“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?”
Dianne took a deep breath and then let it out. Now the idea, the mad idea, was out in the open. “Good,” she said. “I needed to hear you say it. I wanted to be sure I wasn’t crazy.”
“What about the SCOREs on the other side?” Gerald asked. “Won’t they try and stop us?”
“I don’t think so,” Dianne said. “Not if we’ve got the rest of this figured out. They’re trying to keep something from coming through the hole going the other way. The SCOREs on this side are blocking anything coming out of the hole. That only makes sense if the SCOREs on the other side are there to block anything going in. We ought to be safe enough heading outward.”
Gerald nodded his head abstractedly. “Ordinarily, I’d say that was mad optimism. The risks are far too high. But with all the other chances we’d be taking, that one seems almost trivial.”
Dianne smiled sadly. “When the chance of getting smashed to atoms by SCOREs on the other side of a wormhole seems trivial, then I say things are in a pretty bad way.”
Gerald laughed. “Let’s you and me get to work, and maybe we can find some way to make them better.”
Twenty-eight
… And It Comes Out There
“One of the tricky things about researching NaPurHab’s arrival in the Shattered Sphere system, and what happened afterward, is that neither the people in the Solar System nor the people in the Multisystem knew the whole story. It’s hard, now, after the fact, to remember the appalling ignorance we all suffered under. Everyone had holes in their knowledge. Big enough holes that, for all intents and purposes, no one knew what the hell was going on.
“Come to think of it, the Adversary and the Charonians knew even less than we did.”
—Larry Chao, transcript of interview for Gravitics Research Station Oral History Project, Charon Datapress, 2342
Another attacker came at the Adversary, and it dealt with the assault as effortlessly as always. The Adversary smashed through, its multi-megaton assailant, emerging unscathed, its course unchanged, and leaving another cloud of debris in its wake.
The immediate threat dealt with, the Adversary extended its senses outward and noted a different disturbance in the vicinity of its main target. It focused its attention there. Some odd sort of mass, quite different from the others it had seen, had come out of the link from the living system. Had the Adversary entertained any lingering doubts at all that this was the real target and that all the others were decoys, then the arrival of this strange object would have put those doubts to rest. The Adversary’s kind had long experience of the Charonians, and how they behaved. The unique link locus, the one with something, anything, different about it, was the real one. The Adversary was well pleased to have its previous conclusions confirmed. It moved smoothly on, toward the link and the rich feeding grounds beyond.
NaPurHab
Transiting the Wormhole
Sianna held on as the habitat bucked and kicked like a live thing. And she promptly put any thought that she was cured of claustrophobia right out of her head.
You bloody idiot, what the hell are you doing going down a wormhole down a wormhole down a wormhole?—They were trying to send the hab through a tunnel of infinite length, and that tunnel was inside a hole that took up absolutely no space whatsoever. Sianna’s fear of being closed in rose to new heights, took on new meanings, as NaPurHab headed deeper into the hole, the ride getting progressively rougher as Eyeball fought to keep them moving down the centerline—and as the gravitation fluxes and tidal pulses struggled to tear them apart.
After an especially sharp bang and a thud, the overhead lights cut out and came back up and then went out and stayed out. A dozen new alarms started up, hooting and beeping and ringing, and Sianna could smell something burning.
At least the exterior monitors stayed on, even with the cabin lights out. The sideview cameras showed an un-blue-white tunnel wall of flailing storm, seething with power, rushing past the habitat, and that was bad enough. But the forward cam showed the view looking straight down the wormhole, down, down, down the seething, glowing tube, toward the tiny black pinprick that was the way out, the only way out, impossibly far off and getting no closer. Sianna clutched at the arms of her scruffy old crash chair and tried to tear her eyes away from that seething tunnel.
The passage seemed to go on forever in time and space, taking them further and further away from the Universe, deeper and deeper into the tunnel and the depths.
And then, abruptly, it was over—gone, all at once. The wormhole swept past the forward view, and the Universe beyond came into view, and they were up, and out, and through.
But through into what, and where? The forward camera showed a huge, sullen-red globe, a tiny, dried-up grey lump of a world, the black of space—
Suddenly the habitat was pitching over, starting to tumble, end over end.
“Damnation!” Eyeball called out. “Aft boom caught wormhole side. Sheared right off. Morons failed to retract or what?”
“Can you correct?” The Maximum Windbag had to shout the question to be heard over the alarms.
“Dunno!” Eyeball shouted back. “Shut up and stand by!”
Something broke loose behind Sianna’s head and went windmilling across the compartment to smash into the far wall. The lights on a whole bank of terminals flared and went out, and the hot smell of burnt insulation was suddenly stronger and more pungent. Wisps and tendrils of smoke filled the compartment. Air. They were going to run out of air and suffocate and die in the darkness.
