Free The Depths of Time by Roger MacBride Allen Page A

only of things he truly needed to know.
    Just let them all get through this. Let everything stay on an even keel until the convoy was through, and then—
    “ Captain, I ’ m getting something strange on long-range detectors, ” Sentar, the detection officer, called out.
    “ What is it? ” Koffield demanded, snapping out of his reverie.
    “ It looks like a fast-moving gamma-ray source, real close in, but that doesn ’ t make any sense. ”
    And Koffield knew. There was no doubt at all in his mind. He had no proof, no evidence at all, but still he was certain, unshakably so.
    “ Moving toward what? ” he asked, knowing full well what the answer would be.
    “ Still getting a vector—it ’ s—it ’ s headed straight for the wormhole. ”
    Of course. Where else would it be going? “ Look for others, ” he said wearily. “ There will be two others, probably coming in on widely dispersed vectors, driving for the wormhole. ” Of course they would come back. And of course they would come back now.
    The convoy. Whatever happened next, those ships had to get clear. “ Communications! Flash alert to all convoy ships—abort, abort, abort. Cancel final-approach clearance. Break off approach and take up parking orbits. Send that in clear over all voice and data channels. ”
    “ Two more gamma-ray sources incoming! ” the detection officer shouted. “ Correction—three, four, five, six total sources incoming. All decelerating at extremely high rates, bearing in toward the wormhole from widely scattered vectors. All match profiles of the intruder ships that killed the Standfast.”
    Six of them. The original three survivors must have had some way of building copies of themselves, or maybe each of the original intruders had been a docked pair of duplicate ships that was now split up. Or else three of the incoming intruders were some sort of decoy—or else there was some other explanation that Koffield was missing.
    Whatever it was didn ’ t matter. What mattered was that six intruder ships were there, and heading for the wormhole, and they could not be allowed to break through into the past, no matter what the cost.
    “ Battle alert, ” Koffield said, his voice flat and cold. “ All personnel to battle stations. Weapons, what are our present options for attack on the intruders? ”
    Amerstad was working the weapons panel. “ None, sir, ” she said, an apology in her voice, if not in her words. “ They ’ re too far out of range and moving too fast for us to hit. Even if our weapons systems were fully operational, we wouldn ’ t be able to hit them. ”
    “ Will we have a shot if they decelerate to more or less normal velocity closer in to the wormhole? ”
    “ Possibly, ” said Amerstad, studying her displays as she spoke. “ We might be able to get a targeting solution with the laser cannon. But I doubt we ’ d be able to get off any sort of shot at all with the railgun. Even if we could, we ’ d have friendly-fire problems with the convoy ships. ”
    “ Can you give me meaningful odds on our chances of destroying some or all of the intruders? ”
    “ Very roughly, fifty-fifty odds we can score a hit on one of them. Maybe one in ten that we could score hits on multiple targets. Odds on hitting and destroying all of them—I ’ m sorry, sir. Far less than one percent. Maybe one chance in ten thousand we could do it. Maybe a lot worse than that. ”
    Koffield nodded to himself. Those were the answers he had expected. And those answers told him something else he had already known, deep in his soul. Defeat was all that was left to them. A defeat so vast, so complete, that it was terrifying to do so much as contemplate it. A defeat that would trade victory over the intruders for incalculably greater losses.
    For Captain Anton Koffield still had one last weapon, one that was still undamaged, one that he could still use against the faceless and ineffable intruders. A weapon that had never been used, and