Hunted Earth Omnibus

by Roger MacBride Allen

  But none of that mattered now. NaPurHab had run out of choices long ago. A thousand things could go wrong, a thousand ways they could all be destroyed. Whether the hab crashed into the event horizon, was smashed by the SCOREs, was ripped apart by tidal stress, or was destroyed by a clumsy pilot at the helm, the result would be the same. She could get this exactly right, and they could still all get killed. Somehow, that made her feel better.

  They were skewing to port just a tad. She tweaked the att jets a trifle and took a deep breath.

  “Tidal forces becoming significant,” Wally announced, and, as if on cue, there was another low moan as a support shifted its load.

  Eyeball tried to ignore her fears. Get it right. No excuses, no second chances, no apologies. An alarm bell sounded behind her, and then another, and another. But they hadn’t held an alarm drill since Eyeball had joined the nav team. Hull breach? Power short? The galley out of coffee? Never mind. She had to pilot this thing and there was nothing she could do. Let the others worry about everything else. Someone cut the alarms and silence returned, at least for a moment. Closer, closer. She could see the motion now, without any effort, see the wormhole coming closer, swelling wide. Or was the worm-hole aperture actually expanding? A sudden, hard jolt punched at the habitat, and the main lighting system cut out. A sort of rippling shudder moved over Eyeball, and she grabbed at the yaw controls, fighting to keep the hab on the right course and heading, even as the massive tidal forces strained to tear it apart.

  Closer, closer, the inner depth of the hole now visible. Eyeball looked up to see how far off the Moonpoint Ring was from here— and saw nothing but the not-blue-white nothingness of the wormhole wall. They were inside it, swallowed whole by the hole, or maybe swallowed hole by the whole.

  But they couldn’t be in or through, or over, or across—not yet. No. Eyeball could see nothing on the other side. The seconds felt like hours. A new, deeper, shuddering vibration grabbed at the hab. Something wrenched at them, pulled at them, flared across them.

  Eyeball looked up again, ahead, toward their destination. An enormous blood-black shape, far too large to be seen as a whole, swallowed up half the horizon, its huge surface smashed and pitted and scored. And there, dead ahead, a wizened little ruin of a world seen in half phase hung over the huge black-red form beyond.

  The Naked Purple Habitat moved forward, down into the wormhole, toward the strange worlds on the other side—

  —And then they were gone.

  chapter 27: Pandora and the Tiger

  “It’s been said that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I’ve often wondered if there is a direct relation, or an inverse one, between the amount of knowledge and that of safety. There are times, I’m quite sure, when a little knowledge is dangerous—while a large amount is positively fatal.”

  —Selby Bogsworth-Stapleton, entry in personal journal

  Dreyfuss Memorial Research Station

  The Moon

  THE SOLAR SYSTEM

  Larry Chao waited until everyone else had gone to bed before he went to see her, until there was no chance of being interrupted or overheard. He had thought it all out very carefully, and it seemed to him that he needed Marcia MacDougal. He could do the flight alone, yes. But that was not the point. Well, not all of it, anyway. He had personal reasons to get back to Plutopoint, no question—but it was also his duty to go there. If they were detecting radio signals, Plutopoint and the Ring of Charon were where the action was. That was where he was needed. Get back to Pluto, and then…

  No. Don’t think past that, he told himself. Don’t get ahead of yourself.

  And he had the ship to get him there, get him there fast, if they would let him use her. The Graviton, the gravity-beam ship. The test program was nearly complete. They would have started piloted tests in another week or so anyway. If he could get flight clearance, the door would be open. Sondra Berghoff would back him, and provide the gravity beams for the flight.

  But no one would let Larry Chao do a solo flight. Not if he had learned anything about people these past few years, and come to understand that he was close to halfway around the bend as it was.

  But with Marcia MacDougal—sensible, clear-headed Marcia MacDougal, expert in Charonian visual symbolism—as part of the deal, it would work. He could sell it.

