Crucible of Time

by Jeffrey A. Carver

  Except Dakota. What had happened to her and her ship? Had they survived the encounter?

  “Excuse me, John Bandicut—but could you—?” Sheeawn was standing in the doorway to the commons. Bandicut blinked and waved him in. “I’m sorry to bother you,” Sheeawn said. “We just wanted to ask you—well, I mean, what we should expect to be happening?”

  “I’m sorry, please sit.” Bandicut gestured to the table before him. “I should have filled you in earlier. Is the Watcher coming to join us?”

  Sheeawn looked troubled as he sat. “No, she is very quiet. I believe she fears that she made a mistake in remaining on this ship.”

  “Is she afraid of this new Mindaru?” Bandicut asked softly.

  “Of course. Aren’t we all afraid?” Sheeawn’s expression was cast down, his eyes barely visible, glinting under his brows.

  Bandicut nodded, acknowledging the point. “You’re right. But consider this. At least you’re showing the Karellians that you’re willing to put your lives on the line against the Mindaru—and that’s not nothing.”

  Sheeawn considered that, and seemed to accept it. “But,” he continued, “her fear is not for her life, so much. I think it is that if we die, are destroyed—and cannot get back to Uduon—” Sheeawn paused to gulp a breath, and to run his fingers through his hair in agitation “—all that we have to tell our people—”

  “—about the Mindaru?” Bandicut asked.

  “Yes, but also about you, and about Karellia. All that would be lost.”

  Bandicut sighed and took another sip of his coffee, now cold. He grimaced. “We will just have to do our best not to be destroyed, eh?”

  He was interrupted by a sharp tone, and Ruall’s voice: “John Bandicut to the bridge! All hands to the bridge at once!”

  Bandicut stood, leaving his coffee. “Fair enough? Let’s go see what’s about to happen.”

  ***

  Ruall clanged as they strode onto the bridge. Akura was already there. “Intercept in five minutes!” Ruall barked. “Copernicus, can you let us see what the missiles are doing?”

  The view ahead zoomed in rapidly, and two seconds later Bandicut saw two gray shadows that were probably artificial representations of the missiles. Four and three-quarter minutes passed. “They are going to have to make course corrections,” Copernicus reported. “At the last possible moment.”

  Two faint halos of light appeared, nudging the missiles into slightly altered paths. The Mindaru came into view. Like the first one, it looked like a mineral specimen with spines, but it was darker and uglier. The missiles glowed again—and veered. They shot past the Mindaru in a clean miss, and the Mindaru continued undisturbed on its course.

  Ruall rumbled with displeasure as Copernicus reported, “The enemy seized the missiles’ steering control at the last instant. Now it’s powering up weapons.”

  Bandicut gulped.

  “Change to defensive profile!” Ruall clanged. “Protect all data inputs. Copernicus, bring us around!”

  “You intend to engage directly?” Bandicut asked. He glanced at Sheeawn and Akura, who were trying to disguise their alarm behind stoic expressions.

  “Better here than wait until we’re back at Karellia,” Ruall said. “Copernicus, particle beam ready?”

  “Ready, skipper. How well do you want me to aim?”

  Ruall spun. “Explain the question.”

  “For best aim, I would integrate all available sensors. For best protection against enemy penetration, I would shut down all sensors.” Copernicus paused. “I must strike a balance. Do you want me to use my own best judgment?”

  Bandicut felt a cold claw of fear as he remembered how the enemy had penetrated The Long View’s systems on the Starmaker mission, and how close they had come to losing the ship—because that Mindaru had gotten in through a sensor port. They’d escaped because Copernicus had taken the place of the ship’s AI, fused with the ship, and shut down its compromised systems. “I think,” Bandicut managed, “you should use your own judgment.”

  “Agreed,” said Ruall.

  The image in the viewspace went black-and-white and grainy. A blocky object in the view grew in size. “That’s the enemy,” Copernicus said. “I’ve cut the sensor input to the bare minimum. The enemy is trying to penetrate our grid, but shield protocols are holding. Twenty seconds to firing range.”

  Bandicut held his breath.

