The Depths of Time (2 page)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
 
Bursting the Bubble

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
 
Jonah and Pandora

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
 
Domino Theory

SOLACE CENTRAL ORBITAL STATION

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
 
The Deepest Tower

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
 
Chamber of the Conjuror

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
 
Rude Awakenings

SOLACE

CHAPTER NINETEEN
 
View from a Diamond

CHAPTER TWENTY
 
For Want of a Nail

SUNSROX AND GREENHOUSE

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
 
Gatekeepers

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
 
A
Thousand Times

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
 
Collateral Damage

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
 
Blowout

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
 
The Ocean of Years

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
 
The Depths of Time

Glossary and Gazetteer
of Terms, Places,
Ships, etc.

Back Cover

I would like to express my thanks to Pat LoBrutto, my editor at Bantam Books. His sharp eye significantly improved what you are about to read. Further thanks to him for allowing my ideas room to evolve, and for agreeing that an idea for one book was really big enough for two or three. Thanks also to Tom Dupree, who had a big hand in this book
’
s early development. And, once again, thanks also to Eleanor Wood and Lucienne Diver, who were far more patient with me than they should have been, but definitely hard-nosed enough when it counted.

Thanks as well to my parents, Tom and Scottie Allen, who read over the manuscript and zeroed in on some significant flaws.

But thanks most of all to two people. First, thanks to my wife, Eleanore Fox, who read the first draft of this book and gave it no mercy at all. She was right, and I was wrong, about a lot of things.

And finally, thanks to my son, Matthew Thomas Allen. He had nothing to do with the writing or editing of this book, as he was born after it was finished. But that doesn
’
t matter. Thanks, Matthew. For everything.

Roger MacBride Allen, Takoma Park, Maryland January 1999

A glossary and gazetteer appear at the end of the book.

Characters are identified in regard to their situation on first introduction in the story.

Wandella Ashdin—Historian and expert on Oskar DeSilvo.

Ulan Baskaw—Scientist who lived approximately five centuries before the main action of the story. Little is known about her—it is not even certain whether or not Baskaw was a woman or in fact a man.

Baskaw invented many terraforming techniques that were later appropriated by DeSilvo. Baskaw also discovered certain mathematical principles underlying the science of terraforming.

Norla Chandray—Second Officer aboard the
Dom Pedro IV.

Oskar DeSilvo—Architect and terraformist of the previous centuries, and director of the project to colonize Solace. He managed the centuries-long project by using cryosleep and temporal confinement, arranging to have himself revived from time to time in order to oversee critical points in the process.

Aither Fribart—Assistant to Grand Senyor Jorl Parrige.

Neshobe Kalzant—Planetary Executive, Solace.

Captain Anton Koffield—Commander of the Chronologic Patrol Ship
Upholder.

Captain Felipe Henrique Marquez—Captain of the
Dom Pedro IV.

Elber Malloon—Solacian farmer, caught up in the evacua
tion of flooded farm areas, and sent to SCO Station as a
semi-involuntary refugee.

Mandessa Orlang—Director of the Greenhouse Institute.

Jorl Parrige—Grand Senyor, or senior senator, of the Planetary Council of Solace.

Dixon Phelby—Cargo specialist aboard the
Dom Pedro IV

Karlin Raenau—Station commander of SCO Station, orbit
ing Solace.

Hues Renblant—Propulsion and guidance officer aboard the
Dom Pedro IV.

Ensign Alaxi Sayad—Watch officer aboard the C.P.S.
Upholder.

Yuri Sparten—A young man working as an assistant to Karlin Raenau on SCO Station. His parents, as children, were refugees from the fall of Glister.

Milos Vandar—A biologist working on the project to revi
talize Lake Virtue on the planet Solace.

1.
            
Spacecraft departs home star system, bound for target system, ten
light-years away. Crew enters cryosleep hibernation and/or temporal
confinement for duration of voyage.

2.
            
Spacecraft travels for fifty years at one-tenth light-speed, thus traveling fifty years uptime and a distance of five light-years.

3.
            
Spacecraft reaches timeshaft wormhole, midway between home and target systems. Captain is revived briefly to pilot ship through timeshaft.

4.
            
Both uptime and downtime ends of wormhole are guarded by Chronologic Patrol ships.

5.
            
Spacecraft drops through timeshaft and is propelled one hundred
years downtime, into the past.

6.
            
Spacecraft emerges from wormhole, fifty years before its departure from its home system and one hundred years before it enters the wormhole. Captain returns to temporal confinement.

7.
            
Spacecraft once again travels fifty years at one-tenth light-speed, again traveling fifty years uptime and five more light-years.

8.
            
After traveling for one hundred years shipboard time, spacecraft arrives at target system a few days or weeks after departure in
objective time. Crew is revived from one-hundred-year hibernation
to find less than a month has passed.

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 sta-tionkeeping 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.