The Seeds of Time (2 page)

The dimension change triggered a nasty ripple in space-time. Clio almost thought she could see the ripple fan outward from the ship, but well clear of Earth, got to stay well clear. Ripple or no ripple, you want to avoid your own historical past—avoid changing it, changing yourself. No matter how much you’d like to redo it. No second chances. Just fly by the book, girl.

She leaned forward, cradling her stomach, felt that old warm brick forming there, saw the lights haloed around the control panel, and the air on the bridge turned thick as water at thirty fathoms.
Gotta ride this pony. Going to be fine. Dive fifty-five, going to be fine
.

Clio’s eyes flicked over to the comm screen, all static now, picking up only the electromagnetic impulses of the galaxy. The static ebbed and surged, creating patterns if she watched long enough—sometimes faces, a fleeting Rorschach test. Clio yanked her attention back to the control board, trying hard to stay tuned, get the job done.

The right-side controls in front of her were for aerospace, the left for Dive. She jockeyed both sides. The Dive pilot rode the controls through Dive, and, coming up on real space, flew the ship like a normal pilot.

The contrails of the stars striped across the viewport, tracing the bright orbits of their endless paths, as the Milky Way rotated around its center.
Starhawk
was picking up
time speed, the past rushing by. Time before she was born, before Mom and Elsie and Petya. Time before the good old U.S. of A. Time before time.

Clio focused her eyes on the chronometer, watched the numbers scroll up, six thousand years, going on seven thousand, now crawling to eight thousand. She scanned the readouts for chunks of matter the galaxy might throw at the ship, hurtling along faster than mere humans were meant to travel.
Gotta stay awake, stay awake
.

Teeg was radiating colors everywhere his skin was exposed. His face had become fuzzy, as though the surface of his skin wasn’t always in exactly the same place. His handsome, squarish face had lost its perpetual leer, looking lost and serene. Trusting to wake up in the right time and right place, like a child committing himself to sleep, to the night.

If I should die before I wake …

Clio snapped back in a hurry. You were getting a little mesmerized there, old girl. Was not. Were too.

Ran a systems check. What the hell time was it anyway? She laughed out loud at that; heard a voice, high and bell-like. God, was that her laugh? Damn well better be. Don’t get spooked now, girl. You got a job to do.

The numbers slipped by the face of the chronometer, counting the years, the thousands, the hundreds of thousands, until time was meaningless, too enormous to matter, to count. There in the blackness of interstellar space, moving back in time meant less about time than it did about space. The solar system, the whole galaxy, was rushing headlong through the universe, while at the same time the galaxy was rotating around its own center. Going back in time, you found yourself surrounded by the stars that had preceded Sol on its swing through the galaxy. Travel to the stars achieved without faster-than-light speed, a simple backdoor approach called time travel. Humanity’s only bridge across the monstrous distances of space. A limited bridge, but better than nothing. Vandarthanan’s mathematical vision of the mechanics of time had opened up space travel without the need for the speed—or near speed—of light.

A Dive ship was needed. Both a spacecraft and a time-travel device. Send it out far from Earth to avoid paradox risks. Send it back in time, not forward in time—at least not past the Future Ceiling, that current date you left on Vanda. But back in time, in search of an Earthlike planet, one that had once swung by on its immense sweep along the Orion arm of the galaxy. Sometimes Clio thought of it as a merry-go-round, where those rearing horses, nostrils flaring, plunged ahead of her, but only a moment before occupied the very point on the circle, the very point where she and her red-saddled mare now thundered by. Space was like that, a little. Galaxy, solar systems, planets, all thundering by in a headlong, circling rush to nowhere. And with Dive, humanity could hold on and ride …

With only a few flaws.

Like the Future Ceiling, forbidding all trespass. Like Dive pilot burnout, where you push a Dive pilot past certain tolerances and neurons burn out, flaring incandescent, leaving your highly trained pilot a few bricks short of a full load. Took twenty-five to thirty Dives, or thereabouts. Then the companies brought in your replacement.… Hey, show the fellow around, will you?

She leaned back in her chair, breathing deeply, remembering where she was:
Starhawk, Starhawk
, hawk of the stars, circling, circling, watching for its prey.…

Clio jerked up in her chair. She had dozed off. Gods! She had lost it this time, gone over the edge, gone under with the rest of the crew. Jolted awake by the dimension swing. They were stopped dead in space, the chronometer reading steady.

