Sakalov looked at Sianna, his expression dour and unreadable. “Go on,” he said quietly.
Sianna wanted to shut up, but some part of her insisted on going on—and unfortunately, that part seemed to be controlling her mouth at the moment. “Well, ah, sir, you are working from extremely thin and highly circumstantial evidence,” she said, “and I’m afraid you are stretching it well past its limits. I don’t even see how this theory aids you in your goal. Even if Charon Central were where you say it was, how could we ever reach it? What could we do about it? How does this help us?”
Sakalov brought himself up to his full height and cleared his throat, a bit self-importantly. “The truth is not always convenient, young lady. I cannot decide where it would be convenient to place Charon Central, and then work backwards to the proof of the theory.”
“But—” Sianna began, and then bit her tongue. Enough was enough.
“But what?” Bernhardt asked from the shadows, speaking for the first time.
Great. All she needed was to draw him into the argument. “Nothing,” Sianna said, looking down at the floor.
“I am thinking you are having something more than nothing on your mind, dear miss, and I am thinking you had best tell me what it is,” Bernhardt said, in a tone of voice that made it clear he expected an answer, not an evasion.
MRI folklore had it that Dr. Bernhardt’s English took on a slightly German syntax when he was agitated, but Sianna would have been just as happy if she had never had the chance to confirm the story.
Sianna tried to say something. Anything. “Ah… ah, well,” she began, not quite sure where she was going.
“What more do you have to say, please?” Bernhardt asked, the courtesy of his words completely missing from his tone of voice.
Sianna realised her arms were wrapped around her chest, as if ready to shield her body from a blow. She put her arms at her sides, and then behind her back. She clamped her hands together so she wouldn’t knot herself up in a pretzel again. She shut her eyes for a second, took a deep breath, and spoke, being careful to direct her words not at Bernhardt, but at the slightly less intimidating Dr. Sakalov. “Well, sir, before this, all your theories have been based on the idea that Charon Central was the absolute apex of the Charonian command hierarchy.
“You have worked from the assumption that you could derive a unique physical location that was ideally and uniquely suited to be Charon Central. Your theory was that the Charonians were utterly rational, and therefore the location of Charon Central could be established by entirely rational means. Each site would offer advantages and disadvantages, and the Charonians would balance all the pluses and minuses until they derived the optimal site.”
Sakalov cocked his head to one side and nodded. “I am impressed that you have studied my work so well, but what of it? How does that invalidate my new approach?”
“Because—because—by the criterion of unique qualification, your new location for Charon Central cannot be right. A polar control center does not offer a single ideal location, but two equally valid ones. Where would it be? North pole, south pole, or both? And if one and not the other, what is your criterion for choosing?”
That brought a low chuckle, but not from Sakalov. Dr. Bernhardt stepped forward and patted the older man on the shoulder. “I think she has you there, Yuri,” his voice far gentler than it had been. Bernhardt turned toward Sianna, and smiled, but the expression did not look as if it really belonged on his face. “I made exactly the same objection in my office not half an hour ago.”
“And I make exactly the same answer to you both,” Sakalov said. “There is a deciding variable that renders one more optimal. Charon Central is located on the south pole of the Sphere. More of the planets and Captive Suns are visible from that point than from any other on the Sphere.”
“And that just happens to be the pole we won’t see until the Earth and Sunstar complete another half-orbit around the Sphere, a small matter of a hundred years or so from now,” Bernhardt said, still with that most artificial smile in place. It wasn’t insincerity, Sianna decided. Bernhardt was just unused to smiling. Not that it mattered, but maybe if she focused on what sort of smile the man had, then she wouldn’t be thinking about how this nice chat was destroying her career.
“That is inconsequential!” Sakalov protested. “All that is needed to prove my theory is to send the Terra Nova on a course that will bring the south pole into view and—”
“Yuri, Yuri. Do you know how many requests I get a week asking—or demanding—that I send the Terra Nova to this location or that?”
“But this is—”
“Most urgent and important,” Bernhardt said, finishing Sakalov’s sentence. “They all say that. Sometimes I think that if someone sent in a request and described it as minor and trivial, that would have a better chance of getting my attention.”
“But you must listen—”
“Yes, yes, I know I must,” Bernhardt said. “That is, after all, why I am here. For you to convince me. Convince me, and I will try and convince Captain Steiger to set such a course, though after today’s news I warn you she will not be in much of a mood to listen.”
“Today’s news?” Sianna blurted out, instantly wishing she had kept her mouth shut. Shut up, shut up, shut UP! she told herself.
Bernhardt looked surprised, as if he had forgotten she and Wally were there—and perhaps he had. He looked from Sianna to Wally and back again, and shrugged. “Well, you both have the standard clearances, no doubt, and the news will be all over MRI soon enough. The Terra Nova sent a small stealthy ship out in an attempt to board a CORE. All hands aboard the stealthship were lost and the ship destroyed. Captain Steiger broke radio silence to ask if we had any ideas that might aid their next attempt.”
