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.”
Graviton
Departing the Vicinity of the Moon
THE SOLAR SYSTEM
Larry Chao tried to look calmer than he was. “All right,” he said, “three minutes to beam reception.” If the Ring had actually sent the beam, long hours before. That was one slightly nerve-wracking thing about gravity-beam propulsion. The beam had to come from the Ring of Charon. From lunar space, your power had to come, at the speed of light, from a little matter of forty astronomical units, or just under six billion kilometers away. In theory, the Ring had fired the beam five and a half hours ago. In three minutes—no, two now— they would find out if they had done it right. They could abort now by slamming on the rocket engines and blasting out of the beam’s path—but once the beam hit the ship, the Graviton was committed. No one had ever tried shutting off a gravitic-beam system from the shipboard side of things, but theory indicated the attempt would destroy the ship. Once the beam touched them, there was no turning back.
The Graviton had lifted off the Moon eighteen hours before, and done pretty good time under old-fashioned rocket power getting to the safe-distance point. A nice, smooth, routine flight. But now. Now they had turned their crash couches around, and they sat in the ship’s backwards control room, with the floor where the ceiling should have been. Now came the interesting part.
Larry looked over to Marcia. “I’m scared to death,” he said, “but I’m maintaining a brave front. How about you?”
She smiled feebly, but did not take her eyes off the countdown clock. “Just about the same. Three days to get there,” she said. “I know it’s much shorter than the old transit times, but is it fast enough?”
“They won’t leave without us,” Larry said, with more conviction than he felt. “They’ve had just as many glitches reconfiguring the Ring as we had getting the Graviton ready. Probably they’ll still have half a dozen snags that will need me to sort out when we get there,” he said, trying to make a joke out of it.
“I still can’t believe it’s happening, finally happening after so long,” Marcia said. “Gerald. I’m going to see Gerald. Maybe it really isn’t happening. Maybe the Terra Nova went through the wormhole from place A to place B, and we’re just going to place A. Is it possible we have it backwards?”
“I doubt it very much,” Larry said, watching the last of the seconds fall away.
TERRA NOVA TERRA NOVA TERRA NOVA. Not much of a message, but it was all the Ring team had gotten during the last wormhole passage, a week ago. They knew the TN had gone through the wormhole. Marcia’s fears to the contrary, they knew which set of coordinates it was moving toward. But they did not know if the ship had survived.
“Here we go,” Larry said. The clock reached zero—
And nothing happened. Not at first. But then the meters twitched and starting crawling upwards. The Graviton creaked and groaned a time or two as the ship’s structure took up the new stress load. It was happening. The Graviton was taking the gravity beam and using it to create an imaginary mass just ahead of the ship’s nose, under their feet. One that was pulling her forward at forty gravities. Larry felt his weight returning as the acceleration-shielding system tapped some of the gravity field to produce a little resistance, just enough to give them an interior one-sixth gravity. It was working. It was working.
Thirty hours accelerating, nine hours in zero gee, and thirty more hours slowing down. They were making history. They were the first people ever to ride a human-built gravitic spacecraft. But that was a trivial point, almost beneath notice. What did such things matter, compared to the fact they were going to get there in time?
Thirty-one
The Autocrat Departs
The Mind of the Sphere felt a second strange pulse move through the wormhole web, a rough, crude movement through the net. Then, shortly thereafter, a third pulse this one coming from outside, somehow, from a wormhole aperture no Charonian had ever formed. But like the first two illicit wormhole transits, this one terminated in the default link station in the dead system—the same link point the Mind had sent its own forces through, the same link point the Adversary was driving for.
Were these passages some strange new scheme of the Adversary? The Mind’s fears were instantly aroused. It examined the records of the link in more detail. No, no. This was not the Adversary. It was all too coarse, too crude, too awkwardly done, too cautious.
But it was something. Something to do with the strange troubles that had surrounded the last world brought into the Multisystem, such a brief time before. For a moment, the Mind considered the idea of destroying that world now, as a precaution, and expending the massive energy needed to bring another planet forward to serve as a projectile weapon.
But no. That would drain its energy reserves to dangerously low levels. And these were such small and weak interlopers. Certainly there had to be more frugal means to defend against them, if need be. Surely it would make more sense to conserve its projectile planet, keep it for its intended use.
Besides, the Mind could always destroy the troublesome planet later, after all this was over.
Terra Nova
THE SHATTERED SPHERE SYSTEM
There was a lot going on. Communications to establish with NaPurHab, navigation setting to work out, observational procedures to work out, once they figured out what they were looking at. But Gerald was happy to let the captain and the comm officer dicker and bicker with NaPurHab and sort out the rest of it. He had a ship to manage.
He quickly confirmed what he had been hoping for—the ship was safe, at least for the moment. No damage from the wormhole transit, none of the handful of SCOREs in the neighborhood showing any hostile intent, and no other danger on the immediate horizon.
He punched up the intercom and set it to general announcement. “This is the executive officer,” he said. “All sections, secure from special shifts and resume normal shift rotation. Resume normal watches. Everybody get some rest.”
They had made it. They had gone through the wormhole, and not so much as a scratch on the paint job. Gerald glanced toward the main screen as the tracking officer put up a live feed of NaPurHab. It was little more than a sharp-edged spot in the screen at this range. Dianne already had headphones on, no doubt talking to the Maximum Windbag himself.
