Hunted Earth Omnibus

by Roger MacBride Allen

  And Selby was kneeling beside her, putting her arm around her, drawing her up to stand, leading her back the way they had come. “Come on, love. We found a small empty side cavern a few hundred meters down the way. We’ve set up a pressure bubble and a field office there. You and I need to talk.”

  chapter 3: Penance and Remembrance

  “There have been any number of attempts to portray Larry Chao as a maniac or a lunatic, as a destructive monster who went out of control. The truth is much simpler, and much less satisfying to those who need villains to blame for the ills of the world: the Larry Chao behind the myth was simply unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The real Larry Chao is not a monster, but a man.

  ”A good man. That is the first thing that must be said about Larry Chao. He is a good man who accidentally committed the greatest crime in history, a good man who is guilty of nothing and responsible for everything. No one could possibly have dreamt that a gravity beam of the type he fired could do any more harm than shining a flashlight. Who could have imagined it would serve as an activation signal for a hidden alien black hole generator?

  “The second thing to say is that he was a victim of forces he could not control. Fate, or history, or chance—whatever name you want to give it—saw to it he was the one who activated the experiment. I was in the room, I saw him do it, I approved of his action, and yet history has left no black mark on me. No matter how you divide up the guilt, or no matter what you do to demonstrate that it was wild, bizarre chance, the fact remains that it was Larry O’Shawnessy Chao who pushed that button.

  ”Sooner or later someone was going to discover how to shape the force of gravity as Larry did. But that inevitability is meaningless. There is no escaping the reality that it was Larry who actually did it. No escape for us—and certainly none for him.“

  —Dr. Sondra Berghoff, statement for Qravitics Research Station Oral History Project, Charon DataPress, 2443

  Armstrong Research Hangars

  Central City Spaceport

  THE MOON

  Abduction Day

  Larry O’Shawnessy Chao marked the dismal anniversary of Earth’s disappearance by struggling to ignore it. Rather than commemorate the day, he had tried to do some tests on the Graviton, but he hadn’t been able to concentrate on anything significant. So he had wasted his time doing a studious and careful job on an absurd and trivial task. No real purpose could be served by rerunning the standard electro-response testing regime yet again on yet another servo-claw from yet another long-dead Charonian scorpion robot. But the work had kept him focused, kept him absorbed.

  Playing around with bits and pieces of the half-living, half-machine corpses of dead Charonians wasn’t much, but it was all he was capable of at the moment.

  He tried to concentrate on the claw, tracking out its bioelectronic circuits with painstaking care, for all the world as if he expected to find something meaningful there. For all the world. Now there was a poor choice of words.

  Most days, recently, it had not been too bad. But today. Today, everything seemed to remind him of what had been. Today was different, no matter how hard he told himself it was not. Today, he could not keep the thoughts at bay.

  Five years.

  Five years since the Charonians awoke and swallowed Earth up, pulled the home world down a wormhole.

  Damn it all, admit it to yourself, at least, he thought, savagely jabbing at the claw with a logic probe, pulsing far too much current through its contacts. The claw whirred and clacked in response, its razor-sharp teeth nearly snapping the probe in two.

  Larry pulled the probe back and forced himself to calm down, to clear his mind. All right then. Allow the thoughts inside your own mind. Even if you can’t say the words, at least dare to think them. How long since you have even allowed yourself that much! They all said it wasn’t his fault, of course, but they could not know. They could not possibly understand.

  Larry dropped his tools and kneaded his hands nervously. But just as it always did, the sight of his hands moving in that nervous gesture made him think of Pontius Pilate, washing his hands before the multitude. He pulled his hands apart, lay them down on the workbench, stared straight ahead at the blank wall. After a while, he found that, quite involuntarily, his hands were gripping the edge of the bench, holding on tightly, as if he feared that he would be ripped away from this time and place.

  Dare to think it. The thought echoed insistently in his mind with a force that would not be denied, an intruder that would not depart until it was acknowledged.