Sianna’s blood ran cold. Never mind for the moment that she had no clearances at all—technically, she was not even supposed to be in the sim center. That was of no consequence. Those words “next attempt.” Here they were, safely deep in the bowels of the Earth, fiddling around with meaningless questions of the whichness of what, asking each other where the enemy’s imaginary fortresses might be—and people, real people, were dying out there, in battle against the real enemy.
MRI was nothing but a bunch of dreamy time-markers far below Manhattan, but the crew of the Terra Nova was asking their advice before sacrificing themselves anew.
If that didn’t chastise a person, bring on a feeling of humility and unworthiness, then nothing would. “Do—do we have any advice to give them?” she asked.
“No,” Bernhardt said, his voice quiet and sad. He let his answer hang there for a moment, and the brief silence spoke volumes to Sianna. People are dying out there and we’re letting them down. She herself had gone in early, not to grub away at her proper work on CORE research, but to go glory-chasing after some completely meaningless thirty-seven-minute hiccup in a long-destroyed space probe’s chronometer. And to compound the crime, she had been distracted from that nonsense by the even more foolish nonsense of Sakalov’s pursuit of Charon Central.
At last Bernhardt spoke again. “But perhaps there is no need to say more about the Terra Nova. In any event, it’s quite possible that they are safer in that ship than we are here. I think, Yuri, that perhaps it’s time I showed you what I brought you here to see. I think you will see that the arrival of the SCOREs makes any discussion of what goes on at the Sphere a bit academic. We are going to have other worries.”
“SCOREs?” Sianna asked. She had heard the term go past once or twice, in the lab, but no one seemed ready or willing to explain what the acronym meant.
“Small Close-Orbiting Radar Emitters,” Bernhardt said, a bit absently. “Hmmph. Wally, I was going to operate the equipment myself, but as long as you’re here, if you could run that simulation of the SCOREs you did last week—”
“Yes, sir,” Wally said. He bent over his control panel for a moment.“ Good God, Wally had been working with Dr. Bernhardt himself? Why hadn�
��t he ever said anything about it? But Sianna knew the answer even before she was done asking herself the question. What Bernhardt said next confirmed it, even if it didn’t make her feel any better.
“Needless to say, this is all top secret data,” Bernhardt said. “If it gets out prematurely—”
“Ah, sir, excuse me,” Sianna said. Better fess up now before she got in even deeper. “Sir, I don’t have top secret clearance. I don’t have any clearances.”
Dr. Wolf Bernhardt swivelled his head about and regarded her for a full five seconds. “You don’t,” he said at last. “Most unfortunate, considering what you have heard already. What is your name, young lady?”
“Ah… Sianna Colette,” she said, her heart pounding with fear. Oh God, what was he going to do with her?
“Wally—Mr. Sturgis. Can you vouch for this person?”
“Ah, yessir. I know her. She’s okay,” Wally said as he made his adjustments. From his tone of voice, Sianna knew that he wasn’t paying all that much attention. He could have been talking about the weather—and Wally hadn’t been outside for weeks.
“Very well, Miss Colette. You have top secret clearance now. I would suggest you read and obey the regulations, or else you might find yourself in some difficulty.” That done, he cocked his head back towards Wally and the control panel. “Are you ready?”
“Yes, Dr. Bernhardt.”
“Then you may begin.”
—And the Universe of the Multisphere shifted, changed.
The Sphere itself vanished, and suddenly it was the Earth hanging in the blackness. The background stars and planets shifted their positions, and the perspective veered about until they were looking at Earth in half-phase, with the Sunstar out of view to the left. They were looking at the planet from a point a few thousand kilometres back along the planet’s orbital path. Sianna could see tiny dots hanging in space all around the Earth, the COREs, guarding the planet against the deluge of skyjunk that filled the Multisphere.
The view pulled back, getting further and further from the planet. The Moonpoint Ring came into view to the right.
There was something odd about the background of the scene. Then Sianna realised what it was—there were stars visible. Not the Captive Suns and planets, though they were there too, but points of light hanging in the firmament. “What are—”
“Those are the SCORES. Wally’s enhanced them to make them visible, of course,” Bernhardt said, his attention on the sim and not on Sianna. “In reality, they are about as dark as lumps of coal, under one hundred meters across. Fairly bright in radar frequencies, once you know where to look. We had a hell of a time detecting them with our ground-based gear. Terra Nova hasn’t been doing sky survey work, and she’s missed them so far. NaPurHab just started watching for them. But once they get this data, you can bet they’ll be looking for them. Wally, can you lose the Captives and the other objects we’re not interested in?”
Suddenly the suns and planets vanished, and only the dots of light were left. Sianna noticed they seemed to be concentrated in one quadrant of the sky.
“How long ago is this image?” Bernhardt asked.
“Ah, this is a real-time image,” Wally said. “Or close enough, really. Latest data from the automatic tracking systems. Enhanced and enlarged, of course, or we wouldn’t be able to see anything at this scale.”
“Hmmph. Backtrack thirty days, speed up the time display by factor ten thousand, and move forward to the present time,” Bernhardt said.
After a moment’s pause, the image jumped and skewed as Wally set in the new commands. Then the three-dimensional ghosts of reality settled down. The Earth’s rotation was obvious now, one day taking just over eight and half seconds. Sianna looked past the planet to the sky beyond.
