The Shattered Sphere the-2

by Roger MacBride Allen

Aboard CC43

  Deep Space

  The cargo ship fired its attitude jets again, even as the main engines continued to fire at maximum thrust. Dr. Yuri Alexandrovich Sakalov felt his tired old body being rattled about like a pea in a pod, despite the best efforts of the restraint system. It did not matter. True, if he survived, he would be covered with bruises from head to foot. But he was not going to survive. If there was any subject on which he was expert, it was the behavior and abilities of the Close-Orbiting Radar Emitters. And if a CORE decided to hit a ship, no amount of maneuvering was going to save it.

  Yuri Sakalov tried, in the midst of the thundering chaos, to think through his life, as it ended. He had regrets, many of them. Things he had done, and had not, women he should have loved, mistakes he should not have made. And yet. And yet.

  He was just about to die trying. Surely that counted for something.

  The ship lurched suddenly, the engines cut out for a few seconds, and fired again. Sakalov frowned. What was the point of all these wild gyrations? It could not gain them anything but a few seconds of futile respite.

  Soon now. He knew it would happen too fast for him even to be aware of it. The multi-megaton mass of the CORE would be moving faster than a bullet when it struck. There would not even be time for pain when it—

  The Guardian smashed into the target, this time half-expecting another undetectable impact. But this time the Guardian struck a large mass moving at high velocity. Not enough to kill the Guardian, of course, or even to do it significant harm, but the impact was violent enough to stun it, confuse it, knock it off course.

  Huge explosions ripped through the target, engulfing the Guardian in a shockwave of shrapnel and gas and heat and light that dissipated almost immediately. Debris of all sizes and descriptions tumbled through the sky.

  And suddenly, where there had been two large bodies moving through space, now there was but one, surrounded by a cloud of wreckage.

  Though still disoriented by the force of the impact, the Guardian felt pleased with itself.

  It had destroyed an agent of the Adversary.

  Or at least, so it thought.

  Nineteen

  CORE Feelings

  “Gerald MacDougal and I had another argument concerning the nature of the Charonians tonight. (What else of comparable importance is there to talk about? Know thy enemy, and all that.) Gerald says we must be extremely wary of any tendency to consider any particular Charonian as an individual. Better to think of the COREs and Singularity Rings and Carrier Drones and other forms as different castes of bees or ants than as different species. Some of the MRI theorists say the Charonians are less individualistic than ants.

  “I am not so sure. I have spent years observing and tracking various Charonians, and I have concluded they have a bit more individuality—a bit more personality—than a line of ants going after bread crumbs.

  “Gerald has his own theories, needless to say. He says that the Charonians don’t really seem to have the idea of the individual, but that this does not prevent them from being individuals. He says it is a mistake to regard the idea of the individual as being some sort of opposite to the idea of the group.

  “I pointed out that one person apart is qualitatively, as well as quantitatively, different, from a group of people, and it is well established that group behavior in humans is fundamentally different from individual behavior.

  “He said that each member of a given group, while conforming to group behavior, can behave as an individual at the same time. Five thousand people walk north along the crowded avenue, and five thousand more walk south, all more or less managing to give way and step aside and cooperate so everyone keeps moving. Yet each of those ten thousand cooperative beings regards himself or herself as a single person, wholly unaware of cooperating, each intent on his or her own business.

  “Nor is the cooperation perfect. People run into each other, arguments flare up if too many people want to get in the same door at the same time. Groups compete within themselves.

  “But the cells in the human body likewise cooperate and compete. Sometimes they react at cross-purposes to each other. Sometimes they will even attack each other. Certainly that is individual behavior. But is the cell aware of it?

  “A talk with Gerald always leaves me questioning assumptions I never knew I had. In a way, it’s a shame he never entered a seminary. He would have given the lecturers headaches.

  “Groups and individuals. Another one of those damn dichotomies that seem utterly clear until you start looking closely at the borderlines. Do my cells know they make up a human being? If they do know, do they care?

