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doable fixes to be made all over the ship, most of them minor things that could be done almost at leisure. Koffield was in a way glad of all those dents and dings and blown circuit breakers and minor breakages that needed attention. Work kept the crew occupied, kept them from brooding on the ship ’ s near-dire circumstances.
    Services had been said over the fallen, and the dead were all safely out of sight, the six coffins in cold storage, deep in the hold of the ship. Captain Koffield had briefly considered burial in space, but it had taken very little time for him to conclude it would be very bad for morale. Normally, a burial in space happened in the emptiness between the stars, out where the dead were truly consigned to the infinite and the empty. Inside a star system, however, spaceside burials were always targeted so the coffin and corpse would burn up in a planetary atmosphere or impact into the star itself, vaporizing instantly. That was clean, and quick.
    But Neither choice was possible in orbit of a wormhole. Given the Upholder’s circumstances, the dead would either have to be left in orbit around the wormhole, where the tracking team would be forced to monitor the movements of their dead comrades, for fear of their becoming traffic hazards, or else the bodies would have to be targeted to impact on the wormhole, and be absorbed by it. But it was the wormhole that had killed everyone aboard the Standfast, and destroyed the ship as well. It was bad enough that the crew could regard the wormhole, the thing they were there to guard, as a killer. Koffield did not want their thoughts moving in that direction. Giving them cause to think of the wormhole as a graveyard as well could hardly help matters. Better the dead remain aboard, awaiting a better time and place to be consigned to the dark and the deep. He had no doubt that the Upholder’s dead would be as eager as the survivors to get far, far away from Circum Central Waypoint.
    In point of fact, Circum Central Waypoint was not central to anything, nor on any transit circuit. It had a grand-sounding name, but Circum Central was no Trior ’ s Realm, no Sirius Power Cluster Farm, with a dozen wormholes cross-linking thirty worlds. All Circum Central handled was the traffic for, and the traffic between, the new, small, and unimportant planets of Solace and Glister. There was not much traffic to handle. Circum Central wasn ’ t even, properly speaking, a wormhole farm. It was a singleton post, with but a single timeshaft wormhole. Whoever had built it, long ago, had named it for expectations of wealth and growth and prosperity that had never been realized, rather than as an honest description of what it was.
    But that was before the attack. What was Circum Central now? The scene of an invasion? But who was invading, and why? What had the intruders been after? He shoved his report pads to one side and stared sightlessly at the blank bulkhead that faced his desk.
    It made no sense. No sense of any kind. Why raid a timeshaft from the past in an attempt to reach the future.
    Settled Space was full of cryo-equipped ships that could simply wait, cruising through interstellar space as time passed. For that matter, there wasn ’ t any need for cryosleep. The intruder ships had clearly been robotic. If they had needed to reach the future, all they had to do was put themselves in storage for seventy-nine years. Why attack a wormhole and lose ninety-plus percent of your force in a needless attack? What had it all been in aid of?
    He had gone over it in his mind a hundred times, and still could see no explanation.
    And what of those acceleration rates they had recorded? The intruders had put on speed at utterly incredible rates, and had at least appeared to reach the speed of light, vanishing off the detectors as they did so, as if they had just blown through light-speed and kept going, moving so fast the trackers couldn ’ t even see them. But faster-than-light travel was