  At twenty seconds, Copernicus loosed a particle-beam burst. A splash of light came back at once from the Mindaru. It struck The Long View’s protective shields and blazed, lighting up the bridge like an atomic blast. The ship veered away from the Mindaru, but the blaze left Bandicut reeling. “Christ!” he muttered. “What was that?”

  “Our own burst, reflected and amplified,” Jeaves reported.

  “Jesus! What did it do to us?” Bandicut cried. He knew he wasn’t reassuring Akura and Sheeawn, but he couldn’t help it. That blast looked powerful enough to fry them.

  “No damage to us, or to them,” Jeaves said.

  “No damage from that?”

  “Remember, this craft is made of n-space fields,” Jeaves said. “If they ever fail, we won’t last long enough to feel it.”

  “I recommend—” Copernicus began, but he never finished.

  A jarring blow hit them, shaking the deck. Bandicut grabbed for a seat to hold onto. Akura and Sheeawn were sprawled on the floor, gasping. Bandicut staggered over to help them up. “What was that, Jeaves?”

  Jeaves had fallen down, too, and was getting back up with the rest of them. “It did not take them long to learn to manipulate n-space,” he muttered, sounding as disgruntled as a robot could sound. “It may have used the energy in our beam—” and he paused as a fresh rumble shook them “—to send shock waves in our direction, directly through n-space.”

  “Well, what the f—?”

  Another splash of light burst over them, and then another. Each was accompanied by a reverberation in n-space. Ruall clanged to Copernicus to get them out of there. But before Copernicus could complete the ship’s turn, the firing stopped, and the enemy went dark.

  “Wait,” Ruall said. “Jeaves? What just happened?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Copernicus, prepare a quantum pulse. Are we still close enough for a solid shot?”

  “Aye.” Then, “Firing in four seconds. Three.”

  “Wait!” Ruall went spinning out to the front of the viewspace, then spun back, reverberating. “Don’t shoot! Do not shoot! Where is Bria?”

  Bandicut looked around and said, “I don’t—”

  “She is not on this ship,” said Jeaves.

  “Then where—?” Ruall spun faster, and a ringing cymbal sound turned into a high-pitched keening. “She is not . . . she is not here . . .”

  Bandicut was holding his ears. “What, Ruall?”

  Ruall spun out of three-space and vanished. For two seconds, Bandicut stood with his mouth open.

  Then Ruall reappeared, ringing madly. “Do not fire, Copernicus! Do not fire!”

  “Why not?” Bandicut demanded. He pointed to the enemy in the viewspace. It appeared dead, but three of its spines had curled into gleaming spirals. It could be alive and gathering power to fire again.

  Ruall’s ringing crescendoed, then abruptly cut off. “Bria is there! She is aboard the Mindaru! She has disabled it! But she is hurt!”

  Bandicut stared at her, dumbfounded. “She what? She went after a Mindaru by herself?”

  Ruall, with her shiny blank face, seemed to glare at him. “Yes,” she rang softly. “Apparently she did. And now I must find a way to save her.”

  Bandicut was still speechless. He looked around at the others—Copernicus, the wide-eyed Uduon, Jeaves—to see if they were hearing what he was hearing. He reached into his thoughts, instinctively searching for the missing Charli.

  When he looked back, Ruall was gone.

  Chapter 17

  Getting a Message Off

  ANTARES HA
D HAD no success at all trying to get through to the yaantel, to see if a warning could be transmitted to Bandie and Li-Jared. While the mission team had granted her permission—and told her that communication to Shipworld was possible via the star-spanner connection—the actual comm options out here half a light-year from Shipworld seemed severely limited. There was a channel that purported to permit messaging through the Shipworld iceline, but neither the yaantel nor Amaduse nor the shadow-people were responding. Napoleon had tried to reproduce his success from the Scalapoorie Sector, to no avail. They might as well have been using a megaphone.

  A request to the mission leaders for help hadn’t gotten her very far, either—raising the question of whether they were actively interfering, or just blindly indifferent. Did they see the potential for danger, with two missions, uncoordinated, both trying to effect change to the timestream? Or was there some unspoken antagonism between the leaders of the two teams, some bone of contention so serious that they would risk the safety of mission personnel over it?

