“
Are they trying to kill the ship, or just trying to keep her busy?
”
asked a low, calm voice from directly behind her.
It took a major effort of will for Sayad not to jump half a meter in the air in surprise. It was Captain Koffield, of course. She glanced up at the small look-behind mirror built into her console, and there he was. Awake, alert, in a clean uniform. Sayad had been on the graveyard shift ever since coming aboard the
Upholder
and had rarely seen the captain. But every time she had seen him, the man had looked just as he did now—steady, alert, well rested, in control.
Captain Koffield was of average height, but thin and wiry enough that he gave the impression of being smaller than he was. His face was long and lean, his thinning hair dark brown. His eyes were brown, deep-set, bright, and expressive. He was clearly used to command, and used to his commands being followed. But there was nothing harsh, or cruel, or peremptory about the man.
Only the slight but unmistakable stubble on his un-shaved face hinted that he had just rolled out of bed, wakened by the alarm: It was a small but telling detail, and Sayad found it reassuring. It said Koffield took care to be alert and professional, to get there first during an emergency, but that he was not fool or egotist enough to stop for a shave on the way.
But the captain was not a man who wasted much time with rhetorical questions.
“
I think they
’
re making a try for the ship, sir,
”
Sayad replied.
“
With velocities that high they won
’
t have time to break off before impact—they
’
re looking to ram her.
”
“
Agreed. Either uncrewed missiles or remarkably well-motivated suicide crews.
”
Other members of the command-center crew were arriving, diving for their battle stations, getting their displays and systems on-line. Sayad paid them no mind. Let them do their jobs while she did hers. She was supposed to do more than see what was happening out there. She was expected to understand it, interpret it.
“
A saturation envelopment attack,
”
she said.
“
Hit the
Standfast
from all sides at the same time and overwhelm her defenses. They want the ship. They
’
ve invested half their forces to go after her. That
’
s too aggressive for it to be just a diversion. At least it looks like—wait a second.
”
She put her hands on the display controls and checked the backtracks.
“
No. I was wrong. They want us to
think
it
’
s a full-press attack and not a diversion.
”
“
They
’
ve got me convinced,
”
Koffield said.
“
But now you think otherwise.
”
“
Yes, sir. The blips moving on the wormhole are maneuvering, seeking and zeroing in on the access nexi. That
’
s not easy to do. But the blips moving on the
Standfast
are just boring right in, with no attempt to refine or correct their course.
”
“
So they just want to keep her busy so their friends can get at and through the wormhole,
”
Koffield said.
“Through
the wormhole?
”
Sayad asked.
“
How the hell do they think they
’
re going to do that?
”
“
I haven
’
t the faintest idea how they
’
ll do it,
”
said Koffield.
“
But it
’
s plain they
think
they can do it.
”
He examined the symbol-logic screen.
“
Three minutes until they encounter the portal
’
s event horizon. We
’
ll find out then.
”
It was a startling thought, but why else would they be pressing home this attack? To hear Captain Koffield himself say the words made the idea seem much more part of the real world, something to consider in terms of practical detail.
“
They don
’
t have the codes to open the access nexi,
”
she objected.
“
There
aren’t
any public codes for going uptime. Just the ones we used to move the
Upholder
uptime.
”
That the wormhole portal nexi codes were unbeatable, unbreakable, was an article of faith in the Chronologic Patrol, and among spacefarers in general. Only the Patrol knew the codes, and therefore only the Patrol controlled the wormhole portal nexi.
A portal nexus was a massively powerful gravitic distorter that, in effect, pushed aside the singularity
’
s event horizon, opening up a hole in time through the hole in space. The nexi orbited at the fringe of the wormhole
’
s event horizon, at hellishly fast velocities. Approach a time-shaft wormhole when a Chronologic Patrol ship had sent the proper code to open a nexus, and you dropped through the nexus, down the timeshaft, into the past. If the CP ship got the code wrong, or failed to send it, when the portal nexus controllers detected your ship approaching they would leave the nexus shut. Your ship would not go through the wormhole formed by the singularity
’
s warping of space, but instead would spiral down into the black hole itself.
Koffield flipped on the ship
’
s intercom, and raised his voice enough so that the bridge staff could hear him as well.
“
This is the captain. Our sister ship, the
Standfast,
is under attack, as is the downtime portal. We must work on the assumption that the attacks will succeed. If they do, we will be facing an assault coming from
inside
the timeshaft wormhole and heading out, rather than an assault from the outside in, toward the timeshaft. In other words, the exact opposite of what we
’
ve trained for. So let us prepare to face the situation. Bring all weapons to bear on the vicinity of the wormhole, and prepare to track and destroy evasive targets as they exit the timeshaft. You have two minutes. I authorize and order weapons hot and an unrestricted free-fire zone and unlimited target list. If it moves, shoot it. Koffield out.
”
The disorganized, uncertain bustle all about them suddenly gained focus and direction. The news was startling, and even alarming, but the captain had spoken. He had told them what was what, and what to do.