Now the dots of light were smaller, dimmer, and spread out in a rough toroid of space that spanned half the sky.
But the images were moving, coming closer, converging, moving toward one point in the sky in front of Earth. The inner edges of the toroidal area converged on each other until the dots of light were moving in a loose, flattened spherical volume of space, following behind the ring. The tiny dots grew closer, brighter, and the ring moved in, still somewhat ahead of the smaller points of light.
Sianna stepped around to the Sunstar side of the simulation and watched it from there. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of the things were moving in toward Earth. It took just under five minutes for the imagery to run up to the present moment and then stop dead at the real-time position. One thing was clear from watching the displays: the objects were moving, not toward Earth, but toward the Moon-point Ring. What the devil did they want with the Ring?
“What are they?” Sianna asked. “Where do they come from?”
“As to the first, we don’t know, though we have some unpleasant guesses,” Bernhardt said. “The detection teams that spotted them called them Small COREs, because that’s what they look like and act like. That got shortened to SCOREs very quickly. As for why they come from where they do, I have an idea, but no proof. The SCOREs are too small to track easily much past the distance we have displayed here, but if you backtrack their course, they seem to come from a rough halo of space around the Sphere. Roughly speaking, Earth is looking down at the north pole of the Sphere, and the rough halo suggests—”
“These were launched from facilities around the Sphere’s equator,” Sakalov said.
“Precisely. What that means, I don’t know. Maybe they were launched from some sort of portals around the equator of the Sphere. Maybe they were launched from your south pole Charon Central site and moved Sphere-north from every point along the Sphere’s circumference. We don’t know. I might add that we have several indications that there are similar streams of SCOREs moving toward most of the Captive Worlds. We can’t tell for sure, precisely because these objects are so hard to track and detect. But we have spotted some small objects that resemble these SCOREs moving toward some of the other Captives. In any event, there is tremendous new activity in the Multisystem. We have no idea why it should happen at this moment, but I doubt it is good news for Earth.”
Sianna noticed something. There was a different class of objects coming in ahead of the others. Wally had them colour-coded red. She counted sixteen of them. “What are those?” she asked, pointing at them.
“They are different,” Bernhardt said. “Faster, larger, moving in a more direct path than the other ones. And they are rather complex in shape. We can’t tell much more than that yet, but they are certainly not the simple oblong typical of most spacegoing Charonians.”
The director stepped around to the other side of the sim from Sianna and pointed at the larger objects. “Note that these larger units seem to be leading the SCOREs in, moving a trifle faster,” Bernhardt said. “It would seem they must be in place first before, ah, other events.”
“Maybe they are a repair kit for the Moonpoint Ring,” Sianna suggested.
The director frowned. “An interesting thought. Better than anything else we’ve come up with. In any event, the SCOREs are likewise making for the Moonpoint Ring. We assume they are heading there for some sort of preparation or processing before they… well, before other events. Wally, run the images forward in time at the same rate, showing our best-guess projection.”
The ring and the SCOREs moved closer and closer to Earth. The larger objects arrived and merged, rather vaguely, with the image of the Moonpoint Ring. From that, Sianna gathered that the research teams were sure the big objects were headed for the Ring, but had no idea what they were going to do upon arrival.
“Ah, sir, NaPurHab orbits the black hole at the center of the Moonpoint Ring,” Sianna said. “What happens to it in all this?”
“We think its orbit should remain stable. But we don’t know. We have of course notified the Purple leadership, and they will be watching, I assure you. There is still some time left before there is any possibility of danger.” Bernhardt didn’t seem much interested in the problem, as if he w
ere more interested in something else than the thousands of people aboard the habitat. “It’s just about here that the first of the SCOREs will be visible to the amateur telescopes,” he said. “No hope of keeping the lid on it past then. We have between now and then to prepare for their—ah—arrival.”
Suddenly it dawned on Sianna. Calling them SCOREs had misled her—as perhaps it was meant to mislead the public. She had envisioned them merely as little brothers to the big COREs, taking up positions around the Earth.
But no, these were not COREs. Bernhardt thought they were invaders, attackers. This was the beginning of a Breeding Binge.
Breeding Binges had just been theory up to now, though there was a lot of evidence supporting the theory, much of it plainly visible on some of the closer Captive Worlds. Binges were the whole reason for the Multisystem. The Charonians needed planetary surfaces for breeding during one part of their life cycle.
The night before, she had stared at the ceiling, wondering when the Breeders would come and make use of the Earth. Now she knew.
Her mind was racing, her body bathed in fear sweat. Time started up again in the simulation, and the SCOREs and the large objects moved in toward Earth and the Moonpoint Ring. The SCOREs—the invaders, the Binge Breeders—came in, did a close pass around the Moonpoint Ring, and then turned toward Earth. They came closer and closer, reached the planet—and disappeared. For one crazy moment, Sianna felt a wave of relief. She gasped, and realised she had been holding her breath. They would vanish. Everything would be all right. She had imagined the Binge Breeders landing, crashing, tearing into the landscape, but no, it was going to be all right.
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