The Depths of Time (40 page)

The tunnel itself was 150 meters in diameter, and ran the kilometer length of the station. Its surface was a perfect forest of complicated shapes wrapped around the inside of the tunnel. The station
’
s spin, naturally enough, produced simulated gravity, courtesy of the centripetal effect. Down was out, toward the exterior of the station, and up was in, straight toward the centerline of the cylinder. The horizon was, in effect, wrapped around itself. In the outer decks of the station, out toward the outer rim of the cylinder, the simulated gravity would be pretty substantial, but the gee forces on the cylinder
’
s inner surface weren
’
t anything much. But they were enough to hold things—all sorts of things—to the curving wall of the tunnel.

Part of the world was right-side up, part was upside down, and the rest was on its side: landed ships, stored cargo, work lights, spidery manipulator arms, free-flying utility robots, and tiny space-suited figures kneeling here and standing there, doing whatever jobs could not be done except by human hands and human eyes,, right there on the spot.

She could easily see the joins between the eight disks that made up the cylinder. It didn
’
t take a very sharp eye to see that the inner disks were the oldest ones, or that a lot of ships had paid a lot of calls here. The inner disks were darker with age, with more cuts and gouges and dings knocked into their armored hulls. Here and there were scorch marks left behind by thrusters fired a bit too hard a bit too close to the deck.

But what about the station
’
s docking system? Norla thought back to her briefing books. Primary Transporters, they called them, robotic arms mounted to carrier cars. The cars moved on monorails that ran the length of the station. Her briefing books said there were two monorails, 180 degrees apart from each other, but Norla saw four, oversize I-beam girders running the length of the station, equally spaced around the interior of the tunnel, each painted bright red to make it as visible and noticeable as possible. It was, once again, easy to tell the old pair, dinged-up and worn-looking, from the new pair. The Primary Transporter Arms
’
carrier cars rode on over-and-under wheels that held them firmly to the monorails as they rolled up and down the length of the station.

It was hard to see at this distance, but it looked as if two of the arms were at present stowed away and powered down at the far end of the station. The third was doing some sort of lifting job about halfway down.

And, she suddenly realized, the fourth was coming straight at her, riding its carrier car down the monorail, unfolding itself out as it came, like the leg of some absurdly overgrown monster spider. The carrier came to a smooth stop at the end of its rail, and the arm slowly extended itself beyond the station, lazily reaching for the
Cruzeiro do Sul.

Norla had to resist the temptation to grab for the controls
and back the ship away, fast and hard, from the big, cruel-looking arm. This was what was supposed to be happening. The docking probe was on the end of the arm, its six capture petals opened up like a big hungry mouth, the two remote cameras on either side of the probe looking for all the world like the eyes of an insect monster that was closing in to devour them.

Norla forced herself to settle down. Five minutes ago she had been patting herself on the back for chasing away her imaginary fears. It wouldn
’
t do her self-respect any good at all for the illusions to have the upper hand again so soon.

The arm stopped its motion with the docking probe fifty meters short of the
Cruzeiro do Sul.
Norla let out a sigh of relief in spite of herself.

“
Looking good,
”
she announced to Koffield, more for the sake of having something to say than out of any need or desire to communicate. She looked over at him again. He was staring intently at SCO Station, not paying the least attention to her. The bright-tracking glasses only made his expression that much harder to read. Damn it, didn
’
t the man ever feel the need to
speak?
“
We
’
re ready to dock,
”
she said, hoping to get his attention.

“
Yes, we are,
”
Koffield said, quite calmly.

“
How does it look to you?
”
she asked, struggling to get some reaction from him. It was an important moment. It wasn
’
t asking too much for the man to have at least
some
sort of reaction.

“
Risky,
”
he said.
“
Not the docking. I
’
m sure that will go fine. Once we
’
re aboard, however—well, we
’
ll be in their hands, won
’
t we? And, from what I can see of the station so far, I don
’
t know how comfortable I am with that thought.
”

“
Sir?
”
What the hell was he talking about? What was he seeing that she was not?

“
Proceed, Officer Chandray. Carefully. Just don
’
t stop being careful once we
’
re on board.
”

“
Right,
”
she said, utterly mystified.
“
Absolutely.
”

She checked her displays and confirmed that the Artlnts
aboard the
Cruzeiro do Sul
and SCO Station had satis
fied each other
’
s data requests. The station knew every
thing it needed to know about the ship, and vice versa.
SCO Traffic Control had cleared her to perform the final
docking maneuver. She checked her aft radar display, and saw four ships moving in on approach to SCO Station,
and a fifth commencing maneuvers even as she watched. All of the ships were moving at far greater accelerations
and in far faster flight paths than what she had been as
signed. Quite obviously, they had cleared incoming traffic
to make room for the fossil-ship that had arrived out of
nowhere.

But that the other ships were now moving told her that even SCO Traffic Control was ready to concede that the
Cruzeiro do Sul
had made it in, and flown in safely.
Now comes the easy part,
she told herself. No need to be ner
vous about it. Nothing to be scared of. Nothing she hadn
’
t
done a thousand times before. The only thing different was that she was light-years from home, and marooned in the wrong century, and the unknown, the future, was waiting for them. Koffield was right. It wasn
’
t the docking she should be scared of. It was what came afterward, once they were aboard the station.

