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

The wedge-shaped Hegemonics faded. Aton did not think too deeply about the paradoxes involved in what he had said. In the strat paradoxes were commonplace. And not only in the strat, either: since the rise of the Chronotic Empire every lowly citizen had been made aware of how contingent his existence was on the fickle mutability of time. Many were the millions who, having existed once (once, if that word were to be given a meaning outside time altogether), now ceased ever to have existed. Outside, that is, the roll of nonexisting citizens in the Achronal Archives, which contained more history that had disappeared than it did extant history.

Unless the Hegemonic attack could be stopped, many millions more would be added to that roll.

Aton turned to Lieutenant Krish.

‘Hold the bridge for me. I’m going to make a quick check.’

As he left the bridge and walked through the galleries he could feel the tension building up in the ship. This would be his third sizeable engagement and on each of the others he had liked to visit each section under his command beforehand. It gave him a feeling of integrating the vessel into a tight fighting unit. And it would be a good half-hour, he told himself, before the fleet found its quarry.

He visited the gunnery-room, where tension was, of course, at the highest pitch – and no wonder. His glance swept around the computer terminals, of which the men themselves were in a sense mere appendages. In some ships gunnery was on the bridge itself, which at first sight seemed a logical arrangement, if cumbersome. But Aton preferred it this way, although he knew some captains did not.

After a few words of encouragement to his gunners he went deeper into the ship to the drive-room.

He paused outside the door at the sound of voices, then smiled to himself. Ensign Lankar, a keen young engineer but newly inducted into the Imperial Time Service, was loudly displaying his knowledge to a drive-room assistant in his charge.

‘The time-drive is really based on the good old mass-energy equation,’ Lankar was saying. ‘E equals MC squared. Let’s take one of the factors on the right-hand side of this equation: C squared. That’s where time comes in. C is the velocity of light – the distance per time of an otherwise mass-less particle. So energy is really mass multiplied by time squared. But we can also write the equation this way: M equals E over C squared. This shows us that mass is a relationship between energy and time. So now we’re getting somewhere: what happens if we disturb this relationship? We do this by forcing energetic particles to travel faster than light. And now we find that the equation doesn’t balance any more: energy divided by the velocity of light squared no longer adds up to rest mass. But the equation must balance – it’s a fundamental physical law. So what happens? The equation keeps the scales even by moving rest mass through time, to the same extent that the time factor is transgressed on the right-hand side.’

‘But where does the strat come in, Ensign?’

‘The strat is what time is made of, lad. If you move through time, that’s what you have to move through.’

Ensign Lankar thumped the steel casings that bulged into the drive-room. ‘And here’s where it’s all done. This is where we accelerate pi-mesons to anything between C and C squared. It’s the most important part of the whole ship, and don’t you forget it.’

Lankar’s voice sounded incongruously young as he talked self-consciously down to his underling. ‘M equals E over C squared,’ he repeated. ‘Notice that time is involved in both elements on the right-hand side. That’s why pure energy can’t be transmitted through the strat, only mass. So we have no radio communication with the High Command and have to use the couriers, poor devils.’

Both young men jumped up with embarrassment and saluted hastily as Aton entered. They had been seated on wooden benches well away from the main control desk, where the drive-room’s senior staff were too busy for such idle talk.

‘Everything in order?’ Aton called gruffly, speaking over the high-pitched whine that always infected the drive-room.

The chief engineer looked up from his work. ‘No problems, sir.’

Aton inspected the flickering dials briefly and went on his way. He paced the short galleries and corridors, speaking to a man here, an officer there. He was about to ascend a long ladder that would take him back to the bridge, passing by the gunnery-room, when a drone of voices caused him to pull up sharp.

It came from a nearby storeroom and had the sound of chanting. Aton felt himself stiffen. Then, dreading what he might find, he unfastened the clamps on the door and eased it quietly open.

The chanting came louder and he was able to distinguish some of the words. ‘Lord of all the deep, if this be our moment for darkness … sear our souls with thy vengeance …’