Sianna shut her eyes so as not to see the darkness. She prayed to someone, anyone, she didn’t care who, to get them out of this get them out of this, now, please God now—
A whole bank of circuit breakers slammed shut with a bang, and the overhead lights came on. The ventilators kicked back in, and Sianna was desperately glad she hadn’t noticed them cutting out. The air cleared, and the control thrusters cut. Eyeball worked the conn, slowing the tumble, bringing the hab around to a steady, stable attitude. Eyeball let out a sigh of relief and leaned back in her crash couch.
The ops boards were still more red and amber than green, and new alarms seemed to be going off every time an old one was silenced. But they had made it. They were here, wherever that was, and they were alive.
At last all the alarms were turned off, and the command center was still, and quiet, for a moment.
“Well,” Wally said, speaking into the silence, “let’s not do that again.”
NaPurHab
The Shattered Sphere System
Sianna held the carrybag with one hand and started climbing the ladder, making her awkward way up to the zero-gee levels. It was four days since the hab had come through the wormhole, but the reality of it all hadn’t set in yet, at least not for Sianna.
What do we do now? she wondered. No one knew. They were surprised enough just to find themselves alive. Most of the Purps weren’t yet thinking clearly enough to manage a state of shock.
Sianna found herself busying herself with small details. Make the tea—one the way Wally liked it, and the other for her. Make the sandwiches. Pack them in the carrybag. Go to where Wally was.
It might have been possible to think no further than lunch if she had been allowed to hole up in her cabin with her pillow over her head. Unfortunately, Eyeball had put Sianna and Wally in charge of charting the big picture, making it a trifle harder to escape.
Sianna reached the top of the vertical shaft and stepped into the horizontal corridor that led to the ob bubble. She swung her legs around and kicke
d off from the end wall, intending to send herself sailing smoothly down the corridor. Unfortunately, the weight of the carrybag in her left hand threw off her balance. She overcorrected and sent herself tumbling through the air, bouncing off the corridor wall. She caught at a handrail, bounced once or twice, and then steadied herself before making her way along the corridor in a more controlled fashion.
She shifted the carrybag full of lunch to her other hand, opened the hatch, and moved into the observation bubble. Wally, as usual, did not notice her arrival. The autoscan scopes had been working overtime since their arrival in-system, and he was busily pulling the data off them and logging it in to his simulator datapack.
Eyeball had just told them to get some sort of inventory of the system. Wally was way past that, already hard at work using his knowledge of the Earth’s Multisystem as a rough working guide to setting up a dynamic model of this system—and of what this system had once been.
“Wally,” Sianna said. “I brought back lunch.” She sat down, opened up the carrybag, and handed Wally a bulb of tea.
“Hey, great,” he said. “Keep forgetting to eat.”
“I know, I know. And I keep remembering to feed you,” she said, handing over a sandwich. She dug out a sandwich for herself and looked out the observation port.
There it was. Huge, brooding, smashed and dead, an overwhelming sight. The Shattered Sphere had named itself. Not even the Purps could dream of calling it anything else. Sianna could see a dozen craters of various sizes, and one or two impacts that had punched holes clean through. The Sphere was covered with a jagged, broken network of cracks.
The Last World hung close in the sky, still in half-phase, appearing somewhat larger now than it had when NaPurHab had first arrived. Sianna had named it Solitude, and it seemed as if the name might stick—a fact that gave her immense pleasure. Not many people got the chance to name a world.
She looked down on it, and was surprised at her own reaction. She felt sorry for the poor thing. A lone world, a last world, a lonely world. An airless, waterless, lifeless lump of rock, all that was left of the control center for a mighty stellar empire. “Sorrow” might have been another name for the place.
It had taken the slightest of burns on the maneuvering jets to put the hab into an elongated elliptical orbit about Solitude. Eyeball might well decide some other orbit would be better later on, but this one at least kept them from crashing into the planet, which was the main thing for now.
Well astern of the hab, and getting further away by the minute, was the wormhole portal, a Ring-and-Hole set very much like all the ones back in the Multisystem. That was no surprise. Most of the SCOREs that should have been in orbit around it seemed to have gone missing. Only nine or ten were on station, their radars aimed out from the wormhole, clearly watching for something on its way in.
But the hab’s radar center had detected signals from at least four or five other clusters of SCORE radars, and visual checks showed that each cluster surrounded its own dormant Ring-and-Hole set. It would seem that the SCOREs the Multisystem Sphere had been sending through other wormholes back on the other side had been reinforcements for a number of sites on this side. But the SCORE counts were low at the other Ring-and-Hole sets as well. That was a good-size mystery right there—where were the rest of the SCOREs that had been streaming through the wormholes?
No doubt plenty more mysteries would crop up before some answers presented themselves. “So,” Sianna asked. “What’s the state of play?”
Wally took a swallow of tea and a bite of the sandwich. “Well, this place looks like what the Multisystem would look like if our Sphere stopped using gravitics to hold the place together. First, there’s the Sphere itself, and presumably a black hole of about one solar mass inside it.”
“Why do you assume the black hole?”
“No gravitic controls means Solitude has to be in a natural orbit, and that means something with enough mass to produce that much natural gravity. If the Dyson Sphere was built out of disassembled planets, it can’t have that much mass on its own—not by a factor of a thousand. So there has to be something massive inside it.”