  “Maybe the Charonians are not a group, but a billion individuals who have self-awareness and don’t know it. Or maybe humanity is a group-being, a mass mind whose individual units are unaware of their collective consciousness.”

  —Dianne Steiger, master of the Terra Nova, personal log entry, April 23, 2431

  Permod Three

  Deep Space

  Sianna Colette opened her eyes from a restless, dreamless, sleepless fog of unconsciousness. Her hands still hurt. She looked at the open palms of her hands, and the deep red welts in her flesh where her fingernails had sliced into the base of her palm. Clotted over now.

  Had she really done that to herself? She had bit her lip, too, somewhere in there. She ran her tongue over the bite, and it stung.

  At least she was not bleeding anymore. Just as well. Tiny spots of blood were splashed all over the permod’s interior and her clothing as it was. Her face must look a sight.

  She shook her head from side to side, trying to clear it, and rubbed her face with a grubby, bloody hand. How long had it been? It seemed as if she had been in here for weeks at least, but that was not possible. The life-support system could not have kept her alive that long— unless they had been lying to her. Maybe they had hooked up some sort of supply module alongside her permod, once she was inside. But why? Why the hell would they want her to stay in space for that long? Some secret plan to send her someplace even worse than NaPurHab? Maybe they had diverted her craft, sent her on a direct path to rendezvous with Terra Nova.

  No, she told herself. It was bad enough being claustrophobic. No sense getting paranoid into the bargain. No. The clock display must be right, and it had only been two days. Was she running a fever? She put a hand to her forehead. She felt hot, and God knows her mouth was dry, but she couldn’t really tell.

  She felt as if she were recovering from a fever, an illness, in that gentle moment of recuperation where you knew you were getting well, when the illness was getting weaker and you were getting stronger.

  She had conquered the permod, more or less unharmed. Horrible as it was, she had discovered that she could survive being sealed up in this damned box. Maybe being sealed in a coffin for a few days was all anyone needed to cure claustrophobia. Granted, it would never be a popular cure, and she still was not exactly enjoying herself, but even so, the fear had been burned out of her. Oh, she still wanted to get out. But all but the last bat’s-squeak of irrational ravening fear was gone. After this trip, she wouldn’t have the slightest concern about stepping into that elevator car at MRI.

  Not that she ever would have the chance, of course. She was never going back.

  Sianna blinked, gulped hard, and forced herself to accept it. She was never going back to Earth. Not with the COREs and SCOREs and whatever other space-monsters the Charonians could dream up blocking the way.

  Unless, by some miracle, humanity found a way to open the spaceways, it would be death to try and go home. She was dead already, so far as anyone back on Earth was concerned.

  She would never see her friends, her city, her books, her clothes, her bed again. All she had was what was with her now. And she had been able to bring so little. Her personal luggage allotment here in the permod was only five kilos’ worth to fit into a space roughly the size of a large handbag. A few family photos, a pair of shoes, and a few changes of underwear. Go
d only knew what sort of clothes the Purps would provide. Best to bring at least a few items that would allow her some chance at modesty and comfort.

  We bring nothing into this world, and we take nothing out of it…

  No. Enough of that. It was time to look forward. Toward NaPurHab, toward the Terra Nova, toward the Lone World—the Lone World that she had unveiled, revealed for what it was.

  Back home, back on the Earth that was lost to her, they were monitoring the Lone World, every antenna and detector they could manage aimed at it, listening for its commands. Her friends back there were scurrying around the archives, digging through all the old data, searching for whatever transmissions from the Lone World the detection hardware had recorded by chance over the years. The experts in Charonian notation and language were working night and day, struggling to squeeze meaning and understanding from the Lone World’s transmissions. They were learning the enemy’s language of command, thus the enemy’s most powerful secrets. And she, Sianna Colette, had told them where the secrets were kept.

  That was something to have pride in.

