The Depths of Time by Roger MacBride Allen Read Free Book Online Page B

miracles, on the detection board before she had been killed, working the scant data with remarkable speed and skill. Finding the intruders ’ far-flung ships in the depths of space, and in the midst of battle, should have been all but impossible. And yet she had done it with preternatural ease. Koffield reached for a record pad, but then pulled his hand back. There was no point in reviewing the action logs from Say ad ’ s station once again. He had done it a dozen times already, and they had told him all they were going to tell.
    But that same data had told Sayad a great deal more.
    She had spotted some underlying pattern, some framework, even in the first incomplete wisps of data, that had told her where to look.
    What had she seen that everyone else had missed? What could she have told them, if she had lived?
    There was no sense chasing those ghosts again. But neither was there anything more useful that he could do.
    He had directed that all the repairs that could usefully be done, be done. He had juggled the crew assignments and assigned substitutes as best he could. Now he had to hang back and let the crew and officers do their work. Breathing down Chasov ’ s neck had done no good, and Koffield doubted if that sort of close-in supervision would help elsewhere. It might well do little more than give the crew and officers more of a chance to see through the holes in his performance, in his pretense of being confident. He had no wish for the crew to discover how unnerved their captain truly was.
    He forced all that from his mind and tried to come up with something else to worry about. He smiled to himself. Finding worries wasn ’ t likely to be a problem for him for a long, long time.
    But most of his worries came down to timing. The odds on all the courier drones getting through were not good. The drones had been kicked around pretty badly in the attack, and they were being sent on long and arduous journeys. However, the odds that at least one of them would make it through were excellent. Koffield found himself wishing, not for the first time, that he had sent more than one drone to a Chronologic Patrol base on the uptime side of the wormhole. His ship needed relief—devil take it, his ship needed rescue. But duty and logic had told him the same thing—it was more important that the people downtime get the word. It was the downtime side of the time-shaft wormhole that had been left unguarded by the destruction of the Standfast, and it was the primary mission of the Chronologic Patrol to guard the past from the future. The downtime side of the timeshaft took priority.
    But still, relief might come from uptime or downtime, and it would be all to the good if it arrived before the return of the intruders, or else—
    Koffield chose not to contemplate the or-else until he had no choice.
    Nor was it simply a race between relief and the intruders. There was another variable to be considered in the timing: the regular merchant traffic that was the main reason for the existence of the timeshaft wormholes in the first place. He might not know when legitimate merchant traffic would be coming through, but Koffield knew it would come.
    No one at a timeshaft wormhole could ever know for sure when a ship might arrive. In the first place, the basic principle of information-denial in and of itself meant no ship guarding a timeshaft was authorized to know anything of events in the future—and that very definitely included ship schedules. Secondly, timeshaft ship schedules were notoriously unreliable in any event, especially concerning arrival at a timeshaft. The distances were so vast, and the travel times so long, that a navigation error of one part in a hundred million could easily translate into an arrival-time error of a month or two.
    Koffield, therefore, could not know for certain when a ship might show up. But all the willful, determined effort to retain ignorance of the future could not keep Koffield, or any good portal-guard