  And where was Rings? He had disappeared shortly after their arrival here.

  Tapping her fingers moodily on the console she’d been assigned near the back of the control center, Antares decided to check on Ik and Julie’s progress. She got up and walked over to the data-pedestal where Napoleon was plugged in. Around them, the control center was quiet, though a great many team members were watching their holo-displays closely.

  “I am sorry, milady,” the norg said before she could speak. “I have requested a more robust channel to Shipworld, but so far no response. Until that is granted, I am focusing on our mission here.” Our mission. Ik and Julie’s.

  “That’s what I’m here to ask you. What’s the latest, metal-friend?” she asked, laying a hand affectionately on the robot’s head.

  “They are still in the stream with the Mindaru and the Ancestors. I know little more than the last time we spoke. The slow speed of transmission is problematic, and their being on the move seems to make it worse.”

  She had watched the slowly compiling low-res images of the alien world, of the early Mindaru, of the flight of the pre-translators, which the stones were now calling the Ancestors. It didn’t give them much to act on. But it was enough to give her a rush of anxiety every time she came back to it. She knew her friends must be frantically compiling data. But most of it would stay locked up in their heads, or their knowing-stones, until they were back and the entanglement broken. “Any indication of what they’re going to do?”

  “Just that they are going to try—may be trying now, as we speak—to block the Mindaru from attacking the Ancestors.” The norg twitched his mechanical hands together, in what seemed to be emerging as a nervous tic.

  “Did they say how?” she asked, surprised by how tight her voice felt.

  “No, milady. They spoke of surprise, and blocking.”

  The anxiety in her chest was squeezing out her breath. She hated not knowing what her friends were doing—even if knowing might have made her feel worse. After all this, she found it hard to accept that her friends here, in the launch-pod, could die if anything bad happened to their projections there, a billion years in the past. She would never really understand it; she just had to take the word of the mission leaders.

  She wondered, though, if one reason for the team’s rush in launching this second mission of Ik and Julie’s wasn’t the same thing that had her so worried—the risk of unintentional interference at the Karellia end. Maybe they were in a hurry to get this mission finished before anything could happen at Karellia.

  Or maybe they were in a hurry to take credit themselves for stopping the Mindaru.

  Surely not.

  “Tell me when you hear more,” she sighed, turning away.

  She had not taken four steps before she saw Cromus shuffling toward her from the rear of the control center. She greeted him, and he clicked his pincers together and rasped, “Rings! Rings-at-Need-d-d w-wishes to speak-k to you!”

  Rings! “Where?”

  Cromus pointed an eyestalk back the way he had come. “In the lobby.”

  Antares strode that way and at once spotted Rings-at-Need through the glass partition at the back of the control center. He was bobbing in the air, flexing his thin arms with their paddle-hands. What was he doing out there instead of coming in to find her? “Rings!” she called, pushing through the door.

  “Ah, Miss Antares!” the Tintangle twanged. “I have been looking for you!” He made a beckoning motion with his right paddle. “Please come.”

  “I’ve been looking for you,” she said, following him to a corner of the lobby. “Where have you been? Where are we going?”

  “We must speak privately,” Rings said, as they stopped, a little out of the traffic area, although there was no one else here at the moment. “I have been with the yaantel.”

  “The translator! Do you have news? I’ve been hoping you can help me.”

  “That is what I heard, and why I came,” Rings gonged, waving his paddle-hands. “I have no news, I am afraid, but the yaantel is worried. How can I help you?”

  “Worried doesn’t begin to describe it. I need to find a way to get a message to John Bandicut. Do you know if that can be done? Could the yaantel help?”

  Rings spun thoughtfully. “Have you tried contacting Amaduse?”

  “Uhhl!” Antares blew out a long sigh of exasperation. “People like you and Amaduse don’t seem to have addresses on what passes for the iceline out here!”

  Rings bonged softly. “I will try. But I am not certain how the mission team will respond.”