Jesus, how long had they been sitting here, everybody blacked out, no one in charge … She punched in visual, scanning the telemetry: and there was a planet—no, a moon. Crippen’s moon, by God. Practically a bull’s-eye in Dive terms and damn lucky they didn’t hit it. Even considering their hopes to get close on the reasonably short Dive, this one was definitely snug on the mark.

Then a shattering Klaxon alarm sounded as a massive object loomed into view, headed directly toward
Starhawk
.
An asteroid, caught in the moon’s faint gravity, same as the ship herself. They were about to get acquainted, real fast. Clio hit the thrusters, swinging the ship around, and punched up the engines to full, moving
Starhawk
out of the path, but not before the blast from the ship’s jets hit the icy asteroid surface and kicked up a rushing plume of water vapor. The eruption hit the ship, sending a shudder through the cabin. She heard the wrenching of metal down amidships, and then they were plunging toward the large moon itself.

As Clio struggled to bring the ship under control, she heard a groan from Captain Russo, always the first to recover from Dive, then her angry command, “Bring the helm over to Teeg!”

“Teeg’s still out, Captain. I’m working this tumble.…”
Starhawk
was tumbling headlong toward Crippen’s moon, five rotations a second. Clio fought the controls, her hands flying over the board, slowing the tumble, but still they were headed dead-on for the moon, out of control. Voices were screaming over the comm, but Clio rode the ship, shutting them out.
Gotta ride this pony, goddamn it, gotta ride it …

Then she got the nose of the ship up, and they were skimming across the horizon of Crippen’s moon, tugged at by the thin gravity, but breaking away in a mad rush for space.

Clio moved them well off from the asteroid, scanned the visual display one more time, saw that they were well clear and safe. Then she leaned into her sick bag and threw up.

“Helm to you, Teeg,” the captain was saying as Clio passed out.

In her dreams she could hear the hull resound: metal scraping on metal. Maybe she wasn’t dreaming, just delirious, if there was a difference.

She woke up to see Doc Posie leaning over her, taking a blood-pressure reading. Posie was only an RN, but the crew called him Doc; a real doctor wouldn’t fuss over a blacked-out Dive pilot.

Clio felt the ship shudder. She pushed up on both elbows. “What’s going on, Doc?” Then, putting the situation together, swung off the bed, trying to find the floor with her feet.

Posie pushed her back down. “Just calm yourself, Clio.”

“Calm myself? I’m so calm I’m barely breathing. Is that the lander separating? They going ahead with the mission?”

Posie nodded.

“Jesus.”

“You don’t need to swear.”

“I didn’t swear, goddamn it.” Posie was so squeaky clean, in thought, word, and deed. “How long have I been out?”

“About ten hours.”

She swung her feet around again, ran into Posie’s thick hands gripping her shoulders, shoving her back onto the pallet.

“You’re not going anywhere, so lie still,” Posie said. He grabbed her arm harshly, pressing the blood-pressure band against her skin.

“Who says? I’m copilot on this ship, and I’m going to the bridge.”

Posie’s face zoomed down to fix her with a stare. “Captain says, Finn. So lie still or I’ll trank you good.” Posie’s hands were shaking, his face redder than usual.

“OK, don’t have a coronary.” She lay back down, deciding to try charm instead of push. “What’s the damage, Doc? I gotta know. I feel awful.” She worked her face into a knot of anxiety.

Posie sniffed, turned to put the pressure band in a drawer, drawing out the moment. “As much as I’ve heard, we’ve got a crunch starboard side as big as a bathtub. No cracks or leaks, but they’re still checking.”

“Still checking! Jesus Doc, we just launched the lander, and we don’t know the full damage to the ship yet? Has Russo lost her mind?”

Posie grabbed his clipboard, stalked to the medlab
door. “You stay here and rest or the captain’ll chew you up for dinner, you copy Finn? She doesn’t want a pilot with the wobbles on the bridge.”

“Goddamn it Posie, you all wobble big time every freeping Dive!”

Posie glared at her and left, slamming the door.

