The Depths of Time (21 page)

The only way that the log could have been wiped that completely was if the ship had suffered malfunctions massive enough to wreck every primary, backup, and tertiary navigation system, along with all the alarms and alerts on board. But all ship systems seemed to be operating. Marquez checked over all of his displays again, looking over the data. Some of it had to be wrong. In fact,
none of
it could be right.

The time codes. Marquez checked the ship
’
s chronometer display, and felt his heart go as cold as the ship around him. It was showing 0000 years, 000 days, 00 hours, 04 minutes, and 23 seconds. The damned thing must have started over from zero just as the temporal confinement had shut down. There was no way to know if he had been in temporal confinement for three months or three thousand years.

That settled it. If the clocks had scrambled, there had to be some sort of major malfunction. A bad one, albeit one that managed to keep from shutting off any of the systems. Main control. Up in the forward dome. He could check it out there. If nothing else, he could look out the damned window and see where they were. He checked the telltales by the hatch that led to the ship
’
s main companionway. Air pressure near zero but rising, temperature 120 below but rising, gravity system just completing activation. He nodded. All of it perfectly normal for a ship just coming out of dormant mode.

He closed the helmet on his pressure suit and depressur-ized the reserve control center down to the corridor air pressure. He popped the hatch, left the reserve control center, and made his way toward the lift complex. He was in the elevator car and had punched the button for the main command level, and watched the doors of the lift car shut, before he even stopped to consider that the lift was not to be trusted any more than the rest of the ship. He could be trapped inside this car for a very long time if its mechanism had failed. Then the car started moving upward, the acceleration pressing Marquez
’
s feet down into the floor of the car.

He smiled to himself. Ridiculous. The lift system, like every other part of the ship, had been built to last millennia, and built with an intricate system of fail-safes that ran a full safety check before each use. There was no need for him to find imaginary things to fret about. Not when there were so many real worries already.

He rode the lift upward, hoping against hope that something in the main control center would make sense to him.

Captain Felipe Henrique Marquez stood in the main control center of the
Dotn Pedro IV.
It would be a long wait indeed before anything made much sense at all. The ship seemed to be functioning perfectly, but even that was incomprehensible. The ship could only have gotten to wherever it was through a series of massive malfunctions that should have left it a derelict, tumbling forever through the blackest depths of space, never approaching another star again. Space was, after all, vast and empty. The odds against getting this close to a planetary system by chance were quite literally astronomical. But though the
DP-IV
had violated every step of her flight plan, she had arrived in a planetary system, and had made what seemed to be a perfect initial approach to it.

Which brought Marquez to the question of where, exactly,
“
here
”
was. Since the one thing he knew for certain was that the ship
’
s navigation system had failed to carry out the flight plan, it would perhaps be best not to rely on it to tell him where he was.

He looked up through the forward observation dome. The
DP-IV’s
bridge stood at the center of the dome, on a cylindrical raised pillar. Marquez stood in the center of a hemisphere of stars, the myriad points of light dazzlingly bright in the darkness of the void.

The sky of deep space was magnificent, but it also told him nothing at all. In theory one ought to be able to divine one
’
s position in space by seeing what stars were in what position. But there were simply too many stars, and, as points of light, they all looked alike. There was an off chance that some pattern of stars would jump out at him, something as instantly recognizable as Orion or the Big Dipper as seen from Earth
’
s sky, but Marquez was not really expecting that kind of luck, and he didn
’
t get it.

There was, however, one point of light brighter than all the others, visible directly overhead. It was the star the
DP-IV
was approaching. The science of spectral analysis was thousands of years old, and the
Dom Pedro I
V
’
s instruments could generate a chart showing the brightness and intensity of every color of light a star put out, a chart as unique and precisely identifying as any fingerprint or retinal scan. Compare that scan against the ship
’
s archives, and you could know at once what star you were looking at, or, at the very least, you could find out it was not in the charts.

Marquez sat at the pilot
’
s station and activated the spectrographic imager. The spot of light dead ahead was a nice, bright target. It only took a handful of seconds for the system to produce a high-quality spectrograph—and only a few milliseconds longer more to produce an exact match.

Marquez swore under his breath. It was HS-G9-223, local name Lodestar—the star that shone on Solace. The star that had been their destination. They had gotten to where they were supposed to go. Which was impossible. The
Dom Pedro IV
had missed her timeshaft-wormhole transit, and had therefore never performed the post-transit course shift that should have aimed her toward Solace. She should have been trillions, quadrillions, of kilometers off course.

Marquez checked the data again. The spectrograph he had just made matched the reference spectrograph perfectly. The odds, he knew, were billions to one at best that the system had made a bad match. But on the other hand, there seemed to be nothing but billions-to-one-against odds in the whole situation. Best to confirm this was indeed the Solace star system. Obviously, the best way to do that was to find Solace itself. Marquez set to work on the problem.

Even with the most sophisticated equipment, locating a planet from tens of billions of kilometers away was no trivial matter—and the
Dom Pedro IV
didn
’
t have the most sophisticated equipment. She was, after all, a freighter, not a survey ship. The point of light Marquez was looking for was hidden in the millions of points of light that shone down on his ship. Fortunately, however, there were ways to narrow the search area. Marquez took a series of spectrographs of the solar disk
’
s edge and ran a Doppler analysis to derive the star
’
s axis of rotation. Marquez was startled to get back a result of zero rotation. Either the star was not spinning at all, which was more or less impossible, or else, far more likely, the
DP-IV
had, quite improbably, come in exactly and precisely over one of the star
’
s poles.

