The Depths of Time - Couverture souple

Allen, Roger MacBride

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0553378112 ISBN 13 : 9780553378115

Editeur : Bantam Dell Pub Group, 2000

Synopsis

Book by Allen Roger Macbride

A propos du livre

Extrait

Brightness flared upon the face of the deep.

Alaxi Sayad, the most junior watch officer aboard the Chronologic Patrol ship Upholder, saw the dazzle of energy that appeared on her screens. She hit the alert button before she even had time to think--but not before the automatics had a chance to set off the alarms themselves.

She checked the drill-indicator, the one light on her board that would tell her if this was just old man Koffield running yet another dry run, another systems test. If this was a drill, the indicator would be a steady dot of green. The drill-indicator was unlabeled, and carefully positioned in the upper-left-hand corner of the display board so that only someone actually seated in the watch officer's chair could see it. Only the watch officers and senior officers were even supposed to know it existed.

Sayad had seen that tiny secret green light come on during a thousand drills, and she expected to see it now. But instead she saw a tiny, flashing dot of red: shocking and positive confirmation that this was not a drill. It was the real thing. Some damn fool was trying to make an unauthorized run through the timeshaft wormhole. Stranger still, if her displays were to be believed, they were going for the downtime, not the uptime, end of the timeshaft wormhole. They were trying, not to head from future to past, but attempting to dive out of the past and into the future.

Sayad allowed herself the luxury of a full hundredth of a second of stunned disbelief. Such a thing had never happened, to the best of her knowledge, in all of Settled Space.

But it was happening now. She shoved feeling aside and let training take over. Seemingly without any intervention from her conscious mind, she started on step one of the standard operating procedure that had been drummed into her through all those thousand drills.

Confirm alert. Easy enough. There was no doubt this one was real.

Locate. That part was likewise quite straightforward. The blast of light had come straight from the timeshaft wormhole.

Identify. A far more difficult proposition. What in space could light up a wormhole like that? And why hadn't the Standfast, the downtime ship, sent some sort of alert through the shaftlink comm system? Even as she formed the questions, she got her answers. The comm system powered itself up and reported data streaming in from the downtime link. Seventy-nine years downtime from the Upholder, the Standfast had activated her comm system and started relaying through the shaft communications system. The signal had been flashed from the Standfast to the downtime stationkeeping laser relay. Then the stationkeeper had fired a repeater signal through the wormhole's signal portal, and to the uptime stationkeeper relay, which instantly passed it on to the Upholder.

The action-status display flashed to life, and Sayad expended five whole precious seconds studying the three-dimensional symbol-logic imagery the Standfast had sent milliseconds ago--or decades before, depending on how one looked at it.

She swore silently, but vehemently, as she struggled to believe what the display was telling her. Thirty--no, thirty-one incoming targets, sixteen of them bearing down on the wormhole, and the remainder diving straight for the Standfast. One of the targets bearing on the Standfast popped out of existence as the ship brought fire to bear. There was another flash of light, dimmer this time, as the blaze of the explosion lanced through the wormhole. That first light blast must have been another of the targets going up.

"Are they trying to kill the ship, or just trying to keep her busy?" asked a low, calm voice from directly behind her.

It took a major effort of will for Sayad not to jump half a meter in the air in surprise. It was Captain Koffield, of course. She glanced up at the small look-behind mirror built into her console, and there he was. Awake, alert, in a clean uniform. Sayad had been on the graveyard shift ever since coming aboard the Upholder and had rarely seen the captain. But every time she had seen him, the man had looked just as he did now--steady, alert, well rested, in control.

Captain Koffield was of average height, but thin and wiry enough that he gave the impression of being smaller than he was. His face was long and lean, his thinning hair dark brown. His eyes were brown, deep-set, bright, and expressive. He was clearly used to command, and used to his commands being followed. But there was nothing harsh, or cruel, or peremptory about the man.

Only the slight but unmistakable stubble on his unshaved face hinted that he had just rolled out of bed, wakened by the alarm. It was a small but telling detail, and Sayad found it reassuring. It said Koffield took care to be alert and professional, to get there first during an emergency, but that he was not fool or egotist enough to stop for a shave on the way.

But the captain was not a man who wasted much time with rhetorical questions. "I think they're making a try for the ship, sir," Sayad replied. "With velocities that high they won't have time to break off before impact--they're looking to ram her."

"Agreed. Either uncrewed missiles or remarkably well-motivated suicide crews."
Other members of the command-center crew were arriving, diving for their battle stations, getting their displays and systems on-line. Sayad paid them no mind. Let them do their jobs while she did hers. She was supposed to do more than see what was happening out there. She was expected to understand it, interpret it.

