Time Past (7 page)

Some of the debris contained pieces of
Calypso
’s engines. I salvaged those engines and started the
Calypso II
project.

In June 2122, I left Jocasta on a test flight and ended up in 2023. Which should be impossible. Dammit, where did I go wrong?

Someone knocked. Or rather, pulled the piece of string at the entry that rattled the pieces of pipe I’d hung in the center of the roof. A gentle
clackety-click
that roused me from my thoughts.

At first I thought it was the wind, grown strong enough to rattle the whole tent. But then it sounded again.

It had to be someone from the neighborhood. One of the gang that collected Grace’s “rent” would have simply pushed open the door and demanded payment. Maybe something had happened to the Assembly office.

An uneasy lump in my throat, I wrapped a sarong around my waist and stood near the door.

“Who is it?” I called softly.

“Halley, is that you?” a man’s voice called back.

In this century nobody knows my name is Halley. Nobody speaks a language called Earth Standard because it hasn’t evolved yet.

No, it’s not possible. Must be an hallucination. That flu’s caught up with me.

“Hello?” I said cautiously. Then thought how ridiculous it was, standing there talking through a screen that provided no protection anyway. I opened it, hand shaking.

“It’s me...” said the man on the other side. In the dark his face was indistinct, but his voice and his smell and his rhythm of breathing was Bill Murdoch’s and I was backing up until my legs hit the bed.

He stepped into the room. “Halley, is it you?”

Then he lifted something up close to his eyes. Something small with two arrays of blinking lights in patterns. I recognized it as a directional indicator.

The sight of that small piece of twenty-second-century technology anchored my wits. I reached up the pole in the center of the tent and switched on the bulb.

In its weak yellow light Murdoch looked at me and breathed a sigh of relief. “It is you. For a second, I thought I’d got the wrong place.”

He wore an old T-shirt and sarong, with thongs on his feet like any resident of the out-town. For a moment I saw him as a dark, heavy-chested stranger with lines on his face that could be either from worry or laughter. Then he was just himself.

He grinned. “Hey, don’t go all wobbly on me.”

I shook my head, beyond speech. An immense bubble of loneliness popped inside me.

“I’m really here.” To demonstrate the point, he stepped forward and hugged me.

I let my face be squished against a warm, firm chest damp with sweat. Reached around with my arms and felt his solidity. Gods, he really
is
here, and I’m shaking and my face is wet. Am I laughing or crying?

“Bill, how did you get here?” I said, muffled. Stupid question—the same way I did, obviously.

His arms tightened for a moment, then relaxed. We separated awkwardly. Uncertain what to do, I reached for the water bottle and poured him a glassful.

“It’s filtered,” I said, unable to tell in the dim light whether his expression was distaste or anxiety. He gulped it down and drank another. Put the glass on the crate and looked around the small space. “Is this it?”

“Is this what?”

“Where you’ve spent the past five months?”

Five months. The same length of time as I experienced. So he must have come through the same jump point that I used, and it had stayed stable at the same “distance” of about ninety-nine years—I left Jocasta in September 2122 and arrived here in December 2022. It was now April 2023.

“Halley? Is this where you live?” He was frowning in puzzlement, the expression familiar in the way it drew his brows together, making two deep lines between them.

“Yes. Yes, it is. When did you get here?”

“Just arrived,” he said. “Yesterday.”

Murdoch must have left in January 2123.

I ran my hand over my head, too many words competing to get out at the same time. I wanted to ask him how he got a ship to travel through the point, how he reached the surface undetected, what was happening back on the station, why he’d come alone, how he’d found me—although I had a good idea—and if he had a way to get back. I took a breath to say the words, but it wouldn’t come into my lungs. Damn, damn. Furious and embarrassed at the same time, I dropped to my knees and scrabbled for the inhaler beside the bed. Where is the thing? I had it earlier...

Murdoch was kneeling down beside me looking worried, but I couldn’t tell him what was wrong and didn’t care because until I found the blasted inhaler... not under the bed…oh hell where…blanket, in…the…got it.

