The Depths of Time (9 page)

Koffield also knew that the main part of his job at this point was to stay out of the crew
’
s hair. Once he had made his decisions and given his orders, there was not a great deal of useful work that the captain could do. He was careful to make himself visible. He performed inspections, listened to his crew—but it was easy to overdo that sort of thing. He did not propose to breathe down their necks. He kept himself out of the way, and kept to himself. He did what he had always done when there was little to do but wait for a crisis to mature. He listened to his music, read his books, quietly, alone.

Throughout Koffield
’
s career, it had seemed to him as if the crises always hit quite literally at the darkest hour, during ship
’
s night. As a general rule, things happened at 0200 hours, not 1000 or 1900 hours. They happened when Koffield was sound asleep, or about to sit down to a meal that had already been postponed three times. For once, all such rules were broken.

It happened at 1107 hours, right in the middle of the dayside shift, with a well-fed and well-rested Captain Anton Koffield on the bridge and at the conn, and Lieutenant Jem Sentar, the ship
’
s best detection officer, on duty.

“
Signal incoming through wormhole link!
”
Sentar called out.

Koffield was out of the command chair, on his feet, and standing over Sentar, right where he had been when a piece of shrapnel had killed Sayad. He half-consciously moved back a step, even as he stared intently at the repaired display screens. Sure enough, there it was.
“
Identify,
”
he ordered.

“
Data packet from Chronologic Patrol vessel,
”
Sentar reported.

Koffield nodded in agreement. It wasn
’
t much, but there it was. A minimal arrival signal, a Chronologic Patrol identity pattern on blank signal packets. Aside from saying
Here we are,
they were sending null data, not even so much as the ship
’
s name attached. Clearly whoever was on the other end was under strict orders to keep intertemporal-information exchange to a minimum. There had been more than enough in the way of temporal violations already. But no matter how little the signal told them, it was enough, more than enough. They weren
’
t alone anymore.
“
Confirm signal,
”
Koffield ordered.

“
Rechecking—confirmed,
”
Sentar said.
“
That
’
s a Chrono-Patrol identity signal.
”

“
Excellent. Good to have someone watching the back door. Send mirror-reply signal.
”
A mirror reply was simply the received signal played backwards and beamed back to the sender. A mirror reply sent no new information, but served to confirm accurate receipt of the sender
’
s signal.

“
Mirror reply sent,
”
Sentar said.

“
Very well,
”
Koffield acknowledged. He returned to his command chair, determined to hide his sense of relief as thoroughly as he had hidden his worries and fears. He wanted to cheer out loud and announce it at once on the ship
’
s intercom, let the whole crew know there was something to celebrate. But he couldn
’
t. He dared not encourage them to get their hopes up, or let their guard down. Too much could still go wrong. The news would spread around the ship fast enough, and the crew would be glad to hear it. That way of getting the news would be far more appropriate than what would be touched off by a jubilant shipwide announcement. He sat back down with as much of an air of calm routine as he could manage.
“
Lieutenant Sentar, log my order that the detection and comm officer is to alert me if and when we get a new signal from the downtime relay. If we get a ready-on-station signal, I want to know the moment it arrives.
”

“
Understood, sir. I have logged the order.
”

An incredibly complicated sequence of events had just concluded with the relief ship
’
s arrival, and the complex motions through time and space that had brought the relief ship to the downtime end of the Circum Central time-shaft as soon after the
Standfast
disaster as possible. It had taken centuries of travel time to make it happen, but the relief ship had arrived in under three weeks of objective time.

And all that time and effort had been taken simply to allow the relief ship to send the least information possible. She had signaled her arrival, but it might well be some time before she signaled that she was on station and ready for duty. Whatever ship it was, she had merely reported herself to be in useful range of the downtime relay. She still needed to perform a series of navigation checks, secure from cruise mode, rig for patrol. It was possible, even likely, that she had not yet roused all of her crew from cryosleep.

Koffield devoutly wished the on-station signal would come soon, before anything else could go wrong. He tried not to remind himself that wishing rarely made it so.

The duty shifts rotated around through a normal day of ship
’
s routine, without any further contact from the downtime side of the wormhole. The
Upholder
watched and waited.

The second alert came just over twenty-six hours later, at 1311 hours the next day.

Chasov had just relieved Sentar at detection and comm duty when the traffic contact alert buzzed. Chasov turned pale for a second, then checked his boards and started analyzing the contact.
“
Incoming traffic, sir,
”
he reported.

“
Very well,
”
Koffield said coolly, as if this were normal routine and not a potential crisis.
“
Keep me informed. Work the contact by the standard procedures.
”
If the new downtime ship was not yet fully powered up, operational, and prepared for on-station duty, she might not be in position to receive clearances on the ships headed downtime. If they were a bit edgy or trigger-happy aboard the downtime ship, and were surprised by the convoy ships coming through, things could get messy indeed. And considering that the new ship was replacing a craft that had been reduced to subatomic particles, they might have good reason to be edgy.

Standard operating procedure called for Chasov to summon Sentar back. Chasov did not have to wait long for Sentar to scramble back onto the bridge. But there was little for Sentar to do, other than watch Chasov work the contact and watch him send the standard mirrors back to the convoy ships. Sentar looked inquiringly at Koffield, who remained in the command chair. Koffield shook his head no, very slightly. Let the boy work the contact. It was routine stuff, after all, and if uptime relief was slow in arriving, Chasov might well have to do the job on his own before too long, without any backstop. Live work was always the best training.

