The Well of Time

by Robert I. Katz

  “It doesn’t mean they’re innocent,” Anson remarked. “It just means we haven’t found anything.”

  Captain Thorenson shrugged. “But probably, they’re innocent.”

  “Probably,” Anson conceded.

  “Let’s go on,” Michael said. “Arcturus knows what we’re looking for. His agents will continue to look.”

  Captain Thorenson nodded. “Next stop, Kyrion.”

  According to the official designation, Kyrion was a moon, not a planet, because it orbited a brown-dwarf proto-star, which in turn orbited a main sequence star similar to Sol. The brown-dwarf, designated Huntington-4, was thirty-four times the mass of Jupiter, not large enough to fuse hydrogen into helium, but large enough to fuse both deuterium and lithium, and hence, large enough to emit energy, primarily in the form of infra-red.

  Kyrion, and the other five moons of Huntington-4, would have been much too distant from the main star to sustain terrestrial life if not for the additional energy emitted by the brown-dwarf. As it was, Kyrion was a pleasant, comfortable little world, having been settled more than five thousand years ago.

  The shipyards on Vinson built intermediate size vessels: destroyers and corvettes, plus private yachts. Ingraham Manufacturing, an old, very respected firm, owned the shipyards on Kyrion, and built vessels from intermediate sized up to the largest military cruisers, battleships and space-going liners.

  Again, Gehenna stayed in orbit while Shiloh, Richmond and Gettysburg drifted down, hailed the appropriate facilities and requested service.

  “Why are we here?” Frankie asked.

  Michael smiled. “Looking for clues?” He waggled his eyebrows at her, which he apparently thought made him look adorable.

  “Andrew Sloane didn’t come here, so why did we? He didn’t go to Vinson or Kowloon, either.”

  “True.” Michael sighed and his face grew serious. “He didn’t come here, but Akadius got those ships from somewhere. We spent a lot of time looking on the other side of the Corporate States from the Empire and found nothing. The Second Empire has recently begun to build ships far more advanced than any others that we know of. What better place to get new ships than right here?”

  Frankie frowned.

  “We have a vector for every ship that left Akadius during the time we were there,” Michael said. “We can follow Andrew Sloane whenever we choose. Meanwhile, if our own people are betraying us, we need to know it, and we might as well look here.”

  Frankie sank back into the bed and crossed her arms over her chest. Frankie was grumpy. She knew it but could do nothing about it. She knew that Michael Glover was much, much older than he looked, even disregarding the two thousand years he had spent in cold storage. He had told her of Marina Simmons, the woman he loved, who had died when he was still young, but hearing about the wife and son he had lost, so many years later but still so very long ago, tugged at something deep inside her. She shook her head. Definitely grumpy.

  “You okay?” Michael said.

  Somehow, Frankie felt reluctant to talk about her misgivings, particularly when she had so much difficulty figuring out what they were.

  “Did you know Glory is seeing Jeffrey Billings?” she said.

  “Yeah. I’m happy to see it’s improved her mood.”

  “She told Rosanna and me that she once tried to seduce you, but you weren’t interested.”

  “Oh, boy.” Michael looked at her. “I’m not sure that ‘seduce’ is the right word. She was pretty matter-of-fact about it. She stated that men required sex and as our leader, I needed to keep a clear head.

  “Does that bother you?” he asked.

  “No,” she said, “not really,” and realized it was the truth. “I like Glory. It was before you met me and you weren’t interested.” She frowned. “Why weren’t you interested?”

  Michael leaned back and sighed. “She’s a beautiful little thing and I’m sure she would be a lot of fun, but her sense of self-worth is too wrapped up in her skills in the bedroom. Her entire world had been disrupted. She didn’t know where she was, who she was or how to act with normal human beings. She was trying to hold on to something that was familiar to her, something she knew how to do, and it felt too much like taking advantage of the situation.” He grinned. “Also, she likes to give orders. I don’t like to take them.”

