Besides, he was already done with his sandwich, and back at his work. He had already forgotten she was there. Sianna sighed and turned her back on the viewport. She sat down and got back to her own work.
Actually, her own work was a trifle on the undefined side, as Wally was doing the whole job that had been assigned to both of them. Sianna knew damned well that it would be all but impossible to pry any part of it away from him, and, worse, that the two of them working together would probably do the job less well than Wally working by himself.
Wally saw the Universe as a species of wind-up toy to be taken apart, figured out, and put back together. Once the puzzle was solved, he lost interest and moved on.
Sianna liked to think she had the imagination to find the problems in the first place, the ability to step outside and see things no one else had. She could interpret the puzzle, take the pieces Wally put together and make them into more than the sum of their parts.
But to do that, she had to at least get a look at the pieces. The hab’s databanks were already full to bursting with images and readings of all sorts. Sianna had taken on the job of looking at all of it, feeding the raw data to her skull, knowing it all from the ground up.
She fired up her terminal, called up the scope log, and started scrolling through it. More small objects of debris located, more of the Sphere’s surface mapped, higher-resolution images of Solitude. All good, important data, but none of it new, unexpected, nothing that made her ask questions.
But then something caught her eye. Not an object, but an event, about two hours back. According to the log reports, no one had reported at the time, which was not surprising, given that things were more than a little busy about the habitat.
Sianna called up a full data playback and was rewarded with the image of a brilliant flash of light, along with a hell of a lot of radio-frequency, gamma, X-ray, and infrared radiation. Sianna frowned. What the hell could have produced that much radiation all over the spectrum? A nuclear explosion? Some black hole absorbing a huge amount of mass all at once?
How big had it been? How far away? The autoscope had logged the sky coordinates, but it had no way of reporting a range.
She brought up the radar ranging data, going back to the moment when NaPurHab had arrived in-system, and cross-linked it against the coordinates for the energy flash.
NaPurHab’s radar system had been meant for use in a traffic-control system, and it had certainly done good service with all the incoming cargo vehicles not so long ago. The Purps had pressed it into service as an early-warning system against spaceborne debris, as the Shattered Sphere system seemed to be even more full of skyjunk than the Multisystem.
Like all active radar systems, the hab’s gear sent out timed bursts of radio signals. Some portion of a given signal would reflect off a target and bounce back. By measuring how long the signal took to make the round trip, radar systems could compute the precise distance to a given target. Of course, the further off a target was, and the smaller its reflecting surface, the weaker the returning signal would be.
Local-traffic control systems didn’t need to be all that powerful. The hab’s hackstaff had done their best to hot-wire their traffic radars into a debris detector, but NaPurHab did not boast the most gifted technicians in the known Universe, and they had moreover done the job in a hurry with rather limited resources.
Sianna had no idea what the energy burst had been, or whether it had come from ten thousand kilometres away or ten thousand light years. Sianna was not really expecting to get any useful data at all out of the cobbled-together system.
She certainly wasn’t expecting to be astonished one more time.
Let alone terrified.
chapter 29: Incoming
“What is our struggle with the Charonians about? That I can tell you in one word. There is something they stole from us, something we want back again. Something that has been at the bottom of every quarrel, every battle, every war in human history.
”In that one word, we fight to get one thing back from the Charonians.
“Power.”
—Wolfe Bernhardt, private signal to the master of the Terra Nova, 2429
Multisystem Research Institute
New York City
Earth
THE MULTISYSTEM
Dusk was falling, night settling over the city. Herr Doktar Wolf Bernhardt, Director-General of the Directorate for Spatial Investigations, Chairman of the Governing Board of the Multisystem Research Institute, stared down at his folded hands, at his empty desk, and faced the fact that, for the first time in years, there was nothing for him to do. At the end of the day, nothing demanded the attention and the authority of Wolf Bernhardt. And worse, much that he had done had proved to be of no use whatsoever.
“All of it for nothing, eh, Ursula?” he asked.
Ursula Gruber let off pacing back and forth along the length of the room and turned to look at her superior. “I beg your pardon?” she said.
“I said it’s all for nothing. All of the effort to rescue NaPurHab and Terra Nova. All the struggle to resupply them before the SCOREs could come and cut them off from us. All the panicked effort to get three scientists to the Terra Nova. Now Sakalov is dead, and if they are lucky, Sturgis and Colette are merely stranded with a habitat full of buffoons on the other side of a wormhole. Unless they are dead, too. And all of it based on guesses that were dead wrong, too. The SCOREs weren’t the least bit interested in Earth, just the Moonpoint Ring. All our preparations have been utterly wasted.”
“It’s not over yet, Wolf,” Ursula replied. “And there’s no question that you did save NaPurHab—or at least gave it a fighting chance. Perhaps that won’t do us much good here in the Multisystem, but the people on the habitat are still alive. If nothing else at all, your spacelift got enough propellant to them so they could adjust their flight path and make it through the wormhole. They’d have been smashed by the SCOREs or have crashed into the singularity if it weren’t for you.”
“Perhaps. Perhaps. If they even survived the passage. But now we are to lose the Terra Nova as well. What good can come of Steiger going down the wormhole?”
