Crucible of Time Read online

  “My thinking exactly, Cap’n,” said Copernicus.

  ***

  Music filled the space now, but it was a dissonant, clamoring, metallic music, ringing around Ruall like something whirring around and around inside a steel drum. It was a powerful annoyance, and she couldn’t seem to get away from it, even by escaping deeper into petal-space, with Bria under her arm. Right now she was having trouble staying focused in any dimension. How long was this going to keep on?

  And perhaps more important: What was happening on the ship?

  /Bria, I think our rest is over. We’ll just have to manage./

  ***

  Before Copernicus could act on Bandicut’s instructions, there was a flash and a bang in the middle of the bridge. Bandicut nearly jumped out of his skin, and Sheeawn yelped. Out of the afterimage in his vision, Ruall reappeared, followed an instant later by Bria. They rose and bounced from the ceiling, and then sank and bounced up from the deck. Ruall stuck out a paddle-shaped hand to steady them both, and they came to a bobbing rest in midair. Ruall didn’t speak at once, but she seemed a redder, more coppery color than usual, as though she were made of heated metal.

  Before anyone could greet her, Ruall let out a ringing cry: “Are we under attack? What is happening?”

  “We’re all right so far!” Bandicut said reassuringly. “We’re in the Clouds of Fire, evading attack.”

  Ruall spun, perhaps trying to take it all in by sight. “Evading? Why? Explain! Quickly! Why are we in this danger?”

  Bandicut did his best to explain.

  “After our victory, you fled?” Ruall gonged. “How long?”

  Bandicut raised his hands to slow her down, quelling an impulse to be defensive. An electric crackle made him pause, before he said, “We can’t fight three of them at once. We had to get clear while we looked for a tactical advantage. But I was just telling Copernicus to get us out of here so we can see what’s happening.”

  Ruall bobbed slightly.

  “Copernicus! Edge of the cloud. Let’s find those Mindaru. And find out how far away Dark is!”

  “Roger, Cap’n,” said the robot, and instantly performed a flip-over maneuver that took them directly away from the electrical fire.

  The shaking subsided quickly, along with the mind-numbing hum and the electrical charge in the air. Within minutes, the glowing clouds began to thin to transparency. The black of space emerged around them. They were back in normal-space.

  Bandicut strode out to the center of the viewspace, searching for signs of the enemy.

  “There they are,” Copernicus said, putting bright circles around one point of light moving toward Karellia—and, some distance off to the right, two more, also just emerging from the clouds. Apparently numbers two and three had pursued them into the clouds, but lost them. All three of the Mindaru were now between them and Karellia. “Those circles are my markers,” Copernicus said. “You cannot see the actual Mindaru.”

  “What’s that?” Sheeawn asked, pointing to the left of the Mindaru.

  Bandicut started at Sheeawn’s presence beside him again. “What?” he said, blinking. Then he saw it: a cluster of dim lights moving from the planet toward the first Mindaru. “Coppy?”

  Copernicus highlighted those, as well. “Those are the Karellian missiles, under power in normal-space. They’re still inside the temporal shield. The Mindaru are still outside. It is possible that the Mindaru are not able to track them from n-space.” The lights dimmed, and were replaced by Copernicus’s markers. “The missiles have gone dark, and are in coasting phase.”

  “Let’s hope this works better than when we tried it,” Bandicut muttered.

  “But Cap’n, by my calculations, they are aimed wrong. Their course does not take into account passing through the temporal shield. After the displacement, they will miss their target.”

  “Explain, please!” Ruall cried harshly. “What missiles?”

  Bandicut did, briefly. As he did so, he thought furiously. If Li-Jared was involved in plotting this course, it did not seem likely they would miss. “Let’s get the shield up there on the display, please.”

  A shimmering boundary appeared, between the first Mindaru and the rapidly closing missiles, now blinking to represent their presumed trajectories.

  Bandicut squinted, trying to visualize what was going to happen. The missiles were going to reach the time-shield just before the enemy. They were going to shift sideways . . . and miss . . .

  Which the Mindaru would be able to anticipate, if they came out of n-space to cross the shield boundary. Which they should do, because it would make for a more predictable crossing. So, if they tracked the missiles, they would see a clean miss coming.