  “Hah,” Frankie said. “I’ll say.”

  “So, how are she and Lieutenant Billings getting along?”

  “They have a lot of sex. I don’t know if there’s anything else to the relationship.”

  “I’m not surprised, and that’s exactly the problem. You can’t fuck more than fifteen, maybe sixteen hours a day. Unless you’ve got something to talk about, sooner or later, sex just isn’t enough to keep a relationship going.”

  “You’re not as funny as you think you are,” Frankie observed.

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “But still, you put up with me.” He smiled. “Which is my point.”

  “I think it will be awhile before they get tired of the sex.”

  “Probably. He’s young and Gloriosa has so much to teach him.”

  Frankie chortled. “She says he’s pretty good at position number three and not bad at seventeen, but that’s about it.”

  “The Rottweiler? I always liked the Rottweiler.”

  She stared at him. “I don’t think I want to know.”

  “Sure, you do.” He rolled over and brushed his lips over hers. “You start like this…”

  “The data is suggestive but hardly conclusive.” Romulus’ disembodied voice echoed through the speakers. A picture of a ship’s skeleton appeared on the holoscreen. “Note the elongated structure, the placement of the main bridge, the entry ports. Ostensibly, this ship be a tourist vessel, capable of transporting up to twenty-thousand passengers and crew in the utmost comfort and luxury. The outline, however, closely resembles that of the large warships that attacked us at Akadius.”

  “Finally,” Michael said, “a clue.”

  Captain Thorenson sighed.

  Anson frowned. “How many such ships are there?”

  “There are currently three similar vessels under construction. They have already delivered eight.”

  “To whom?” Michael said.

  “Erikson-Nagoya Cruise Lines took possession of the first five. The remaining three, plus the three under construction belong to Fantasia.”

  Michael had heard of Fantasia, the largest private cruise line in the Empire. Fantasia was famous for having the largest, most luxurious and by far the most expensive ships in the skies.

  “Any evidence that Ingraham is implicated?” Commander Dumas asked.

  “Ingraham is a publicly owned corporation with a diversified board of directors. The corporate officers were all hired from firms outside of Ingraham, where they already had successful careers. If they are involved, it is an extremely complicated and extensive conspiracy, going back for many years.”

  “So?” Anson said. “This is an extremely complicated and extensive conspiracy. We know that; and it does go back for many years.”

  “I have uncovered nothing to implicate any officers or employees of Ingraham,” Romulus said.

  Michael shrugged. “Let’s find out.”

  The time for surreptitious measures was past and Michael was tired of wasting time. A squadron of Imperial Marines, armed with warrants, stun guns and energy rifles, appeared at the corporate offices of Ingraham Manufacturing. The Chairman of the Board of Directors, the President, Executive Vice-President, Chief Executive Officer, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Design Officer were all placed under restraint.

  All of them protested, some more vehemently than others. The firm had a large legal division, the head of which appeared, inspected the warrants, pronounced them valid and informed his colleagues that they had no choice but to cooperate.

  They were questioned, scanned, placed under induction helmets and questioned again. In the end, all of them wer
e exactly what they seemed to be. The orders for the ships were (or appeared to be) entirely legitimate.

  “Where did you get the designs?” Michael asked.

  The CEO, a portly man with thick black hair and lowering brows, named Jared Price, glared at him. “They’re adaptations from the new military designs. You would have to ask our engineers.”

  “Who adapted them?”

  “You would have to ask our engineers,” Jared Price repeated.

  The Chief of the Engineering Division took one look at the very large, armored marines, puffed up his cheeks and talked. “The possibilities were obvious. Why should the military monopolize an advanced design? As soon as we received the information regarding the new warships, we incorporated it into the rest of our line.” He shrugged. “The military made no objection.”

  Curious. The military, more often than not, preferred to keep classified information classified. Why wasn’t it?

