Doctor Who_ Cat's Cradle_ Times Crucible - Marc Platt [10]
"We travel."
The thought core of the crew, bound and woven by three years of training, virtually eliminated the necessity for a reality. Six minds in one mind. A microcosmic pool of awareness. Shared thoughts in a harmonic ratio. Except . . .
The loss of Chronaut Taspar from the crew had disturbed them all in its suddenness. A freak skimmer boat accident among the marshlanes near the city, only sixty-one days before their mission commenced. Taspar, a proven quantum theorist and the crew's confirmed joker, who also acted as their Pilot's guardian, responsible for the young navigator's welfare. They had all loved him.
A hurried investigation blamed the crash on a corroded fuel plug and a pocket of volatile marsh gas. The mishap was unpredictable and unfortunate. Such are the ways of the Gods.
Since the time programme could not be delayed, Taspar was interred with full posthumous honour and the mission dedicated to his memory. The affair was tidied away with efficiency and reverence. But all the crew had felt his scream and tasted mud as imagined water choked their lungs.
The Pilot had inevitably taken the loss of his "nanny" hardest. His had been the strongest bond, but it had not been easy for any of the crew to accept Taspar's replacement into their tightly woven telepathic family.
Pekkary detected hints of unease in his second officer. Chronaut Amnoni Distuyssor Lorizhon, daughter of the ancient House of Blyledge, had been chosen for her qualities as natural questioner and antagonist. Now Amnoni lay on her couch, unnaturally silent, directing her mind solely to the business of their flight. But Pekkary knew her better. The problem had disturbed them all.
Taspar's replacement had been selected, Amnoni called it imposed, by the Court of Principals with no consultation with the crew. He came from a newly prosperous family in the pasture belt valleys and his hair was almost as red and flame gold as that of the crew's Pilot. He immediately proved himself an excellent time theorist. His mind was sharp and strong-willed, responsive to decision-making, but it was also cold. It sat uneasily in the telepathic pool. His shared thoughts could be abrupt and angry. Too much the Individual.
In short, Chronaut Vael Voryunsti Sheverell was an intruder, and worse, the Pilot did not like him. The mission and all their lives lay in the hands of a four-year-old innocent who must not be provoked. And provocation seemed to be Vael's forte.
Faced with the prospect of hurled toys, temper tantrums and the possible disintegration of his crew, Pekkary directed the thought core towards the function of the Scaphe. An adequate solution. It held together, but it was no longer the team he had built.
"Two minutes since immersion."
Monitor units, set around the tight walls of the Scaphe, registered and recorded the crew's every movement and reaction, both physical and mental. Scientific Specimens in a sealed environment, a cradle of the future.
Plant seeds in temporal isolation tanks germinated, grew, flowered and ripened their fruits, even as the Chronauts watched. A specimen tafelshrew fell accidentally from its exercise wheel and died, its body withering away in mouldering storm of high-speed decay. Its mate gave birth and weaned its young. Thirty days in thirty minutes.
These were the easy trials. Worse by far were the missions when the Scaphe was immersed in vortex for ninety days' isolation, to return only ninety minutes after its departure.
The Captain put out of his mind that the Scaphe should make timefall somewhen or where. Such plans were as yet an impossibility. This phase of the Time Programme was barely the equivalent of the first space flights, carrying lone Heroes strapped into tin canisters on single orbits of Gallifrey.
One day, this work would also seem primitive. Nevertheless, the prospect of a detour into the future to see where their labours would lead amused him greatly.
"Pleasing