“M’sorry,” I said as soon as I could speak, sitting on the floor. “Respiratory problem. Air passages close up.” The hard edge of the bed board dug a trench across my spine and the packed earth was cool on my backside. One of Murdoch’s hands rested on my knee, the other held my shoulder. He was shaking. I was shaking, with the teary relief that followed an attack.

“Are you all right?” he said helplessly. “Does this... how long has this been...” He peered closer at my face. “Jeezus, you look awful.”

“Thanks.” I wheezed the word with as much sarcasm as possible. He was so close. I could sense every centimeter of his body in a way I didn’t remember having experienced before.

He didn’t seem to notice anything, and leaned back against the bed beside me. “Don’t be touchy. If you were on the station I’d hospitalize you on the spot.” He waved his hand at the tent. “What is this place? I got halfway in here and thought I must have made a mistake.”

My skin prickled where his arm and shoulder rested against mine. “It’s where unofficial refugees, illegal immigrants, and asylum seekers end up. Also anyone else who wants to stay away from the legal system.”

He grunted. “Lawbreakers, in other words.”

“And drug users. Runaways. Homeless.”

“Okay. I know what Earth was like in this decade, I read the history files.”

“You’ll find the details quite different.” I felt clarity return. “First things first. Is your ship intact?’

He shook his head. “Sorry. Guess you want to get out of here.” His voice was gentle.

Don’t get nice on me, Bill, I’ll break down. “Second, tell me how you got here.”

Murdoch grabbed the hard plastic chair and straddled it in another familiar pose.

I sat cross-legged on the bed to listen.

Five

“
A
n Serat sent me,” said Murdoch. At my stare, “Make sense to you?”

“He must have met us here in the past. That’s why he had to make sure you’re here.”

He frowned. “But that’s... Anyway, you disappeared on your test flight. Big shock to everyone. But then Ensign Lee—you remember her? She mentioned to me that your signal cut out pretty close to where
Calypso
appeared. Aha, I say, and go to check on her navigational data, and she’s right.

“So I go and have a little chat with the other three engineers on your team. They tell me you might have been caught in an anomaly of some kind. They weren’t very upset, though. Gave me the impression they wanted me out of the lab so they could go back to work.”

I grimaced, half embarrassed. The three engineers and myself had agreed to keep the real content of the research secret; if it leaked, I was pretty sure the Invidi would try to stop us. I hadn’t intended to keep Murdoch out of the picture as well, even though that was how it turned out.

“After twenty-four hours we sent out search and rescue ships, as usual,” he continued. “Must admit, when they didn’t find anything over the next two days, I started to get worried too. I guessed you didn’t have a lot of emergency life-support equipment installed. We had to cut down the search after that—you know how it is.”

I nodded. If the missing person has no air left, there’s no rush to find them.

He tilted the chair farther forward to look intently at me. “I didn’t give up. But I had no evidence to give them that you were alive to be rescued.”

I half smiled. “There was no evidence.”

“Oh, yes there was.” He let the chair fall back with a bump. “I took a look at your research notes...”

“How did you do that?” I sat up straighter.

“I’m chief of Security, remember?”

“And?”

“And it didn’t make a lot of sense to me. Mostly equations and blueprints. But it was obvious even to me that you’d installed something other than a flatspace engine. Which wasn’t in your project proposal, by the way.”

“We thought it was safer not to say exactly what we were doing,” I said.

“Like you didn’t mention salvaging
Calypso
’s engines in the first place?” he said reproachfully. “I talked to Finke, too.”

Hieronymous Finke, the salvage operator and independent contractor whom I’d asked to bring in the remains of
Calypso
after the gray ship spat it out, together with a lot of Seouras debris.

“Finke said he brought some space junk back for you and you stored it in one of the lower bays,” said Murdoch.

“ConFleet was busy at the time,” I protested. “I didn’t want to bother them.”

“Uh-huh. And you stored the junk as research material and paid Finke from the engineering budget. Nice bit of creative accounting, that. Veatch would be proud.”

I suppose it had been naive of me to think that if we were successful, these minor transgressions would be overlooked. An unpleasant feeling, to have one’s sins exposed one after the other. I remembered how I’d kept away from everyone, including Murdoch, over the next couple of months as I investigated what remained of
Calypso
’s engines. Maybe I was too angry at the Invidi, maybe overreacting to the events of the blockade.