  All right, then. Accept it. Today it is five years since I, Larry Chao, lost the Earth. There. He had thought the words. Five years ago, he had configured the Ring of Charon as a gravity laser and fired it. Five years ago he pressed a button and awoke the slumbering alien invaders, who in turn stole Earth and set to work tearing apart the surviving worlds of the Solar System. It was of microscopic consolation to Larry that he had then played a major part in stopping that destruction and preventing the Solar System’s complete disassembly.

  Five years of a loss immeasurable, to all people for the rest of time.

  Never mind. Let it go. Do not let it engulf you. Larry picked up his tools and set to work again. The half-machine, half-animal alien claw was dead, its chitin-plastic skin drying up, turning brown, flaking off. The fierce pincers lay still and useless in front of him.

  He was alone in the workshop. On this day, of all days, no one had the heart to do any work. Any number of remembrances and ceremonies were being held in or on every one of the half-wrecked worlds of the Solar System. Solemn figures were no doubt standing at attention on the Lunar surface right now, staring at Earthpoint, the blank spot in the sky where once the Earth had shone, where now there was nothing but an Earth-mass black hole, far too small to see.

  But Larry knew he was not welcome at such events, not really. Few murderers, even those who killed unintentionally, were invited to memorial services for their victims.

  Others might recall the mother world, speaking wistfully of the cool breezes, the tang of salt air, the wonder of walking unprotected under an open sky. Such could not be for him. To attend would be to rob the others of their chance to mourn undisturbed.

  He picked up the probe and set back to work on the claw, for there was nothing else he could do, down here inside the corpse of the enemy. The Lunar Wheel had been a living thing, after all. Larry had helped to kill it, too. And Lucian Dreyfuss. His blood was on Larry’s hands as well. They had never found his body. No doubt it was still down there, somewhere.

  No. Do not think about that. Do not think of those days. Every human being tried at some time to forget those days. Forgetting was a vital survival skill.

  Focus on the work. Try not to think. The claw. Finish the claw. Then go on to the sensory-cluster carapace. Study them well, seek out the hidden answers.

  He had spent much of the last years in this place, sifting through the world-girdling wreckage of the Lunar Wheel, picking over the corpse of the half-creature half-machine.

  It was dreary work, arduous, painstaking, endless, and Larry welcomed it. There were always tests to run, data to examine, debris to test. There was always a task at hand, a job that offered him escape from the churning knots in his heart. Work was his penance, his act of contrition.

  Besides, somewhere inside the unimaginably huge Wheel, there had to be some sort of clue. There had to be. A scrap of data code, a bit of information that had not been scrambled in the final battle. The search teams would find something, sooner or later. And he would be on hand to help analyse it, decode it, take it apart, find the clue, the answer.

  He longed for a whisper in his ear that could tell him how to find the Earth again.

  Find the Earth. That was the only act of penance that would do any good whatsoever.

  Assuming, of course, the Earth was still alive when they found her.

  He applied the logic probe to the claw again, and this time it jerked spasmodi
cally and threw itself off the table.

  ◊ ◊ ◊

  Sometime after midnight, when it was no longer Abduction Day, Larry started to feel a bit better. He was still too keyed up to sleep, to rest, but somehow his mind was clear again. He could see his way forward. He could look up from his meaningless tests and meticulous fiddlings and see more than his own failures. He could think on the things he had actually accomplished since then. He put his things away, tidied up the workbench, and walked out into the dark vastness of the main hangar. He paused by the entrance and slapped a wall switch, and light swelled up to fill the hangar, a cathedral of gleaming walls and shining equipment—with a small and rather scrappy-looking vehicle dead in the middle of it.

  She didn’t look like much, but then a lot of the great pioneering craft of the past hadn’t either. The Wright Flyer, Armstrong’s own Eagle, the Demeter, even the Terra Nova. None of them were ever beautiful, except to engineers. Larry Chao would be more than content if the Graviton were ranked with those names. She was the reason Larry had come back to the Moon.

  But she still didn’t look like much. She looked like something cobbled together out of spares and optimism, as well she might. Her hull and superstructure came from a surplus asteroid mining ship, her lift rockets were off an old cargo ship, and no one even knew what ship half her old flight hardware came from. Nor was it entirely comforting to know that no one knew exactly how she worked. But that was one of the drawbacks to blackbox engineering.

