The Depths of Time (20 page)

“
I gather that you needed Greenhouse in order to do the fix at all. Is that correct?
”

“
Absolutely. I suppose we could have done it down here, but it would have been far more difficult. They
’
re the ones with the resources and facilities and the controlled environments. What
’
s your point?
”

“
Greenhouse won
’
t last forever. DeSilvo
’
s original terra-forming schedule called for it to be shut down over seventy years ago. The engineers have performed all sorts of clever tricks to keep it up and running this long. They
’
ve done it so brilliantly for so long that most people just assume that it will last forever. The reality is that each time they patch it up for a bit longer, it becomes even more fragile. And most people think of it just as a research facility—not as a vitally needed repair center. What do we do when it finally gives out?
”

Parrige had half expected Vandar to get defensive, or to deny the problems were there. Instead the man smiled sadly at him and shook his head.
“
You
’
re pretty good at finding tough questions, aren
’
t you?
”
he asked, and then starting walking on toward Neshobe Kalzant and the newspeople.

The
Dom Pedro IV
was a gleaming, featureless silver cylinder, dropping down out of the cold darkness of interstellar space, falling toward the still-distant realms of warmth and light ahead. By the standards of interstellar transport she was of modest size, but she was monstrously large when judged by any human scale. She was nearly a kilometer long from stem to stern, though only seventy meters in cross section. The physics and economics of the timeshaft-transport system required ships to be as small in cross section as possible, though they placed no limits on ship length. Hemispherical endcaps made up the two ends of the cylinder, and that too was dictated by the physics of the timeshaft system. Everything had been done to present the smoothest of exterior surfaces to the outside world, for it was far simpler to induce integrity shields around a simple shape than around a complex one.

The adaptations to timeshaft transit had their benefits in the transit across normal space as well, of course. The
Dom Pedro IV
traveled at a significant fraction of light-speed. At such speeds, even a subatomic particle would impact with remarkable energy. A narrow cross section and an easily shielded exterior greatly reduced the danger of serious impact damage.

The
Dom Pedro IV
was nearing the end of her long journey, and the few subsystems that
’
had remained awake for all of the trip now set about rousing the dormant, power-downed, and trickle-charged main systems that had drowsed across the light-years. Hatches opened, sensors extruded themselves. Antennae and thrusters and navigational detectors popped out of their hiding places. The powerful braces of the inertial manipulators swung themselves out and locked into position.

The two endcaps of the ship folded back to reveal the transparent observation dome forward and the main engines aft. Like a masquerader who peels off an expressionless mask and reveals a face of character and complexity beneath, the
Dom Pedro IV
transformed herself. The mirror-bright quicksilver spear shaft that had flung itself across the star-void was gone. In its place was a wakening piece of machinery of impossible complexity, its bristling surface forested with spars and dishes and thruster bulbs and optical clusters.

The ship came about, bringing her main engines to bear forward, directly opposite her direction of travel. The inertial manipulators activated, spinning a shimmering grey-gold cocoon about the ship, diminishing, but not entirely cutting off, her inertial relationship to the outside universe. The main engines came to life, but with none of the flame and flare of the rocket-reaction engines of an age so far distant that it seemed the stuff of legend. The only visible evidence of operation for these engines was the dull orange glow that flickered and flared over the surface of their massive thruster bulbs.

In less time than any of the ancient engineers of the proto-Space Age would have credited, the
Dom Pedro IV
decelerated. The main engines shut down, and the great ship came about, until she was pointed nose first through her direction of travel, and the center of the local star system.

The
Dom Pedro IV
had arrived in splendid style, moving with an artful and graceful precision through every step of the complex procedure that brought a ship back to life and slowed the craft to a reasonable speed. All of it had worked perfectly, smoothly, beautifully well.

And that was quite remarkable, given the degree to which everything had gone so utterly wrong.

On board the
Dom Pedro IV,
the ship
’
s captain became aware of his surroundings—and knew, instantly, that there was something seriously amiss.

There were only three circumstances in which the temporal-confinement field was meant to cut off—arrival at a timeshaft waypoint, arrival at destination, or in a major emergency. But in any of those cases, the temporal confinement should have flicked itself off smoothly and completely. The walls, ceiling, and floor of the reserve command chamber should have come smoothly into view.

He should have seen the jewel-black interior of the field snap cleanly out of existence, smoothly revealing the command chamber beyond. Instead, the field seemed to shudder once or twice, lurching in and out of the external timestream, the command center visible through a grey haze. Then the field came back on—and immediately cut off again, leaving the containment chamber floating in the center of the room.

Captain Felipe Henrique Marquez knew the sloppy cutoff had to mean that something was wrong. Very wrong. But what?

The bone-chilling cold of the long-dormant ship wrapped itself around the containment chamber. The chamber
’
s transparent cover was frosting over as the too-cold air outside warmed itself against the containment and gave up its moisture in the form of ice crystals that froze to the chamber. The cover
’
s defrosting system came on automatically and chased the frost away by warming the transparency.

Marquez opened the spill valve, allowing ship
’
s air into the containment, thus equalizing the temperature. He took in a breath of the frozen air and felt the knife-sharp stab in his chest as his lungs struggled to contend with the subzero cold. At least that much was normal. The ship was supposed to be cold in dormant mode.

