The Depths of Time

by Roger MacBride Allen

  TIMESHAFT SHIP DOM PEDRO IV

  CHAPTER SIX Out of Time

  The Dom Pedro IV was a gleaming, featureless silver cylinder, dropping down out of the cold darkness of interstellar space, falling toward the still-distant realms of warmth and light ahead. By the standards of interstellar transport she was of modest size, but she was monstrously large when judged by any human scale. She was nearly a kilometer long from stem to stern, though only seventy meters in cross section. The physics and economics of the timeshaft-transport system required ships to be as small in cross section as possible, though they placed no limits on ship length. Hemispherical endcaps made up the two ends of the cylinder, and that too was dictated by the physics of the timeshaft system. Everything had been done to present the smoothest of exterior surfaces to the outside world, for it was far simpler to induce integrity shields around a simple shape than around a complex one.

  The adaptations to timeshaft transit had their benefits in the transit across normal space as well, of course. The Dom Pedro IV traveled at a significant fraction of light-speed. At such speeds, even a subatomic particle would impact with remarkable energy. A narrow cross section and an easily shielded exterior greatly reduced the danger of serious impact damage.

  The Dom Pedro IV was nearing the end of her long journey, and the few subsystems that’had remained awake for all of the trip now set about rousing the dormant, power-downed, and trickle-charged main systems that had drowsed across the light-years. Hatches opened, sensors extruded themselves. Antennae and thrusters and navigational detectors popped out of their hiding places. The powerful braces of the inertial manipulators swung themselves out and locked into position.

  The two endcaps of the ship folded back to reveal the transparent observation dome forward and the main engines aft. Like a masquerader who peels off an expressionless mask and reveals a face of character and complexity beneath, the Dom Pedro IV transformed herself. The mirror-bright quicksilver spear shaft that had flung itself across the star-void was gone. In its place was a wakening piece of machinery of impossible complexity, its bristling surface forested with spars and dishes and thruster bulbs and optical clusters.

  The ship came about, bringing her main engines to bear forward, directly opposite her direction of travel. The inertial manipulators activated, spinning a shimmering grey-gold cocoon about the ship, diminishing, but not entirely cutting off, her inertial relationship to the outside universe. The main engines came to life, but with none of the flame and flare of the rocket-reaction engines of an age so far distant that it seemed the stuff of legend. The only visible evidence of operation for these engines was the dull orange glow that flickered and flared over the surface of their massive thruster bulbs.

  In less time than any of the ancient engineers of the proto-Space Age would have credited, the Dom Pedro IV decelerated. The main engines shut down, and the great ship came about, until she was pointed nose first through her direction of travel, and the center of the local star system.

  The Dom Pedro IV had arrived in splendid style, moving with an artful and graceful precision through every step of the complex procedure that brought a ship back to life and slowed the craft to a reasonable speed. All of it had worked perfectly, smoothly, beautifully well.

  And that was quite remarkable, given the degree to which everything had gone so utterly wrong.

  On board the Dom Pedro IV, the ship’s captain became aware of his surroundings—and knew, instantly, that there was something seriously amiss.

  There were only three circumstances in which the temporal-confinement field was meant to cut off—arrival at a timeshaft waypoint, arrival at destination, or in a major emergency. But in any of those cases, the temporal confinement should have flicked itself off smoothly and completely. The walls, ceiling, and floor of the reserve command chamber should have come smoothly into view.

  He should have seen the jewel-black interior of the field snap cleanly out of existence, smoothly revealing the command chamber beyond. Instead, the field seemed to shudder once or twice, lurching in and out of the external timestream, the command center visible through a grey haze. Then the field came back on—and immediately cut off again, leaving the containment chamber floating in the center of the room.

  Captain Felipe Henrique Marquez knew the sloppy cutoff had to mean that something was wrong. Very wrong. But what?

  The bone-chilling cold of the long-dormant ship wrapped itself around the containment chamber. The chamber’s transparent cover was frosting over as the too-cold air outside warmed itself against the containment and gave up its moisture in the form of ice crystals that froze to the chamber. The cover’s defrosting system came on automatically and chased the frost away by warming the transparency.

  Marquez opened the spill valve, allowing ship’s air into the containment, thus equalizing the temperature. He took in a breath of the frozen air and felt the knife-sharp stab in his chest as his lungs struggled to contend with the subzero cold. At least that much was normal. The ship was supposed to be cold in dormant mode.

  People generally knew that ship captains wore pressure suits with helmets open when they went into temporal confinement. Few realized that they did so more for protection against the expected cold than for protection against some unexpected danger. Marquez left his helmet open but powered up his suit heater. Perhaps it would be some scent in the air that would tell him what was wrong.

  Otherwise, he made no attempt to leave the containment chamber. Not yet. Not until he knew more. Suppose he left the temporal-confinement chamber and the temporal field came back on—trapping him outside, aboard a derelict ship somewhere between the stars? And suppose the malfunction had jammed the containment controls in some way so he could not get back in? No, thank you. Marquez would much prefer to be trapped inside the field under such circumstances. If the ship were that far gone, he was a lot more likely to survive long enough to be rescued if he were inside the containment.