The crew of the
Upholder
set to work, making use of every one of the precious seconds they had. Energizers came on-line. The trackers took in the data from the
Standfasts
datastream, interpolated probabilities on the egress trajectories for the attackers, and set aim at the most likely points in space. Damage-control teams went to standby. Hatches sealed. The battle lighting came on, a dim red glow that permitted one to see, but left one
’
s eyes adapted to the dark of space and the glow of the display screens.
But none of that was the concern of Alaxi Sayad. Her job right now was to watch the
Standfast
and her attackers as they did battle, a fight to the death that was happening seventy-nine years in the past, and a heartbeat away, through the wormhole.
Sayad forced back the irrational wish that they could go look up what happened, and prepare for it that way. After all, the battle
had
happened nearly eight decades before. There ought to have been a way to know all about it, and be ready in advance to deal with the consequences.
But there wasn
’
t, of course. The powers-that-be had quite wisely set things up to make such researches impossible. Indeed, the whole reason the
Upholder
was on station was to make them impossible. Her job, and the job of the entire Chronologic Patrol, was to ensure that the past knew nothing whatever about the future.
Their job was to protect causality, to prevent temporal paradox. The Chronologic Patrol went about its work with care and determination, and went to great lengths to keep the future as dark a secret as possible from the past— starting with how the uptime picket ships got to their stations. The uptime ships came from downtime, and thus knew nothing of events in the future of the downtime ship.
The
Upholder
might be in the year 5211 A.D., but she was far more connected to the world of 5132, seventy-nine years in the past. She and the
Standfast
had traveled to Circum Central Waypoint in convoy, relieving, the two Chrono-Patrol ships that had been on duty. The
Upholder
had gone uptime through the timeshaft wormhole, while the
Standfast
had remained at the downtime end, but it could have just as easily been the other way around.
The
Upholder
had only two communications systems. One was a short-range beacon-interrogator that allowed her to challenge ships that arrived at the uptime end of the timeshaft and sought passage through. The other was the shaftlink comm system that
Standfast
was sending on. Both systems were, by design, extremely limited. Except in the most exceptional circumstances, the
Upholder
could not send messages at all, aside from clearances and portal-control commands. For the most part, she could only receive communications, and send them only in carefully proscribed circumstances. Every regulation, every Artificial Intelligence watching over the comm channels, every safeguard in the hardware, was designed to ensure that the
Upholder
did not send any information about the future into the past.
One of the most basic precautions was to see to it that she did not
receive
any information about the future. By design, the
Upholder
carried no long-range comm system that might pick up transmitted information.
Timeshaft wormholes could only be located in the depths of interstellar space, far from the time-space distortions created by a star or even by a mid-sized planet. The Circum Central Waypoint wormhole was no exception to that rule. It was three light-years from the colony at Glister, and a good 3.5 lights from Solace, off in a different direction. Without a highly sensitive, precision-aimed receiver of exactly the sort the
Upholder
did not carry, there was no way to communicate with the worlds on the uptime side of the timeshaft.
A ship could in theory carry information to the
Upholder,
or even downtime into the wormhole. However, timeshaft-wormhole ships moved far slower than light, meaning that most information would be out-of-date by the time it reached a wormhole.
But precautions were taken nonetheless. An uptime picket ship would refuse transit rights to any ship that had been under way less time than half the chronologic distance of the timeshaft wormhole in question. Circum Central Waypoint, for example, was a seventy-nine-year timeshaft. No ship was allowed to enter the uptime end of the shaft until she had been under way for at least thirty-eight and a half years.
And, no matter what, no ship, aside from the arriving uptime picket, was
ever
allowed to enter the downtime end of a timeshaft.
Including this bizarre fleet of presumably uncrewed ships that had just appeared out of nowhere.
Uncrewed.
They would have to be, and it wasn
’
t just their apparently small size. How the devil would anyone find crews enough to fly thirty-two ships on a secret and criminal mission that was all but suicidal? But if no one was aboard those ships, what was the point of the attack? What value in sending a machine into the
future?
Why not just put the ships in storage and wait seventy-nine years? Alaxi stared at the sym-log display, trying to will the answers out of the cryptic indicators of heading, speed, projected course, acceleration, and weapons discharge.
The
Standfast
had been holding her ground, presenting a stationary target to her attackers. Now, perhaps too late, she got under way, even as she finally blazed away with her heavy weapons, the laser cannon and her steel-shot mag accelerators, firing at the incoming attackers.
“
At last,
”
Koffield said.
“
What the devil kept her from maneuvering before now?
”
“
They were taken by surprise,
”
Sayad replied, though she had been wondering much the same thing. It was damned easy to let things get slack on garrison duty, and it looked as if it had happened to the
Standfast.
Sayad wondered if the
Upholder
would have done any better with zero warning. Besides, the
Standfast
had been watching for an assault coming through the wormhole, out of the uptime end and the future, not from out of normal space.
The
Standfast’s
heavy-weapons fire took a heavy toll. Three, four, eight of the blips diving on the ship blazed and vanished from the display. More, dimmer flares of light, flickered through the timeshaft.
But then the
Standfast
broke off and started maneuvering at flank acceleration toward the wormhole. The remaining ship-attacking blips did not pursue her, but instead kept on diving straight for the ship
’
s original position. The
Standfast
had finally seen what Sayad had seen minutes before. The attack on the ship was a diversion, not a serious danger.