Time Past (54 page)

And that was the direction
Vengeful
was chasing
Farseer
right now. I used Lee’s adjoining screen to search for the
Calypso
point’s exact coordinates.
Farseer
was heading near them, but not right for them. Even so, I felt a coldness on the back of my neck. Surely Serat knew that point would destabilize soon. He’d been on Earth on 16 May when it happened.

“
Vengeful
’s gaining,” said Stone. He stood on my toe as he edged around the console to get a better view.

By now the entire Bubble was watching, breathless.

Why didn’t
Farseer
retaliate, I wondered. Surely the Tor parts of it could modify existing equipment into a weapon.
Vengeful
was within range now. The Q’Chn were fools, to spend this long chasing one small prey instead of following Venner to safety.

Vengeful
fired burst after burst. We could only see it on the tactical display, it was too far away for visual sensors. I looked over at the spectral display. That gave
Vengeful
’s position as a bright patch of light, glowing as each volley was fired.
Farseer
was a different color, steadily burning in a line like a comet as it kept on its course.

An Serat must be trying to get into the asteroid belt and then beyond. But he’ll be too late.

Vengeful
fired again and
Farseer
made the jump.

It took us all by surprise. One minute the readings were normal, the next, everything rose off the scale. Or dropped, depending on the display.

On tactical, a small whirling dot opened rapidly,
Farseer
’s signal superimposed upon it.

“Shit, that is a jump.” The first time I’d heard Lee swear. “You were right.”

“Look at
Vengeful,
” someone said.

The cruiser veered as quickly as its lateral thrusters would allow, to avoid charging into the jump point. The Q’Chn apparently didn’t chase prey that far. But the space they veered into was changing, too.

As the jump point and
Farseer
intensified in its normal burst of radiation, space nearby began to change. Every set of sensor data we had on that area showed massive disturbances. All over the Bubble lights flared and signals blipped.

“Never seen a jump do that,” said someone else.

“It’s not the jump,” said Lee.

On the visual display, the area of space around
Vengeful
seemed to bubble. The stars and nebulae beyond stretched, distorted. A bright ring formed, seeming to enclose it, then dispersed into auroralike shimmering.

“What the...” Lee pored over the tactical readouts. “It’s some kind of gravimetric radiation, that’s all I can tell.”

Vengeful
’s readings had disappeared, swamped in the surge of radiation. The Q’Chn would never get back to the New Council. Ninety-nine years ago this happened in space near the solar system on the other side of the jump point, now it’s happening here, on our side.

“Look at the jump point,” said Stone. “Is it supposed to do that?”

The tactical showed
Farseer
’s signal, motionless, in a bright spot of jump point also unmoving. For a second I thought the screen had simply frozen. Then the confused distortion of the destabilized point next to it grew larger, reached out and around the frozen whorl of the jump point, sending out amoebic arms as if to embrace it. The jump point and
Farseer
also became blurred, distorted, and started to glow red. For a moment we were looking at a twisting red cloud. It seemed like
Farseer
was trying to free itself. Then the center of the cloud glowed brighter and brighter until the protective cutoff shut down the screen.

We looked away and blinked or rubbed our eyes until the afterimages ceased to block the sight of the Bubble’s wall monitors and consoles. One of the ensigns held his hand up in front of his eyes. Stone pressed on his eyelids.

Seconds later the screen came on again and we all craned to see. The red glow was shrinking far more quickly than it grew. Shrank to a dot, winked out. Only dark space remained. An eerily beautiful thing to be the end of a dream.

Epilogue

M
urdoch said he’d come to see me after he got through Customs and reentry processing. He was on leave from EarthFleet after staying behind on Jocasta for a week after I’d left. Both my asylum hearing and the processing of EarthFleet charges had to be done on Earth, however much I would have liked to remain on the station.

I waited for Murdoch in Sydney by the bay where the airport used to be, although the runway where the Invidi ships landed was gone. There was a strip of sand surrounded by mangroves and shrubs, like the rest of the bay. The water still winked and glittered in the sunlight as it had on the morning Will died one hundred years ago. The seagulls still swooped, dopplering in and out of earshot.