Understanding that helped, somehow. Her lips had gone
dry, and she ran her tongue over them and swallowed. She
gimbaled her command chair around until the ship
’
s dock
ing probe was over and in front of her left shoulder, right
where she could see it. She flipped the main video screen to
the probe
’
s camera, and was rewarded with a straight-on
view of the PT Arm. She flipped her thruster controls back from roll to maneuver, and tapped the rear jets at minimum
power for a quarter second. The ship moved slowly for
ward, straight on for the PT Arm
’
s docking probe at a meter a second.

She watched her lineup indicators, and saw she was drifting just a hair high in y-axis. She blipped her side thrusters,
killing the drift. The y-axis-up adjustment had put her perhaps three or four centimeters out of perfect alignment with
the docking probe, but she made no attempt to correct it.

She was well within tolerance, and any attempt to compensate would likely produce an overcorrection, and lead to repeated over-and-under shots that could lead to a lot more trouble than being off center by four centimeters.

She drifted in slowly, watching the docking probe move closer. At fifteen meters out, she killed most of her forward motion, bringing it down to a quarter meter per second.

The PTA
’
s probe was close enough now that she was no longer seeing it straight on. It was coming in toward her left, toward the
Cruzeiro do Sul’s
own docking probe. The closer it got, the bigger, the cruder, it seemed to be, its jaws gaping wide to seize at her ship.

Slowly, she drifted in, tapping out another bit of braking thrust at five meters, slowing to a bare eight centimeters a second. She checked her translations. She noted with a nod that the y-axis-high drift seemed to have solved itself, and they were right on target. If she had tried a correction, she would only have made things worse.

She pulled her hands away from the controls. She was exactly where she wanted to be. There was nothing to do but look out the port side of the pilot
’
s station and watch the two probes close in on each other.

It took just slightly over a minute for the
Cruzeiro do Sul
to cross that last few meters. Strange to be moving so slowly aboard a ship that could go so fast, that could go from the outer reaches of the system to Solace in a matter of days.

And strange that a minute could seem so long.

She watched as the claw of the PT Arm docking probe drew closer and closer to her ship. Terror grabbed her, and she did not know what scared her—and then knew that it was the unknown itself that she feared. The outside world, the present-day universe, was closing in on them. Until they were docked, until they were in the station, they were not truly part of the future. They could at least imagine drawing back, safe into the vanished- past. The last few seconds in which they were part of the past, part of the life and time to which she could no longer return, were evaporating before her eyes.

The ship
’
s probe and station
’
s probe moved closer,closer. They touched. The jaws of the station
’
s probe closed upon the
Cruzeiro do Sul,
and the whole ship shuddered slightly at the contact. The docking autostop thrusters killed the last of their forward momentum. The future had caught them.

Anton Koffield watched and listened as an alert tone sounded and lines of text appeared on the
Cruzeiro do Sul’s
pilot station
’
s display.

POWER-OFF ALL ATTITUDE CONTROL, ALL PROPULSION SYSTEMS. EXTEND SHIP LANDING GEAR. WILL NOT PROCEED UNTIL COMPLIANCE DETECTION.

The syntax was a little odd, but the intent was clear enough. SCO Station didn
’
t want powered ships flying around inside itself.

Anton Koffield looked to Norla Chandray, and nodded at her unspoken question. She let out a worried sigh and flipped the appropriate switches.

COMPLIANCE DETECTION. PT SYSTEM NOW WILL TRANSPORT TO SHIP BAY GAMMA TWO (G2). MAINTAIN PASSIVE STATE.

Interesting. There had been no noticeable shift in language or context when Second Officer Chandray had been talking with the human controllers. Why would an automatic system use such strange phrasing?

Koffield looked at Chandray again. The woman did not much like the thought of powering down her ship. Well, he could not blame her. Even under normal circumstances, no pilot liked to cede control of her craft—and these were far from normal circumstances.

The PT Arm folded back on itself, pulling the
Cruzeiro do Sul
toward the station. Koffield peered into the station
’
s central access tunnel and saw their PT Arm
’
s carrier car starting to roll forward, hauling the arm and the
Cruzeiro
along. There was a creak and a groan from the docking system
’
s load-bearing structure as it took up the towing stress. Then the ship started moving slowly forward toward the station.

Koffield checked his recorders again and confirmed they were working, then concentrated on seeing everything, noting everything, that he possibly could.

The carrier car moved steadily forward, the PT Arm and the ship trailing along behind. It was hard not to imagine the open end of the central access tunnel as a giant mouth swallowing them up, and the tunnel itself as a gullet of some monstrous beast. Jonah being swallowed by the whale. Well, Jonah had come out of it all right. Perhaps they would be equally lucky.

The
Cruzeiro
passed out of sunlight into the shadow of the station, then entered the station
’
s access tunnel. Without taking his eyes off the tunnel, Koffield removed his bright-tracking glasses and handed them to Chandray. She removed hers and put both pairs back in their storage compartment.

Koffield
’
s attention was focused on the interior of Solace Central Orbital Station. The place had doubled in size in the last century. That in and of itself was not remarkable. It was the
way
that time and use had made their mark that told him what he needed to know, and that gave him reason for alarm.

They passed by a loading bay that was stripped down to its structural members, wall panels pulled out more or less at random, and some of the structural hardware missing as well. What looked very much like the same type of wall panels had been used to add an extra repair bay in a nearby yard. A beat-up old orbital tug in that repair bay was half-disassembled, but whether it was being taken apart or being put back together was impossible to tell. There were no work lights on, no cables strung, no test equipment running, no workers on duty. Koffield got the very strong impression that no one had worked on that tug, or in that yard, for a long time.