  The Graviton was a short, squat cylinder sitting on four landing docks. She was battleship grey, and as disreputable-looking a hulk as you could ask for.

  But she was also the first gravitic-powered ship ever, riding a beam of gravity power controlled by the Ring of Charon. Her rocket engines were intended to do no more than get her well away from a planet before the gravitic system took over. Mission rules were very clear on that—the gravity-beam system was not to be activated until he ship was at least a million kilometres from any planet. It seemed highly doubtful that there were any other Charonians out there who night be roused by a gravity beam—but no one on the Graviton earn, least of all Larry, wanted to take any chances.

  The Graviton’s propulsion system used enough hardware taken from dead Charonians that one or two wags had suggested that she be christened the Graverobber, but it might be years, if not decades, before humans could build their own g-beam hardware. The Charonians had used gravity-beam systems to propel asteroid-sized bodies around the Solar System at incredible velocities, and there were plenty of dead Charonians about from which to take equipment.

  Even Larry, an expert on gravities technology, was not certain how some of the Charonian hardware worked. It was enough, for now, that it did work, and had worked in the unpiloted test flights. The Graviton had taken the gravity beam from the Ring of Charon and accelerated up to fifty gravities—while retaining a standard Lunar gravity field inside the main cabin. They were nearly ready for test flights with humans aboard.

  Larry looked up at the ugly little ship. It wasn’t going to help get the Earth back. But at least it was work, and valuable work. Somehow, just looking at her made him feel better. He blinked, yawned and stretched. He didn’t feel exactly rested, but he had the feel of being sharp, of being ready. Sleepless nights did that to him now and then. He had had plenty of chances to find that out in the past few years. He felt like working.

  Larry stepped to the data display system and checked the work log. He was scheduled to do the modifications to the wave-coupler resonance chamber next. Might as well get on with it. Larry returned to his workshop, collected his tools, and went aboard the little ship. He set to work on the job, happy to be doing something worthwhile. He barely noticed as the rest of the work team came in.

  His pocket phone rang at about eleven A.M. He set down his tools, pulled it out, and switched it on.

  “Chao speaking,” he said.

  “Larry?”

  That was all it took for Larry to recognise the voice, and his stomach turned to a block of ice. Marcia MacDougal. Not someone who would call just to chat. “Yes, this is Larry Chao. Hello, Marcia.”

  “Hello. Good to hear your voice. Listen, Larry, I’m calling from the North Pole.” The North Pole. To anyone else on the Moon, she would have said Dreyfuss Station. But not to Larry. She couldn’t say that to Larry. “Something has come up and, well, you might say we want your opinion on it. Is there any chance that you could get up here in a hurry?”

  “It’s important?” he asked, but it wasn’t really a question. Marcia MacDougal wasn’t the type to ask big favors without explaining why. Unless it was important.

  “Yes, it is. Very.”

  Larry found he could do nothing but stare at the splitter housing on the resonance chamber. It needed re-alignment. He’d have to log that in.

  He shut his eyes and let out a sigh. Maybe Marcia could hear it, maybe she couldn’t. He didn’t care. He felt angry, frustrated, hounded. He wanted to shout at the phone, throw it against the wall, tell her to go to hell. But he knew he would not, and that was part of what was making him angry. He would agree to go, would do his duty, would do whatever they asked, because he knew they would not ask for what they did not need. Because they would not ask him if anyone else would do.

  “I can catch the 1600 hopper,” he said. “No problem.”

  “Thank you, Larry. Thank you very much. I’ll be there to meet you.”

  “Good,” Larry said. “See you then.”

  “Until then,” Marcia said, and the line went dead.

  She hadn’t said a damned thing about whatever it was. And that only made Larry more certain of one thing.

  He wasn’t going to like it.

