The Depths of Time Read Free

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 However, timeshaft-wormhole ships moved far slower than light, meaning that most information would be out-of-date by the time it reached a wormhole.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.
    The diversion had served its purpose. The Standfast commenced firing on the blips moving toward the wormhole, but the incoming ships were already deep enough inside the wormhole ’ s complex gravity field and moving fast enough that accurate targeting was all but impossible. Space and time were wildly warped and twisted by the wormhole ’ s intense gravitation, sending laser fire and mass-accelerator fire skewing off in