  Now if she could get the hell out of this damned box…

  Kourou Spaceport

  Earth

  Wolf Bernhardt sat at the water’s edge, in the darkness, in the hot, fetid night of the South American coast. He stared up at the blackness where the sky should have been. Thick cloud cover hid the stars from view, and made the night as dark and blank as his heart.

  Soon he would have to head back to the ops center and watch over the next phase of this bloody nightmare. He would have to be strong, and firm, ready to make decisions. Before then, he needed sleep. He knew that. He should go back to his quarters and try and rest. But not yet. Not yet. He needed the darkness, and the roaring surf, and the chance to be alone.

  Wolf shifted on the park bench, some tiny fragment of his mind wondering why on Earth no one ever made such benches comfortable. They always seemed to cut into some part of one’s anatomy. Thinking on trivial matters at such a time prevented one from thinking about so many other things.

  The Atlantic lay before him, the water of the mighty ocean quite invisible in the darkness. But it was there, all right. The roar of the surf, and the salt air, and the glint of lights from the spaceport reflected off a whitecap all told him that. The unseen was still there. The hidden could be close, and powerful.

  Half-mechanically, Wolf checked the glowing numbers of the time display on his wristaid. Two hours since Yuri had died.

  But that was not strictly accurate. Better, more accurate to say, that it was two hours since Wolf Bernhardt had killed Yuri Sakalov by sending him off on a suicide mission.

  And Sianna and Wally still were out there, just waiting to be picked off, the defenses on their ships just as useless as the ones on Yuri’s.

  And that was his doing, too. His. All of it. This whole mad, jury-rigged scheme to resupply NaPurHab before the SCOREs arrived. The hurried, improvised, idiotic, un-thought-out, comic-opera-heroics idea of sending Sakalov and the others to Captain Steiger and the Terra Nova. Others had thought of it, but he had agreed. He had liked the idea.

  But no, damnation, no! It was not idiotic. It was right and proper to send those three to Steiger. MRI could beam all the information it wanted to the ship, but knowledge was not expertise, or wisdom, or insight. Sianna Colette had proved that much. She had not discovered anything new—she had simply put the pieces together, and made something new out of the parts everyone else had already seen.

  Sooner or later, Terra Nova was going to have to confront the Lone World, and when she did, she would need not just the data concerning the Lone World, but the minds that had lived with that data, talked it out, seen it from a dozen different angles.

  He needed to talk. Never had he felt more alone.

  He pulled his phone from his pocket and stared at it for a moment before he realized that it was, of course, Yuri that he wanted to call.

  Call and apologize for the very thing that made the conversation and the apology impossible.

  But if not Yuri, then whom?

  Time and events were rushing past, beyond all control. The crisis, the moment, was still unraveling. Early tomorrow, the first of the SCOREs would arrive at the vicinity of Earth, just about the same time Sturgis got to NaPurHab. That moment would give the first clue as to what the SCOREs—and perhaps the entire Multisystem— intended. Would they indeed attack Earth, land and use it for their breeding ground? And if so, could Earth survive?

  Wolf had spent every waking moment of the last five years struggling to prepare for the time when the Charonians moved against Earth. He had gleaned every bit of data from every observation of the nearby Captive Worlds, attempting to analyze the nature of the attacks on them by the scars left behind. He had cajoled the United Nations and the rump national governments to prepare weapons to defend the planet, given a hundred speeches, written endless articles and reports urging this plan or that proposal, preparing these evacuation plans and those training programs.

  Now the time had come and, across the world, armies and scientists and politicians were scrambling to be ready for the unknown, for whatever the SCOREs might do.

  Perhaps the Battle of Earth would start tomorrow when the first SCORE made its closest approach to the Moonpoint Ring and then turned toward Earth. Perhaps tomorrow would mark a victory—or the beginning of the end.