  “Cap’n, Mindaru numbers two and three have turned this way.”

  Spotted us. Damn. “Okay, let’s—” He hesitated. “Ruall, were you—planning to resume battle command?”

  Ruall reverberated. “Not at this time. I do not wish to disrupt in mid-battle. But I suggest we prepare to evade two and three, in favor of targeting the lead enemy, after the missile strike fails.”

  “Agreed,” Bandicut said. “Coppy, be ready for smart maneuvering.”

  “Heads up, everyone!” Jeaves called.

  In the viewspace display, the markers for the missiles and for the lead Mindaru were approaching the temporal shield from opposite sides. A computer projection of the missiles’ course showed a jog at the shield, resulting in a clean miss. The marker for the Mindaru changed color, and Jeaves announced, “Mindaru has dropped into normal-space.”

  They were vulnerable. If by a miracle something was there to hit them. If they weren’t impervious to fusion blasts.

  Without warning, the pale boundary of the temporal shield winked off. “What?” Bandicut shouted. “Coppy, did you do that?”

  “No,” Jeaves answered. “The shield has shut down!”

  “Shut down?”

  The missiles blazed to life, and in the blink of an eye their track shifted to the right, squarely into the path of the Mindaru. Suddenly Bandicut understood. The missiles had been aimed at the Mindaru all along, but only the Karellians knew that the time-shift would abruptly vanish.

  Jeaves said, “The Mindaru is—”

  Too late. In a rapid cascade, the missiles mushroomed into blinding light. The viewspace compensated quickly, and then magnified. “Fusion explosions, all missiles,” Jeaves reported. “I am trying to analyze the result . . .”

  Bandicut waited anxiously.

  “Cap’n, Li-Jared on comm,” said Copernicus.

  “Bandie, did it work? All we can see is a debris cloud.”

  “We’re not sure yet, either!” Bandicut answered. “We’re trying—”

  Jeaves interrupted. “The debris cloud matches the spectrum and mass of the Mindaru. No indication of a remaining solid body. We need to keep some scopes on it, but I believe the enemy is destroyed.”

  Bandicut’s shout of satisfaction was matched by Ruall’s clang, the Uduon’s cheers, and Li-Jared’s whoop. “Li-Jared!” Bandicut called when he could be heard. “Brilliant job with the time-shield!”

  “Thanks,” Li-Jared said. “I don’t think they would have turned off the shield, if it hadn’t seemed the only way to stop that Mindaru.”

  “I am trying to understand why it worked,” Jeaves said. “Not the feint, but their vulnerability to simple fusion blasts.”

  Simple? Bandicut thought. Compared to quantum implosion, maybe.

  “I think we overwhelmed them with something they were not expecting,” Li-Jared said.

  “Yes,” Jeaves said, “but your cascade of extreme temperature and pressure may also have created an interdimensional pinch, which could have destructively—”

  “Wait—” Li-Jared interrupted. “Are you saying we just independently discovered n-space?”

  “Possibly . . .”

  “I don’t suppose we can use it a second time,” Bandicut said, suddenly remembering numbers two and three bearing do
wn on them. “These other two will be wise to it.” Time for a different plan.

  Li-Jared answered, “We can’t, anyway. We have more missiles, but the fast shutdown damaged the field generators. It’s off, maybe for good.”

  Bandicut winced. That was exactly what they had wanted, but now it felt like an arrow gone from their quiver.

  “Something you need to know,” Jeaves said. “There’s a whiplash effect from the dropping of the shield. It’s moving along the path of the distortion and will be hitting the starstream, and timestream, shortly. Not as powerful as the pulse we talked about earlier, but maybe bad enough.”

  That shook Bandicut a little. Had they just destroyed one Mindaru, at a risk to Ik and Julie, Dakota, and who knew how many thousands of others in the starstream?

  He didn’t get a chance to think about it. Ruall gonged a reminder. “Mindaru two and three are closing. Do you have a plan?”

  “Copernicus! Let’s see if they care enough about killing us to follow us away from the planet.”

  “Aye, Cap’n.”

  “Toward Dark. Can we lead them toward Dark?”

  “I will lead and hope they follow.”