  But first he had to sell it to her. And he thought he had a way to do that, too. Maybe not the straightest, purest way—but a way. And if Larry had it figured right, it was even fairly honest.

  He got to the door of her room and knocked. There was a brief pause, and then a bump and a thud or two. The door came open a crack, and Marcia peered around the corner. “Larry,” she said with a yawn. “What brings you around at this hour?”

  “A proposition,” Larry said, and suddenly the words were spilling out of him. “A proposition I think you’re going to like. The odds on it are a little long, and a lot of things have to go right, but—”

  “But what?” Marcia said, her expression halfway between puzzled and alarmed. “What?”

  Larry paused, calmed himself. “Marcia, it’s long odds and a lot of guesses, but… but I think they’re going to be able to use the ring to punch open a wormhole link, and I think they’re going to do it soon, very soon. When they do, they’ll send a ship through and… and…”

  “And what?” Marcia asked.

  “And how would you like to see your husband again?” Larry asked.

  The Ring of Charon Plutopoint

  Computers, Sondra thought, are good at what is known and stays the same. People are good at what changes and becomes different. Plodding through the pattern-recognition results files would have told her that much, if she hadn’t known it already. The Ring of Charon’s detectors had recorded dozens and dozens of wormhole passages by now. The computers had recorded reams of data about each and every event. The pattern-recognition software had massaged all the data, finding differences and similarities between the various events. The software had come to a rather unremarkable conclusion about the wormhole events: they were all pretty much the same.

  But it was in the variance, the spread of values, the outliers, that Sondra hoped to find more useful data.

  In theory, the team at the Ring now had enough tuning information to tune the Ring to the resonance patterns themselves, pump enough power into the Ring, and open up a wormhole link to the target location.

  In practise, things were not so easy. There were hardware problems, for starters. Tech crews were working around the clock, finding ways to reconfigure the Ring so it could in fact form a wormhole link.

  Sondra had confidence in her people. But hardware wasn’t the only problem. Sooner or later—probably sooner—the Ring would be capable of opening a wormhole link to whatever was on the other side of those tuning parameters.

  But did they want to open such a wormhole? Large masses were being moved through a wormhole somewhere, but Sondra was nowhere as convinced as Larry Chao that Earth was involved. In her opinion, Larry was reading too much into the evidence. He wanted it to be Earth, and therefore it was.

  All that being said, she’d be damned glad to get Larry the hell back here, if he could finagle the powers-that-be to let the Graviton make the run. She’d send all the gravity beams they wanted to get Larry back here. He might be one of the few people around who could actually give her some worthwhile advice.

  But leaving Larry to one side for the moment, even if Earth were on one side or the other of the wormhole link, opening a link to the same target point might not be such a good idea. Did she, Sondra, really want to open a door that might let monsters like the Adversary loose into the Solar System?

  If and when they got a hole open, what would they do? Merely look through it? Send a probe, or a ship? The Charonians knew how to make safe wormhole links—but did the Ring of Charon team? Might there not be, say, some unexpected source of radiation formed by the wormhole link? For that matter, could they be certain that the Ring of Charon itself would b
e safe? Might there not be some unexpected danger that could damage or destroy the ring? Granted, there were no such known dangers, but that really wasn’t much comfort. Mother Nature loved surprises.

  They would, therefore, take it slowly. They would slog through all the data, looking for the tiny clues, the microscopic hints, that might add up to some sort of idea about what was on the other side. Then she would decide.

  She would decide. That was a startling thought. No one else had authority over the Ring of Charon, and the Ring was the only game in town so far as gravities was concerned. The Autocrat could try and impose a decision, with the bully-boys in his crew there to serve as enforcers, but the Autocrat seemed serious about keeping the Ring out of his jurisdiction.

  Good God. She would make the call on what might be the most important decision for humanity since the Abduction. Should she leave Pandora’s box closed, keep all the evils safely on the other side? Or was this the Lady or the Tiger? Was Larry right that Earth was in mortal danger even now? Suppose that danger was real, and there was something the Solar System could do to stop it? Leaving the worm-hole shut could doom the Earth. Or opening the wormhole could bring the same danger to the Solar System.

