I would like to offer my thanks to a number of people who have been tremendously helpful on this book.
Thanks first of all to Charles Sheffield, to whom this book is dedicated. He read and critiqued The Ring of Charon, but it goes far past that. He deserves a lot more than a book dedication for all his kindnesses to me over the years. He is a good man, and a good friend. Read his books.
To Debbie Notkin, my editor, who rode herd on me and did that tricky thing editors must do: she forced me to be faithful to my own vision of the book, without imposing her own. She got the book focused and moving.
To my father, Thomas B. Allen, who zeroed in on the cuts that needed to be made, substantially improving the book you hold in your hands. Read his books too.
To practically everyone at Tor Books—Ellie Lang, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Heather Wood, and Tom Doherty. They did more than publish this book. They got behind it.
And finally, thanks to the others who read over this book and kept me honest—my mother Scottie Allen, and my friend Rachel Russell.
One last thing. This book is subtitled The First Book of the Hunted Earth, and yes, there will be others. But this book, and the next, and all the books I have ever written or will ever write stand alone. You’ll never pick up a book of mine and not be able to understand it without reading 37 other titles. That’s a promise.
—Roger MacBride Allen
April, 1990 Washington, D. C.
About the author
Roger MacBride Allen (born September 26, 1957) is an American science fiction author. He was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut and grew up in Washington, D.C., graduating from Boston University in 1979. His father is American historian and author Thomas B. Allen.
Also By Roger MacBride Allen
Series
Allies and Aliens
The Torch of Donor (1985)
Rogue Powers (1986)
* Allies and Aliens (1995) collects The Torch of Donor and Rogue Powers
Hunted Earth
The Ring of Charon (1990)
The Falling World (TBA)
Caliban
Isaac Asimov's Caliban (1993)
Isaac Asimov's Inferno (1994)
Isaac Asimov's Utopia (1996)
Chronicles of Solace
The Depths of Time (2000)
The Ocean of Years (2002)
The Shores of Tomorrow (2003)
BSI Starside
BSI Starside: The Cause of Death (2006)
BSI Starside: Death Sentence (2007)
BSI Starside: Final Inquiries (2008)
Corellian (Star Wars)
Star Wars: Ambush at Corellia (1995)
Star Wars: Assault at Selonia (1995)
Star Wars: Showdown at Centerpoint (1995)
Stand-alone Novels
Orphan of Creation (1988)
Farside Cannon (1988)
The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III (1989), with David Drake
Orphan of Creation (1991)
Supernova (1991), with Eric Kotani
The Modular Man (1992), accompanying the novel is an essay by Isaac Asimov "Intelligent Robots and Cybernetic Organisms."
Historical
Time Capsule: The Book of Record (2010) with Thomas B. Allen
Mr. Lincoln's High Tech War (2008) with Thomas B. Allen
Roger MacBride Allen
THE HUNTED EARTH OMNIBUS
Book II
The Shattered Sphere
© 1994
Dedication
to
Eleanore Maury Fox— Home is where she is
Dramatis Personae
The Autocrat of Ceres. The absolute ruler of Ceres, and de facto hegemonic leader of the entire Asteroid Belt. By tradition, the holder of the office renounces his or her name and all links to his or her previous life upon entry into office.
Joanne Beadle. Operations technician at Kourou Spaceport, South America. She acts, rather reluctantly, as Wolf Bernhardt’s personal assistant during his stay there.
Dr. Wolf Bernhardt. Head of the U.N. Directorate of Spatial Investigation (DSI) and Director of the Multisystem Research Institute (MRI).
Dr. Sondra Berghoff. Director of the Ring of Charon Gravities Research Station at Plutopoint.
Canpopper Notworthit. A rather inefficient cargo handler on NaPurHab.
Dr. Selby Bogsworth-Stapleton. A “Leftover,” that is, a citizen of Earth stranded in the Solar System by the Abduction. The only trained archaeologist on the Moon, she heads the exploration of the Lunar Wheel and the Wheelway Tunnel system.
