A flicker on the comm repeater display. The Intruder was transmitting again.
“
Comm,
”
Koffield said,
“
can you make anything more of that?
”
“
Doing a pattern match. Stand by. Sir, maybe a little bit of good news. As best I can tell, that was a repeat of their last signal—and I haven
’
t seen any sort of response from the nexus itself. It sends a mirror reply of any command it receives and accepts. The Intruder is having some trouble.
”
“
Very good,
”
Koffield said.
“
That
’
s a very good sign indeed.
”
It might well mean that the nexus Artint had put a block on Nexus D
’
s communications system, ordering it to ignore commands from any other source. And that in turn would mean that the Artint had analyzed the situation properly, and would blow Nexus D in time.
It sounded hopeful, though it was a hell of a lot to read into a silence—but silence was all they had.
Seven minutes. Six minutes. The wait went on forever. Koffield
’
s universe shrank down to nothing but his displays, and the numbers and logic symbols on them. The bridge, the ship, the exterior reality represented by the displays, all faded away. There was nothing but the shifting countdown numbers, the dot representing the Intruder creeping toward Nexus D, the blank status line on the nexus control Artlnt display.
It was a standoff, but a standoff that favored the
Upholder.
Intruder Five had long since gone past the point of no return. It was headed straight for the singularity, falling like a rock, and nothing could stop it now. It could no longer escape the singularity
’
s gravity well. It was going in, no matter what.
Koffield had ordered the Artlnt to destroy Nexus D, wreck it, slam the door shut and seal it for all time. The Artlnt had not yet decided whether to send that order. Intruder Five was ordering Nexus D to open itself, and let the Intruder through. If the Artlnt sent the destruct command and Nexus D accepted it and refused the orders from the Intruder, the Intruder would crash into the singularity. If the nexus refused both sets of orders, it would remain shut, and the Intruder would still slam into the singularity to be utterly destroyed.
The Intruder could only win, could only cause the nexus to open and allow it through the wormhole, if the nexus accepted the Intruder
’
s orders and refused those from the
Upholder’s
Artlnt. The logic sounded hopeful— but the Intruder had been doing all the winning so far.
Five minutes. Four.
Was there anything left undone? Anything left to do at all? Koffield could hear a stifled sob, and the sound of someone quietly weeping, somewhere on the half-darkened bridge. All his life, all his career, there had always been some action to take, some choice left. Nothing.
“
Intruder sending commands again,
”
the comm officer reported, even as Koffield watched the same information pop up on his repeater.
“
Is it repeating the same sequence?
”
Koffield asked.
“
As best I can tell, sir. Our aspect angle is shifting relative to the Intruder, and we
’
re getting less of the transmission every time.
’’
“
Very well.
”
Let the Intruder keep trying. In three minutes
’
time it would be too late. Nexus D would stay closed, the Intruder would impact on the singularity, and it would be all over.
Two minutes.
“
Sir! Detecting response from Nexus D. Odds ninety-five plus it
’
s a mirror reply to the Intruder.
”
The news was a sharp, hard blow to the gut. Where the hell was the Artlnt? Had it been blown away, wrecked or damaged by the last strike to the ship? Ninety seconds to go. Not even rime left to restart the sequence of command and confirmation. The Artlnt should have responded, yes or no, Koffield decided. There was some malfunction. He would leave it as long as he could, and then try the restart, hope that the urgency of the situation would get the Artlnt to act faster. At the sixty-second mark he would try it again. His hands were poised over the keypad.
nexus control system reports unauthorized access attempt. stand by.
Koffield stared at the display, the sweat standing out on his forehead. Stand by? How long could he—He checked the countdown clock. Seventy seconds until Intruder Five hit the singularity. And who did nexus control think was unauthorized? Koffield or the Intruder?
nexus control system reports loss of control over nexus. attempting to regain control and deactivate portal nexus “d” permanently.
“
Nexus D opening!
”
the detection officer shouted.
“
Oh, my God, it
’
s opening. Nexus D open, stable, active, and operational.
”
Koffield pulled his hands back from the keypad, his eyes wide with horror. It was the disaster, the catastrophe, that all of the Chronologic Patrol had been built to prevent. And it had come to pass, here, on his watch.
Sixty seconds. The past would be attacked—by what or whom? for what reason?—in sixty seconds. The Intruder would get past the downtime relief ship. Of that he had no doubt. It would get past, accelerate to those same impossible speeds, and roam at will through the past, carrying detailed information—about what, for what, who could know?— from the future.
Try again. If the Artlnt had gone off script, he could as well.
ANTON KOFFIELD COMMANDING UPHOLDER REPORTS
SITUATION URGENT AND DANGEROUS IN EXTREME. KOFFIELD ORDERS NEXUS CONTROL SYSTEM TO DEACTIVATE PORTAL NEXUS
“
D
”
PERMANENTLY AT ONCE. DEACTIVATE NEXUS
“
d
”
NOW.
portal nexus control acknowledging, attempting to comply, stand by.
Thirty seconds. Who would not be born who should have been? What invention would be left uncreated, or created in the wrong time or place? What tiny chance encounter would be altered, changing all that came after? What small cause would lead to huge effects, like a deflected pebble setting off a landslide? What paradoxes would be sent caroming through the years?