  Or suppose opening the wormhole now, in a hurried, unconsidered rush, would bring some other danger home to the Solar System—or wreck the Ring of Charon beyond repair, and thus destroy the last hope of some future contact with the Earth?

  Or suppose that this was it, the last best chance to use the Ring? Suppose this wormhole activity ceased, and the Charonians cut the link or destroyed it, and the Ring of Charon never, ever, detected another usable tuning frequency?

  And she had to decide.

  She was nearly at the last of the gibberish interpretations the pattern-matchers kept offering up, when something that seemed orderly scrolled past the screen, almost too fast for her to see it.

  She frowned, and moved the scrollbar back. Forty zeroes and ones run together, repeated three times. The pattern matcher had broken the string out in various ways. Two twenty-digit numbers, four ten-digit numbers, eight five-digit binary numbers and so on.

  Five digits… Not a very useful length. The largest number you could express in five binary digits was 11111, or 31. So why did the computer bother to break it out that way?

  And then it hit her. Because of 26. Because 26 was smaller than 31, and you only needed 26 numbers to express a certain rather useful symbol set…She started working in her head—but no, this was no time to drop a digit and get confused. She punched a few mindlessly simple commands into the pattern matcher and the answer popped up on the screen.

  And all of a sudden, her decision was much simpler.

  Terra Nova

  Approaching the Moonpoint Ring

  THE MULTISYSTEM

  Dianne sat at the captain’s chair in the briefing room as Gerald MacDougal stood by the wall screen, using the wall controls to stop the playback again.

  He locked onto one frame of the images sent back by NaPurHab, a slightly blurry picture of a small grey world lit in half-phase, hanging over a cracked and pitted red-black surface that filled the background. What looked to be a SCORE was visible toward the right edge of the frame. “Once they entered the wormhole, we only got about ten seconds of video and other data before we lost the signal,” he said. “Earth didn’t do any better. Nowhere near as much as we’d hoped for, and that’s the single best image.”

  “Why so little data?” Dianne asked. “Five years ago, when the Saint Anthony went through the wormhole from the Solar System to the Multisystem, we got hours and hours of data.”

  “They had time to set things up for a proper line-of-sight relay straight through the wormhole,” Gerald said. “NaPurHab didn’t manage to launch a relay, or else the relay failed immediately. Without a relay, we had to have direct line-of-sight with NaPurHab to get a signal—and the moment the aft end of the hab entered the wormhole, the signal was cut off.”

  “How so?”

  “Think of the wormhole as a long thin tunnel. If the Terra Nova had been lined up with one end of it, we could have seen all the way down it, and we would have picked up NaPurHab’s signal as the hab beamed it out of the tunnel. But we’re well off to one side of the wormhole—and the moment they entered it, the tunnel wall cut off the radio link.”

  “So the lack of data doesn’t mean they were killed instantly, or anything like that?” Dianne asked.

  “No. All the telemetry was more or less normal up until the moment of cut-off. We were getting a lot of indications of structural stress, but that was to be expected, and it was well within tolerance.”

  “So this is the best we have,” Dianne said, getting up to look at the video frame. She stared at it for a long time, searching it, trying to pull meaning out it—and succeeding. This told her things. Including things to do.

  “So there’s a planet in front of a Sphere like ours. One clear frame of video can’t tell us much past that,” Gerald said, after the silence had dragged on for a bit.

  “The hell it can’t,” Dianne said. “There are lots of dogs not barking in here.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Read your Sherlock Holmes,” she said. “When a dog that always barks stays silent, that’s a clue too.”

  “Ah. Okay. So what don’t you see here?”

  “Shadows,” Dianne said. “No multiple shadows, no illumination at all in the darkened hemisphere of that little world.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Only one light source. If that red-black is the surface of another Sphere like ours, then it should have two or three dozen Captive Suns orbiting it, the way ours does. Any planet there would have seven or eight captive stars shining on it at any given moment. And yet there is only one light source here. That tells me this Sphere has lost nearly all of its captives.”