  “Why?” Captain Paulo Morelli was in charge of security for the military section of the complex. He squinted his eyes and gave Michael a scathing look. “Because nothing we gave them is classified.”

  Michael stared at him.

  “The new warships have advanced controls, brains that were previously beyond our abilities, virtual reality so good you can barely tell that it isn’t real, holographic displays, screens, shields, vacuum generators and plasma torpedoes that are better than anything we used to have. We’ve released none of it to the civilian side of Ingraham Manufacturing.” The Captain shrugged. “They’re building big ships. That’s a design issue. There is nothing fundamentally different between these ships and the ones they previously built except their configuration, which is obvious by looking at them, and their size.”

  “Oh,” Michael said.

  “Oh, indeed.” The Captain eyed him with evident disdain. “Will that be all?”

  “Yes,” Michael said. “Thank you.”

  Four people, three men and one woman, all young and unmarried, had recently left the Engineering Division of Ingraham Manufacturing. Two had accepted positions on Kowloon. One had taken an offer from an old friend to form their own small firm on the other side of Kyrion. A simple inquiry revealed that this individual was still on the planet and that his current business, adapting small racing yachts, had nothing to do with either Ingraham or space-going liners. The destination of the last was unknown.

  “Let’s try Kowloon,” Michael said.

  Chapter 18

  Kowloon-3 was a routine, Earthlike world orbiting a routine yellow sun. It had been colonized over six thousand years ago by refugees from Taipan, a world whose settlement had proven to be an unfortunate mistake, since a drifting, extra-solar planet turned out to be drifting directly toward them. The planet was small and dark and hidden in the system’s Kuiper belt and was not discovered until it was far too late to destroy or divert it.

  Taipan was now, six thousand years later, a dead volcanic hell but Kowloon-3 was a peaceful, prosperous, mid-sized world. The main production facilities of Ishikawa and Spence, Inc., were located in the zero-gravity center of an orbiting habitat constructed from a refurbished asteroid.

  “The place was just sitting here, abandoned. Four hundred years ago, it was state-of-the-art. By the time we took it over, it had been mothballed, outdated by the larger habitats out in the belt. My predecessor was a brilliant woman. It cost us almost nothing.”

  David Horowitz was a trim little man with a keen face, fitting for the CEO of one of the Empire’s most important firms. He was happy to show Michael, Captain Thorenson and Commander Dumas around the facility.

  They had quickly established that this trip was not going to tell them what they wanted to know. The majority of Ishikawa and Spence’s business was fighter craft and one or two man scout ships, very fast, very deadly but nothing like any of the ships that had accosted them in the Akadius system. Rarely, the Navy might sell an obsolete scout ship to a private individual, who would contract with Ishikawa and Spence to modify it for their own use. Aside from this, the firm’s only non-military business was the manufacturing of luxurious but small private yachts.

  Ishikawa and Spence, like the rest of the Navy’s contractors, had taken advantage of the technology supplied by Michael, though Michael’s role remained a secret. The new ships were faster, more powerful than the old, and required no human guidance other than a destination, but they were small ships, and Ishikawa and Spence lacked the facilities to make larger ones.

  “Gravity incurs a cost on everything we do, and so does anti-gravity, in the form of required energy, and that energy has to be paid for. Putting our facilities here, in the center of an asteroid, was a convenient solution.”

  It was ingenious. Michael had been in plenty of habitats with a similar design, but this was the first one he could remember that had filled the center of their little artificial world with a zero-gee manufacturing facility.

  Metals were stronger when produced in zero-gravity, with a uniform dispersal of molecules and trace elements. Crystals grew symmetrically. Transport costs were much less, as well.

  Their tour finished, they said farewell to their host and returned to Gehenna.

  They had been here for only two days and Michael was already eager to leave, but the ships’ officers had requested a few days for shore leave. Michael had been reluctant to grant it, but there seemed no compelling reason to refuse. The crew deserved it. Three more days would do their mission no harm.

  He hoped.

