Barrington Bayley SF Gateway Omnibus: The Soul of the Robot, The Knights of the Limits, The Fall of Chronopolis

Haight gave the order to proceed pastward, traversing across the vertical time-axis. A hundred and fifty years deeper into historic territory he ordered the fleet to stand by; the flagship phased briefly into orthogonal time.

They hovered over a sunlit landscape. Down below, roads and rivers made a meandering pattern among the towns and villages that were dotted here and there across the patchwork of fields. The flagship’s computer library was busy comparing the scene with the official encyclopaedia, but neither Haight nor Anamander needed its report to know the worst. The geography of the place simply did not correspond to the official record. In particular, the sizeable city of Gerread was completely absent.

In orthogonal time the Hegemonic attack had already been successful.

Haight inspected the landscape carefully, looking for signs of recent devastation. There was none: it did not seem that Gerread had been removed by bomb or plague.

Instead, the Hegemonics must have used their most terrible weapon, of which the High Command had obtained some information but which they had never been absolutely sure existed: a time-distorter, capable of altering the fabric of time directly. Gerread had been simply … annulled. All trace of it, past and future, had vanished.

It was a sobering thought that in all probability no one except those aboard the ships manoeuvring in the strat, and those in the special Achronal Archives at Chronopolis, had even heard of Gerread any more. Once again Haight experienced the familiar burden: the terrible responsibility of being a chronman.

The priest, having finished his asperges, retired to the rear of the bridge, where he learned the dreadful facts confronting Haight and Anamander. He began to pray in a sonorous, desperate mutter. The two officers shared his feeling of horror: Gerread and all its inhabitants had been swallowed, foundering like a ship, by the infinity of nonactual, merely potential time. That, at least, was how it was described technically. In church language it was the Gulf of Lost Souls.

Leaving behind it a clap of air, the flagship rephased into the substratum. Haight recalled the region of turbulence they had recently passed through. That, no doubt, had been connected with the new distortion in the orthogonal time-flow. But the battle was not yet lost. There was still strat time, and in strat time events did not vanish, once having taken place, but lingered for hours, days, sometimes months of subjective personal time. Nothing was irreversible.

They might yet snatch back those lost souls from perdition.

The fleet continued its traverse. This, Haight reminded himself, was but a preliminary exercise in how the coming time-war would be fought. Always the object would be to alter the adversary’s history: reaching back and further back into the murky tale of mutated events, answering every move with a cancelling counter-move. And final victory would be achieved only when the history of one side was so completely distorted that the existential support for its fleets of timeships was removed. Even then they would continue to fight for a while, ghosts moving through the strat, never having been manufactured, manned by crews that had never been born. Then they would fade, sinking into nonactual, potential existence.

But it was some time before the warning gong sounded again and Hegemonic ships came up once more on the scope screen.

‘Heading for Node Five,’ the scanman informed him.

They counted the ships as they appeared blurrily on the screen. There were twelve.

‘This is it,’ Haight said. ‘This is their incoming path. Get ready.’

Captain Mond Aton, officer commanding the Smasher of Enemies, had seen the Hegemonics’ outgoing flight path on the scope screen of his own ship and had fully expected to enter battle. Only later, when the order to hold came from the flagship, did he realise that he had been impetuous. The homeward-bound ships would probably have refused to fight; and even if defeated, their destruction would solve nothing.

His own bridge was a miniature of Commander Haight’s; it was manned by only seven men. Unlike the bigger, heavier ships that doubled as battleships and troop carriers, the Smasher of Enemies was a manoeuvrable, lightly manned, heavily armed destroyer. It had the speed to pursue, and elaborate chronphase equipment for accurate microsecond broadsides.

‘Breaks your heart to see them go,’ said the scanman, looking up from the screen, ‘doesn’t it, sir?’

Aton nodded. ‘They haven’t escaped us yet, Scanman. Those ships we see are already ghosts, though they don’t know it.’