The Depths of Time

by Roger MacBride Allen

  Phelby swallowed hard and looked down at the table. “Well, yeah. Okay. Never mind.”

  Koffield turned his attention back toward Marquez. “The captain understands the purpose of my journey here,” he said. “He will understand that it has become more, not less, urgent.”

  “I cannot risk my ship and my crew,” Marquez said. “The Dom Pedro IV will go into hiding, and remain there until such time as we have checked over the ship and studied the local situation. At our present distance from the inner system, we can avoid detection without much trouble. We can reduce power consumption to cut our heat signature, reduce our visual and radio cross section as much as possible, maybe hide behind some uncharted comet core, and play a few other tricks. No one in the inner system will stand a chance of finding us—even if they knew we were here, or where to look.”

  “Then let me go in on my own,” Koffield said. “Let me go in on one of the auxiliary craft. We can arrange precautions that will keep the DP-IV from being detected, keep them from tracing back from the auxiliary craft.”

  Marquez had half expected Koffield to make such a suggestion, and he was ready with objections. “The DP-IV only carries three auxiliaries—two small cargo handlers that would not have range for such a mission, and one larger craft, a modified Corona Interspace Mark 300 lighter. The Corona shipyards make good ships, but their main market is for interplanetary ships, and interplanet controls and defaults aren’t much like those on interstellar ships. Are you rated or licensed to pilot Corona Interspace lighters?”

  Koffield smiled thinly. “I expect all our various licenses and certifications and ratings have expired by now—but no, I have never trained on any Corona-made spacecraft. But I expect I would have no trouble once I was checked out on your lighter. I have a general interplanetary license and an unlimited interstellar rating.”

  That inspired a flurry of awed murmurs around the table. There were damned few unlimited interstellar ratings in Settled Space. Even Marquez did not have one. But Marquez made sure not to seem impressed. “I have no doubt of your general skill, Admiral, but surely you would agree that it would be far safer for the lighter to be flown by a pilot trained for that particular craft? And if you are to take the lighter, what lifeboat capability would we have? If this ship fails altogether, would you have us left stranded here?”

  Koffield frowned. “I hadn’t considered the lifeboat issue,” he admitted.

  “Ah, sirs, excuse me,” said Norla Chandray. “According to the ship-maintenance documentation I read when I came on board, the two cargo handlers got lifeboat capability installed at their last upgrade. They can be rigged to carry the whole crew between them, and even if they can’t do the round-trip, they’d have the one-way range to get us to the inner system.”

  Damnation, thought Marquez. So much for that bluff.

  Well, someone was bound to have read the documentation. “Quite right, Chandray. I had forgotten.” A lie, but a captain needed to save face. “But that still leaves Admiral Koffield without a pilot. I’m checked out on the lighter, of course, but I doubt anyone else is. I had planned to run some of you through qualification training on her during approach to the inner system. Clearly we could still do that, but obviously doing a thorough safety check of the Dom Pedro IV will have to take precedence over—”

  “I’m checked out on Corona Interspace ships. The Mark 250, 300, and 350-a,” Chandray said.

  Again, a heartbeat and more of silence around the table. Marquez looked at Chandray in astonishment. Interstellar crew looked down their noses at interplanet fliers, and interplanetary crew deeply resented interstellars. Both sides knew that interstellar was the elite, and that nine out of ten of the people in interplanet service got there by flunking out of the exams for starside service—or by not taking the exams because they knew damn well they were going to flunk out. Marquez had known, vaguely, that Chandray had done in-system work when he checked her service records before signing her up, but it would not have been seemly for him to look into the matter too deeply. She had her starside certificate, and she was willing to work cheap, and that was all he needed to know.

  But now. Now, here among the elite, she was freely admitting that she was planetside trash. No one would put it that way in public, but there it was. She had been tricking the starside elite into treating her as one of their own. Just by opening her mouth, she had just changed her relationship with every member of the crew, now and for all time. Renblant in particular looked annoyed and put out.

  It took Marquez a moment to recover. “I can’t order you onto a mission like this. I promise you, the inner system is not going to be a safe or pleasant place.”

  “You don’t have to order me,” she said. “I’m volunteering. I signed up for starside so I could see new places. I won’t get to do that if the Dom Pedro spends the next six months hiding behind an outer-system iceball.”

  “Thank you, Second Officer Chandray,” said Koffield.

  “But, ah—”

  “Captain Marquez.” Koffield’s voice was calm, firm, commanding. “I need to get where I am going. My errand has become more urgent, not less, as the years have gone by. You know this. Please let me go in. I do not ask this lightly.”

  Marquez glared around the table. He had been outma-neuvered. He could see that now. He could have sat on this if Koffield had asked for it privately. He could have kept Chandray from volunteering if she had talked to him without the crew watching—or at least he could have talked her out of it. He would have had more time to think of reasons to say no. But not when things happened this publicly. “I don’t like this, Koffield,” he said, quite deliberately leaving off the “Admiral.”

