The Depths of Time Read Free Page A

strange, unexpected directions. Even so, the Standfast scored a series of direct hits on the attackers. Whoever was in charge of those guns might have been slow to react, but he or she was a remarkably good shot.
    Five, six, seven, eight of the attackers flared into nothingness as the Standfast raced toward them, all weapons firing. But that still left half the attackers coming on.
    The closer the Standfast got to the wormhole, the more difficult it became to target her weapons. But she had to get closer, and closer still, if she was going to be able to bring her weapons to bear on the remaining targets. Another volley of fire, every shot a clear miss. And another volley, this time taking out two of the intruders.
    “ Oh, no, ” Koffield said. “ Stars in the sky, no!”
    Sayad had been concentrating so hard on the screen that she had all but forgotten Koffield was there. What had he seen that she had missed?
    Then she saw. The Standfast was moving too fast, getting too close. She was going in, all guns blazing. She was redlining, headed down into the black hole ’ s gravity well, past the point of no return. She would either have to go through the wormhole, or crash into the surface of the black hole.
    And she was nowhere near any of the alignments for a safe transit through one of the approach nexi.
    The Standfast made no attempt to save herself, but instead flew in closer to the intruders, setting up for one last desperate all-weapons volley, getting in under the six remaining targets, firing directly into their paths. She fired everything she had, and then, before her guns and laser even reached their targets, she fell in toward the black hole ’ s event horizon, far, far away from any of the approach nexi.
    She was too close, going too fast. The datalink died with the ship, but the suddenly blank screen told Sayad all she needed to know about what happened next.
    Within a blink of an eye, the flicker of a moment, the Standfast had been destroyed, torn into a million, a trillion microscopic fragments, every man and woman -aboard ripped apart with shattering speed, down to and beyond the molecular level. They had been ground up, shredded into subatomic nothingness by the gravitational vortex of the black hole before they even had time to know they were dying.
    The rest was silence.
    The crew of the Upholder stared at their screens in horrified, frozen shock. This wasn ’ t supposed to happen. It made no sense. How could—
    “ They ’ re coming through! ” Koffield shouted into the mike. “ All weapons, fire at will. The Standfast died trying. Don ’ t let her down. ”
    It was what the crew needed to hear. They shook off their shock and their horror and refocused on their duties.
    Sayad blinked, drew in breath, and tried to do the same. No more data coming from the downtime feed. All right then, work from last positions and trajectories. Factor in projected paths of the access nexi. Feed it all to the battle-projection Artificial Intelligences that weren ’ t designed to track targets coming up out of the timeshaft, and pray they could do the projections, and that the probabilistics projections weren ’ t completely smoke and mirrors at the moment. She massaged and routed the data, and saw projected exit trajectories appear on her display. She converted them to firing solutions, and piped them to the weapons consoles.
    It was guesswork piled on guesswork, but there was no time for anything better—and no way to produce it, no solid numbers to work from. It had taken precisely twelve seconds for her to go from raw data in to firing solutions out, but Sayad doubted she could have done much better work if she had taken twelve years.
    “ Well-done, Ensign Sayad, ” Koffield said. “ Now we wait, if not for long. ”
    “ No, sir. Projected arrival in fifteen seconds—mark. ”
    “ Here comes our turn, ” Koffield said.
    Right on schedule, a flare of blueshift light blossomed out of the event horizon, and