  Besides, there was no reason to venture out at once. The reserve control center was designed to allow him a clear view of all the vital system-status boards while still inside the temporal-confinement chamber. Marquez decided to take advantage of that while he tried to think things through. What had happened? What had gone wrong?

  A temporal-confinement-field generator was vastly more expensive, complex, power-hungry, and heavy than the sort of conventional long-sleep cryo canisters in which a ship’s passengers and crew slumbered away the journey across the star-void. But the cryosleep canisters worked by, in essence, freezing the passengers solid. It could take hours or even days to fully revive a long-sleep subject and have him or her recovered and alert. That, of course, was far too long to wait for human intervention in an emergency. Thus the captain of a timeshaft ship—and the captain alone— traveled, not under long-sleep, but inside a temporal-confinement field, where time itself was vastly slowed.

  In a sufficiently powerful field, a century would pass in but a few apparent minutes. Captain Felipe Henrique Marquez had traveled inside just such a field. He also knew precisely what would have to have happened in order to interfere with it.

  One temporal-confinement field could not exist inside another: If one field came into being around another, the two fields would try and merge into one another. Either the more powerful field would simply absorb energy from the weaker one, or else both would flare out, decanting whatever was inside the fields back into the normal timestream. Similar results were produced when a field that manipulated timelike effects was generated—such as an inertial-manipulation . field.

  But the ship knew better than to activate the inertial-manipulation system with the captain in temporal confinement. The Dom Pedro’s artificial-intelligence systems knew perfectly well that the two field systems were enough like each other that they interacted in complex and hard-to-predict ways, up to and including a high-energy temporal flare-out. And a sufficiently energetic flare-out could incinerate the reserve command center—or even vaporiz
e the entire ship.

  It would, therefore, take a hell of an emergency for the Dom Pedro IV to take such risks. But what in the name of chaos was the emergency? Marquez watched as the reserve command center’s displays came to life before him. Nothing. No explanation at all. Everything seemed absolutely normal. No warning lights flashing or alarms hooting. There was something eerie, disconcerting, almost unnatural, about the normalcy on the situation displays. He shifted his gaze to the temporal-confinement status display. As he watched, the indicator screens flicked over into standby mode as the containment generators powered down. That was something, anyway. Once in standby, the containment generators would require several hours to come back to full power. The temporal confinement couldn’t come back on unexpectedly. Suppose the system was damaged? he asked himself. Suppose it cannot come back on at all? But there was no sense dwelling on such thoughts. One way or the other, there was little he could do about it.

  He checked all the banked displays one last time, then unlatched the top of the containment chamber. The reserve command center was always kept in zero gee. Its grav system was independent of the main ship’s gravity system. He swung the top out and shoved himself gently forward, floating toward the control displays. The containment chamber’s stationkeeping system corrected for the force Marquez had imposed and held the chamber dead in the center of the reserve control center.

  Marquez floated forward, grabbed hold of a stanchion with a gloved hand, and steadied himself as he checked over the displays in more detail. Normal. All was absolutely normal. The ship was in the final stages of moving from long-flight dormancy to full operational capacity. A fully normal power-up. Except for the fact that none of it should have been happening, everything was precisely as it should have been.

  So what had prompted the ship to run the inertial manipulators with the temporal confinement running? The inertial manipulators were activated when the main engines lit. It took Felipe Henrique Marquez only a few seconds to check the automated-operations log and confirm that the engines had fired moments before.

  But the ship should not have come out of dormancy or activated the inertial systems or fired engines unless and until Captain Marquez was safely decanted out of the temporal confinement, for safety reasons and so as to allow him to oversee the ship’s operations.

  Marquez finished his initial systems check and went back to the operations log, reset the display to show major navigation events only, leaving out all the endless housekeeping operations and nav checks and minor course corrections that even a dormant ship had to handle.

  And he was suddenly aware of his heart pounding against his rib cage. The system reported only one event—the engine braking that had just taken place.

  And that should not have been. Because if that was the only major navigation event, then the Dom Pedro IV was nowhere within light-years of where she was supposed to be. The flight plan had called for launch and acceleration from the Solar System, a braking, timeshaft transition, and reacceleration through Thor’s Realm, Wormhole TR-40.2, braking at Heaven’s Funnel, transition through Timeshaft Wormhole HF-TW/102, followed by a long cruise phase and subsequent arrival at HS-G9-223, the Solace star system. None of that had happened. Or had it? The log was blank. He could have no confidence in the event log— which made it difficult to have confidence in anything else.

  The only way that the log could have been wiped that completely was if the ship had suffered malfunctions massive enough to wreck every primary, backup, and tertiary navigation system, along with all the alarms and alerts on board. But all ship systems seemed to be operating. Marquez checked over all of his displays again, looking over the data. Some of it had to be wrong. In fact, none of it could be right.

  The time codes. Marquez checked the ship’s chronometer display, and felt his heart go as cold as the ship around him. It was showing 0000 years, 000 days, 00 hours, 04 minutes, and 23 seconds. The damned thing must have started over from zero just as the temporal confinement had shut down. There was no way to know if he had been in temporal confinement for three months or three thousand years.

