The Depths of Time - Softcover

Allen, Roger MacBride

 
9780553574975: The Depths of Time
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0553574973 ISBN 13: 9780553574975
Verlag: Bantam Books, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

When ships approaching a crippled planet are set upon by mysterious attackers, Anton Koffield of the Chronological Patrol investigates and finds himself stranded eighty years in the future and accused of destroying an entire planet. Reprint.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Roger MacBride Allen is the author of seventeen novels and a number of short stories. He lived in Brazil for some years but now makes his home in Maryland with his wife and young son.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

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...

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Verlag
Bantam Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2001
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0553574973
ISBN 13 
9780553574975
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
496
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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