The Depths of Time Read Online Free PDF

calm. Just say the words. “ Four. Three. Two. One— ”
    “ Conn, Mark One, all engines emergency stop and safe! Now, now, now! ”
    But the engines were dying before he was even done speaking the word Mark, the ship ’ s frame shuddering and vibrating anew as the stresses rearranged themselves.
    “ Zero. Impact now possible. Plus one second. Two. Three. Four. Five. ”
    “ Engines all stopped and safed! ” came the call from the conn.
    “ Defense systems—Mark Two! Mark Two! Shield full, max aft, now, now, now! ”
    And the lights dimmed and throbbed as the shields grabbed greedily at all the ship ’ s power they could take. Sayad ’ s screens flickered and distorted for a moment as the electromagnetic shielding pulsed up. Then her displays cleared, steadied. Sayad tried to hold herself steady as well. “ Six, ” she intoned. Steady. Professional. “ Seven. Impact detected. ”
    But she didn ’ t need to say that, no, not at all. A flare of light bloomed out in the darkness, blinding the Upholder’s sensors once again.
    “ Shields at seventy percent. Eighty. Ninety. Ninety-five. Ninety-eight. Stability flicker. ”
    “ Hold at stable point! ” Koffield called. The lights dimmed again, and the ship ’ s fabric moaned and creaked as the shields took hold, wrapping a thick, clumsy wall of electromagnetic energy around her.
    “ Dropping to stable point. Holding at ninety-seven-point-five. “
    “ Hang on! ” someone on the bridge shouted needlessly. No one in the compartment was giving any thought at all to anything besides holding on.
    The first radiation pulse had passed them with the light of the explosion, but the slower, heavier, more deadly radiation would be just a trifle behind it. The shields ought to be able to handle the heavy particles. But they would have to hold long enough to protect the ship from the larger debris, from the bits and pieces the size of molecules to dust particles to shrapnel to fist-sized chunks of metal. The debris moved slower than the radiation, but was still coming at them fast, far faster than rifle fire.
    “ Estimate, time until front of blast wave arrival! ” Koffield called.
    “ Sensors blanked, sir. No current data. ” How hard had the intruder hit the scattershot? What was the closing rate and angle? She could have read all that off the lightblast, given time and sufficient data. But not in half a second, and not with her detectors blanked.
    “ Estimate and count to and past first possible moment, based on last data. ”
    “ Estimate first possible, twenty seconds. Nineteen. Eighteen— ”
    “ Five-second interval, ” said Koffield, almost snappishly. “ Hell of a time to go blind. ” He gave up staring at the displays. Old data could tell him nothing new.
    “ Defense systems! ” he called. “ Shield status, projected duration. ”
    “ Shields at stable point, drifting down to ninety-seven percent. They ’ re taking a good peppering from the heavy particles, but holding stable. Projected remaining duration, twenty seconds. ”
    “ Fifteen seconds to first possible blast wave contact, ” Sayad announced.
    Close. Damnably close. The shields would start to die just as the cloud of blast debris swept past them. There was not time enough to stop and restart the shields. It would be suicide to try, anyway. The heavy particles still streaming past would be enough to give them fatal doses of radiation sickness. Sayad could almost imagine that she could hear, feel, the heavy particles pinging .off the electro-mag shields. But that was nonsense, of course.
    “ All emergency power to shields, ” Koffield ordered. Not that there would be much power not diverted to them already. Simply to function at all, the electromags needed nearly all of the Upholder’s power output.
    But the bridge lighting dimmed by half. The ventilators cut off. The ship ’ s Artlnts were stealing whatever little dribs and drabs of power they could from other systems. If the trivial