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

The scene at Station 3 was one of turmoil. Discipline had broken down in the face of horror, and about thirty men were fighting to get aboard the raft – even though, with an orderly embarkation, room could have been found for them all. On his arrival Lieutenant Krish tried to impose a sense of command. He was cut down by Sergeant Quelle, who had found a pistol beamer and held it awkwardly in his brass suit’s mechanical claw.

Quelle had good reason for shooting the lieutenant. He was anxious that no one who knew his guilty secret, apart from his fellow Traumatics, should board the raft with him. He ensured that the Traumatics went aboard first, then entered the raft himself preparatory to casting off.

But among those who boarded in the final rush were the two noncoms carrying the unconscious form of Captain Aton. They themselves were not so lucky. They dropped Aton to the floor then bravely left the raft to assist some wounded men. Quelle indignantly clanked forward to rid himself of his potential accuser, but he was too late. In that moment others in the raft decided that they had lingered long enough and activated the escape sequence. The gates closed and the hum of the raft’s own emergency ortho field filled the dim interior.

The last wisps of the ship field were now dissipating, and the shattered destroyer was wholly saturated by the strat. It ceased, in one sense, to have any material existence at all: matter cannot retain its properties without the vector of time to give it substance. As such, the life raft magically passed unimpeded through several walls and floated free.

It was the only raft to leave the Smasher of Enemies. All the others either were too damaged or else failed to energise in time. The survivors switched on the small scope and saw, by the light of the raft’s feeble beta projector, the vague image of a tall Hegemonic warship looming over them. They cowered, fearing, but eventually the ship turned and receded beyond the scope’s range.

Still wearing the protective suit, Sergeant Quelle fretted. He had felt it reasonably safe to kill in the confusion at Station 3, but here there would be witnesses who could not be silenced and bodies that could not be disposed of. He sweated inside the suit, glancing at Aton and hoping he would not recover.

The raft was transmitting, as a beacon, a rotating beta beam. Otherwise there was nothing they could do. They settled down and waited, for life or a fate worse than death.

TWO

Node One: Chronopolis, mistress of the Chronotic Empire, seat of the Imperial Government of His Chronotic Majesty Philipium Ixian I, and the location of that repository of imperial wisdom, the Imperator.

Chronopolis was complex and sprawling. In the morning light (the sun had risen to that angle which most accentuated the city’s panoply of splendour) her towers, arches, and minarets sparkled and flashed, casting long shadows that fell sharply across the various quarters housing her polyglot population – across the Hevenian quarter, with its characteristically arcaded architecture; across the more rigidly styled Barek quarter; and so on. For people of every nation and of every period in the mighty time-spanning empire flocked to Chronopolis.

The incredibly massive, intricate palace that occupied the centre of the eternal city was well placed, for both practical and aesthetic reasons. Like a spider at the centre of a vast web, it cast out tentacles in all directions so that it was hard to say where it left off and the rest of the city began. This enmeshment was functional as well as descriptive: the palace merged gradually into the city in the form of government departments, military offices, and church institutions – the three pillars of any state. The residence of His Eminence the Arch-Cardinal Reamoir also lay within the palace grounds, so that all strands, spiritual as well as political, were drawn into the hands of His Chronotic Majesty. And visible from the upper reaches of the palace, from where one could overlook the entire city, were the massive shipyards beyond the outskirts of Chronopolis, busy now as never before.

On this day of Imdara in the fifth month of year 204 (as measured from the pastward buffer known as the Stop Barrier – the zero point in imperial reckoning) the activities proceeding in the imperial palace were too numerous to list. The business of attending to the affairs of the thousand-year imperium went on – all under the gaze, if they so desired, of those members of the Ixian dynasty who were domiciled there – in the thousands of chambers, halls, lecture-rooms, salons, and chapels. As they did on every other day, except for the specified holy days of observance.