Sianna nodded. “Right. I should have seen that. And it has to be a compact dark mass like a black hole. If it were a star, we’d see its light shining from inside the Sphere through the holes, and be detecting lots of heat energy.”
“Exactly. Aside from the Sphere, we’ve got Solitude, of course, and one Captive Sun that’s still around. It might have been in a natural binary relationship with the star the Charonians built the Sphere around.”
“Any more tracks on the other stars and their planets?”
“Plenty of them,” Wally said enthusiastically. “It’s going to take months for me to build up a simulation of the momentum exchanges that ejected them from the system. So far I’ve tracked seven definite ejected Captive Suns moving away from this system. Working backwards from their current velocity tells us it happened something like one hundred fifty years ago.”
“What about the Captive Worlds?” Sianna asked. “Are they still with their stars?”
“Not most of them,” Wally said. “But then you wouldn’t expect them to be. I just ran a quick-and-dirty simulation of the Multisystem, to see what would happen if the gravity control system shut off there. One or two planets per star stay anchored in their orbits. The rest are thrown around by momentum exchanges caused by various close passes between the Captive Suns. The planets in those pseudo-stable orbits go sailing off into space, or impact with other planets, or spiraled into their suns. Some of them end up in extremely eccentric orbits of the Sphere. Two or three impact on the Sphere— including Earth.”
Sianna shivered at that thought. Wally could put it all in terms of hypothetical, theory. But this place was death, and it was real. Suppose whatever killed this place went through the wormhole and visited itself on the Multisystem. “How did it die, Wally?” she asked. “What did all this?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Wally said. “Right now, you know everything I know. No, wait, there is one other interesting thing. As best I can tell, the co-orbital wormhole ring loop is still more or less intact.”
“Hmmm? What?” Sianna blinked and looked back toward Wally.
“Just like back in the Multisystem. There’s the Lone World, and then a whole system of modified and oversized Ring-and-Hole sets spaced at equal intervals along the same orbit. It looks as if there used to be sixteen—and all but two are up and running. The only damn things in this system that still are.”
“How can you tell which ones are operational, or how many there are?” Sianna asked. “We can’t possibly see more than two or three of them from here. The Shattered Sphere gets in the way of line of sight.”
“Yeah, but I rigged a whole set of alternate-mode gravity-wave detectors, the ones based on Charonian technology. The ones we built have never worked real well, but believe me, even on a bad detector, an active Ring-and-Hole set shows up very nicely, no matter how many Spheres are around.”
“They’re active?” Sianna asked.
“Makes sense they’d be the last thing to go,” Wally said. “They served as communications relays and cargo conveyors. Even if everything else went, as long as the wormhole ring loop was intact, Solitude could still maintain radio communications with the system, import new stars and worlds from other systems and move raw materials around this system.”
“But once the wormhole ring loop goes, you’re dead.”
“Right. So you set things up so it keeps running, no matter what. That’s why there are so many rings in the loop. You only really need three or six, but this system had sixteen—and fourteen survived whatever killed the rest of the system.”
“But what the hell are they using for power?”
“That’s the other thing,” Wally said, suddenly grinning. “I finally cracked one of the mysteries about the Spheres that’s been bugging me from day one. Remember how we figured out the longitudinal lines w
ere huge accelerator rings, super-big versions of the Moon-point Ring? But we could never figure out what the latitudinal lines were?”
“Yeah, so?”
“So with this Sphere dead, all the other power systems aren’t masking the readings. I nailed them. The latitude rings are power-storage rings, holding reserve energy. About thirty percent of the rings on this Sphere are still intact and carrying a charge.”
“And the wormhole ring loop is tapping into them?”
“At real, real, minimal levels. But I doubt they’ll last much longer. Everything’s decaying.”
Sianna looked out the viewport again, at the dead Sphere ami the dead Last World of Solitude. “Very impressive work, Wally. Find any other surprises out there?”
“Not really,” Wally said. “There’s the little stuff, of course. Asteroids, impact debris, dead COREs, other dead Charonians, and random skyjunk. This Sphere’s taken impacts from all kinds of stuff.”
“So this is what happens when a Sphere dies,” she said. “Sounds like that old poem, doesn’t it? ‘This is the way the world ends,’ ” she whispered. Though there was little as gentle as a whimper in the violence that had been wrought here. Smashed, broken worlds, stars flying off in all directions, planets being flung off into the frozen interstellar darkness. Sianna shook her head, staring out into the void with unseeing eyes.
“How did it happen, Wally?” she asked again. “What killed the Sphere?”
He shrugged. “I’d love to know. We have that three-dee clip from five years ago, of something smashing into a Sphere and pushing through, but that still doesn’t tell us anything.”
Sianna stared out at the dead world she had named. “This is a sad place,” she said at last. “Death, decay, collapse.”
They had all thought of the Multisystem Sphere, of the Charonians, as the enemy, and that was right as far as it went. But it did not go far enough.
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