“A great deal,” Ursula replied. “What more could they accomplish here in the Multisystem, at lower risk than the wormhole transit?”
“I know, I know,” Wolf said. “And they may be able to learn a great deal, do a great deal, on the other side.”
“Except?” Ursula asked.
“Except,” Wolf said, “except we have utterly lost control of events. We, here, on Earth, we in this institute—you and I here in this room, have lost the initiative. Now we must merely watch from the sidelines, wait, hope that word will come.”
Ursula smiled. “There may be hope for you yet, Wolf. Not many autocratic, authoritarian leaders would be willing to admit that.”
Wolf looked to Ursula, but did not return her smile. “Indeed? So, very well, I admit it. But I find it remarkably small comfort.”
He stood up from behind his desk and turned around. He looked out, up into the sky, to where the great ship was preparing for its passage. “Now,” he said, “it is up to them.”
NaPurHab
Orbiting Solitude
THE SHATTERED SPHERE SYSTEM
“There, there, there, and there,” Sianna said, stabbing her finger down on the display screen with each word. “Debris clouds, all lined up nice and neat, one right after another. You can run a single track through all of them. And there, there, and there, bright radar images, what have to be SCOREs running with their own internal radars turned off. One flight of twelve SCOREs still fairly close in, and others further enough out that we can’t get a precise count. Each flight of SCOREs on a precise intercept course with the projected sky track you get by running a line through the debris clouds. We figure the debris is what’s left of the SCOREs that tried and failed to smash whatever is moving in on that track.”
“We can’t see it?” the Maximum Windbag asked.
&nbs
p; “Either it’s too small, or too nonreflective, or it’s using some sort of stealth technique,” Sianna said. “And I don’t think it’s stealth.”
“What for why not?” Eyeball asked.
“That thing’s moving in a straight line right for the SCOREs that are moving to intercept it,” Sianna said. “It’s not trying anything evasive or tricky, just barrelling right through. Besides, it’s obvious the SCOREs can see it, even if we can’t. It’s not hiding. It just doesn’t care.”
“How they see it?” Windbag asked.
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Sianna said. “Obviously some sort of sensor we don’t have.”
“What’s more important is where the object is heading,” Wally said.
“Wherzat?” Windbag asked.
Sianna pointed at the display again. “Right there. Straight for the wormhole we came through. In other words, straight for Earth—and Earth’s Sphere—on the other side. It’s coming for us, Charonians and humans.”
“Say what?”
“We’ve got to assume this—this object is what’s been scaring the hell out of our Sphere,” Wally said. “We’ve got to assume this thing, whatever the hell it is, killed the Sphere here. It’s going to try and kill the Sphere in the Multisystem. And that will kill Earth.”
Windbag stared at the screen and nodded thoughtfully. “You know,” he said, “this isn’t good.”
Terra Nova
THE MULTISYSTEM
Dianne Steiger sat down in the pilot’s control station and started working through her checklist. Normally, the bridge team sat at their consoles, fed commands to the computers, and watched the computer fly the ship. Not this time. Too many uncontrolled variables. Too many unpredictables and imponderables. Computers could react faster than humans could, of course, but the ship’s computers could not think, and quick thinking might be necessary to get them through this. If something went wrong, she would have to be ready to take over fast.
It had been a long time since Dianne had flown the Terra Nova manually, and she was more than a little nervous. But she was a pilot first and foremost, trained to fly spacecraft long before she had been called upon to command a crew.
She powered up the navigation display and confirmed the flight path. Manual thruster controls on-line. Auxiliary engines at go. No need for main engines on this one—just a few light taps on the thrusters and the auxiliaries and they would be on the beam.
It wasn’t necessarily a one-way trip, of course. The folks back on Earth were learning a lot about manipulating the Charonian command system. NaPurHab’s passage showed that the folks at MRI knew how to open and shut a wormhole. Sooner or later, humans might well be able to shoo the COREs and SCOREs out of the way and pass freely through the wormhole to whatever lay beyond. Ursula Gruber’s cryptographic and linguistics staff seemed quite confident about the matter.
But confidence was no guarantee. After all, the Terra Nova had cast off from Earth five years ago, eager to explore the Multisystem, confident of return, never dreaming that she would not make planet-fall in all that time.
No. They had to assume this was to be a one-way trip. No looking back.
The relay satellite had been launched. It was programmed to perform highly precise station-keeping, keeping in exact alignment with the wormhole aperture. If all went well, they would launch an identical relay on the other side. The two relays were equipped with radio and comm lasers. In theory, they would be able to contact each other whenever the wormhole was open. With a fair amount of luck, Earth and the Terra Nova might be able to retain at least some sort of intermittent contact.
Dianne checked the countdown clock. Almost time.
Just a pilot, she told herself. You’re just a pilot moving a hunk of iron around the sky. Just get it where it’s supposed to be. Don’t think about all the people aboard, or that you’ve got their lives in your hands. Don’t think about what you might see on the other side, or how you got into this mess. Just fly this thing.
