off-duty hours in his cabin, brooding, worrying over it all. Two days after they had detected the convoy, he was sitting at his desk, reading an historical novel. He gave k up when he realized that he had just read the same passage over a half dozen times, and yet had no idea what it said. He shoved the datapage that held the book away and stared at the bulkhead opposite his desk.
He did not know what to do. He could order the convoy ships to cancel their approach and simply have them wait until the downtime ship sent the all clear. Or else he could let them continue their approach and send the clearance codes through the wormhole at the proper time, activate the nexi and send the ships through, and simply count on the downtime relief ship to handle her end of things.
But it wasn ’ t that easy or that simple. Once he cleared the convoy ships to final approach, and they committed to entering the wormhole, there could be no turning back. Once a ship was on final approach, it was impossible to abort, impossible to come about and escape the singularity. A ship on final approach was falling like a stone toward the singularity, and there was nothing that anyone could do to stop the fall. She would either go through the timeshaft wormhole, or she would impact the singularity that generated the timeshaft.
Ordering the convoy ships to standby orbits seemed the most prudent course. But they were not ships laden with expensive trinkets or luxury goods. The scale of effort was too great for that, the ships coming and going too quickly for it to be anything other than an all-out relief—or even rescue—effort. Delay the ships a day, a week, a month, waiting for the downtime ship to end its silence, and there would, almost certainly, be people dying on Glister, waiting for the supplies the convoy was bringing. Better to risk the remote chance of the downtime ship taking a potshot at one of the ships before realizing her mistake, than go with the near certainty that slowing the ships would result in greater suffering and death.
Or was he pushing his guesses too far? He could not know for certain the convoy was even bound for Glister.
It was a maddening temptation to bypass all the safeties, to order the comm channels open, to send a voice message in clear to the downtime ship, asking what the devil was going on, to hail the convoy ships and ask what their mission was, and how urgent it was.
But to do either of those things would Be to violate the very core of the Chronologic Patrol ’ s mission, its reason for being. The convoy ships had followed all the procedures required to keep them from gaining knowledge of the future before they dropped back into the past. He could not betray their trust. That the Upholder had been contaminated with knowledge of events on the uptime side of the worm-hole, events that the convoy ships and the downtime relief ship did not want to know about, did not matter. It was his mission to ensure that the past remained ignorant of the future, that time paradoxes of any sort did not arise. It was his job, his ship ’ s job, to see to it that nothing, including his own knowledge of the situation, could reach back from the future and derange the past.
That was why the Upholder could never go back to her own time. She could not spread that curse of forbidden knowledge to the others. It was Anton Koffield ’ s sworn duty to prevent any such thing from happening. He could not, dared not, try to make contact with any of the players in the drama.
And what of the uptime relief ship? Why hadn ’ t she shown up yet? Had the one courier drone sent out on the uptime side of the timeshaft failed to get through? But it was clear that at least one of the couriers sent through the downtime side had made it. A time-sealed message should have been put in storage for seventy-nine years to let the uptime side know.
Unless.
Unless, somewhere in the seventy-nine years that stood between the downtime and uptime ends of
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