The Depths of Time (29 page)

Koffield raised one eyebrow slightly and allowed one corner of his mouth to move in the direction of a smile.
“
You
’
re not slow getting off the mark, are you?
”

“
I
’
m right?
”

Koffield nodded reluctantly.
“
Quite right. Captain Marquez is going to brief the crew in about twenty minutes
’
time.
”

“
Then I
’
d better get up,
”
Norla said. She sat up completely in bed, then swung her feet around and planted them on the deck. Just that simple act was enough to set her head reeling and put black spots before her eyes. She grabbed the edge of the bunk with both hands, as hard as she could, and braced herself up.

Koffield watched her carefully, but made no move to help her. That all by itself sent a clear message.
We’re in an emergency situation,
Koffield was saying, just by sitting there, hands folded.
We can’t spare the time and energy right now seeing after invalids who shouldn’t be out of bed in the first place. There’s no sense encouraging you if you can’t manage on your own.
“
Do you think you
’
ll be in good enough shape to attend the meeting?
”
he asked. The words he spoke were gentler than the message Norla imagined, but the intent was the same.

Norla sat there for a moment, trying to get her head to clear. She could not, would not, let her first act after revival be a decision to give up without a fight.
“
No,
”
she said at last.
“
But I
’
m going to be there anyway.
”

“
That about sums it up,
”
Marquez said, switching off the last of the display devices.
“
Beyond saying that I will conduct a memorial service for our fallen comrades in two hours, there is little else left to report. Now you know as much as I do about our situation. For reasons I cannot explain, we
’
re where we
’
re supposed to be, but over a century late. And, just to be absolutely clear, there
’
s no going back. The Chronologic Patrol would blow us out of the sky if we went near the uptime end of a timeshaft and tried to head downtime.
”

The main table in the wardroom was round, with just enough room about it to accommodate the full crew of the
Dom Pedro IV.
But two members of the crew were back in their cryocans, dead, in storage, until Marquez could figure out what to do with them. No one seemed pleased about the extra elbow room.

Marquez considered the faces about the table. Koffield sat directly opposite him; Norla Chandray, the one who had nearly been their third fatality, sitting on Koffield
’
s right. The rest of the crew, all twelve of them, took up the remaining seats. Thirteen crew and Koffield—and he knew most of the crew no better than he knew Koffield. That could be a problem. Timeshaft crew tended to be freelancers, signing on for one or two voyages at a time, rather than remaining with one ship for years on end. It was not unusual for a timeshaft ship to have some of her crew recruited at the last minute. But there were only three in this crew Marquez had ever shipped out with before, and he had done so only once with each.

Well, they were stuck with each other now. The
Dom Pedro IV
was a century out-of-date. Would he, Marquez, even be able to find the command center on a modern ship?

One of the crew—Smillers, that was the name—raised his hand.
“
Yes, Smillers, what is it?
”

“
Sir, beg your pardon, but how the hell did this happen?
”

“
We don
’
t know,
”
Marquez said, and looked at all the other faces around the table.
“
Why didn
’
t we enter the wormhole or even fly toward it? Why didn
’
t my temporal-confinement field shut down when it was supposed to? Why did the clocks zero out? How did we get to our destination at all, instead of sailing past into space? Why was cryogenic revival so bad for everyone? Why did cryogenic revival kill two people? I can give you the same answer to all of them—we don
’
t know.
”

“
Sir?
”

Marquez turned toward the new speaker. He was a young man Marquez knew only slightly. Normally cheerful, he looked as worried as everyone else did at the moment. Dixon Phelby, the cargo specialist.
“
Yes, what is it?
”

“
I think I can help out with part of the last, sir,
”
said Phelby.
“
I
’
ve shipped a couple of times on big colonist-transport ships, sir. Four times the size of this ship, and no cargo holds—just cryostorage for humans and animals. They might fly with three or four thousand passengers. They don
’
t even use individual cryo canisters on those ships. They just put a hundred people in one big chamber, and freeze the whole compartment. They do it wholesale. Forty or fifty multicans like that per ship.
”

“
What
’
s your point?
”
Koffield asked, speaking for the first time.

“
Well, sir, on a ship like this
”
—he gestured with a wave of his hand to indicate the
DP-IV
—
”
there
’
s only healthy crew of adult age on board, and most of them have cryo experience that
’
s on the shipboard computer file. The ship can
’
t afford a full-time med staff, and doesn
’
t really need one. No high-risk cases on board. So you stick your arm in the cryomed detector. It does some scans, takes skin and blood samples, looks up your onboard med history, and issues you the right types and dosages of cryomeds. The automatics are all you really need to deal with the limited-population universe. No muss, no fuss.
”

Phelby shook his head.
“
But you can
’
t do it that way on a colony ship. You
’
ve got older people, people with medical conditions that would scratch them from starside service, teenagers, pregnant women, people with bad or missing or inaccurate med files, and so on. Colony ships have to go to the expense of keeping medical staff in temporal confinement. The doctors wake up every year or so to check on everyone, and the med-monitor Artlnts can wake them in an emergency.