  Andrew Sloane had left on a vector to nowhere, with no known star or habitat on his line of flight. There were two possible explanations. The first was that the vector had been a deliberate deception. Andrew Sloane’s ship would take off for some random spot, emerge from slip-space and then re-route toward his real destination, unobserved. If so, there was no way to tell where that destination might be.

  The second possible explanation was that there was something on this line of flight, something unknown.

  The transition into and out of slip-space was seamless. Passengers and crew had no knowledge that anything out of the ordinary was happening. Gehenna emerged every half-light year, scanned space for energy emissions, habitats or any sign of anything that should not be there. It was a slow process. Jump after jump, they worked their way along the spiral arm. Stop, search, re-enter and jump, over and over again.

  “Something?” Michael asked.

  “A signal,” Romulus replied. “Very faint. It’s coming from straight ahead of us.”

  “Excellent,” Michael said.

  “What is that thing?”

  Michael was sitting on a reclining chair in the small lounge on the passenger deck, linked through a VR headset to Twyla Thorenson and Commander Dumas. Sitting at a round table, Marissa, Matthew, Frankie, Curly and Gloriosa, plus Jeffrey Billings, a new addition to their little group, were playing poker. Richard, enticed away from his instruments and boards by the presence of a newcomer, sat on a couch, pretending to read a book. Rosanna was in the open kitchen, making omelets.

  Through the VR headset, Michael could see a large, metallic object floating in space, approximately twenty meters long and five meters wide, tapering to rounded points at each end. A series of lights around its middle flashed in a repeating pattern. It emitted radio frequencies ranging from 550 megahertz up to nearly 100 gigahertz, in phased pulses. The signal seemed meant to convey information but was heavily encrypted. The ship’s brain could not read it.

  “That,” Michael said, “is an Imperial beacon.”

  Captain Thorenson puffed up her cheeks. “I’ve never heard of an Imperial beacon.”

  “The First Empire set them up all along the spiral arm. They’re inexpensive and relatively low-tech. They were meant to assist navigation.”

  “I don’t understand,” Commander Dumas said. “We’re far outside the borders of the First Empire. What is it doing here?”

  The First Empire had been aggressively expansionist. Its ships had travelled
widely, exploring, mapping, trading with every alien race it came across. Its ambitions had known no bounds. True, the Empire itself had not extended so far as this beacon, but the beacon’s presence clearly announced its intentions.

  “A different time,” Michael said. “A different culture.”

  “I’ve never heard of these things. If they were so common, why have we never seen one before?”

  “The Swarm, and then the Hirrill, destroyed all of them that they came across.”

  “Oh,” Commander Dumas said.

  “Why is the signal encrypted?” Captain Thorenson said. “What is it supposed to be saying?”

  A good question, and Michael did not have a good answer. The Empire had intended the beacons as navigational aids. They had been set to emit radio impulses in as many languages as possible, both human and alien. They weren’t supposed to be encrypted. Quite the opposite. “I think it’s safe to say that somebody has been messing with this one’s programming.”

  “Great,” Dumas muttered.

  “Can we break the encryption?” Captain Thorenson asked.

  “I do not believe so,” Romulus said. “Not without some clue to its origins.”

  “Now what?” Dumas said.

  Another good question. What was the old line? All things come to him who waits. Not necessarily true but at the moment, waiting seemed to be their best bet. They could leave behind a drone, but they would have to periodically return and access whatever it might have observed.

  “This thing is in good repair,” Michael said. “Somebody is taking care of it. It serves a purpose. Let’s wait and see.”

  Gloriosa seemed happy, almost giddy. She smiled and laughed. She bet on every hand and barely pouted when she lost. Jeffrey Billings looked at her frequently. He kept his face blank but he did not look like a man in love.

  Rosanna served the omelets. Jeffrey Billings thanked her. Rosanna smiled and sat down at the table. “Deal me in,” she said. They ate between hands and didn’t interrupt the game.