Five metres along the corridor, Kenelm was sprawled face-down on the floor. She knew it was Kenelm; the body was wearing hir green-and-blue tunic. But sie’d been dead for a long time. Yirella could see hir head, the shrunken desiccated skin tufts protruding from a skull that had decayed so far there was very little left. A disgusting stain had spread out from it, organic fluids long since dried.
But . . .
Hir feet were swollen and discoloured, the flesh a vile mid-putrefaction green.
All Yirella could do was stand there staring, muscles rendered useless by shock and incomprehension.
The Olyix haven’t slowed time, she realized. They’ve speeded it up. But how did that kill hir?
It made no sense. If Kenelm had walked into a zone with a faster time flow, then sie would simply live at that rate. Just like the Morgan had lived at a slower rate while they were flying along the wormhole.
She examined the body again. The swollen feet were wrinkling up, the flesh darkening, while the head’s paper-like skin was diminishing away to nothing as wisps of hair fell to the floor.
‘Different rate,’ she whispered. ‘It’s a gradient.’
The zone of faster time flow didn’t have an abrupt border. It built over a few metres from the ordinary rate where she was standing to one where a human corpse decayed in barely a couple of minutes. A databud file told her that kind of decay would take years.
Great Saints! She took an involuntary step backwards. The gradient, short though it was, would be utterly lethal to any living thing. All the parts of your body would be living at different rates as you moved through it. Circulation would be impossible, nerve impulses from the faster sections would flood into the slower ones, overloading axons to burnout while the misfiring synapses of the brain would scramble every thought.
She gagged as bile surged up into her throat. Initial inertia would sustain your motion across the gradient. But . . . parts of you would have been dead for a year, while the rest was still alive as you started to fall.
Yirella dropped to her knees and threw up violently. Even now she couldn’t take her eyes off the corpse.
That’s what was happening to the Morgan. They’d jumbled the time flow so it had been segmented. Some areas were fast, and some were slow; it was why the network dataflow increased from some sections while others slowed so much they didn’t even register. It would be the same with all the corpus aspects. It was not a straight communications failure; they were all separated in time. Alone.
Being briefly separated into just two consciousnesses as all their aspects flew into the enclave had left Immanueel badly perturbed. Now each of their aspects would be solitary. All the corpus human aspects would be divorced. A disconnected armada.
She took a juddering breath, spitting out the last of the bitter juices from her mouth. Slowly she backed away from the junction, terrified by the fate that awaited any unsuspecting soul crossing the boundary. Then she stopped. She had no idea where the other aberrative time flows began.
Think. There must be a way of spotting them.
First was a review of the network failures. Sure enough, the corridor to the service shaft had no operational connection to the section around her. Using that as a baseline, she began to plot other blank areas of the life-support section. A pattern began to build. It was reassuringly simple. The Morgan had been divided up into layers – some slow, some normal, some fast. Comparison of data rates as the network collapsed told her just how different the flows were, but that was only an approximation. She knew the general area where the time flows changed, but there was no way of telling the exact position of the boundaries.
So what would give them away?
Yirella switched her optik to infrared, at the highest sensitivity. The air around her had currents. Purified air at an exact temperature of twenty-one degrees Celsius gusted out of the vents along the floor, while vents along the top of the wall sucked it back in to run through filters. They were slow currents, barely visible. But there were enough minute temperature variants to distinguish the general circulation movements.
She looked down the corridor towards the stairwell. Beyond Kenelm’s corpse, the air was moving like a gas giant’s supersonic cloud stream. She gave it a respectful nod and backed away a little further.
The normal time area she was in seemed to be four decks deep, and over half the diameter of the life-support section. A file showed her the zone that now incarcerated her was all living quarters – individual crew cabins, some lounges, canteens, a gym, a medical bay and various compartments of support machinery. There was no power coming in from the ship’s main generators; everything was running off local backup quantum cells. A quick calculation for one inhabitant showed the decks she was trapped in could provide life support and reprocess nutrients to print food for the next three hundred and seventy-two years – assuming optimum equipment operation. There were no initiators to provide spare parts should anything major fail. Then she realized she had no way of moving between decks. The portals had shut down, and she couldn’t get to the service shafts where the stairs were.
‘Oh, great Saints.’
Yirella went back to the canteen. Without the network, Boulevard Saint-Germain was stuck on a loop, condemning the happy, stylish Parisians to walk through their fresh new morning every seven minutes. The irony of sitting in a temporal bubble watching their closed time cycle was strong enough to burn. She switched the windows off.
Now what?
She wasn’t sure
