Nothing quite concentrates a man’s mind like the knowledge that he is to be hanged in four weeks; unless it is possibly the knowledge that he has sabotaged the very ship he sails in, and he — along with everyone else in it — will be hanged in three months. For while the execution may be farther away, the chances of a reprieve are infinitely lower.
Martin Springfield sat in the almost-deserted wardroom, a glass of tea at his hand, staring absently at the ceiling beams. A nautical theme pervaded the room; old oak panels walled it in, and the wooden plank floor had been holystone-polished until it gleamed. A silver-chased samovar sat steaming gently atop an age-blackened chest beneath a huge gilt-framed oil painting of the ship’s namesake that hung on one wall. Lord Vanek leading the cavalry charge at the suppression of the Robots’ Rebellion 160 years ago — destroying the aspirations of those citizens who had dreamed of life without drudge-labor in the service of aristocrats. Martin shivered slightly, trying to grapple with his personal demons.
It’s all my fault, he thought. And there’s nobody else to share it with.
Comfortless fate. He sipped at his glass, felt the acrid sweet bite of the rum underlying the bitterness of the tea. His lips felt numb, now. Stupid, he thought. It was too late to undo things. Too late to confess, even to Rachel, to try to get her out of this trap. He should have told her right at the beginning, before she came on board. Kept her out of the way of the Eschaton’s revenge. Now, even if he confessed everything, or had done so before they tripped the patch in the drive kernel controllers, it would only put him on a one-way trip to the death chair. And although the sabotage was essential, and even though it wouldn’t kill anyone directly—
Martin shuddered, drained the glass, and put it down beside his chair. He hunched forward unconsciously, neck bowed beneath the weight of a guilty conscience. At least I did the right thing, he tried to tell himself. None of us are going home, but at least the homes we had will still be there when we’re gone. Including Rachel’s unlived-in apartment. He winced. It was next to impossible to feel guilt for a fleet, but just knowing about her presence aboard the ship had kept him awake all night.
The mournful pipes had summoned the ship to battle stations almost an hour ago. Something to do with an oncoming Septagonese carrier battle group, scrambled like a nest of angry hornets in response to the fiasco with the mining tugs. It didn’t make any difference to Martin. Somewhere in the drive control network, an atomic clock was running slow, tweaked by a folded curl of space-time from the drive kernel. It was only a small error, of course, but CP violation would amplify it out of all proportion when the fleet began its backward path through space-time. He’d done it deliberately, to prevent a catastrophic and irrevocable disaster. The New Republican Navy might think a closed timelike loop to be only a petty tactical maneuver, but it was the thin end of a wedge; a wedge that Herman said had to be held at bay. He’d made his pact with a darker, more obscure agency than Rachel’s. From his perspective, the UN DISA people merely aped his employer’s actions on a smaller scale — in hope of preempting them.
Good-bye, Belinda, he thought, mentally consigning his sister to oblivion. Good-bye, London. Dust of ages ate the metropolis, crumbled its towers in dust. Hello, Herman, to the steady tick of the pendulum clock on the wall. As the flagship, Lord Vanek provided a time signal for the other vessels in the fleet.
Not just that; it provided an inertial reference frame locked to the space-time coordinates of their first jump. By slightly slowing the clock, Martin had ensured that the backward time component of their maneuver would be botched very slightly.
The fleet would travel forward into the light cone, maybe as much as four thousand years; it would rewind, back almost the whole distance — but not quite as far as it had come. Their arrival at Rochard’s World would be delayed almost two weeks, about as long as a rapid crossing without any of the closed timelike hanky-panky the Admiralty had planned. And then the Festival would — well, what the Festival would do to the fleet was the Festival’s business. All he knew was that he, and everyone else, would pay the price.
Who did they think they were kidding, anyway? Claiming they planned to use the maneuver just to reduce transit time, indeed! Even a toddler could see through a subterfuge that transparent, all the way to the sealed orders waiting in the admiral’s safe. You can‘t fool the Eschaton by lying to yourself.
Maybe Herman, or rather the being that hid behind that code name, would be waiting. Maybe Martin would be able to get off the doomed ship, maybe Rachel would, or maybe through a twist of fate the New Republican Navy would defeat the Festival in a head-to-head fight. And maybe he’d teach the horse to sing …
He stood up, a trifle giddily, and carried his glass to the samovar. He half filled it, then topped it up from the cut-glass decanter until the nostril-prickling smell began to waft over the steam. He sat down in his chair a bit too hard, numb fingertips and lips threatening to betray him. With nothing to do but avoid his guilt by drinking himself into a paralytic stupor, Martin was taking the easy way out.
Presently, he drifted back to more tolerable memories. Eighteen years earlier, when he was newly married and working as a journeyman field circus engineer, a gray cipher of a man had approached him in a bar somewhere in orbit over Wollstonecroft’s World. “Can I buy you a drink?” asked the man, whose costume was somewhere between that of an accountant and a lawyer. Martin had nodded.
“You’re Martin Springfield,” the man had said. “You work at present for Nakamichi Nuclear, where you are making relatively little money and running up a sizable overdraft. My sponsors have asked me to approach you with a job offer.”
“Answer’s no,” Martin had said automatically. He had made up his mind some time before that the experience he was gaining at NN was more useful than an extra thousand euros a year; and besides, his employing combine was paranoid enough about some of its contracts to sound out its contractor’s loyalties with fake approaches.
“There is no conflict of interest with your current employers, Mr. Springfield. The job is a nonexclusive commission, and in any event, it will not take effect until you go freelance or join another kombinat.”
“What kind of job?” Martin raised an eyebrow.
“Have you ever wondered why you exist?”
“Don’t be—” Martin had paused in midsentence. “Is this some religious pitch?” he asked.
“No.” The gray man looked him straight in the eye. “It’s exactly the opposite. No god exists yet, in this universe. My employer wishes to safeguard the necessary preconditions for God’s emergence, however.
And to do so, my employer needs human arms and legs. Not being equipped with them, so to speak.” The crash of his glass hitting the floor and shattering had brought Martin to his senses. “Your employer—”
“Believes that you may have a role to play in defending the security of the cosmos, Martin. Naming no names”—the gray man leaned closer—“it is a long story. Would you like to hear it?” Martin had nodded, it seeming the only reasonable thing to do in a wholly unreasonable, indeed surreal, situation. And in doing so, he’d taken the first step along the path that had brought him here, eighteen years later: to a drinking binge alone in the wardroom of a doomed starship, only weeks left to play out the end of its role in the New Republican Navy. Minutes, in the worst possible case.