“I went back to your engineering colleagues,” said Murdoch, “and told them I wanted answers. They were all a bit subdued by then—I think they needed to tell someone what had gone wrong. They told me you were probably at the other end of the jump point
Calypso
came through. Nothing we could do from our end.”

He leaned forward again. “I thought, I can do something. I was going to go to ConFleet and request a rescue ship to go through the same jump point. At least, I wondered if I should do that, because if ConFleet caught you with Invidi jump technology you’d be under arrest in no time. But anyway, before I could do anything, transfers came through for all three of your engineering team.”

“Whose orders?”

“EarthFleet for Josh Heron and ConFleet for the other two. Admiral’s signatures on all transfers, no discussion. I barely had time to ask them what was going on; none of them knew. I went back to check whether I had enough evidence about the project and where you’d gone to take to ConFleet if necessary, and what do you know? Lee’s navigational data was missing.”

“What about the research results?” I said, not really wanting to hear the inevitable answer.

“Some of it had security seals on it. Above my level. Some of it had been ‘transferred’ and disappeared into a bureaucratic muddle.”

“Sounds like An Barik’s been busy.”

I meant our “local” Invidi, An Barik, who had been the Confederacy Council observer on Jocasta for several years before the Seouras blockade. An Barik lived on Jocasta but didn’t socialize in any way with other species, and only appeared at official functions when absolutely necessary. We suspected he’d been able to contact the Confederacy at any time during the blockade but chose not to. It was difficult to understand why, but as far as we could see, his reason was so that nothing would happen to prevent
Calypso
arriving.

He nodded. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. So I went to see him. Tried to, that is, but I never got any response that made sense. I started to get really worried. It was over a month since you left and everyone was saying how sad, a tragic accident, let’s get on with our lives.”

“I’m sorry, Bill.” I looked up from where I’d been tracing circles on the coarse brown weave of the blanket. “I meant to tell you.”

“You mean, you didn’t mean to get lost.”

“Right.” I don’t know what bothered me more, that he knew me well enough to accept I’d put off telling him, or that I had, in the excitement surrounding the test flight, put it off too long. “So, um, what happened after that? Did you go to the Confederacy and tell them what you suspected?”

“No-o,” he said slowly. “I waited another couple weeks. I mean,”—he flashed me a quick smile—“you’ve got out of some difficult situations before this. And... I dunno. I didn’t want them to arrest you for possession.”

“Thanks.”

“And then the orders for my transfer came through.”

“You?” Hell, I messed up Bill’s life too. The three engineers were a different matter—they’d all accepted the risks and wanted to be part of the project. But Murdoch didn’t even know what we were doing.

“Yeah. I didn’t know what was going on for a while. Back to Earth, the orders said. By the time I contacted someone who knew something—an old mate of mine in Finance—it was time for me to go. I took leave and stayed on the station and tried to get the transfer annulled, or changed, or something. No luck. So I started looking for An Serat. That was bloody difficult, too. I tracked him to a H’digh colony.”

“You went yourself?” Travel quotas for private individuals of the Nine Worlds within the jump network were small and prohibitively expensive. I didn’t want to hear that Murdoch had mortgaged his pension to try to find me. Or worse, put himself in the kind of danger that stowaways on Four ships faced.

“I pulled in a favor with Neeth—you remember, the K’Cher trader who tried to sell our planet?”

I did remember the incident, which had embroiled External Affairs, the Confederacy Bureau of Trade Investigation, the K’Cher League of Barons, and a network of small traders and pirates that covered the whole of Abelar system. Murdoch’s Security team had prevented Neeth from being lynched.

“It gave you a berth to Rhuarl system?”

“Uh-huh. Serat seemed pretty much at home with the H’digh on Rhuarl.”

“So what did he say?”

Murdoch narrowed his eyes as he remembered. “He didn’t say much. Basically, that he’d been waiting for me. He told me he’d send me back to Jocasta and then to meet you. I waited around for a couple hours, then a H’digh gave me a pass back to Central in an unmarked transport.”