  That settled it. If the clocks had scrambled, there had to be some sort of major malfunction. A bad one, albeit one that managed to keep from shutting off any of the systems. Main control. Up in the forward dome. He could check it out there. If nothing else, he could look out the damned window and see where they were. He checked the telltales by the hatch that led to the ship’s main companionway. Air pressure near zero but rising, temperature 120 below but rising, gravity system just completing activation. He nodded. All of it perfectly normal for a ship just coming out of dormant mode.

  He closed the helmet on his pressure suit and depressur-ized the reserve control center down to the corridor air pressure. He popped the hatch, left the reserve control center, and made his way toward the lift complex. He was in the elevator car and had punched the button for the main command level, and watched the doors of the lift car shut, before he even stopped to consider that the lift was not to be trusted any more than the rest of the ship. He could be trapped inside this car for a very long time if its mechanism had failed. Then the car started moving upward, the acceleration pressing Marquez’s feet down into the floor of the car.

  He smiled to himself. Ridiculous. The lift system, like every other part of the ship, had been built to last millennia, and built with an intricate system of fail-safes that ran a full safety check before each use. There was no need for him to find imaginary things to fret about. Not when there were so many real worries already.

  He rode the lift upward, hoping against hope that something in the main control center would make sense to him.

  Captain Felipe Henrique Marquez stood in the main control center of the Dotn Pedro IV. It would be a long wait indeed before anything made much sense at all. The ship seemed to be functioning perfectly, but even that was incomprehensible. The ship could only have gotten to wherever it was through a series of massive malfunctions that should have left it a derelict, tumbling forever through the blackest depths of space, never approaching another star again. Space was, after all, vast and empty. The odds against getting this close to a planetary system by chance were quite literally astronomical. But though the DP-IV had violated every step of her flight plan, she had arrived in a planetary system, and had made what seemed to be a perfect initial approach to it.

  Which brought Marquez to the question of where, exactly, “here” was. Since the one thing he knew for certain was that the ship’s navigation system had failed to carry out the flight plan, it would perhaps be best not to rely on it to tell him where he was.

  He looked up through the forward observation dome. The DP-IV’s bridge stood at the center of the dome, on a cylindrical raised pillar. Marquez stood in the center of a hemisphere of stars, the myriad points of light dazzlingly bright in the darkness of the void.

  The sky of deep space was magnificent, but it also told him nothing at all. In theory one ought to be able to divine one’s position in space by seeing what stars were in what position. But there were simply too many stars, and, as points of light, they all looked alike. There was an off chance that some pattern of stars would jump out at him, something as instantly recognizable as Orion or the Big Dipper as seen from Earth’s sky, but Marquez was not really expecting that kind of luck, and he didn’t get it.

  There was, however, one point of light brighter than all the others, visible directly overhead. It was the star the DP-IV was approaching. The science of spectral analysis was thousands of years old, and the Dom Pedro IV’s instruments could generate a chart showing the brightness and intensity of every color of light a star put out, a chart as unique and precisely identifying as any fingerprint or retinal scan. Compare that scan against the ship’s archives, and you could know at once what star you were looking at, or, at the very least, you could find out it was not in the charts.

  Marquez sat at the pilot’s station and activated the spectrographic imager. The spot of light dea
d ahead was a nice, bright target. It only took a handful of seconds for the system to produce a high-quality spectrograph—and only a few milliseconds longer more to produce an exact match.

  Marquez swore under his breath. It was HS-G9-223, local name Lodestar—the star that shone on Solace. The star that had been their destination. They had gotten to where they were supposed to go. Which was impossible. The Dom Pedro IV had missed her timeshaft-wormhole transit, and had therefore never performed the post-transit course shift that should have aimed her toward Solace. She should have been trillions, quadrillions, of kilometers off course.

  Marquez checked the data again. The spectrograph he had just made matched the reference spectrograph perfectly. The odds, he knew, were billions to one at best that the system had made a bad match. But on the other hand, there seemed to be nothing but billions-to-one-against odds in the whole situation. Best to confirm this was indeed the Solace star system. Obviously, the best way to do that was to find Solace itself. Marquez set to work on the problem.

  Even with the most sophisticated equipment, locating a planet from tens of billions of kilometers away was no trivial matter—and the Dom Pedro IV didn’t have the most sophisticated equipment. She was, after all, a freighter, not a survey ship. The point of light Marquez was looking for was hidden in the millions of points of light that shone down on his ship. Fortunately, however, there were ways to narrow the search area. Marquez took a series of spectrographs of the solar disk’s edge and ran a Doppler analysis to derive the star’s axis of rotation. Marquez was startled to get back a result of zero rotation. Either the star was not spinning at all, which was more or less impossible, or else, far more likely, the DP-IV had, quite improbably, come in exactly and precisely over one of the star’s poles.

  Well, what was one more improbability among so many? Marquez quit worrying about it. The Solace system was like 99 percent of all the other star systems in the galaxy: The planets orbited around the equator of the star. That meant he should be face on to the system’s orbital plane.