Sianna Colette. A young woman, orphaned as a teenager by the pulsequakes of the Abduction. As the book opens, she is a graduate student working at the Multisystem Research Institute (MRI) in New York.
Dr. Larry O’Shawnessy Chao. Formerly a youthful and very junior researcher at the Gravities Research Station, Pluto. Chao accidentally activated the huge Charonian being, the Lunar Wheel, and thus inadvertently set in motion the events leading to the Abduction. As the book opens, he is working on the Graviton project.
Lucian Dreyfuss. Once a technician at the Moon’s Orbital Traffic Control Center, he was captured by the Charonians in the Rabbit Hole. He is presumed dead.
Eyeballer Maximus Lock-on. A rather moody and forceful woman, she is head of navigation and guidance on NaPurHab.
Dr. Ursula Gruber. Director of Observational Studies at MRI and a key adviser to Wolf Bernhardt.
Dr. Gerald MacDougal. Second-in-command of the Terra Nova. He is married to Marcia MacDougal. A born-again Christian, he is a trained exobiologist.
Dr. Marcia MacDougal. Once a planetary engineer on Venus Initial Station for Operational Research (VISOR), now a researcher in Charonian symbology. She escaped from the Naked Purple Movement in Tycho Purple Penal as a teenager. She returned to the Moon when VISOR was moth-balled. As the book opens, she is based at the Lunar North Pole and involved in research into Charonian language and behaviour there.
Wally Sturgis. An expert in computer modelling. As the book opens, he is employed at the Multisystem Research Institute.
Ohio Template Windbag. The Maximum Windbag, or leader, of the Naked Purple Habitat (NaPurHab).
Tyrone Vespasian. Director of the Lucian Dreyfuss Memorial Research Station (a.k.a. “The Rabbit Hole”) at the Moon’s North Pole.
chapter 1: Boarding Party
Others called it the Adversary, but it had no name for itself, or even a sufficient awareness of self for a name to be meaningful. The distinction between individual and group was as meaningless to it as it would be to a volume of water that happens to be divided and then recombined. The Adversary could divide itself, and merge itself, to whatever degree it chose. But the Adversary was, ultimately, one.
It lived in the warm, slow, soft recesses of heavy gravity, of gravity fields powerful enough to slow time down to a reasonable rate of speed. As seen from out in the cold and dark distortions of fast-time space, the Adversary was deep inside a truncated wormhole aperture, seemingly unheeding of the outside universe.
But it was not so, even if the slowed passage of time inside the ruined wormhole might make it so appear. It was aware of its surroundings, even if it was slow to react to them.
And it had detected a vibration in the fabric of the gravitic links. Some time past, as measured in the cold and dark of fast time, there had been a series of disturbances. As a series of lightning flashes might briefly illuminate all of a darkened landscape, and so serve to guide one across it, the gravitic vibrations made much that was hidden suddenly visible. The Adversary could see the path to new sources of power, of energy, illuminated across the expanses of wormhole links and fast-time space.
Slowly, oh so slowly as seen from fast-time space, it began to move.
“The Terra Nova was, of course, built to be the first starship. In the parlance of the time, she was a sleep-ship. Her passengers were meant to be frozen before departure, and to sleep away the long years and decades between the stars, t
hen thawed and decanted on arrival at the target star system. However, budget restraints forced the mothballing of the great ship a few months short of completion. She was never launched toward Alpha Centauri, as intended. Instead, she sat in a parking orbit of Earth.
”As chance would have it, the Terra Nova was swept up along with Earth when the planet was abducted into its new surroundings in the Multisystem. The Terra Nova was immediately set to work studying Earth’s startling new environs.