  Chapter 22

  Mindaru Attack

  GETTING THE MINDARU to follow them wasn’t the problem. Figuring out how to fight them was. They had no strategic advantage against two Mindaru combined, and the enemy had already closed some of the distance between them. It was clear they could not rejoin Dark before the enemy caught them; the Heart of Fire was closer. Should they go back there and dive all the way in this time? Would the enemy be mad enough to follow?

  “Is there any chance Dark could make it to us, if she poured on the coal?” Bandicut asked.

  “Unlikely. Dark appears to be engaged with numbers four, five, and—is it six? Yes, six,” Jeaves said. “Wait—number six does not appear to be Mindaru. At least not the kind we know.”

  Bandicut scowled. Were they going to have to deal with yet another kind of Mindaru? “What is it, then?”

  “Difficult to tell. Another kind of ship.”

  “Different kind of Mindaru?”

  “Stand by; I am trying to correlate some readings. John Bandicut, number six matches many of the characteristics of your niece’s ship. It may be Plato.”

  “What?” Bandicut felt as if he’d been hit in the chest with cold water. Whatever he’d been thinking about was gone. “Dakota’s ship? Are you sure?”

  “I cannot be certain at this distance. But here, look,” Jeaves said, putting an image up for them to inspect. It was blurry with distance and movement, but it sure looked like Plato.

  “Well, that’s . . . I don’t know what it is! Great news? And terrible news?” His thoughts raced. “They’re alive! They survived the blowup in the starstream! That’s wonderful!”

  “And they seem to have detoured—perhaps to help us?” Jeaves offered.

  Bandicut gulped hard. “And that’s . . . terrible! If they’re chasing the Mindaru for us, they’re in awful danger! My God!” He blanched at the thought.

  “They are definitely in danger from the Mindaru,” Jeaves said. “But they are too far away for us to intercede.”

  If Bandicut and his shipmates had put Dakota and her shipmates in mortal peril . . . if his mission killed his niece, after she had survived to come so far forward in time? And the rest of the Plato crew? He would never forgive himself.

  Ruall gonged loudly. “This is all very interesting, but have you forgotten that we are in imminent danger?” The Tintangle flew far into the viewspace and waved a paddle-hand at the view astern, where two Mindaru were in hard pursuit of The Long View. They would be in firing range soon.

  There was nothing they could do for Plato now. “Coppy, get us back up into the clouds—fast!” Bandicut said.

  “Roger, Cap’n.” The ship vibrated as Copernicus made the course change he had obviously been waiting for.

  And then Bandicut had a sudden thought. “Coppy—?”

  Copernicus turned his camera eyes, as though wondering if he should take his foot off the throttle. “Cap’n?”

  “Go fast. But not too fast,” Bandicut said. “Can you make it look like we’re limping a little?”

  “Because—?” Copernicus said. “And I’m not sure how to go fast and make the ship limp.”

  Bandicut waved in exasperation. “Make them think we’re wounded. Can you make our drive sputter a little? Like we’re losing power? I want them to hope they can come finish us off. Maybe we can get them fried by the cloud itself, or at the very least, even up the playing field.”

  The deck trembled again. “That’s the drive sputtering,” Copernicus said. “They’re following. Still gaining.”

  “A little faster, please. Give them hope, but don’t let them catch us.”

  He turned to look at the others. Sheeawn and Akura were silent, but fear was written in their eyes.

  ***

  The first of the luminous plasma clouds already enveloped The Long View like curtains of emerald and ruby aurora. Soon they hit brighter and more turbulent layers, and then a region of rampant electrical discharge. Perhaps emboldened by their recent foray, Copernicus steered them directly toward the heart of the nearest active zone. As they plunged deeper, it began to feel more personally threatening. Branches of lightning danced toward the ship, as though guided by some magnetic attraction, arcing and crackling with dazzling flashes. The view was so bright it had to be cut with filters. A rising and falling hum came from the deck, like the cry of a chained monster in the basement. The air began to tingle with ionization and hints of ozone.

  This was much worse than last time—and the true maelstrom still lay ahead, glittering and dancing like nuclear fire.