  “No, sir,” said Anton Koffield, his voice quite calm and reasoned. “But it is necessary. And, sir, I might add, we will be able to develop more and better information about inner-system conditions if we have people in-system. I’m sure we can work up a way to communicate that data to you without giving away the DP-IV’s condition or position.”

  The hell of it was that the man had a point. If he was even halfway right about his climate-collapse theories, Solace wasn’t just going through a bad patch—she was dying, right now. The people down there had a right, and a need, to know that, and it would be criminally immoral for Marquez to keep that information from them, just to keep one miserable old obsolete timeshaft ship from possibly imaginary harm. And hell, they did need more and better information about what was going on down there.

  But he didn’t care for being tricked, or bullied, or maneuvered into a decision. And he definitely did not appreciate Koffield so blatantly challenging his command authority. The man was pressing hard, very hard, risking a lot to get what he wanted. Marquez would be within his rights to confine the admiral to his quarters indefinitely.

  On the other hand, there was such a thing as facing up to the inevitable. They needed information. Maybe they’d learn something on Solace.

  “Very well, Admiral Koffield,” he said at last. “Go ahead. Go do whatever it is you intend to do.”

  As if, Marquez told himself, there was any way to prevent the man from doing exactly that.

  AUXILIARY LIGHTER CRUZEIRO DO SUL

  CHAPTER ELEVEN Walls of Glass and Steel

  “Midflight checks complete,” Norla announced. “All systems normal, and we are on course.”

  “Very good,” Koffield replied, his voice coming through the intercom. And his voice made it clear he was not paying much attention.

  Second Officer Norla Chandray spun around in her command chair and looked through the glass wall of the pilot’s station. Koffield was reading, seated in the lounge area on the other side of the ops deck of the lighter Cruzeiro do Sul. With the pilot station’s access hatch open, they didn’t really need the intercom. They could have shouted to each other, or even just raised their voices a bit.

  The Cruzeiro was essentially a fat cylinder, fifteen meters high and twenty in diameter. Topside was the docking system, and the flat
upper deck, open to space so that the Cruzeiro do Sul could carry bulky cargo, that would not fit inside the ship, strapped down to her upper deck. The main deck, the ops deck, was little more than one big open compartment that could be rigged as any combination of cargo space or passenger facilities. Below was the systems deck, and below that, at the aft end, the main ship engines.

  This trip out, they had rigged the ops deck with two small private cabins, one each for Norla and Koffield, and a large open area that served as a combined lounge and wardroom.

  The pilot’s station was built up against the hull between the only other two permanent structures on the deck—the gangway leading down to the systems deck to the pilot’s left, and the main airlock to the right. The airlock was an oversize job, to allow for trips when the Cruzeiro carried bulky cargo in the main deck. For this trip, however, the central deck space was wide-open, the gunmetal-grey deck plates a broad and cold expanse between Norla Chandray and Anton Koffield.

  The lighter had four portholes set into the hull at equally spaced intervals. These gave the pilot’s station, the lounge, and each cabin a view out.

  So far as flying the ship was concerned, the pilot’s porthole wasn’t of much use, because it looked out the side of the ship. For most operations, the ship’s pilot relied on external cameras, radar, and other sensor systems that put information on the displays. But even if the porthole wasn’t much use for piloting per se, there was good psychology in giving a ship’s pilot a way to see out.

  In the two days they had been aboard, neither had ventured near the other’s cabin, let alone knocked on the hatch or gone in. They had their meals together, but there had not been much in the way of real conversation. Norla was starting to think she might as well carry the transparent walls of the pilot’s station around the cabin with her, for all the contact she had made with Koffield so far.

  The arrangement felt strange, uncomfortable, as if they had carved up the ship’s interior into sections of private turf and neutral territory. Which was not to say that Koffield had behaved badly. Far from it. He was always gracious and polite, but still reserved and distant.

  Well, never mind. She had work to do. She spun back around in her chair and started resetting the controls from diagnostic to operational.

  The pilot’s station consisted of two command chairs and control equipment inside a transparent cubical box. At the moment, the pilot’s station was retracted into the hull. But merely by sealing the hatches on the transparent exterior shell and the transparent interior bulkhead, and pressing a button or two, the pilot’s station could be sealed tight and raised up and airlocked out of the hull to the topside face of the cylinder. When the pilot’s station was extended, Norla had an unobstructed view in every direction but straight down. The command chairs could be rotated to any orientation, pointing her straight at whatever she needed to see.

  It would be nice if she could get a clear view of Koffield just by sealing a hatch and pressing a button. As she finished reconfiguring the controls, she found that, once again, her thoughts were turning back toward the mystery man she traveled with. Despite her best efforts, she could not keep her mind from the puzzle that was Koffield.

  Norla Chandray finished the reconfig, flipped the master to standby, stood up, and stepped out of the pilot’s station. She stood at the station entrance for a moment and considered Koffield as he sat in the lounge-area sofa, reading. A strange and haunting song, sung in no language she had ever heard, played over the wardroom speakers.

