The Landers used a sort of reactionless gravitic propulsion that allowed them to travel fast, and they had made a good start of their work before the people of the Solar System sent the Saint Anthony through the wormhole. The Anthony, using a tight comm beam aimed straight through the wormhole, had transmitted a tremendous amount of information back and forth between Earth and the Solar System before a CORE smashed into the Anthony, cutting the link with the home system.
Then the wormhole link itself shut down, the Moonpoint Ring on the Multisystem side of the wormhole stopped functioning as well and all hope of further contact with Earth was lost.
The best guess for what that meant—and the most hopeful explanation—was that the people of the Solar System had managed to send a self-destruct command through the Charonian communications system, killing all the Solar System Charonians. In any event, something had killed the Moonpoint Ring here in the Multisphere and cut the wormhole link.
But suppose the Charonians had cut the link for their own, unknowable purposes, and then proceeded to disassemble the Solar System at their leisure? No one on Earth had any way of knowing. It was an article of faith, and nothing more, that the Solar System survived.
No sense in being gloomy, though. Sianna sat up a little straighter, blinked, and shifted in her seat to get a bit more comfortable. The Solar System was still there. It had to be.
The images told a horrible story. The dust clouds around Mars, the horrible damage done to Saturn’s rings, the chaotic disruption of Jupiter’s weather patterns.
Either there were different breeds of Lander for each planet, or else every Lander had the ability to adapt to any kind of world. Mercury, Venus, and Mars all had suffered Landers on their surfaces. The Landers had proceeded to tear up the planetary surfaces and propel them into free space.
The Martian satellites had been completely destroyed. The Asteroid Belt was in chaos—many of the asteroids had been disguised, dormant Landers all along. Once the disguised Landers awakened, they launched themselves to the attack. Most headed straight for the major worlds, but some set to work attacking other asteroids, everything from nameless, numberless hunks of rock forty meters across right on up to Ceres itself.
Jupiter’s Red Spot wasn’t there anymore, nor was much of the planet’s banding system. The Landers had disrupted the planet’s weather system, setting up artificial spin storms that accelerated Jupiter’s atmospheric gases past escape velocity. The Jovian moons were savaged as well. Saturn and its satellites were in as bad a shape or worse, with the added tragedy of the ring system’s destruction. At the time Anthony had died, Landers were reported moving for Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. All the worlds were under attack.
Except one, said a tiny voice inside Sianna’s head.
Well, yes. There was an exception. One world went untouched. But that was so obvious that no one ever gave it any thought.
The Moon.
What was that old saw about exceptions proving the rule? Sianna had never really understood that one. But maybe at least the exception could tell her something about the rules.
No Lander had ever moved on the Moon. Even when the Multisystem Sphere had started sending its own Landers through the wormhole to support the attack on the Solar System, they had all headed for the other worlds. None had made the mere 300,000-kilometre trip to the Moon.
The standard explanation for that was that the Moon had been pretty well infested with a Charonian presence as it was—after all, the Lunar Wheel was there, sixty or so kilometres down below the surface, circling right around the Moon from pole to pole.
Why would the Charonians attack one of their own, as it were? The explanation was close to self-evident. But that was not enough for Sianna. Not this morning. Something about it jangled in her head, teased at her. It was part of the puzzle, another hint coming at her from her own subconscious. Let it come. Let it come.
One thing she was able to establish as she slogged through the Saint Anthony data: the thirty-seven minutes were real—or at least the SA thought they were. Every time-stamp on the data from every source aboard the probe showed exactly the same time discrepancy—37 minutes, 23.43 seconds to be precise.
With that settled, she needed to see one other thing. She had seen it many times before, of course. But that whisper inside herself told her to look at it again, look at it now, for it was part of the whole.
The Saint Anthony had transmitted one image, along with all the others, of an event no human had ever witnessed. It was a moving three-dee image, a holographic movie, transmitted by the Multisystem Sphere through the wormhole into the Solar System and then intercepted by comm workers on the Moon. Indeed, it was the first Charonian imagery ever decoded. She punched it up and watched it run.