I’d come to this place because I had something left to do here. In between the asylum hearing, which was successful, and the EarthFleet inquiry, which was not, I’d gone over to Homebush and seen where the out-towns used to be. I said my good-byes to Grace there. Not at her grave-side, which was well maintained thanks to Vince’s descendants, but in the tidy streets that fronted onto the green expanse of mangrove park that had regrown over the dirt and the chemicals. The best tribute to the out-towns was that they no longer existed.

Lorna was right about EarthFleet—they hadn’t been pleased at the damage we caused to Sigma 41 when Murdoch’s plan worked. They refused to take into consideration our effort to save lives on the station, or the positive effect on Confederacy morale of three Q’Chn deaths. They also demanded I repay all the funds used on the
Calypso II
project.

External Affairs had to accept my application for asylum, so I was safe from ConFleet court-martial, but they included a mobility restriction clause, which meant I couldn’t leave Earth for a year.

The idea of being stuck on Earth away from Jocasta appalled me, and I almost wished I’d taken my chances with ConFleet. Then when the year was over, the deferred payment for damages to Sigma 41 was waiting. Unless, Lorna said, she managed to get the charge dropped in the meantime. Or unless I joined EarthFleet or some other branch of Earth’s planetary government.

A whole year. Stuck here while the station moves on. I couldn’t even be there when the neutrality vote went through. After all I went through in the past to get home in time for it. But neutrality passed. Thanks in a large part to Dan Florida’s boisterous publicity of the
Farseer
affair—he criticized the Confederacy for meddling in the governance of a neutral star system and the Invidi for interfering in Earth’s past. No formal accusations were ever made. But when the votes were counted, Abelar and Jo-casta went on record as the only neutrality petition to ever pass without direct support from one of the Four.

Sarkady had voted yes for Earth, but she lost her Council post soon after. The other yes votes were the Dir, Neron, Tell, Achel, H’digh, and, surprisingly, the Leowin. Which left the Four on the no side, plus Stegg and Chehgiru, which were distant relatives of the K’Cher and a Bendarl colony, respectively. Neutrality by one vote, but that one vote was enough.

The Invidi denied all of Florida’s accusations and ignored the little evidence we had. They insisted An Serat was acting by himself and that
Calypso
had somehow gone through Central. The gravitational disturbance we witnessed when the jump point destabilized they called an unfortunate result of his experiments. Nobody else was at risk. The idea of off-network jumping was laughable, they said. A theoretical and practical impossibility.

How did Murdoch and I get to the past, then? We could have asked. But there was no proof we did go. The
Calypso II
records were well and truly gone, and Eleanor’s medical records were open to interpretation. We agreed not to make a fuss, for the sake of the newly approved neutrality and for the sake of Murdoch’s career—he still had one, at least.

And there was plenty to occupy us all in the present. Venner’s New Council ship was still somewhere in flat-space. ConFleet hadn’t found them yet, but were blaming the New Council for the loss of
Vengeful.
They were demanding stricter penalties for New Council sympathizers within the Confederacy, which were likely to come into effect, so the New Council had achieved little by helping Serat, and they’d lost a large number of Q’Chn. We all hoped they’d think twice before creating more.

I intended going back to Jocasta when my enforced stay on Earth was over, sooner if I could get the decision repealed or the time shortened. I didn’t mind being a civilian or employee of the new administration, or whatever. But I wanted to be a part of the new Jocasta.

The interim administration, which was basically the arrangement of Residents Committee, old administration, and staff on loan from EarthFleet, would have to decide whether to take a defense contract with ConFleet. When I spoke with him before I left, Veatch seemed keen to do so. He thought that ConFleet’s defeat by the Q’Chn and the loss of
Vengeful
would bring the price down, and they’d also be keen to prove themselves again and therefore extremely efficient.

“How about the New Council?” I said. “Do you offer them docking rights as well?”

Veatch’s antennae twitched with shock, but not at the prospect of hosting terrorists. “Any application will be considered if it uses the appropriate protocols.”

I thought he might have difficulty getting Rupert Stone to agree with this. To everyone’s surprise, Stone had stayed on Jocasta on secondment from External Affairs, as joint acting head with Veatch of the interim administration.

