me, you have no choice. The three of us will leave our weapons over here, and then we can all go back on board together. And when we return to a port none of us will mention this unfortunate incident again. That is reasonable, surely?»
• • •
Schutz had just reached the bridge when they received Jorge's datavise.
«Damn! He's disconnected our cable from the communication block,» Karl said. «We can't call the Captain now even if we wanted to.»
Schutz rolled in midair above his acceleration couch and landed gently on the cushioning. Restraint webbing slithered over him.
«What the hell do we do now?» Roman asked. «Without the command codes we're bloody helpless.»
«It wouldn't take that long for us to break open the weapons cabinet,» Schutz said. «They haven't got the Captain. We can go over there and hunt them down with the carbines.»
«I can't sanction that,» Katherine said. «God knows what sort of weapons they have.»
«Sanction it? We put it to the vote.»
«It's my duty watch. Nobody votes on anything. The last order the Captain gave us was to wait. We wait.» She datavised the flight computer for a channel to the MSV. «Wai, status, please?»
«Powering up. I'll be ready for a flight in two minutes.»
«Thank you.»
«We have to do something!» Karl said.
«For a start you can calm down,» Katherine told him. «We're not going to help Marcus by doing anything rash. He obviously had something in mind when he told Wai to get ready.»
The hatchway to the Captain's cabin slid open. Marcus air-swam out and grinned round at their stupefied expressions. «Actually, I didn't have any idea what to do when I said that. I was stalling.»
«How the fuck did you get back on board?» Roman yelped.
Marcus looked at Katherine and gave her a lopsided smile. «By being right, I'm afraid. The dish is a distress beacon.»
«So what?» she whispered numbly.
He drifted over to his acceleration couch and activated the webbing. «It means the wormhole doesn't go back to the xenoc homeworld.»
«You found out how to use it!» Karl exclaimed. «You opened its other end inside the
«No. There is no other end. Yes, they built it as part of their survival operation. It was their escape route, you were right about that. But it doesn't go somewhere; it goes some
• • •
Instinct had brought Marcus to the portal chamber. It was as good as any other part of the ship. Besides, the xenocs had escaped their predicament from here. In a remote part of his mind he assumed that winding up on their homeworld was preferable to capture here by Jorge. It wasn't the kind of choice he wanted to make.
He walked slowly round the portal. The pale violet emanation in the air around it remained constant, hazing the dull surface from perfect observation. That and a faint hum were the only evidence of the massive quantity of power it consumed. Its eternal stability a mocking enigma.
Despite all the logic of argument he knew Katherine was wrong. Why build the dish if you had this ability? And why keep it operational?
That factor must have been important to them. It had been built in the centre of the ship, and built to last. They'd even reconfigured the wreck to ensure it lasted. Fine, they needed reliability, and they were masters of material science. But a one-off piece of emergency equipment lasting thirteen thousand years? There must be a reason, and the only logical one was that they knew they would need it to remain functional so they could come back one day.
The SII suit prevented him from smiling as realization dawned. But it did reveal a shiver ripple along his limbs as the cold wonder of the knowledge struck home.
• • •
On the
«The wormhole leads into the future,» Roman said in astonishment.
«Almost. It doesn't lead anywhere but back to itself, so the length inside it represents time not space. As long as the portal exists you can travel through it. The xenocs went in just after they built the dish and came out again when their rescue ship arrived. That's why they built the portal to survive so long, it had to carry them through a great deal of time.»
«How does that help you get here?» Katherine asked. «You're trapped over in the xenoc wreckage right now, not in the past.»
«The wormhole exists as long as the portal does. It's an open tube to every second of that entire period of existence, you're not restricted which way you travel through it.»
• • •
In the portal chamber Marcus approached one of the curving black buttress legs. The artificial gravity was off directly underneath the doughnut so the xenocs could rise into it. But they had been intent on travelling into the future.
He started to climb the buttress. The first section was the steepest; he had to clamp his hands behind it, and haul himself up. Not easy in that gravity field. It gradually curved over, flattening out at the top, leaving him standing above the doughnut. He balanced there precariously, very aware of the potentially lethal fall down onto the floor.
The doughnut didn't look any different from this position, a glowing ring surrounding the grey pressure membrane. Marcus put one foot over the edge of the exotic matter, and jumped.
He fell clean through the pressure membrane. There was no gravity field in the wormhole, although every movement suddenly became very sluggish. To his waving limbs it felt as if he was immersed in some kind of fluid, though his sensor block reported a perfect vacuum.
The wormhole wall was insubstantial, difficult to see in the meagre backscatter of light from the pressure membrane. Five narrow lines of yellow light materialized, spaced equidistantly around the wall. They stretched from the rim of the pressure membrane up to a vanishing point some indefinable distance away.
Nothing else happened. Marcus drifted until he reached the wall, which his hand adhered to as though the entire surface was one giant stikpad. He crawled his way back to the pressure membrane. When he stuck his hand through, there was no resistance. He pushed his head out.
There was no visible difference to the chamber outside. He datavised his communication block to search for a signal. It told him there was only the band from one of the relay blocks in the stairwells. No time had passed.
He withdrew back into the wormhole. Surely the xenocs hadn't expected to crawl along the entire length? In any case, the other end would be thirteen thousand years ago. Marcus retrieved the xenoc activation code from his neural nanonics, and datavised it.
The lines of light turned blue.
He quickly datavised the deactivation code, and the lines reverted to yellow. This time when he emerged out into the portal chamber there was no signal at all.