A massive Sphere, the color of old dried blood, hung in the sky, spinning slowly. Faint lines were etched into its surface. They looked like lines of latitude and longitude.
Suddenly, the Sphere’s rotation began to wobble, skewing about more and more erratically. Two spots on its upper surface began to glow in a warmer red, and suddenly flared up and flashed over into glare-bright white. The flare was over as soon as it began. Two blinding-bright points of light swept out of the Sphere’s interior and vanished out into space. The Sphere itself was left behind, tumbling wildly, with a pair of massive, blackened holes torn through its surface.
The ruined thing vanished and was replaced by the original image of a whole Sphere, rotating steadily and smoothly on its access. The wobble set in again, the flashover happened, and the two glowing dots rushed away. The original intercepted message had looped over and over again, repetition perhaps being the standard Charonian way of emphasising something.
Back when they had first intercepted and decoded the image, no one in the Solar System had the faintest idea what the image could be. Now everyone knew. The Sphere in the image was a Dyson Sphere, identical to the one that ruled the Multisystem. There could be no doubt of that.
Equally certain, the data transmitted by the Saint Anthony showed that all the Charonians in the Solar System had plunged into frantic, hasty activity the moment the image arrived, as if it were a warning of coming danger. That interpretation was clearly anthropomorphic. Humans might read the image that way, but would Charonians? What did the image mean? Was it a prediction of what was to happen to this Dyson Sphere? Was it a warning of what might happen? Was it an image of some other Dyson Sphere?
Or was the smashing of a Sphere good news, somehow—the cosmic equivalent of a huge egg hatching? That seemed damned implausible, but no one knew. And what were the two things that flew out of the Sphere?
Likewise puzzling was the apparent rotation period in the image. The Sphere in the image spun at about three rotations per minute. The Multisystem Sphere had a rotation period of about 1.3 standard years. If you assumed the Sphere in the image loop rotated at the same speed and worked the time scale out, then the events displayed in the thirty seconds of imagery had taken something like six months in real life. That made sense at the scale of the Multisystem Sphere. Scale the image loop up to the physical size of the real Sphere, run it at the same speed as the image loop, and the Sphere would be rotating at something over light speed. Most analysts believed the rotation could best be explained as evidence that the image was stylised in some way. That seemed plausible, if a trifle pat.
But the image itself fit. Fit into what, Sianna did not yet know, but it fit. The more Sianna stared at the endlessly repeating destruction of the Shattered Sphere, the more sure she was that the imagery held a clue to whatever it was she felt herself on the verge of finding.
But what the hell was she looking for? She was beginning to think that her subconscious already knew the answer, whereas she barely knew the question.
Sianna did not feel herself to be on the best of terms with her subconscious: it seemed to her that it often made her work to get what it already had. It was going to make her stumble her own way toward the inspiration that would set i
t all free. The clues, the knowledge, were inside her head, but her subconscious was going to make her find the stimuli, the images, the words, that would bring it all to the fore. So, how best to give her subconscious a poke?
Wait a second.
Wally. Sianna blinked at the screen and the images in it. She had been staring at the loop of imagery, the Sphere smashing, the two objects flying out of it, over and over again for ten minutes without seeing it. She shut her eyes and afterimages of the dying Sphere danced behind her eyelids. Sianna leaned back in her chair, opened her eyes, and looked up at a blank spot in the ceiling. Wally.
Something Wally had been talking about, something that whispered at the bottom of her skull. A hint, a guide toward an idea. Something that prodded her toward whatever it was she was looking for. His Charon Central and her thirty-seven minutes. Could the two be linked, somehow? Or was she just grasping at straws?
She turned toward where he had been, half-expecting him to be in the chair, staring into space. Then she remembered him leaving. She was getting as bad as he was.