“I couldn’t leave things in such a mess,” he told me when I asked him why.

“Veatch likes the mess,” I said. “He knows exactly where everything is but nobody else does.”

“We’ll see,” said Stone.

I spoke with another old Jocasta resident before I left. An Barik came back to the station and asked to see me. He had escaped through the jump point before the Q’Chn took over
Vengeful,
as we’d suspected. Nobody was particularly pleased to see him again—he’d run away and left us to cope with the Q’Chn. Left us to confront An Serat for him. Barik’s behavior made me reflect that although An Serat had his problems, at least he did things for himself.

I said I’d talk to Barik and we met in the half-dismantled “observation lounge” in Level Three of the center. I asked Barik if Serat’s research remained, and what he and the other Invidi would do with it.

“The one possesses not,” he said. “Good.” I didn’t like to feel pleasure at knowledge lost, but if we couldn’t have it, I was glad they couldn’t either. “Some of Invidi wish Serat’s work. The one does not. Your path-decision is the most open.”

“I’m not really glad I helped you,” I said. “Do you ever help us? Or is it all part of some self-serving plan?”

“The one is not all Invidi.”

“Don’t give me that crap.” We were still cleaning up after the explosion and the fire extinguisher incident, and I was tired. “You must have known about Serat’s research for decades.”

“The one sees only the paths of clarity.”

“You mean you didn’t know about it?”

He hesitated.

My feet hurt in my new boots so I righted one of the remaining chairs and sat on it. The chairs were lying at various angles all over the room where they’d fallen when the gravity field was restored after the explosion on Level Eight.

“The one moves,” he said, “but Serat moves also and evades the one. He is correct in some ways and some of Invidi help him.”

“Help him change human history by coming to Earth.”

His voicebox sounded puzzled. “Invidi change nothing. Your history is always your history. Invidi cannot change that which is.”

He’s right, of course. We’ll never know what might have happened if the Invidi hadn’t come. The only way to change history is when it’s happening.

“The one envies you. Your species,” said Barik.

I blinked. Envy? The only Invidi I’d ever seen express anything like desire was Serat. As far as we knew, the rest of them were as unworldly as Buddhist saints.

“Why?”

“You possess infinite... what you call ‘now.’ ”

“But your people can see further than we can. By the time we’ve thought of the moment, it’s over. And we can’t experience the next one until it’s here and gone.”

“Within one moment all may be.”

I swore under my breath and didn’t bother to hide my frustration. “I don’t understand you. So how about I tell you my theory of what happened, and you can say either yes you’re right, or no you’re wrong.”

He swayed a little. “Acceptable.”

“There was one pair of jump points. One of these was at coordinates close to Earth’s solar system and one was near Jocasta,” I began. “This jump had a ninety-nine-year correspondence. An Serat sent
Calypso
through those points in 2027, so it should have arrived in 2126.

“It didn’t, because the Tor ships that were blockading Jocasta in early 2122 dragged the jump point back four years so that
Calypso
arrived at Jocasta in early 2122 instead. There was never a pair of jump points with a ninety-five-year correspondence. It just looked that way.”

I paused and contemplated Barik. He might be asleep for all I knew. “How am I doing?”

The answer came immediately, so he wasn’t asleep. “Continue.”

“You don’t know why the Tor wanted
Calypso,
do you?”

“Tor want Invidi drive. As Serat wants Tor drive. Greed is downfall.”

There must have been better ways to get hold of Invidi technology, I thought. But the gray ships were acting on the programming of long-dead Tor. Maybe they weren’t thinking straight.

“Anyway, when the Tor dragged the jump point back four years at this end, the other end moved too. So it would now open four years before 2027 if anyone tried to go through it. As I did with
Calypso II,
and ended up in 2023. So did Murdoch. When we tried to go back to Jocasta in
Farseer,
though, we overshot the coordinates of that jump point.
Farseer,
using its Tor hybrid technology, opened a new set of jump points between Earth and Jocasta. Same ninety-nine-year correspondence. For a couple of days, there were two pairs of jump points.”