the center point of the station and toward the far end of the cylinder. They came to the forward docking complex, and were greeted by the sight of a quite different sort of pattern—or perhaps, Koffield reflected, merely a variation on the same theme.

  Every docking bay was full, and that made no sense. If there was one thing not in short supply, out in space, it was space itself. At every other station Koffield had ever seen there was a very simple way to deal with overcrowding. If a bay was needed, one simply waited until the ship in it was finished unloading, then undocked it and left it in a matched parking orbit close to the station. Assuming one. took basic anticollision precautions, and assuming the ships had sufficient propulsion power and life support, there was no practical limit to the number of ships one could stack up, and no purpose served by leaving ships at their bays. Koffield peered down the forward end of the access tunnel, toward open space. Even just with the naked eye, he could see a good ten or twenty ships—interorbit jobs, mostly—of one sort or another, all plainly in just that sort of standard stationkeeping orbit. They used the normal techniques.

  Then why were SCO Station’s docking bays filled to bursting?

  Koffield found his answer by noting what sorts of ships were in the bays themselves. Atmospheric transports, nearly every one of them. All of them of vaguely futuristic design, as seen from the perspective of a century and a quarter in the past, and nearly all of them showing signs of long and hard use. Few showed anything more than minimal interior lights through their portholes. Few had propel-lant lines or personnel access tunnels running to them—but all of them had what looked to be life-support umbilicals hooked up. Only a few had their locator lights blinking, and no pilot liked to power down those unless absolutely necessary. Yet a few ships had their beacons going, so there couldn’t be a local prohibition against running lights. Then why shut them down, unless—

  Second Officer Norla Chandray was a step ahead of him. “I think there must be worse trouble on the planet’s surface than we thought,” she said. “Those are all ground-to-orbit ships, not orbit-only craft. That’s why they’ve got LSUs running to them, but not propellant lines or personnel access tunnels.”

  Koffield nodded. He had read it the same way. The ships down there didn’t have enough power reserves or propellant to get themselves back, so they had to stay docked. The station was feeding them power and air because the ships didn’t have enough of their own. And the Personnel Access Tunnels weren’t extended because a PAT gave, well, personnel access. And for whatever reason, SCO Station didn’t want anyone from those ships getting into the station. The passengers and crew of the distressed ships were trapped there.

  So why didn’t the station refuel them? None of the three possible answers Koffield could come up with made him feel any better. Either the station didn’t have the fuel to give the ships, or the ships couldn’t afford to pay for it, or the ships were refusing to take the fuel, for fear of being sent back.

  But who would fly from the planet’s surface to SCO Station under such circumstances unless—

  Unless things on the surface of Solace were getting very bad indeed.

  “How’s our propellant holding out?” Koffield asked. He could have checked for himself, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the grounded hobo fleet spread out before his eyes.

  “Tanks at just under eighty percent full,” Norla said. “We can get anywhere in the system, or get back to the Dom Pedro with no problem, if we have to.”

  “The Dom Pedro sounds good right now,” Koffield said. “But I can’t think of anyplace else in this system I’d much like to go.”

  “I’m right with you there, sir,” Chandray replied. “What I’d like to know is, where are they going to put us?”

  “You saw it on the heads-up,” Koffield said. “Docking Bay Gamma Two.”

  “Yes, sir. But it looks as if someone is there already.” She pointed over his shoulder. He looked in the direction she was pointing. He hadn’t been watching for the marking placards, but clearly Chandray had been. And there, very plainly, was the sign indicating G2. And just as plainly, there was a ship already there, a cone-shaped ballistic atmospheric lander that was plainly too large to share G2 with a minitug, let alone an intersystem transport the size of the Cruzeiro do Sul. The name of the ship, the Pilot’s Ease, was painted in bold letters on the side of the ship.

  The answer to Chandray’s question came almost before she was finished asking it. The PT Arm towing the Cruzeiro slowed to a smooth, steady halt, and the Cruzeiro’s superstructure creaked and moaned as the stresses readjusted. Another PT Arm rolled up on its carrier car and came to a halt just ahead of the Cruzeiro do Sul. The second PT Arm swung down over Docking Bay Gamma Two and connected its docking probe to the docking probe in the nose of the Pilot’s Ease. The arm pulled the Ease straight up out of the bay and brought it to the centerline of the station. The arm rotated its docking collar about until the base of the ballistic ship was pointed straight at the forward end of the station, the end opposite to the one through which the Cruzeiro had entered the station.

  The arm moved forward, pushing the Pilot’s Ease ahead of itself. Arm and ship moved forward, toward the end of the tunnel. Twenty meters or so shy of the tunnel’s end, the - arm let go, and set the Pilot’s Ease adrift. The big ballistic ship sailed slowly out into open space. So far as Koffield could see, she made no effort to adjust her course or slow her forward motion relative to the station. The PT Arm hadn’t pushed her hard, but it had put a few meters per second of speed into the ship, enough to shift her orbit somewhat. If she did not slow her forward motion, the Ease would stay in her slightly variant orbit, gradually drifting away from the station. Koffield could not see any nav locator lights or interior lights on the Ease.

  Chandray and Koffield looked at each other. Was the captain of the Pilot’s Ease just being extremely—even insane
ly—economical of his onboard power, or had they just seen a ship being deliberately set adrift, made a derelict? Had there even been a crew aboard that ship? And if there had been crew aboard, were any of them still alive?

  Had SCO Docking Control just performed a routine bit of ship-handling—or had they just seen a corpse thrown overboard to make room for the new arrival?

  There was no time for such questions. Their own PT Arm had started moving again, swinging the Cruzeiro do Sul through ninety degrees so that her base and her landing jacks pointed straight at Docking Bay Gamma Two. The arm started lowering the ship down toward the deck of the docking bay, setting the Cruzeiro into her docking bay, a pawn being set down on a giant chessboard. But what of the Pilot’s Ease) Had they just seen some other pawn sacrificed so they could take its square? Would they sacrifice the Cruzeiro just as casually, should that suit their purposes?

  It seemed to Koffield that he had been moved about by others, often by forces he could neither see nor understand, moving without any real choice of his own, for far too long. Ever since Circum Central, or so it sometimes seemed. Games within games. Who had maneuvered him to this place and time, and why? And what, exactly, did the position of the pieces on the gameboard that was SCO Station tell him? What game were they playing here, and what, exactly, was the state of play?

  With a sudden, sharp thud, the Cruzeiro do Sul landed on the docking bay deck. They had arrived.

  It was, Anton Koffield realized, his move now. And he hadn’t the slightest idea what the rules of this game were.

  It should have been the climax of their trip. A few quick housekeeping chores to secure the piloting station and power down the ship’s propulsion and nav systems, and then should have come the big moment when they stepped from the Cruzeiro into a Personnel Access Tunnel, and from the PAT into Solace Central Orbital Station, into the up-close-and-personal, in-your-face, future full of people and events.Now that they were here, with no turning back, now that they had crossed their Rubicon, and, at long last, had gotten to where they were going, Norla was eager to get off the ship and see what there was to see of this place.