“The ship’s designers named her for a famous British exploration ship of the early twentieth century. No doubt they would have chosen a name of better omen had they examined the history, rather than the myth and romance, surrounding that namesake vessel. That Terra Nova, Commander Scott’s ill-fated command vessel on his fatal trip to the South Pole, was a rather ordinary ship, a whaling vessel pressed into Antarctic service, quite ill-suited to exploration or Antarctic conditions. As a result, she found herself in the greatest of difficulties on many occasions, putting her crew in great and needless peril. Her unsuitability was a contributing factor in the expedition’s disastrous failure.
”Our Terra Nova, on the other hand, was built for the sole purpose of exploration—but found herself forced into virtually every other role instead. By turns a mothballed hulk, a military craft, a rescue ship, a lifeboat, and many other things besides, she earned fame for doing all the things she was never meant to do.
“In one of the great ironies of the history of exploration, the ship built to search for and colonise new worlds trillions of kilometres from Earth instead found herself among any number of new and fertile worlds a mere stone’s throw away from Earth—and yet she dared not approach any of them, let alone take up orbit or send down landers.”
—Earth, in the Multisystem: A Chronicle of Exile, Jose Ortega, Central City Press, 2436
Aboard the Terra Nova
Deep Space
THE MULTISYSTEM
June 4, 2431
“Hijacker now five kilometres from the Close-Orbiting Radar Emitter.” The tracking officer kept up her steady, monotone reports. A half million kilometres away, the long stern chase was drawing to its close. Terra Nova might have built and launched Hijacker, but the mother ship was nothing but an observer now. There was nothing she could do to help. Captain Dianne Steiger stared at the main bridge screen, at the huge lump of rock that was the CORE, straining her eyes for the dim, tiny dot that was Hijacker, the frail, tiny ship that had departed the Terra Nova nearly a month before.
Her hands gripped the arms of her command chair hard, her fingers dug deep into its fabric. She longed for a cigarette, but she had smoked the last one on board two years before. The CORE and Hijacker might be hundreds of thousands of kilometres away, but that didn’t make the little ship’s mission any less important. Hijacker’s crew had to succeed. They had to, or else it was time to change the Terra Nova’s name to the Flying Dutchman and be done with it.
The damnable COREs, the endless thousands of COREs, had prevented Dianne’s ship from approaching any planet for the last five years. The Terra Nova could not even return home to Earth, for Earth had been surrounded by its own swarm of COREs.
But this CORE was out in the depths of space, nowhere near a planet, all by itself, travelling between worlds on some unknowable task of its own. Maybe, just maybe, this one the men and women of the Terra Nova could take on.
“Hijacker now three kilometres from the CORE,” the tracking officer reported.
Dianne stared harder at the screen. Ah, there she was, just coming into view of the long-range infrared cameras. Even with all the enhancers cranked up all the way, Hijacker was nothing but a dim brown dot crawling into the picture frame. Staring at the image made Dianne’s eyes swim. She blinked to clear her vision, and found she had lost track of the hard-to-see blob of color. Then the Artificial Intelligence system, the Artlnt, running the display system threw a yellow target circle centred around Hijacker. Much better.
No need to throw any such circle around the CORE, of course. The alien ship was the size of an asteroid, and all too easy to see. In fact it was an asteroid. Perhaps even calling it an alien ship was a bit misleading. Dianne glanced to her left, where Gerald MacDougal was sitting, staring at the screen himself.
Gerald always argued, quite plausibly, that the CORE was as much crew and captain as it was ship, one semi-organic whole. Certainly the CORE was alive. More or less. Unless you chose to regard it wholly as a machine. Dianne sighed and gave it up. Nothing was ever clear when you were dealing with the Charonians. And even if they were the most deadly enemy that humanity had ever faced, and even if the Charonian’s utter failure to notice that humans existed was the one thing that kept humanity from being destroyed, there was something damn mortifying in the arrogant way the Charonians steadfastly ignored everything human. Cockroaches got more attention from humans than humans got from Charonians. Sometimes Dianne thought it would be a victory just to get the other side to acknowledge the existence of humans.