  He had not done any of the things she had expected of him on this voyage. The nonsense about his not being rated for this type of spacecraft was just that—nonsense. After ten minutes of familiarization, it was clear that he could fly the ship as well as she could, or better. She had expected him to act on that, to plant himself in the copilot’s seat of the Cruzeiro do Sul and stay there, watching her like a hawk—or, more accurately, like a flight instructor. It would not have surprised her overmuch if he had simply ordered her out of the pilot’s station for the duration of the trip and done all the flying himself.

  Instead he hadn’t set foot in the station, once he had confirmed that he could handle the controls in an emergency. Beyond that, he had barely paid Norla a moment’s attention since they had boarded the lighter.

  Instead he had idled over his meals, by all appearances doing his best to savor what there was to savor in flavor and texture of shipboard food. He had brought along a large number of downloaded books from the DP-IVs library. From what Norla could see from looking at the titles, his choices were either eclectic in the extreme, or else had been made totally at random. And if there was anything beyond random selection in the music he played, Norla was unable to divine it. She recognized hardly any of it. Some of it was, to her, heart-stoppingly beautiful, but just as much of it was indistinguishable from noise.

  There was something disturbing behind his calm, his detachment. Something that also whispered of the condemned man’s last meal, a man bidding a last fond farewell to all the things that made life worth living. But that was not quite it. There was something in what Koffield did that told her he was familiar with the patterns of the things he was doing, that he had done these things before, and in the same way. The meals, the books, the musical pieces were part of some ritual he had performed many times.

  Norla was finally coming to understand what was going on. Koffield was preparing himself for battle, enjoying one last time the things of civilization, the things that made battles worth winning.

  Anton Koffield was doing what he did when he knew it might be the last time. He was saying good-bye, bidding a ritual farewell to all the things he loved. Anton Koffield was savoring, one last time, not merely the things of life, but the things of peace. Whether or not he came back from whatever fight he expected, he would start the struggle with the fresh and clear memory of the things that made fighting worthwhile.

  But if Koffield was going into battle, then she was too. And if he felt the need to be prepared, then so did she. She needed to know things. And there was only one way she could see that she was going to find them out. She crossed the deck and sat down in the chair opposite him, regarded him closely. It took a moment for him to look up from his book and notice her. “What is it, Officer Chandray?” he asked.

  “That was what I was about to ask you,” she said. “What’s going to happen? What is it you’re getting ready to face? Is there going to be a fight? A battle? If there is going to be, I should know about it, so I can get ready too— and get the ship ready.”

  “This ship was not built to fight,” he said.

  “No, sir. She’s not armed. But even if it meant standing on the hull with a hand weapon, I’d rather go down fighting—if we are going to fight. When I see a man going through his prebattle ritual, I like to know what it’s about. Are we going to have to fight—and if so who, and over what, and where, and when?”

  Koffield glanced down at his book, then closed it and set it down on the sofa next to him. “ ‘Prebattle ritual,’ “ he said. “I’ve never thought of it in quite those terms, but I suppose that’s what it is.” He pulled a pocket controller out of his breast pocket and pressed a button. The music stopped. “I have every expectation that I will be in a fight,” he said. “But it will not involve you. It will not be fought with guns or bombs or laser cannon, but with words—at least at first. I doubt I will be killed, or even injured, even if it goes badly—but I could very well be arrested and thrown in some sort of jail or concentration camp—or mental institution.”

  Norla thought back to the scuttlebutt she had heard aboard the DP-IV: third- and fourth-hand stuff about what one crew member had heard about what another crew member had said about what the captain had said in an unguarded moment. “The story going around is that as soon as you were revived, before you knew what had gone wrong, you were expecting to be arrested—for warning the Solacians that their climate had gone wrong.”

  “Yes. I expected to be arrested f
or predicting disaster.”

  “Are you still expecting that?”

  “In a way, yes.”

  “Even though what you predicted has already come true.”

  “Partially. Not all of my predictions have come true— yet. According to my studies and researches, the worst is yet to come.”

  “You don’t think the planetary ecostructure will recover,” she said, careful not to make it sound like a question. “But I don’t see why that should be such shocking news that you’d be thrown in jail for saying it. If things are as bad down there as you say they are, surely someone has thought of that—and said it—already.”

  “Quite true,” Koffield said, his face revealing nothing.

  “But if that was all there was to it,” Norla went on, “you wouldn’t have pushed so hard to go in-system. Why risk being thrown in jail for the rest of your life, just to tell them what they already know?”

  “You are quite right once again.”

  “So what is all this? You know more than you’re saying.”

  Koffield shook his head no, back and forth one time, as if to deny that he knew more—but then stopped, and let out a weary sigh. “And why I do keep hiding it all? That’s the logical next question. And the best answer I can offer is force of habit. Fear of spreading panic, of getting rumors started without any way of stopping them if—or rather when—the story goes out of control. Maybe there’s some part of me that still believes in magic, that thinks that if I don’t say it out loud, it won’t come true. But you’re right. I know a lot of things. And I haven’t even told them to Marquez. He thinks he knows it all—and what he knows is bad enough. But he doesn’t have the whole story.” Koffield paused a moment, and considered. “That was a mistake, probably. If something happens to me, there will be no one left in a position to press on. I should have taken the time, convinced him. Too late now.”