  Lunar Wheel

  Beneath Moon’s Surface, North Pole Region

  Eight hours after she called Larry Chao, Marcia MacDougal was wondering if calling him had been such a good idea. He had taken the sight of the un-corpse very well. A little too well. He had yet to show the slightest outward reaction, unless an impassive expression was his way to register shock. Now they were back in the improvised office Selby’s team had set up in a chamber just down the Wheelway from where Lucian was.

  She watched impassively as Selby poured Larry Chao a stiff three fingers of scotch and handed him the glass. Larry took a long hard gulp and winced at the taste. The distilleries here just hadn’t gotten the hang of it yet. Scotland was sorely missed on the Moon, if any part of Earth was.

  “Lucian Dreyfuss,” Larry said, sitting in the operations bubble a hundred meters from where the undead man lay. “Lucian Dreyfuss. You brought me up here because you solved the Dreyfuss mystery.”

  “Yes, love, we did,” Selby Bogsworth-Stapleton replied, her cheerful tones utterly unconvincing. Neither Selby nor Larry seemed to have much else to say, and Marcia couldn’t think of anything herself.

  Marcia stood, leaning one-shouldered against the wall of the field office, watching Larry closely. She knew Larry slightly, nowhere near well enough to guess how he would deal with this nightmare. Marcia was an expert in analysing Charonian data and imagery, but she never had understood people that well.

  And right now she wished, devoutly wished, that she were anyplace but here, down here in the Wheel, watching a neurotic Brit pour cheap bar scotch down a man who had earned his nervous breakdown. But maybe, just maybe, this was the first step on the long road that would get Earth—and her husband Gerald—home.

  Selby poured herself a drink and then gestured with the bottle, but Marcia just shook her head no. Larry took the bottle from Selby, though he hadn’t finished his first drink yet. He held the bottle close to his body, as if it were some sort of shield. None of them seemed quite ready to speak.

  Larry sat there, still in his suit, his helmet off, as Selby bustled about, getting her own suit off, trying to pretend everything was fine. Larry emptied his glass and then poured himself another. It was hard for Marcia to watch him. She found herself staring at a brownish splot
ch on the wall just over Selby’s desk.

  At last, Larry seemed to decide they were going to have to talk this thing through. “Is there any way to get him out of that thing?” he asked.

  Selby sat down, stared at him for a minute, drummed her fingers on her desk, then knocked back the rest of her own scotch in one gulp. She stood again and started pacing the office. At last she spoke. “We don’t know. But there’s more to it than just getting him out.”

  “What do you mean?” Chao demanded. “He’s in there. Can’t you open that thing up?”

  “Certainly,” Marcia replied. “We’ve run tests on small samples of the material he’s in. We can chip it away, or melt it off, or dissolve it. But then what?”

  “We give him a decent burial, of course!” Larry replied.

  “Except he’s not dead, love,” Selby said. “Not so far as we can tell.” She reached across the desk, took the bottle back from Chao and poured herself another drink. She stared at her glass as she held it in both hands. “Not bloody much we do know for sure, really. But it could be us opening that thing up that kills him.”

  “Wait a second,” Larry said, looking from one woman to the other. “I’m not clear. Is he dead, or isn’t he?”

  “We don’t know,” Marcia said. She pulled a chair up and sat down, close to Larry. “To be honest, I don’t even know if that’s a meaningful question. I’ve been studying Charonian symbol systems for five years, and I haven’t spotted anything that suggests they make any distinction between living, unliving, and dead. The closest they come is ‘on’ and ‘off.’ ”

  “What are you saying?” Larry asked, fighting to stay calm.

  Marcia shook her head and held her upturned palms in the air, a gesture of helplessness. “I can’t answer your question. He could be either living or dead. Or it could be that he has been… been taken by the Charonians to such a degree that there is no such thing as Lucian Dreyfuss anymore, and asking if that object out there is his living or dead body would make as much sense as asking how deep is sunshine. That body is in as close to a state of perfect stasis as I have ever seen. I’d be willing to bet his last meal is still half-digested in his stomach, that his beard and fingernails haven’t grown a millimetre. I bet that if we went down to the cell structure, we’d find there has been no decay, no change in energy state at all.