She got up out of her chair, stretched, and rubbed her eyes. Something Wally said. All right, go find him, and get him to say it again. Wally’s cubicle was just six doors down. She stepped out into the hallway and walked over. He had the door to his cubicle shut. Wally, it seemed, didn’t have much problem with enclosed spaces. Sianna knocked, but got no response. She tried again, but still nothing. Either he wasn’t in there or else…
She opened the door and sighed to herself. He was there all right— more or less. Wally sat slumped over in a blown-out old recliner he had unearthed somewhere, his body settled down in the chair so that his knees were higher than his head. Wally was completely unaware of where he was—and that was just as well, considering the shape the room was in. It was as messy as Sianna’s cubicle was clean. Empty food containers overflowed the recycle bin. Papers were stacked everywhere, in no apparent order. The light seemed dimmer in here, somehow. It smelled a bit mouldy.
Wally was oblivious to all, clearly off in his own world, thinking about who knew what. He stared off into space, eyes locked on some unseen image. Hell and damnation. Now if she said anything, she would be interrupting him, breaking his train of thought—and his thoughts were valuable things.
But she had to break in. She was close to something. She could feel it. Wally did not have the knowledge, but she knew there was something he could say, something he could tell her, that would make it all clear to her. Maybe it didn’t even matter what he said. Her subconscious was telling her his words would hold the answer, and therefore they would.
“Wally,” she said. “Wally. Come on.” She reached out a careful, gentle hand and gave him a nudge.
Wally jumped a bit, startled, and looked about in bewilderment for a moment. “What? What?”
“Okay, Wally, you win. Show me what you have. Let’s see what Sakalov’s dreamed up this time.”
chapter 8: Wheels Within Wheels
The Adversary ventured, somewhat reluctantly, fully out into fast-time space. There were certainly benefits to be had, gains to be made, here in the cold, flat Universe outside the wormhole web. But it was, nonetheless, a most unpleasant place to be.
But no matter. It would not have to stay here long. There was no need to lose precious time and energy searching for its prey.
It had a good, solid lock on the wormhole link that had betrayed itself with those bursts of sympathetic vibration. Something, somewhere, had gone through a wormhole in such a way as to set off remarkably powerful vibrations.
An easy transit back toward the dead system it had left behind, the dead system where last it had fed. The trivial challenge of forcing the wormhole open, the brushing back of whatever pathetic defences its prey could muster—and then the Adversary would kill and feed on the energy so obligingly stored up by its prey. Stored up by the Sphere.
Simulation Center
Multisystem Research Institute
New York City
The Sphere hung perfect in the night, glowing brick red in the darkness, strong and solid. The fine cross-hatching etched in its surface like tidy lines of latitude and longitude added to the sense of serenity and order. All was as it should be, all was under control.
Sianna walked a bit closer, brushing past the lightfleck of a Captive Sun, walking straight through holographic projections of several planets, all but microscopic at this scale, until the Sphere was right in front of her, a meter from her face. She had to admit it was impressive. Wally did indeed do good work.
“We have the whole Multisystem mapped into the simulation now,” Wally said with obvious pride. “All the Captive Suns and the known planets, of course. But also every known Charonian installation and object, all the way down to the COREs.”
Sianna had seen other sims of the Multisystem, of course, but she had never seen a full run of a full three-dee animated sim—and this was one of the best.
“What sort of detail can you get?” she asked.
“Well, it varies, of course,” Wally replied. “Some things we know to twelve decimal places, and others we’re just guessing at. The Terra Nova has done good long-range mapping surveys of the closer planets and good spectroscopic and mass studies of pretty much all the Captive Suns. The most distant Captive Worlds and a few of the Captive Suns that are behind dust clouds we don’t know so well. And of course we don’t have completely reliable masses for a lot of the objects in the Multisystem—just apparent masses. Our only way to measure the mass of a body is by measuring the movement of bodies near it. From that we get a measure of gravity, and from there to mass. Back in the Solar System, it was a straight conversion, cut and dried. Here, we have to guess what is a straight, ordinary gravity field and what is an artificial field imposed by the Charonians.”