“
Anyway, I learned a couple of things. One is that the meds they give to the cryosubjects on a colony ship are very carefully tailored, both for the individual and for the duration of the trip. On a cargo ship, we tend to let the medical systems do the worrying. The crew members take the meds the automatics give us, and we don
’
t much think about it. The flight plan called for us to be in cryo for about eighty ship-years on this flight, and we were dosed for that. There
’
s a big margin of error in those dosages—-but we were on ice for an extra forty-seven years.

“
The other thing is that young people are more susceptible to revival shock. They let pregnant women go cryo, because the mother
’
s body protects the fetus, but anyone from newborn up to about thirteen they don
’
t let into cryo, period. An immature human body can
’
t handle the stresses. After about age fourteen, children can manage cryo—but they have to make age adjustments to the standard meds, and increase the dosages, up until about age twenty-four.
”

“
So what you
’
re saying is that you were all on the ragged edge of depleting your cryogenic support medications—and the two who died did so because they were young and consumed their cryomed dosages faster than the rest of you,
”
Marquez said.

“
Yes, sir. We were all at dosage exhaustion. None of us would have come out alive if we had been on ice much longer.
”

Marquez looked around the table at everyone else. He had been the only one in temporal confinement. If Phelby was right, and they had traveled much longer, all the other people here would have been dead. He would have awakened to a ship full of death and corpses.

“
That
’
s all theory, and nothing else,
”
said Hues Renblant. Renblant was officially first officer on the
DP-IV,
but he had signed up just before the
DP-IV
launched. Marquez barely knew him. He had hired Renblant for his skills in propulsion and guidance, and had not worried much about his command skills. There was something in Renblant
’
s tone of voice that made it clear that someone as low-ranking as Cargomaster Phelby wasn
’
t qualified to have opinions on
’
such subjects.
“
I for one don
’
t plan on getting back in a cryocan until we have something more.
”

“
Fair enough,
”
said Phelby, his tone quite relaxed.
“
I wouldn
’
t want to bet my life on my explanation either. Not without checking it out. But it
’
s a place to start from.
”

Marquez drummed his palm on the table. Renblant looked as if he
’
d be interested in arguing the point further, but Marquez cut him off.
“
Let us remain calm,
”
he said.
“
Cargomaster Phelby raises some interesting possibilities, but we have to find out everything we can. The bodies of our unfortunate colleagues are in storage, and will remain there until we have a far better understanding of what has happened. If we reach some sort of facility where it
’
s possible, we
’
ll have full autopsies done. We have the revival-sequence medical information on all of us, and I want everyone to have a full medical scan as soon as possible, so we have some postrevival data.
”

“
The automedics can do the scans, but who is going to interpret the data?
”
Renblant asked.

“
I haven
’
t the slightest idea,
”
Marquez said.
“
We might have to educate ourselves to read them—in which case we will be here a while. Probably we will obtain some sort of local assistance, but that is by no means certain. Admiral Koffield will address that point in a moment. Before turning to that issue, however, let us remember there are more mysteries than those surrounding the deaths of our colleagues. Something, somehow, went terribly wrong with our ship. We have to find out what went wrong—and even if we are not competent to interpret medical scans, we had damned well better be able to understand a timeshaft ship! We must examine every system, every unit, every component on this ship. I will not trust her beyond the simplest of maneuvers until such time as I understand what happened. I will meet with section chiefs in my cabin at eighteen-hundred hours to discuss strategies and schedules for ship inspection.
”

Marquez looked around the table and got the nods and mutters of agreement he was looking for. It was important to be firm now, hard-edged, assertive. This crew had signed on for a routine cargo run that should have had them back in home port only a month or two of self-chron time after departure. Instead they were hopelessly marooned in the future, two of their number dead, face-to-face with the unknown. Such a situation required tight discipline for the crew.

But such a situation also engendered fear, anger, perhaps even panic. Renblant in particular would bear close watching. The man was too tightly strung for Marquez
’
s liking.

“
That all being said, I now call upon Admiral Koffield to brief us on the situation in the Solacian system.
”

“
Yes, sir,
”
Koffield said, in brisk, military tones. He nodded once sharply, and seemed to draw himself up a bit taller in his seat. Perhaps, Marquez thought, he was trying to remind the crew that a polite request from Marquez should be treated like an order from the ship
’
s captain.
“
Before I begin, I should point out there are some guesses and some assumptions in what I am going to tell you. They are educated guesses and informed assumptions, and I think I can safely say that my information is essentially reliable. I am probably wrong on a few small details, but I very much doubt that I am wrong about the general situation.
”

He looked around the table, as if daring anyone to protest, then went on.
“
We have been monitoring whatever communications we could pick up from the Solacian system—commercial broadcasts, ship-to-ship radio, radio traffic in the clear, video news reports, and so on. None of what we have heard or seen gave us direct information on the matters that interest us. No reporter came on the screen and announced that a drought had started twenty years before, or broadcast a detailed account of Solace
’
s history over the last hundred and thirty standard years.

We haven
’
t seen statistical reports on population decline or infectious disease. What we have seen is normal, routine, everyday information, the sort of thing that assumes the person getting it knows the general background and just needs a quick update. Obviously, we don
’
t have that background.