"A saturation envelopment attack," she said. "Hit the Standfast from all sides at the same time and overwhelm her defenses. They want the ship. They've invested half their forces to go after her. That's too aggressive for it to be just a diversion. At least it looks like--wait a second." She put her hands on the display controls and checked the backtracks. "No. I was wrong. They want us to think it's a full-press attack and not a diversion."

"They've got me convinced," Koffield said. "But now you think otherwise."

"Yes, sir. The blips moving on the wormhole are maneuvering, seeking and zeroing in on the access nexi. That's not easy to do. But the blips moving on the Standfast are just boring right in, with no attempt to refine or correct their course."

"So they just want to keep her busy so their friends can get at and through the wormhole," Koffield said.

"Through the wormhole?" Sayad asked. "How the hell do they think they're going to do that?"

"I haven't the faintest idea how they'll do it," said Koffield. "But it's plain they think they can do it." He examined the symbol-logic screen. "Three minutes until they encounter the portal's event horizon. We'll find out then."

It was a startling thought, but why else would they be pressing home this attack? To hear Captain Koffield himself say the words made the idea seem much more part of the real world, something to consider in terms of practical detail.

"They don't have the codes to open the access nexi," she objected. "There aren't any public codes for going uptime. Just the ones we used to move the Upholder uptime."

That the wormhole portal nexi codes were unbeatable, unbreakable, was an article of faith in the Chronologic Patrol, and among spacefarers in general. Only the Patrol knew the codes, and therefore only the Patrol controlled the wormhole portal nexi.

A portal nexus was a massively powerful gravitic distorter that, in effect, pushed aside the singularity's event horizon, opening up a hole in time through the hole in space. The nexi orbited at the fringe of the wormhole's event horizon, at hellishly fast velocities. Approach a timeshaft wormhole when a Chronologic Patrol ship had sent the proper code to open a nexus, and you dropped through the nexus, down the timeshaft, into the past. If the CP ship got the code wrong, or failed to send it, when the portal nexus controllers detected your ship approaching they would leave the nexus shut. Your ship would not go through the wormhole formed by the singularity's warping of space, but instead would spiral down into the black hole itself.

Koffield flipped on the ship's intercom, and raised his voice enough so that the bridge staff could hear him as well. "This is the captain. Our sister ship, the Standfast, is under attack, as is the downtime portal. We must work on the assumption that the attacks will succeed. If they do, we will be facing an assault coming from inside the timeshaft wormhole and heading out, rather than an assault from the outside in, toward the timeshaft. In other words, the exact opposite of what we've trained for. So let us prepare to face the situation. Bring all weapons to bear on the vicinity of the wormhole, and prepare to track and destroy evasive targets as they exit the timeshaft. You have two minutes. I authorize and order weapons hot and an unrestricted free-fire zone and unlimited target list. If it moves, shoot it. Koffield out."

The disorganized, uncertain bustle all about them suddenly gained focus and direction. The news was startling, and even alarming, but the captain had spoken. He had told them what was what, and what to do.

The crew of the Upholder set to work, making use of every one of the precious seconds they had. Energizers came on-line. The trackers took in the data from the Standfast's datastream, interpolated probabilities on the egress trajectories for the attackers, and set aim at the most likely points in space. Damage-control teams went to standby. Hatches sealed. The battle lighting came on, a dim red glow that permitted one to see, but left one's eyes adapted to the dark of space and the glow of the display screens.

But none of that was the concern of Alaxi Sayad. Her job right now was to watch the Standfast and her attackers as they did battle, a fight to the death that was happening seventy-nine years in the past, and a heartbeat away, through the wormhole.
Sayad forced back the irrational wish that they could go look up what happened, and prepare for it that way. After all, the battle had happened nearly eight decades before. There ought to have been a way to know all about it, and be ready in advance to deal with the consequences.

But there wasn't, of course. The powers-that-be had quite wisely set things up to make such researches impossible. Indeed, the whole reason the Upholder was on station was to make them impossible. Her job, and the job of the entire Chronologic Patrol, was to ensure that the past knew nothing whatever about the future.

Their job was to protect causality, to prevent temporal paradox. The Chronologic Patrol went about its work with care and determination, and went to great lengths to keep the future as dark a secret as possible from the past--starting with how the uptime picket ships got to their stations. The uptime ships came from downtime, and thus knew nothing of events in the future of the downtime ship.

The Upholder might be in the year 5211 A.D., but she was far more connected to the world of 5132, seventy-nine years in the past. She and the Standfast had traveled to Circum Central Waypoint in convoy, relieving the two Chrono-Patrol ships that had been on duty. The Upholder had gone uptime through the timeshaft wormhole, while the Standfast had remained at the downtime end, but it could have just as easily been the other way around.