  Bandicut tried to hide his worry—they had flown into a star once, after all—but the gnawing in his gut was real, and growing. This was the belt of energy that was so dangerous it kept Karellia’s space fleet bound to its homeworld. “We’re taking a beating here, guys,” he said to the robots. “Are you sure we can handle it?”

  “We can for a while,” Jeaves said. “N-space fields are holding well. But we’re taking some fire from the enemy.”

  “Are they still gaining on us?”

  “I am afraid so,” Jeaves said.

  “But that’s what we want, isn’t it?” Ruall boomed. “We’re hoping it will be worse on them than on us?”

  “That’s the idea,” Bandicut said. “But if they’re shooting at us, it can’t be that much worse on them. Do we still have clear tracking?”

  “Not really,” said Copernicus. “Cap’n, visible and radio-spectrum scans are all washed out. I’m relying more on acoustic now.” As Copernicus spoke, the speakers came alive with groans and staccato chirps and rumblings like the amplified sounds of animals on a coral reef.

  Bandicut pressed two fingers to his forehead, trying to interpret that. It was hopeless. “Can you do something to make that visual?”

  “I’ll try,” Jeaves said.

  The viewspace was suddenly painted with blotches and streaks, and shimmering representations of sound. For a mind-jarring instant, he felt as if he were in an old war movie, a submarine sonarman watching his display and hoping to pick out the enemy, or possibly the sound of his own torpedoes. “Are you making sense of this—either of you?”

  “It is difficult,” both robots said.

  “Ruall, how about you? Can you make anything out?”

  The Tintangle hummed, waving her paddles. “I cannot.”

  Hell’s bells.

  “Cap’n, I can pick out their weapons fire,” Copernicus said.

  The left half of the display changed to some kind of refined rendering of the visualized acoustics. The two Mindaru weren’t visible, but their weapons fire took the form of lurid-red blobs that extruded themselves like jets of dye in the clouds behind the ship and squirted toward The Long View—where they diminished to yellowish droplets that mostly vanished in flares of green when they grazed The L
ong View’s n-space shields. But then two of the droplets connected. There was a slam through the deck as if pile-drivers had hit the ship. Everyone on the bridge crashed to the deck.

  As he scrambled to get up, Bandicut yelled, “Can’t you do something to evade that?”

  “Trying, Cap’n!”

  Bandicut hauled himself onto one of the bench seats and gripped its edge, waiting for the next blow. He gradually became aware of a voice beside him. “John Bandicut! Captain!” It was Sheeawn. He looked agitated, and again Bandicut realized he had been leaving them out of the loop.

  “I’m sorry—look—it’s not as bad as—”

  Sheeawn cut him off. “Please! Watcher Akura says she can help!” Sheeawn pointed. The Watcher was sitting on the floor against the back wall with her eyes closed. Her hood was drawn forward, obscuring much of her face. Her hands held the front of her cloak in a death grip.

  “She is watching,” Sheeawn said. “She can sense the positions of the enemy.”

  Startled, Bandicut said, “You mean like what she tried before—?”

  “Yes, but now we’re farther into the clouds. All the energy here is creating a sort of—” Sheeawn paused, wringing his hands together. “I don’t know how to describe it! But it’s like what happens in the earth at home—the thing that lets the Watchers connect. She is seeing things she cannot see with her eyes. The enemy ships. The layout of the cloud structure.”

  Bandicut stared at him. “Are you certain? Because that would be—”

  The viewspace flared as another Mindaru shot caught the ship, a glancing strike on the protective fields. Bandicut steadied himself, and then lurched toward Akura. “What do you see, Akura? Sheeawn tells me—”

  Akura burst into words, interrupting him.

  “She says the enemy is following us easily,” Sheeawn said. “We have to get to where the energy flux is higher.”

  Bandicut stared. “Higher? Can she really see the layout of the cloud? Can she guide us?”

  Ruall suddenly zoomed in close to Akura, and made several pinging sounds. Akura opened her eyes wide and said something. Ruall pinged again, and said to Sheeawn, “I think I am following. Please check my understanding.” Ruall rattled off a series of directional descriptions. Sheeawn bobbed his head and muttered a single correction. Ruall clanged and then spoke to Copernicus in some kind of fast machine language.