Sianna nodded. “But what about the Sphere and its behaviour? How good is your detail on that?”
“Not so good,” Wally admitted. “We, ah, have to fudge a lot on that.”
No surprise there, either. The Sphere was a completely artificial object. How the hell could you determine which motions were the result of natural forces and which were deliberate action? You could not derive information about either mass or density from, say, the orbits of the Captive Suns, for the Suns’ orbits made no sense whatever. The Sunstar, about which the Earth revolved, orbited the Sphere at the same radial rate, and thus with the same orbital period, as Captive Sun Fifteen—even though CS-15 was a billion kilometres closer to the Sphere, and exactly 180 degrees ahead of the Sunstar.
Sianna found the Sunstar, and then CS-15, in the simulation. CS-15 was always invisible from Earth, of course, hidden behind the bulk of the Sphere. The Terra Nova had spotted it and reported back.
She found her way around other parts of the simulation. Captive Suns Seven to Eleven were at varying distances from the Sphere, but they were spaced exactly ninety degrees apart from each other, and shared an orbital plane forty-five degrees away from the Sunstar’s.
And there, CS-4, -5, and -6. The three stars shared their orbit, spaced a perfect 120 degrees apart from each other. Other sets of suns were likewise lined up like beads on a string, orbiting in impossibly perfect alignment.
Some of the arrangements of stars seemed sensible enough, in that they kept the Captive Suns out of each other’s way. Others were completely inexplicable. Maybe the stellar orbital arrangements simply appealed to the Charonian sense of aesthetics.
The worlds that orbited the Captive Suns were arranged by equally mysterious criteria, but they were not Sianna’s concern right now. She had asked Wally to show her the Sphere. And he wanted to show off his latest handiwork.
Wally knew everything—more than everything—there was to know about simulation modelling, and absolutely nothing about anything else. He almost never left the campus, and didn’t even go aboveground that much. He supposedly had an apartment topside somewhere, in Morningside Heights, but his cubicle was his real home; that and a series of cots
scattered around the labs.
All he cared about, or paid any attention to, was his work, the problem he was called upon to solve, the simulation someone asked him to create. To Wally, nothing but his simulations were real.
Wally had showed off some of his previous triumphs to her now and again. She had stood where she was right now, and watched real-time, highly detailed recreations of dinosaur mating dances, seen the Moon born in the impact of a Mars-sized object on the proto-Earth, seen imaginary “fast-life” creatures in invented environments evolve at the rate of a generation a minute. Sianna could almost understand why the real world wasn’t of much interest to Wally. If his simulations were that intense, if life in this tank had the hallucinatory, fever-dream, hard-edged sense of being more real than reality, how could anyone expect him to deal with—or be much interested in—the ordinary world?
Math department legend had it that Wally did not find out that the Earth had been abducted by the Charonians until six months after the fact, and only then because he was asked to design a simulation of the Multisystem’s gravity-control system. He went from a steadfast belief that the rest of the faculty were pulling yet another elaborate practical joke on him directly to a steadfast acceptance and an utter lack of interest in the new situation. It did not affect him personally, therefore it did not exist.
Until now, of course. He had to simulate it now, and therefore reality affected him. A rather inside-out way of looking at the world.
Sianna stood there a moment longer, allowing herself a grudging admiration of the Multisystem’s might and grandeur. The glowering Sphere, the Captive Suns gleaming bright and perfect against the inky blackness of the dust clouds, wheeling about the sky in their forced, artificial orbits, shining yellow jewels imprisoned in a setting of terrible beauty and ponderous strength. The Captive Worlds, gleaming dots of blue-green life and light in the darkness, the ruination of their surfaces invisible at this scale. It was beautiful, in its own horrible way. She felt a deep pang of guilt in her gut for admitting even that much.
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