  “No?” She was surprised.

  “We work together. We do not find agreement on all things. However, they did make you a promise,” Rings said, with a metallic riff. “I believe they must keep it. I am certain a way can be found. Do you have a place to connect from?”

  Antares puffed air through her lips. “Just my console. But it’s in the main control room.”

  Rings rang softly. “Let us see what we can do.”

  ***

  Even after she watched Rings put the call through, she still wasn’t entirely sure how he did it. Maybe Napoleon was following—something about comm shunts through borrowed packets on the mission team’s reporting lines. Antares wondered if the mission leaders would approve. Rings made a soft humming sound, which seemed to have an oddly soothing effect on everyone in the immediate vicinity.

  The hooded face of Amaduse appeared in her console, eyes sparkling in the darkness of his hood. “I’ve been hoping to hear from you,” the librarian whispered.

  Antares sighed with relief and joy. “I have been trying. I didn’t know how to reach you, until Rings-at-Need came and helped me.”

  “My apologies-sss. Here, keep this code and use it to call me whenever you have need.” The Logothian’s serpentine visage weaved from side to side in the monitor. “Are you well? Are your friends still engaged in the mission down-ssstream in time?”

  Antares filed the code and said, “I am well, and yes, they are. But I have serious concerns about the mission, and that is why I am reaching out to you. Is there some way to send a message to The Long View?”

  “Ssss.” The librarian’s eyes glittered and blinked in the shadow of his hood. “I wondered if that might come up. Discord among factions-s-s of the Round Table, and s-so on. I have already been, sss, exploring the influences and permissions-s that might be needed to get a, sss, transmission approved.”

  Influences? Permissions? “Uhhl,” Antares said carefully, “so it’s not easy, but it can be done?”

  “Not easy, no. And verrrry cos-s-s-tly. Pulsar time is perhaps the most expen-s-sive communication time there is. But since this entire mission plan, if you can, sss, call it a plan, is about s-saving all of us from a galactic calamity, sss . . . I think I can jus-s-s-tify the cost to those who will care.”

  Antares felt the tension in her body ease a fraction. “Good. How do we do it?”

  The Logothian stretched
and did something to one side, out of the view of the monitor. “We can send text only, and it mus-s-t be brief. Please tell me the message as concis-s-s-ely as you can.”

  “Do you want me to dictate it now?” Antares focused her thoughts. “How about this: ‘Ik and Julie Stone on mission in timestream. Danger! Ancestors of translator—no, just say, translator—at risk! Do nothing to disrupt timestream until we send word it is safe. Please advise your progress. Antares.’ Can you send that?”

  Amaduse fussed for a few moments and then said, showing her the screen so she could read, “Shortened to this-s-s:

  Amds/Antrs to LV. Danger! Ik/JulieS in timestrm. No disrpt untl AllSafe frm us. Rsk harm trnsltr. [REPEAT]

  “Does that suffice-s-s? It will be compressed by standard algorithm for transmission.”

  Antares squinted, interpreting the message. “Must it be that cryptic?”

  “Sending messages through n-space is a tricky business-ss,” Amaduse said. “The transmission will be at one character per ssecond, repeated many times for redundancy. They could be in circumstances where reception is-s-s difficult or nonexistent. They might catch only fragments-s-s. Briefer is better.”

  Antares bobbed her head. She glanced at Napoleon. “Does that seem understandable to you, Nappy?” If Napoleon could understand it, then there was some chance Bandie—or perhaps Jeaves, if they were still together—could, as well.

  Napoleon ticked and read the message back in expanded form. “It is good,” he said.

  She was aware of Rings just out of her peripheral vision, and she glanced at him, too. “Rings? Can you think of anything else?”

  Rings twirled. “I suggest you send it-t.”

  Amaduse made a sinuous movement with his head and neck. “I cannot guarantee. But if logic and reasonableness-s prevail among higher authorities-s-s, it will be s-s-sent.”

  “Uhl,” Antares said, twitching a little at the if. “Will you call me if there is a reply?”

  “I am afraid, Miss Antares-s-s, that this-s-s communication can be only one way.”