The clock moved down, moving too fast and too slow, both at once, the way all countdown clocks did. But then the numbers got to zero, and it was time. Back on Earth, some computer sent the commands to the Ghoul Modules, and the wormhole bloomed into being, dead ahead.
Dianne fired the engines, and the Terra Nova moved in.
chapter 30: Rubicons
Terra Nova
TRANSITING THE WORMHOLE
Gerald MacDougal watched the wormhole getting closer, surprised at how calm he was. He should have been terrified, his pulse pounding, the sweat thick on his body.
And yet he was not. Was he serenely confident they would make it? Was he so certain they were doomed that he had given himself up to death with calm and dignified resignation? Or was he so terrified that he could find no other reaction than absolute, blanket denial?
As the blazing un-blue-white circle of the wormhole aperture swelled forward, rushing toward them, like a wall in space they were just about to slam into, Gerald braced for the impact, his instincts telling him the ship was about to crash into the barrier that was not really there.
Gerald glanced up at the status displays. Dianne was flying at a much higher velocity than NaPurHab had used. Maybe that was wise. No sense remaining inside any longer than necessary. Or maybe it was downright suicidal.
But then they were in. No turning back. They had crossed their Rubicon; they were committed. The ship hit the un-blue-white, and dove into the wormhole. Gerald felt a sudden thrill of excitement. At last, at long last, the Terra Nova was living up to her name. She was off in search of New Worlds indeed.
Dianne Steiger drove the ship in, her whole attention, her whole soul, focused on the job of getting her ship in and down and through and out. The ship bucked and jittered as the complex tidal and gravitational forces inside the wormhole grabbed at it. Dianne was flying by the seat of her pants, the joystick in a death grip. Easy now, she told herself. No heroics. Just get it done. But hell, getting done would require heroics.
A secret part of her knew that, and gloried in it. She had been here before, after all. She had been in space when the Abduction struck, just inside the zone that the Charonian wormhole had swallowed up, flying a little cargo shuttle. A hundred meters further out from Earth and she would have been left behind in the Solar System. And she had brought her ship home, back to Earth, in a spectacular crash landing at Los Angeles Spaceport she had no right to have survived. She had lost her left hand in the crash, and had long since forgotten that her new one was a sprint-grown bud-clone. It didn’t matter. Because she had lived. She had beaten them all.
The secret soul of a certain kind of pilot lives for the thrills it does not get. It wants to fly to and past the ragged edge of disaster, to bring its craft through the greatest of perils, and yet escape. Pilots who flew winged craft back from orbit wanted to come to a smooth rolling stop right on the centreline, knowing that, by all rights, they ought to be part of the gooey dead slime in a fiery crater a kilometre short of the runway.
Pilots of that sort live to cheat death. Dianne had tasted that forbidden thrill back then, and God forgive her but she wanted it again. And she was getting it now.
Back then, she had flown through a wormhole because she had no choice. The Charonians had had it all their way. But now, today, was her chance to use their own damn wormhole to save her ship, the ship the Charonians were trying to kill.
So here she was again, up against a wormhole, the sweat standing out on her forehead, a strange, fierce anger in her heart, battling the forces that wanted to destroy her ship.
They were going to have to try a lot harder if they were going to kill a ship with Dianne Steiger at the controls. She could feel it. They were going to make it!
There. There, dead ahead, was the exit from the wormhole. Closer, closer, closer—
A shuddering thump and bump, and they were through. The wormhole snapped out of existence behind them, and they were there.
Wherever they were.
&
nbsp; Ring of Charon Gravities Research Station
Plutopoint
THE SOLAR SYSTEM
“We picked up the signal twenty minutes ago,” Sondra told the Autocrat. “Same pattern as with NaPurHab. The words TERRA NOVA TERRA NOVA TERRA NOVA coded into the wormhole activation command.”
“Interesting. Most interesting,” the Autocrat said. “It seems reassuring to know our friends on Earth were willing to send a habitat and a ship through.”
“Somewhat. Not all that much. Autocrat, once again, I must ask you to reconsider. You are a head of state. Do you really feel it is wise for you to leave your people, your nation behind? The odds are very good that we will die on the other end, or be stranded there.”
“But you are going,” the Autocrat said.
“It’s my job,” Sondra said. “I couldn’t send anyone in my place if I were unwilling to go myself.”
“My feelings exactly,” the Autocrat said. “I do not think any more need be said.”
Sondra nodded. “All right,” she said. “I know when I’m beaten. Not that it matters, of course.”
“Why not?” the Autocrat said, a little startled.
Sondra grinned, delighted to finally find a break in the man’s armour. She couldn’t resist pressing home her advantage. “You forget,” she said, “we’ve never done this before. You can’t go through a door you can’t get open. The only way this ship is going anywhere is if our team can successfully establish a stable wormhole link to the proper coordinates and tuning frequency on the first try. What do you think our odds are?”
The Autocrat smiled. “Actually,” he said, “I’d say they are rather good. And they can only get better if your friend Dr. Chao manages to get here. Do you think he’ll make it?”
Sondra frowned. “I hope so, Autocrat. I sure as hell hope so. Because I know Larry. If he doesn’t make it, he’s sure to die trying.”
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