  “Okay, I guess. What else?”

  “The surface of the Sphere. It’s banged up as hell. Lots of impacts on it. It’s not protecting itself against debris.” Dianne stabbed a finger down on one of the larger features. “And that looks like a wide-angle crack going all the way through the surface of the Sphere. It’s much darker than the bottom of the other cracks and craters.”

  She shifted her finger to point out a pair of straight lines crossing at right angles, almost out of the frame toward the bottom. “And that looks a hell of a lot like one of the ‘latitude’ lines intersecting a line of ‘longitude’ on our Sphere, seen from damned close-up.”

  Gerald stared at the image himself, stepped back from the screen for a minute to get a better look. “You’re right,” he said. “I was just seeing that as two long straight cracks, but you’re right. Hey wait a second.”

  Gerald thought for a minute, then turned to the table and grabbed a datapack. “We’ve got the optical data on the cameras NaPurHab was using,” he said. “Let’s see. Factor in the focal length of the lens, assume those lines are the same width as the ones on our Sphere, and that gives us a scale. Get the apparent width of the lines and we’ll have a range to the Sphere in the picture.” He measured the line width ami punched the numbers into the datapack. He looked at the answer, then ran the problem again. “I don’t believe it,” he said. “It couldn’t be that close.”

  “How close?” Dianne asked.

  “Twenty-two million kilometres,” Gerald said. “NaPurHab came out twenty-two million kilometres from the surface of a Charonian Sphere.”

  “A dead Charonian Sphere,” Dianne said. “A Sphere that can’t hold onto its stars, that can’t prevent impacts on its surface. And to hell with being close to the Sphere. Remember what Sturgis and Colette figured out, that the Lone World here, in our Multisystem, was Charon Central, the brains for the whole operation.”

  She stabbed her finger down on the video image again. “That is the Lone World, Charon Central for the system NaPurHab is in. It is orbiting the Sphere directly. It is the place from which the Charonians controlled this system. Maybe it’s the Last Wo
rld in that system, too, the only one left.

  Gerald looked at his captain with something between fear and excitement in his eyes. “It makes sense,” he said. “I think you’re right.” He looked at the image again, and worked it all through, nodding to himself. “Yes,” he said. “It’s got to be.”

  “So,” Dianne said, “There we have it.” Suddenly she knew what to do. “So now what?” she asked.

  “I beg your pardon?” Gerald asked, turning away from the image.

  “What next?” Dianne asked again, leaning in close, her eyes intent.

  “We were supposed to rendezvous with NaPurHab. Now what?” If Gerald saw the same answer, then there was at least some rational basis for it.

  Gerald’s eyes lit up. “I think,” he said, “that we should give serious consideration to proceeding with the rendezvous—at an alternative location.”

  “You thought it was too dangerous for the Purps to try the passage. You said so yourself. Why would it be safer for us?”

  “The circumstances are different. Because they went through, we know there’s another side. And we know there is something over there that can kill Spheres. That’s knowledge we need.”

  “But we don’t even know if the Purps survived. They could have been destroyed the moment after we lost contact.”

  “The Terra Nova can take more punishment than they could. And, we can’t survive here that long ourselves. Beating one CORE was a triumph. We can’t make a career out of it. Sooner or later, one of them is going to get us.”

  “We could shift our trajectory away from Moonpoint, and regroup,” Dianne suggested. “Get well away from all the planets and all the COREs and SCOREs, take a month or a year to think it through.”

  “No,” Gerald said. “What would wasting time change, except that the Ghoul Modules could shut the Moonpoint Ring down again? We go in after them. That Last World alone ought to tell us more about the Charonians than anything else we’ve ever seen. A month or two ago we were hoping to learn more by boarding a CORE. Now, maybe we have the chance to explore the mind of a Charonian Sphere. Compared to exploring an unguarded Command Center and a Sphere, what is there for us here?”