“
Intruder Five on final approach,
”
the detection officer announced.
“
Centered on standard insertion vector. Twenty seconds.
”
portal nexus control still attempting to comply with previous order, stand by.
“
Fifteen seconds. Intruder entering timeshaft in ten seconds. Nine. Eight. Seven.
”
History itself was about to be attacked, and there was nothing to be done.
“
Six. Five. Four.
”
portal nexus control still attempting to comply with previous order, stand by.
Too late. There wasn
’
t time.
“
Three. Two. One. Zero.
”
And it was over. It would take several seconds for the confirming data to reach them at the speed of light, but it was over. The Intruder was in the wormhole, dropping into the past. Defeat. It was over.
Koffield switched on an exterior-view camera and pointed it at the utterly invisible spot in the sky that was the singularity. Out there, an equally invisible Intruder had left this time and entered—
A sword of light, impossibly brilliant, flared out into the darkness.
“
Telemetry from Nexus D is going crazy!
”
the detection officer cried out.
“
The readings are all over the place. I
’
m— I
’
m picking up a debris cloud coming from the nexus. Trying a pattern match. Stand by.
”
The story of my life,
Koffield thought.
Stand by.
“
What the devil just happened?
”
he demanded.
“
Comm! Do you have anything?
”
“
No, sir.
”
“
Sir, all telemetry from Nexus D is at zero. No carrier, no signal, no data. It
’
s like it
’
s not there.
”
And then, another message appeared on the nexus control Artlnt
’
s screen.
portal nexus “d” deactivated permanently.
Short, sweet, and to the point.
“
It isn
’
t there,
”
Koffield said.
“
Not anymore. I think—never mind what I think. Detection—where
’
s that pattern match?
”
“
Sir, I
’
m only at about eighty percent confidence, but that debris cloud looks a lot like what we got when the other Intruders went up. I think it blew right inside the timeshaft wormhole.
”
The light flare faded away, to be replaced by flickers and sparks of light concentrated in one tiny point in space—debris reimpacting on the singularity. Bits of this ship and that, this Intruder and that, dropping down onto the event horizon of the wormhole, letting out a last burst of energy as they were torn to pieces by the massive tidal effects.
The nexus must have closed down, deactivated, just as Intruder Five was going through. With the protection of the nexus gone, the Intruder would have been shredded to bits in a nanosecond, setting off a half dozen kinds of violent energy release.
It was as close as Koffield ever wished to cut anything.
Another heartbeat, another millisecond, and the Intruder would have been free in the past, and all would be in vain.
But even if their losses had given them victory, still the price was far too high.
The past had been spared. But at what cost to the present, and the future, to the
Standfast,
to the
Upholder,
to the five convoy ships, to the planet Glister?
And, Koffield could not help but ask, in the very core of his soul—at what cost to himself?
What blood and doom had he just put on his own hands?
Four standard days later, the
Upholder
boosted away from the ruined domain of the Circum Central Wormhole Farm, into the uptime future where/when Anton Koffield had stranded her. She quite literally left nothing behind, as the singularity swept up the wreckage of the battle. Nothing at all but the singularity, that point of deepest, and most absolute, nonexistence, remained.
The crew spent the better part of the first two months
’
boost repairing their battered craft as best they could. Then, in groups of eight or ten, they entered their cryosleep canisters, each group assisting those who went before. They would sleep away the long decades until they reached the Solar System, and Earth.
If all went well, they would be ninety years in transit, ship
’
s time. A run through the 89.8-year timeshaft at Sirius Power Cluster would bring them to the outer approaches of the Solar System in about three months, objective time.
Then it would be up to luck, and fate, and the crew members themselves to build whatever lives they could build, seventy-nine years uptime from where they had started. If all went well.
But Anton Koffield had no illusions. Bad luck and ill fate had already shaped the form of his existence in the future. He was, he knew,
marked
by what had happened, by what he had done. When every other fact about him had been forgotten, he would be remembered—:as the man who blew the timeshaft, the man who killed the convoy, the man who had faced and fought and killed a mysterious force of Intruders.
No one, much as he might wish it, would ever forget what he had done. No one.
Least of all, Anton Koffield himself.
Oskar DeSilvo stared thoughtfully at the spherical image of the planet Solace that hung before him in the center of the room. The image was not of the planet as it currently existed, but as it would be, decades from now. By then, his work, his creation, would be all but complete. By then, Solace—his world, his laboratory, his monument to himself—would have come fully alive, have bloomed and commenced to flourish.
Baskaw
’
s ideas were working—though no one but DeSilvo need ever know the ideas were Baskaw
’
s, and not DeSilvo
’
s. Indeed, DeSilvo himself was close to forgetting himself that he had not thought of it all on his own. He saw no need to share the credit, or the glory, with a long-forgotten crackpot researcher who had been dead for centuries.
But he dared not forget that what he looked down on was not real. Not yet. Until the terraforming of Solace was largely finished and complete, there was precious little point in worrying over who would eventually get the credit—or the blame—for it. What he saw was a mere ghost of what might be in a far-distant star system. Solace was but half-built, still a dream, decades in the future and light-years away. Reality was a holochamber in DeSilvo
’
s office, center, aboard the Grand Library habitat, orbiting Neptune in the outer reaches of the Solar System.