The Upholder had only two communications systems. One was a short-range beacon-interrogator that allowed her to challenge ships that arrived at the uptime end of the timeshaft and sought passage through. The other was the shaftlink comm system that Standfast was sending on. Both systems were, by design, extremely limited. Except in the most exceptional circumstances, the Upholder could not send messages at all, aside from clearances and portal-control commands. For the most part, she could only receive communications, and send them only in carefully proscribed circumstances. Every regulation, every Artificial Intelligence watching over the comm channels, every safeguard in the hardware, was designed to ensure that the Upholder did not send any information about the future into the past.

One of the most basic precautions was to see to it that she did not receive any information about the future. By design, the Upholder carried no long-range comm system that might pick up transmitted information.

Timeshaft wormholes could only be located in the depths of interstellar space, far from the time-space distortions created by a star or even by a mid-sized planet. The Circum Central Waypoint wormhole was no exception to that rule. It was three light-years from the colony at Glister, and a good 3.5 lights from Solace, off in a different direction. Without a highly sensitive, precision-aimed receiver of exactly the sort the Upholder did not carry, there was no way to communicate with the worlds on the uptime side of the timeshaft.

A ship could in theory carry information to the Upholder, or even downtime into the wormhole. However, timeshaft-wormhole ships moved far slower than light, meaning that most information would be out-of-date by the time it reached a wormhole.

But precautions were taken nonetheless. An uptime picket ship would refuse transit rights to any ship that had been under way less time than half the chronologic distance of the timeshaft wormhole in question. Circum Central Waypoint, for example, was a seventy-nine-year timeshaft. No ship was allowed to enter the uptime end of the shaft until she had been under way for at least thirty-eight and a half years.

And, no matter what, no ship, aside from the arriving uptime picket, was ever allowed to enter the downtime end of a timeshaft.

Including this bizarre fleet of presumably uncrewed ships that had just appeared out of nowhere. Uncrewed. They would have to be, and it wasn't just their apparently small size. How the devil would anyone find crews enough to fly thirty-two ships on a secret and criminal mission that was all but suicidal? But if no one was aboard those ships, what was the point of the attack? What value in sending a machine into the future? Why not just put the ships in storage and wait seventy-nine years? Alaxi stared at the sym-log display, trying to will the answers out of the cryptic indicators of heading, speed, projected course, acceleration, and weapons discharge.

The Standfast had been holding her ground, presenting a stationary target to her attackers. Now, perhaps too late, she got under way, even as she finally blazed away with her heavy weapons, the laser cannon and her steel-shot mag accelerators, firing at the incoming attackers.

"At last," Koffield said. "What the devil kept her from maneuvering before now?"

"They were taken by surprise," Sayad replied, though she had been wondering much the same thing. It was damned easy to let things get slack on garrison duty, and it looked as if it had happened to the Standfast. Sayad wondered if the Upholder would have done any better with zero warning. Besides, the Standfast had been watching for an assault coming through the wormhole, out of the uptime end and the future, not from out of normal space.

The Standfast's heavy-weapons fire took a heavy toll. Three, four, eight of the blips diving on the ship blazed and vanished from the display. More, dimmer flares of light, flickered through the timeshaft.

But then the Standfast broke off and started maneuvering at flank acceleration toward the...

Présentation de l'éditeur

Time is of the essence when you're stranded in the future.

Humanity is running out of time....

The settled universe is filled with terraformed worlds linked by timeshafts--temporal wormholes in deep space. These timeshafts are the only way to travel the vast distances between the stars....

As passengers and crew are placed in cold sleep, their ships spend decades crossing the interstellar void--traveling the wormholes and arriving at their destinations just days after leaving home. The Chronologic Patrol is charged with guarding these timeshaft wormholes and preventing time paradoxes at all costs. But one critical mission ends in disaster, turning Anton Koffield, captain of the Upholder, into a dark legend....As ships carrying relief supplies to a crippled planet approach a timeshaft, they are mercilessly set upon by mysterious attackers--their crews are murdered, the sanctity of time itself is at risk. In response, Koffield is forced to do the unthinkable: He must stop the invasion by destroying the timeshaft. Marooned eighty years in the future, he lives as a cursed figure, the villain who killed a world.

And his odyssey through time has only just begun....

Time has passed; man has not discovered new naturally occurring planets capable of sustaining human life. Terraforming has allowed for some colonization across the galaxy, but the only method for moving supplies to and from these far-flung worlds is the use of timeshaft wormholes. To safeguard the planets and these portals, laws governing the "who, what, where, when, and why" of time travel routes are strictly enforced.

Suddenly, the Chronologic Patrol Ship Upholder--charged with enforcing these stringent precepts--is attacked at the Circum Central Timeshaft Wormhole in 5211 a.d. Unpro- voked and unprecedented, all rules are blasted away in that deadly encounter, and it will take heroic measures to restore balance to the galaxy. -->

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Bantam Dell Pub Group
• Date d'édition: 2000
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0553378112
• ISBN 13: 9780553378115
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 426
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible