“
Zero. Impact now possible. Plus one second. Two. Three. Four. Five.
”
“
Engines all stopped and safed!
”
came the call from the conn.
“
Defense systems—Mark Two! Mark Two! Shield full, max aft, now, now, now!
”
And the lights dimmed and throbbed as the shields grabbed greedily at all the ship
’
s power they could take. Sayad
’
s screens flickered and distorted for a moment as the electromagnetic shielding pulsed up. Then her displays cleared, steadied. Sayad tried to hold herself steady as well.
“
Six,
”
she intoned. Steady. Professional.
“
Seven. Impact detected.
”
But she didn
’
t need to say that, no, not at all. A flare of light bloomed out in the darkness, blinding the
Upholder’s
sensors once again.
“
Shields at seventy percent. Eighty. Ninety. Ninety-five. Ninety-eight. Stability flicker.
”
“
Hold at stable point!
”
Koffield called. The lights dimmed again, and the ship
’
s fabric moaned and creaked as the shields took hold, wrapping a thick, clumsy wall of electromagnetic energy around her.
“
Dropping to stable point. Holding at ninety-seven-point-five.
“
“
Hang on!
”
someone on the bridge shouted needlessly. No one in the compartment was giving any thought at all to anything
besides
holding on.
The first radiation pulse had passed them with the light of the explosion, but the slower, heavier, more deadly radiation would be just a trifle behind it. The shields
ought
to be able to handle the heavy particles. But they would have to hold long enough to protect the ship from the larger debris, from the bits and pieces the size of molecules to dust particles to shrapnel to fist-sized chunks of metal. The debris moved slower than the radiation, but was still coming at them fast, far faster than rifle fire.
“
Estimate, time until front of blast wave arrival!
”
Koffield called.
“
Sensors blanked, sir. No current data.
”
How hard had the intruder hit the scattershot? What was the closing rate and angle? She could have read all that off the lightblast, given time and sufficient data. But not in half a second, and not with her detectors blanked.
“
Estimate and count to and past first possible moment, based on last data.
”
“
Estimate first possible, twenty seconds. Nineteen. Eighteen—
”
“
Five-second interval,
”
said Koffield, almost snappishly.
“
Hell of a time to go blind.
”
He gave up staring at the displays. Old data could tell him nothing new.
“
Defense systems!
”
he called.
“
Shield status, projected duration.
”
“
Shields at stable point, drifting down to ninety-seven percent. They
’
re taking a good peppering from the heavy particles, but holding stable. Projected remaining duration, twenty seconds.
”
“
Fifteen seconds to first possible blast wave contact,
”
Sayad announced.
Close. Damnably close. The shields would start to die just as the cloud of blast debris swept past them. There was not time enough to stop and restart the shields. It would be suicide to try, anyway. The heavy particles still streaming past would be enough to give them fatal doses of radiation sickness. Sayad could almost imagine that she could hear, feel, the heavy particles pinging .off the electro-mag shields. But that was nonsense, of course.
“
All emergency power to shields,
”
Koffield ordered. Not that there would be much power not diverted to them already. Simply to function at all, the electromags needed nearly all of the
Upholder’s
power output.
But the bridge lighting dimmed by half. The ventilators cut off. The ship
’
s Artlnts were stealing whatever little dribs and drabs of power they could from other systems. If the trivial amounts of power the Artlnts were stealing were what made the difference, then their chances of survival were very slim indeed. But there was nothing they could do but watch their boards and make their time reports.
“
Fifteen seconds shield duration remaining. Shields at ninety-five percent,
”
Sayad reported.
“
Ten seconds to first possible impact.
”
And the bridge went silent with waiting. Time had been dragging before, but now it seemed to have ground to a complete halt. How long since that first blast of light through the wormhole? Five minutes? Ten? An hour? A day? Any answer seemed possible. It was as if time no longer had any real relation to the clock numbers that were beating down on them.
“
Ten seconds of shields. Shield decay rate increasing. Shields at ninety-two.
”
“
First possible impact in five seconds. Four. Three. Two. One. Ze—
”
And it came down on them, a half heartbeat early. The ship lurched violently to one side, the shields holding, but only just, as the first wall of debris ripped past, hitting the shields a dozen times, a hundred times, in the space of a second. The ship fell into a violent tumble, pinwheeling across space. The shields weakened under the drumbeat of blast debris tearing into them, but still they held, diverting, deflecting, slowing the impacts. Something tore off a stanchion and crashed into the floor. The lights died, and
alarms began to scream. Then came the horrifying, echo
ing bangs of impacts directly on the hull as debris pene
trated.
In the darkness came the shriek of tortured metal, the
sudden, terrifying first drop in pressure, the sudden cold feel of air being sucked away that told of a hull breach somewhere not far off. Death and terror seemed on all
sides of Sayad in the Ughtless compartment. Another shriek
of torn metal, another hull breach, and then—
The rest was dark and silence.
It was not until hours later, until the damage-control crews had sealed the hull breaches, until power was restored, un
til the ship
’
s tumble was slowed and then stopped, that
Captain Anton Koffield even had time to realize that Ensign
Alaxi Sayad was among the dead.
He could read the story off the gouges cut out of his
ship
’
s bridge. A ricocheting piece of debris, a wedge-shaped
piece of the intruder, a full ten centimeters long, had torn
through the hull and bounced around the bridge interior,
caroming a half dozen times off the decks and bulkheads before zeroing in on Sayad. It had caught her in the side of
the head, stabbed deep into her skull. Death had come to
her in the darkness, and in an instant.
It was not until later still, until thirty hours after the attack, after the initial repairs were complete, and he was sitting in the galley, staring blankly down at a stone-cold
meal he could not force himself to eat, and could not remember preparing or ordering, that he realized how close
that fragment had come to him. His head had been less than half a meter from Sayad
’
s when that fragment had torn through the hull and into the bridge compartment. It so easily could have, should have, been him who was killed.
It took scarcely any imagination at all for Captain Anton
Koffield to know there would be times without number
to come when he would wish, most devoutly, that it
had
been him.
Seven days after the attack, Anton Koffield sat in his working cabin, examining the ship
’
s department reports with a certain degree of gloomy satisfaction. Things were getting back together. Life aboard the
Upholder
had returned to a grim version of normality. The hulls were patched, and the last of the
“
emergency
”
and
“
urgent
”
repairs were complete. Navigation, propulsion, defense, life support, and detection were all reported as operational again, though relying on backup systems in some cases.
Some damage could not be repaired until and unless the
Upholder
reached port, if she ever did. But there were still a thousand doable fixes to be made all over the ship, most of them minor things that could be done almost at leisure. Koffield was in a way glad of all those dents and dings and blown circuit breakers and minor breakages that needed attention. Work kept the crew occupied, kept them from brooding on the ship
’
s near-dire circumstances.
Services had been said over the fallen, and the dead were all safely out of sight, the six coffins in cold storage, deep in the hold of the ship. Captain Koffield had briefly considered burial in space, but it had taken very little time for him to conclude it would be very bad for morale. Normally, a burial in space happened in the emptiness between the stars, out where the dead were truly consigned to the infinite and the empty. Inside a star system, however, spaceside burials were always targeted so the coffin and corpse would burn up in a planetary atmosphere or impact into the star itself, vaporizing instantly. That was clean, and quick.
But Neither choice was possible in orbit of a wormhole. Given the
Upholder’s
circumstances, the dead would either have to be left in orbit around the wormhole, where the tracking team would be forced to monitor the movements of their dead comrades, for fear of their becoming traffic hazards, or else the bodies would have to be targeted to impact on the wormhole, and be absorbed by it. But it was the wormhole that had killed everyone aboard the
Standfast,
and destroyed the ship as well. It was bad enough that the crew could regard the wormhole, the thing they were there to guard, as a killer. Koffield did not want their thoughts moving in that direction. Giving them cause to think of the wormhole as a graveyard as well could hardly help matters. Better the dead remain aboard, awaiting a better time and place to be consigned to the dark and the deep. He had no doubt that the
Upholder’s
dead would be as eager as the survivors to get far, far away from Circum Central Waypoint.
In point of fact, Circum Central Waypoint was not central to anything, nor on any transit circuit. It had a grand-sounding name, but Circum Central was no Trior
’
s Realm, no Sirius Power Cluster Farm, with a dozen wormholes cross-linking thirty worlds. All Circum Central handled was the traffic for, and the traffic between, the new, small, and unimportant planets of Solace and Glister. There was not much traffic to handle. Circum Central wasn
’
t even, properly speaking, a wormhole farm. It was a singleton post, with but a single timeshaft wormhole. Whoever had built it, long ago, had named it for expectations of wealth and growth and prosperity that had never been realized, rather than as an honest description of what it was.
But that was before the attack. What was Circum Central
now?
The scene of an invasion? But who was invading, and why? What had the intruders been after? He shoved his report pads to one side and stared sightlessly at the blank bulkhead that faced his desk.
It made no sense. No sense of any kind. Why raid a timeshaft from the
past
in an attempt to reach the
future.
Settled Space was full of cryo-equipped ships that could simply
wait,
cruising through interstellar space as time passed. For that matter, there wasn
’
t any need for cryosleep. The intruder ships had clearly been robotic. If they had needed to reach the future, all they had to do was put themselves in storage for seventy-nine years. Why attack a wormhole and lose ninety-plus percent of your force in a needless attack? What had it all been in aid of?
He had gone over it in his mind a hundred times, and still could see no explanation.
And what of those acceleration rates they had recorded? The intruders had put on speed at utterly incredible rates,
and had at least
appeared
to reach the speed of light, vanishing off the detectors as they did so, as if they had just blown through light-speed and kept going, moving so fast
the trackers couldn
’
t even see them. But faster-than-light
travel was impossible. Three thousand-plus years of space travel had taught humanity that much. Was that assump
tion wrong? Or were they misreading the data, seeing some
thing that wasn
’
t there, while missing things that were?
The door comm blipped, and Koffield pressed, down the stud on his desk that opened the door, glad of the interruption. It was Lieutenant Sheelton, the defense systems officer, though today he was handling comm duties. Because Chronologic Patrol ships were deliberately designed to allow precious little communications, the standard patrol ships did not even carry full-time comm officers, but instead swapped the duty around the other departments.