People generally knew that ship captains wore pressure suits with helmets open when they went into temporal confinement. Few realized that they did so more for protection against the expected cold than for protection against some unexpected danger. Marquez left his helmet open but powered up his suit heater. Perhaps it would be some scent in the air that would tell him what was wrong.

Otherwise, he made no attempt to leave the containment chamber. Not yet. Not until he knew more. Suppose he left the temporal-confinement chamber and the temporal field came back on—trapping him outside, aboard a derelict ship somewhere between the stars? And suppose the malfunction had jammed the containment controls in some way so he could not get back in? No, thank you. Marquez would much prefer to be trapped inside the field under such circumstances. If the ship were that far gone, he was a lot more likely to survive long enough to be rescued if he were inside the containment.

Besides, there was no reason to venture out at once. The reserve control center was designed to allow him a clear view of all the vital system-status boards while still inside the temporal-confinement chamber. Marquez decided to take advantage of that while he tried to think things through. What had happened? What had gone wrong?

A temporal-confinement-field generator was vastly more expensive, complex, power-hungry, and heavy than the sort of conventional long-sleep cryo canisters in which a ship
’
s passengers and crew slumbered away the journey across the star-void. But the cryosleep canisters worked by, in essence, freezing the passengers solid. It could take hours or even days to fully revive a long-sleep subject and have him or her recovered and alert. That, of course, was far too long to wait for human intervention in an emergency. Thus the captain of a timeshaft ship—and the captain alone— traveled, not under long-sleep, but inside a temporal-confinement field, where time itself was vastly slowed.

In a sufficiently powerful field, a century would pass in but a few apparent minutes. Captain Felipe Henrique Marquez had traveled inside just such a field. He also knew precisely what would have to have happened in order to interfere with it.

One temporal-confinement field could not exist inside another: If one field came into being around another, the two fields would try and merge into one another. Either the more powerful field would simply absorb energy from the weaker one, or else both would flare out, decanting whatever was inside the fields back into the normal timestream. Similar results were produced when a field that manipulated timelike effects was generated—such as an inertial-manipulation .
 
field.

But the ship knew better than to activate the inertial-manipulation system with the captain in temporal confinement. The
Dom Pedro’s
artificial-intelligence systems knew perfectly well that the two field systems were enough like each other that they interacted in complex and hard-to-predict ways, up to and including a high-energy temporal flare-out. And a sufficiently energetic flare-out could incinerate the reserve command center—or even vaporize the entire ship.

It would, therefore, take a hell of an emergency for the
Dom Pedro IV to
take such risks. But what in the name of chaos was the emergency? Marquez watched as the reserve command center
’
s displays came to life before him. Nothing. No explanation at all. Everything seemed absolutely normal. No warning lights flashing or alarms hooting. There was something eerie, disconcerting, almost unnatural, about the normalcy on the situation displays. He shifted his gaze to the temporal-confinement status display. As he watched, the indicator screens flicked over into standby mode as the containment generators powered down. That was something, anyway. Once in standby, the containment generators would require several hours to come back to full power. The temporal confinement couldn
’
t come back on unexpectedly.
Suppose the system was damaged?
he asked himself.
Suppose it cannot come back on at all?
But there was no sense dwelling on such thoughts. One way or the other, there was little he could do about it.

He checked all the banked displays one last time, then unlatched the top of the containment chamber. The reserve command center was always kept in zero gee. Its grav system was independent of the main ship
’
s gravity system. He swung the top out and shoved himself gently forward, floating toward the control displays. The containment chamber
’
s stationkeeping system corrected for the force Marquez had imposed and held the chamber dead in the center of the reserve control center.

Marquez floated forward, grabbed hold of a stanchion with a gloved hand, and steadied himself as he checked over the displays in more detail. Normal. All was absolutely normal. The ship was in the final stages of moving from long-flight dormancy to full operational capacity. A fully normal power-up. Except for the fact that none of it should have been happening, everything was precisely as it should have been.

So what had prompted the ship to run the inertial manipulators with the temporal confinement running? The inertial manipulators were activated when the main engines lit. It took Felipe Henrique Marquez only a few seconds to check the automated-operations log and confirm that the engines had fired moments before.

But the ship should not have come out of dormancy or activated the inertial systems or fired engines unless and until Captain Marquez was safely decanted out of the temporal confinement, for safety reasons and so as to allow him to oversee the ship
’
s operations.

Marquez finished his initial systems check and went back to the operations log, reset the display to show major navigation events only, leaving out all the endless housekeeping operations and nav checks and minor course corrections that even a dormant ship had to handle.

And he was suddenly aware of his heart pounding against his rib cage. The system reported only one event—the engine braking that had just taken place.

And that should not have been. Because if that was the only major navigation event, then the
Dom Pedro IV
was nowhere within light-years of where she was supposed to be. The flight plan had called for launch and acceleration from the Solar System, a braking, timeshaft transition, and reacceleration through Thor
’
s Realm, Wormhole TR-40.2, braking at Heaven
’
s Funnel, transition through Timeshaft Wormhole HF-TW/102, followed by a long cruise phase and subsequent arrival at HS-G9-223, the Solace star system. None of that had happened. Or had it? The log was blank. He could have no confidence in the event log— which made it difficult to have confidence in anything else.