Well, what was one more improbability among so many? Marquez quit worrying about it. The Solace system was like 99 percent of all the other star systems in the galaxy: The planets orbited around the equator of the star. That meant he should be face on to the system
’
s orbital plane.

With the data he had already, it was a trivial calculation to compute his distance from the star, and once he knew his distance and position relative to the star, setting up the search parameters was almost too easy. He fed the numbers to the computers and ordered ship
’
s detection systems to start searching the toroidal ring of space that ought to contain Solace.

Then it was time to let the machine do the rest of the work. He would get out of his pressure suit, freshen up, and get something to eat. With all the ship
’
s clocks reset to zero, he had no way of knowing if it had been a few months or a few millennia since he had last had a shower and a meal. However long it was, he knew he could use both right now.

The familiar routine of stripping out of the pressure suit, bathing, and getting into fresh fatigues served to comfort Marquez. A hot meal helped as well. But all the comfort and familiarity in the universe could not have distracted him for long. The situation was too serious for that.

He tried to force back his worries and take pleasure in his meal, but the puzzle of what had happened was too distracting. No matter how hard he tried to empty his mind and relax, the mystery of how his ship had gotten to where she was intruded.

Marquez no longer doubted that this was the Solace system. Somehow, and he had no idea how, the
Dom Pedro IV
had guided herself here in spite of massive malfunctions, and in spite of missing the timeshaft worm-holes. Besides which, those massive malfunctions seemed to have healed themselves. Everything on board seemed to be working perfectly.

But if the chronometers had all failed, then perhaps the navigation event log had gotten scrambled as well. Maybe the ship had, somehow, negotiated the timeshaft on her own, and then lost the record of the event.

Marquez was heartened by the idea—more heartened, perhaps, than was sensible. If it was merely a question of the log recorder and ship chronometers misbehaving, then maybe everything was all right. Maybe the
Dom Pedro IV
was not only where she was supposed to be, but
when
she was supposed to be as well.

A chime sounded, interrupting his thoughts. Marquez blinked and came back to himself. He looked down and saw that his meal was stone-cold, and virtually untouched.

The chime sounded again, and he looked up at the closest status display.

The detectors had found something. Marquez scooped the remains of his meal into the recycler chute and hurried back to main control.

The visual-spectrum telescope had spotted Solace first, but even as he sat back down at the pilot
’
s station, the infrared scope and the radio-band detectors chimed in, announcing their own discovery of the planet.

On a hunch, Marquez checked the planet
’
s ^position and projected forward motion against the
DP-IVs
current trajectory. It surprised him far less than it should have to find. his ship was on a highly precise near-miss intercept course with the planet, just right for dropping into a polar orbit.

But there would be time enough to worry about the implications of that later.

It was comforting at least to know the planet was there. Solace was not just his intended destination, it was a place he knew. He had been to Solace just six standard years before, and back then it had—

With a start, Marquez realized it had
not
been six years before. He had no idea how long ago it had been. But now that he had a fix on the planet
’
s location, he had a way he could find out.

Wormhole transit, long flight times, and relativistic time-dilation effects all render time measurement difficult during interstellar flight. For that reason, timeshaft ships were equipped to determine the precise time in a number of ways, ranging from measurement of the periodicity of calibrated neutron stars to the technique Marquez was about to use—planetary positional chronojnetry. He could treat the relative positions of the planets
’
orbital position like the hands of some impossibly huge antique analog clock.

Marquez instructed the ship
’
s navigation system to get position locks on the other planets of the system. Having a precise lock on Solace itself allowed the navigation system to zero in far more precisely and rapidly on the other planets. Within eight minutes, the nav system had a positive track on six planets, and that was enough for a precise chronology fix.

Marquez looked toward the positional-calculation chronometer display just as the observational system completed its calculations and put the results up on the clock screen, numbers that placidly reported the time, the day, and the year.

Marquez was vaguely surprised that he had no reaction to the numbers. Perhaps it was some aftereffect of being in long sleep. Perhaps he had subconsciously been expecting such news and had refused to consider it for that reason. Or perhaps his subconscious knew it was wise to keep him from reacting, because the only rational reaction would be unbridled panic.

It did not matter. Nothing he could do would matter.

Their flight plan had called for the
Dom Pedro IV
to arrive at Solace somewhere between two weeks and two months after her departure from Thor
’
s Realm.

No matter what reaction Marquez summoned up, it would not change the fact that they had arrived at Solace almost precisely one hundred and twenty-seven years late.

Marquez sat, motionless, for how long he could not say. It was the realization that he had no idea how long he had been there that brought him back to himself. He smiled without pleasure at the gallows humor of it all. He had already lost track of more than a century
’
s worth of time. It would hardly do to lose track of more time again quite so soon.

You should have been prepared for this,
he told himself.
It is one of the risks of being a timeshaft -pilot.
Well, that was true enough—up to a point. Every timeshaft pilot had nightmares about the temporal confinement failing to deactivate, or about the ship missing a waypoint wormhole or its destination star system and sailing past into the infinite void. There had been ships that had simply vanished, and many had no doubt suffered such fates.