“Any change in radar emissions?” Gerald asked. Any shift in radar could be a warning that the CORE had spotted Hijacker. The Terra Nova was not putting out any radar herself, but the ship’s passive detectors were tuned and focused, watching the CORE’s emissions for any changes caused either by the CORE’s beams being deflected or by the CORE changing its active search pattern.
“No, sir. No change in radar emissions, no target-induced shift in outgoing beam. No new activity that we can detect.”
That was good news, or at least the absence of bad news. CORE stood for “Close-Orbiting Radar Emitter.” This one was not in close orbit of anything at the moment, but it sure as hell was emitting radar like crazy.
The radar was meant to detect any object large enough to threaten whatever planet the CORE happened to be protecting. If it detected a threatening meteor, the CORE would shift course and smash itself into the incoming rock, knocking the rock off course, if not smashing it to bits.
Such protection was necessary. Earth’s new home, the Multisystem, was full of spaceborne debris and clouds of dust, thick enough in places that comm lasers would not work. Terra Nova‘s lasers had not been able to punch through to Earth for weeks. The ship had been in radio silence for all that time as well, for fear of attracting the CORE’s attention.
The best estimate was that there was between fifty and five hundred times as much skyjunk as in the Solar System. Dianne shifted nervously. As if she needed something else to worry about, something else she could do nothing about. There was no real way to know that the Solar System had survived, and plenty of reason to fear that it had not.
But best to focus on the problem at hand. Counting the Earth, there were at least 157 planets in the Multisystem, and every last one of them was surrounded by a cloud of COREs. The COREs were a first-rate defence against asteroids, but the damned things went after ships and landing craft just as relentlessly, swarming out to smash into any craft whose projected course intercepted a planet. The Terra Nova dared not get within three hundred thousand kilometres of any of those 157 planets. There was no danger of starvation, of the ship dying, of course: Terra Nova was designed to cross the dark between the stars, and Earth could still send the occasional outbound resupply ship. The COREs did not seem to care about objects moving out from a planet—most of the time. Something like half the outbound supply cargoes made it through.
No, survival was not the issue—the question was one of the ship’s usefulness, of its meaning. What was the point of a starship that could not get near a planet? Terra Nova had long since learned all she could about the Charonians from 300,000 kilometres away.
But Hijacker might be the key. If the small, stealthy ship could land on this CORE undetected, if her crew could make use of the tiny scraps of information that were all humanity knew about the COREs specifically and the Charonians generally, it was just possible they could take over the CORE, learn how to control it. Then maybe, just maybe, they could find a way to make all t
he COREs back off, find a way that would allow the Terra Nova to send landing craft to explore some of those worlds. Earth could launch new spacecraft, and humanity would have a chance to rebuild the orbital facilities that had been destroyed.
Maybe, just maybe, getting a prise crew aboard a CORE would be the first step toward humanity’s reclaiming control of its destiny. The second stealthship, the Highwayman, was nearing completion, down in the Terra Nova’s massive holds. If this first attempt worked, they would be ready to capture another CORE almost immediately. If the first stealthship worked.
Hijacker was supposed to be invisible to radar, built with every possible trick of stealth technology that the crew of Terra Nova could manage. But no object could be made completely invisible at all detection frequencies, and the closer Hijacker got to the CORE, the more likely it was that the CORE would spot her. In fact, never mind radar. If the CORE used visual or infrared, it would be all over. There was no evidence that COREs had any sort of infrared or visual sense—but there was no proof they didn’t, either.
Hijacker was painted matte black to make her hard to spot visually, but there was damned little they could do to hide the fact that Hijacker was warmer than empty space. After all, if the Terra Nova could track her on infrared from a range of a half million klicks, there had to be some chance that the CORE could spot her three klicks away.
Hunted Earth Omnibus Page 45