  But Wolf had already fought his battle. Either his efforts would be enough, or else they would not. There was nothing left for him to do. And perhaps it was too much for one man to imagine the fate of the world. Instead he found himself thinking about the fate of one child-woman, one frightened girl he had met but briefly and would never see again, a woman he had sent out into the void. Wolf glanced at his wristaid and figured the time. Thirty hours from now, Sianna Colette would either be dead, or just arriving at NaPurHab.

  And maybe the SCOREs would move faster than expected, do something unimagined, get the job over faster, exterminate the local fauna immediately so as to clear the way for the Breeders. Maybe everyone on Earth would be dead or dying in thirty hours’ time. No one could know. Wolf Bernhardt sighed and turned back from the sea. Time to get some sleep, before reawakening to the nightmares.

  Multisystem Research Institute

  New York City

  Ursula Gruber, Ph.D., stared, unseeing, at the datapack in front of her. No doubt there were all sorts of useful—perhaps even vital— datapoints in the cloud of numbers and charts and statistics in front of her eyes, but she couldn’t see them anymore. She rubbed her eyes and sighed. No point trying any more just now. Last night Yuri had died. Last night she had not slept a wink. She needed quiet and rest. Not that she was going to get it.

  They had it wrong. She was becoming more and more certain of that. She did not know where, or how, but she knew they had it wrong.

  The SCOREs were the key to it. But they didn’t have that key in the proper lock. The SCOREs were headed toward the vicinity of the Moonpoint Ring, and not toward Earth. The conventional wisdom was that the SCOREs were going to perform gravity-assist maneuvers, do slingshot turns around the Moonpoint Singularity and come in for landings on Earth to commence a Breeding Binge.

  But that made no sense. The Charonians had never used gravity-assist maneuvering before. Why should they? Even the most energetic gravity assist could only add ten or twenty kilometers per second of velocity change, and any Charonian could manage ten times that much velocity without any strain at all. Gravity assists made sense when you were short of energy but had lots of time, whereas the Charonians had all the energy anyone could hope for— and seemed to be in a desperate hurry.

  Which led her to the conclusion that SCOREs were going toward Moonpoint not for gravassist but because the Moonpoint was their ultimate destination.

  Now all she had to figure out was why the devil would they want to go to the Moonpoint. And there were the damned Ghoul Modules, to use the Naked Purple name, a name which seemed l
ikely to stick. Sixteen of them had landed at equally spaced intervals on the inner surface of the Moonpoint Ring. No one had offered the least explanation for them. They seemed to be sending power through the system, but why?

  This one little planet was far from being the chief concern of the Charonians. Granted, that was difficult to keep in mind as the huge fleets of Charonians swarmed about Earth. Similar fleets of SCOREs were headed toward between fourteen and twenty other Captive Worlds—but not toward all of them. Just some. Why?

  Furthermore, on three Captives, the SCOREs had already arrived—but no one could tell what happened next. The worlds where the SCOREs had arrived were just too dim and too far off to see what was going on in detail.

  About half of the SCOREs apparently went missing after arrival at the target planet. That would seem to support the assumption that at least some SCOREs were landing on the planet—but then why were the other half still detectable? Why didn’t they land and commence breeding as well? Waiting for their turn?

  It didn’t quite hang together. With every passing minute, Ursula felt more and more sure that they had the whole Breeding Binge idea wrong. Yes, there was no doubt that the Charonians used planetary surfaces to reproduce, but why assume they were going to do it today?

  But despite feeling they had it all wrong, she still had no idea what was right. She had no alternative explanation. What other motivation could there be besides a Binge?

  Well, no point in wondering. There was enough else on her plate to keep her busy. The latest from the cryptographic section, for example, with a new analysis of the transmissions from the Lone World—

  A discreet little beep tone from her calendar roused Ursula from her thoughts. Damnation. Time to phone in her report to Wolf Bernhardt.

  Why couldn’t he just accept a written report, instead of interrogating her twice a week? She hated his questioning. Of course, Bernhardt was not likely to be in top form today. Not after getting Sakalov killed the day before.