Clio put her head in her hands, smelling her rank uniform, thinking what a mess, an unholy mess she’d made of the mission. A crew out in
Babyhawk
, and
Starhawk
crumpled up amidships, with maybe a lethal crack or systems damage. She heard the final separation of the lander, as it eased out of its position, where it had been nestled into the side of
Starhawk
, its shipside forming a seal against the launch bay opening. Then a rumble as the ship’s bay doors closed the gap left by
Babyhawk
.

God, I passed out, passed out in Dive
. Rivulets of sweat ran down her sides as she let the thought sink in. God, oh God. Biotime would jerk her back so fast it’d make her head swim. She’d get her retirement real fast, the whole ex-Diver package, a lump sum and maybe a slot as a tech on Vanda Station, so she could hang out near the spacers and shoot the shit with the other old Divers. An unwelcome voice in her head summed it up:
It’s 2019, you’re twenty-seven years old, and you’re finished, sister
.

Or if they weren’t feeling generous, she’d go Earthside, and she didn’t want to think about that, oh no.

Then she noticed the bandage strip on her arm.
Jesus, a blood draw
. They’d taken her blood while she was passed out, a kind of medical rape. Anger stirred, propelling her off the pallet.

She combed every square inch of the medlab cold hatches. No blood sample. She started to go through the hatches a third time, stopped herself, sat on the bunk, holding herself and trying to stop shaking.

She punched up Hillis’ cabin on intercom. “Hill. I’m in medlab. I’m lonely.” In a tone of voice that said, I’m horny. You never knew who might be listening, so give them an earful, let them imagine Hillis and her together like a couple of rabbits. She had, many times.

Hillis answered, “You OK?”

“Come find out.”

“On my way.”

A few minutes later he swung into medlab, leaned against the door. He watched her, a half smile edging the side of his mouth. Hillis was lean without being thin, honed by a high-strung temperament. He was good-looking if you liked high foreheads, sharp features. Clio did. Built for speed was how she thought of Hillis. His wiry, light brown hair was cropped close, like all the crew’s, but still it was wavy, or maybe coiled. Bright blue eyes watching Clio with sardonic patience.

“They took a sample. While I was asleep, goddamn it.”

“What do you want me to do?’

“Find it. It’s not in here. I looked.”

He nodded. “OK, I’ll look around. Should be easy in all the confusion out there.”

“What confusion?”

“One of the launch bay doors is jammed.”

Stomach beginning to shred, awash in acid. “Jammed?”

“Dented from the collision, they figure.” Her face must have been easy to read. “Don’t worry, they’ll fix it.”

Clio was shaking hard by now. He drew her into his arms. “Those pills are poison, Clio.”

“It’s not the pills. Just scared to freeping death.”

“I’ll find the sample. Don’t worry.”

She called up a fairly steady smile. “Who’ll worry if I don’t?”

“Nobody. Nobody does it better than you.” He turned to go.

“I love you Hillis.”

He paused at the door. “I love you too. I’d hate to see you kill yourself with that shit.”

“I’m going to quit.”

Hillis looked at her a few moments. “We’re both outlaws, you know.”

“We’re only doing what we have to. I need Recon, Hill. I haven’t got anything else.”

“Those pills aren’t going to pull you through. Nobody lasts this long, Clio. Nobody lasts fifty-five Dives.”

“Shit. You’re counting too. Maybe I’m the exception, Hill, maybe I’ll last.” She flashed him a grin.

He shrugged. “Maybe you will.” Then he was gone.

Clio forced some food down and tried to sleep some more. She ended up lying on her bunk, eyes wide open, wondering how much trouble she was in and how to lie her way out.

Before her watch—way before—came a sharp command over the intercom: “Lieutenant Finn to the bridge, ASAP.”

Clio’s boots hit the deck. She tore out of her cabin, ran down the corridor, shaking the cobwebs out of her head, her heart pounding.

The captain and Teeg were intent on the monitors, the bluish light from the panels making their faces look sickly.

Russo’s voice was raspy. “
Babyhawk
’s turned around, Lieutenant. Aborting mission; we got casualties.”

Casualties. God
. Clio slid into her chair.

“Helm to you, Finn. Teeg, get off the bridge. You’re too damn tired.”

He nodded, mock-bowing at Clio, and raking her with those hungry eyes, before swinging himself down the ladder.

“Captain, what’s the situation with
Babyhawk?”
Clio was buckling in, noting the approach of the lander, moving in on
Starhawk
.