Chasov quickly interpreted the contact and put it on the main displays.

It was a beacon signal, or rather five beacon signals. The signals carried little more information than that, but the ships
’
heading told them more. They were inbound for Glister, coming in straight down the heading from Thor
’
s Realm. It was plain to see it was the relief convoy, just about on schedule, and inward bound for Glister.

“
Verbal report,
”
Sentar ordered.

“
Five beaconed merchant ships, inbound on standard heading for Glister,
”
Chasov promptly replied. -

“
Distance and time, Crewman Chasov?
”
Sentar asked.

“
Yes, sir. Estimated range one billion four hundred six million kilometers. Doppler ranging shows targets to be decelerating, rendering arrival time uncertain. Using comparison to recorded similar flight paths, I derive estimated time of arrival at timeshaft-wormhole final approach cone at ninety-three hours, fourteen minutes.
”

Sentar nodded in satisfaction, and Koffield allowed himself just the hint of a smile. If Chasov
’
s report wasn
’
t word-for-word out of the detection officer
’
s training manual, it was awfully damned close.

“
Very well,
”
Sentar replied.
“
It would seem that we
’
ll have something to look at for the next four days. So keep an eye on those freighters for us, Crewman Chasov.
”

“
Yes, sir!
”
said Chasov. It was obvious how proud he was of doing his job, of spotting, tracking, and analyzing the detection data.

Koffield was scarcely less glad himself. If the
Upholder
hadn
’
t been so badly damaged, he would have regarded that detection range as scandalously bad. As it was, he was more than pleased. It went beyond knowing one crewman had been trained well enough to do the most routine part of a detection officer
’
s job. It meant that the ship as a whole had demonstrated her ability to perform at least part of her mission. Spotting ships coming in, and shepherding them through the wormhole, was normal, expected. The simple fact that the
Upholder
was back on the job was bound to do great things for morale—and shipboard morale could use all the help it could get.

If he was the only one worried that the downtime relief ship had only four days to declare herself on station and operational before the convoy came through, that was fine as well. He had no desire to wish that worry—or any of his other worries—on anyone.

The ships came on, moving toward the timeshaft worm-hole, and for the next four days everything went by the book. The convoy
’
s sealed Chronologic-Patrol-installed transponders sent all the proper authenticator codes to prove the ships had not sent or received any illegal communications during transit. The
Upholder
acknowledged, and ordered the ships to a standard approach. The convoy ships obediently shifted course, and set themselves up on the proper vector, beads on a string that led straight for the timeshaft wormhole. All routine, all normal.

Except there was still no further word from the downtime relief ship, nothing at all but silence. Standard operating procedure called for the relief to maintain silence after the initial send-and-mirror until she was on station and fully operational. What had happened to her? Had the relief ship been destroyed in some further disaster? Was it merely some minor communications glitch? Was she sending the on-station signal, while the
Upholder
was somehow failing to receive it? The comm people checked the primary and backup gear again and again, but never found anything wrong.

Koffield spent his off-duty hours in his cabin, brooding, worrying over it all. Two days after they had detected the convoy, he was sitting at his desk, reading an historical novel. He gave
k
up when he realized that he had just read the same passage over a half dozen times, and yet had no idea what it said. He shoved the datapage that held the book away and stared at the bulkhead opposite his desk.

He did not know what to do. He could order the convoy ships to cancel their approach and simply have them wait until the downtime ship sent the all clear. Or else he could let them continue their approach and send the clearance codes through the wormhole at the proper time, activate the nexi and send the ships through, and simply count on the downtime relief ship to handle her end of things.

But it wasn
’
t that easy or that simple. Once he cleared the convoy ships to final approach, and they committed to entering the wormhole, there could be no turning back. Once a ship was on final approach, it was impossible to abort, impossible to come about and escape the singularity. A ship on final approach was falling like a stone toward the singularity, and there was nothing that anyone could do to stop the fall. She would either go through the timeshaft wormhole, or she would impact the singularity that generated the timeshaft.

Ordering the convoy ships to standby orbits seemed the most prudent course. But they were not ships laden with expensive trinkets or luxury goods. The scale of effort was too great for that, the ships coming and going too quickly for it to be anything other than an all-out relief—or even rescue—effort. Delay the ships a day, a week, a month, waiting for the downtime ship to end its silence, and there would, almost certainly, be people dying on Glister, waiting for the supplies the convoy was bringing. Better to risk the remote chance of the downtime ship taking a potshot at one of the ships before realizing her mistake, than go with the near certainty that slowing the ships would result in greater suffering and death.

Or was he pushing his guesses too far? He could not know for certain the convoy was even bound for Glister.

It was a maddening temptation to bypass all the safeties, to order the comm channels open, to send a voice message in clear to the downtime ship, asking what the devil was going on, to hail the convoy ships and ask what their mission was, and how urgent it was.

But to do either of those things would Be to violate the very core of the Chronologic Patrol
’
s mission, its reason for being. The convoy ships had followed all the procedures required to keep them from gaining knowledge of the future before they dropped back into the past. He could not betray their trust. That the
Upholder
had been contaminated with knowledge of events on the uptime side of the worm-hole, events that the convoy ships and the downtime relief ship did not want to know about, did not matter. It was his mission to ensure that the past remained ignorant of the future, that time paradoxes of any sort did not arise. It was his job, his ship
’
s job, to see to it that nothing, including his own knowledge of the situation, could reach back from the future and derange the past.