The passage must have been much tougher on the hab. It had to take some real courage to take her through, Gerald told himself. We had it easy. The Terra Nova was much newer and smaller and more compact, built more robustly and maintained with much more care than the hab.
Gerald smiled to himself. The Terra Nova and NaPurHab had just crossed into the unknown, and he was thinking about comparative maintenance schedules. But after a passage like that, it was time to get things back to as near normal as possible as fast as possible. To every thing, there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven, Gerald reminded himself.
But they were suddenly some unknown number of light-years from Earth, and some rather disturbing questions appeared, unbidden, in Gerald’s mind. This far from home, were they indeed still under heaven? And unto what purpose—unto whose purpose—was this time to be given?
NaPurHab
THE SHATTERED SPHERE SYSTEM
“Okay, that’s a lock,” Windbag said to the commlink. “See your team in our maxmeet shop, twentyfour from now.” The Windbag cut the commlink to the Terra Nova and sighed.
He punched up the stern exterior camera shot and was rewarded with a view of the TN with the Charonian wormhole control ring behind it. Nice looking ship, but that was not exactly the key factor here. The Windbag found himself wishing bigtime he did not have to deal with a ship full of straights just now. He knew h
e shoulda been slap-happy glad to get ’em. Like to get heavily lonesome in these parts, and NaPurHab could use all the help it could git. The TN had all kinds of hardware and braintrust types who knew how to run things. Evenso, now wuz not-time for distractions. He had enough on his plate without the TN screaming for attention.
But still they had to have a maximum meet, all the honchos and honchettes. They had to slap together some way of surviving out here, and plain-fact-one was that they were gonna need each other.
But that didn’t make it fun.
Sianna looked around herself and realized that she had blundered onto the Boredway again. How many wrong turns could one person make? Quite a few, as it turned out. The whole hab was a madhouse.
Boredway was anything but boring at the moment, as tangled in frantic activity as an overturned ant heap. The air was filled with the smells of burnt insulation, sweating bodies, hot metal, and bonding chemicals, a tech crew just down the way trying to repair something while a cargo crew was struggling to make sense of the cargo canisters that had been strapped in any which way in the aft sections of Boredway. A few hundred meters forward, some sort of protest group was forming up. God only knew what they were protesting— or whom they were protesting to.
Sianna decided to risk a shortcut through Loopaway turf. If she could avoid any more wrong turns, it would cut twenty minutes off her trip.
She remembered the old joke about time being nothing more than nature’s way of keeping everything from happening all at once. For a while, it seemed as if it didn’t work this side of the wormhole. It had been a busy few days.
The captain of the Terra Nova and her executive officer had come aboard, looking more than a bit disoriented—understandable, considering they had both spent the past five years aboard one ship. Of course, NaPurHab would be disorienting no matter where you came from.
There had been another energy burst the day before—a multiple one this time—as the “object” slammed into a half-dozen SCOREs at once, with every scope on the hab and the Terra Nova watching it. The object was tracking closer and closer, heading right for the wormhole.
The object. It was coming this way, at high velocity. And when it got here, it was going to force open the wormhole and kill the Multisystem, and that would kill the Earth.
Oh God. How to stop it. How to stop it? Or were they just going to have to sit here and watch it happen?
At least life was chaotic enough to take her mind off things. Somewhere in the swirl of comings and goings, in between Purpgroups of this or that philosophy, while the frantic repair crews were rushing to patch up the systems that had been damaged in the passage of the wormhole and the tech teams were juggling like mad to keep the hab working with the solar collectors suddenly delivering a third less power than before, it had all turned from strange to familiar. Sianna had gotten used to it all, and that scared her.
Sianna stopped at the turning that always got her muddled and hesitated a long moment before taking the middle way. Yes, this was the right way. She recognized the stain on the wall. Straight along this way, then down two levels, and she’d almost be there.
Oh, it had been a time, with all the big events seeming to produce little ones in their wakes. A riot or two had broken out, a sit-in had been staged in the Maximum Windbag’s office. Meantime, certain residents of both ship and hab had decided on a change of scenery. Two dozen Purps had applied for crew positions on the Terra Nova, while twice that number of the TN‘s crew had applied for Naked Purple citizenship, which was a great nuisance, as the Purple Citizen’s Council had ruled there was no such thing as a Purple Citizen three years before and then disbanded.
Ah. Here it was. I BALLS ONLEE. Someone had changed the spelling again. She pulled open the hatch and went in. Wally was lost to the outside world, buried in some sort of elaborate simulation of the incoming object. It seemed to be running on every screen in the room, from a different viewing angle on each one. Eyeball was on the comm to someone, cursing them out with alarming skill and virulence as she compulsively neatened her immaculate work station. There were Solitude and the Shattered Sphere out the viewport, glaring down on them.
Sianna sighed happily and sat down at her own station. Scary to think that a scene like this could be the most comfortable and familiar thing in her life—but then, you always had to work with what you had.
Autarch
Docked to Gravitics Research Station
Plutopoint
THE SOLAR SYSTEM
Sondra Berghoff was scared, and trying not to show it. Plans and theories were all very well, but reality was a bit trickier. Hanging in space, the nose of the Autarch pointed straight at the Plutopoint black hole, she could no longer see the slightest logic to sending a ship through the wormhole. Yes, they had some important information. Couldn’t they have just scribbled a note, stuck it in a bottle, and tossed it through the hole?
She sat strapped into her chair on the main deck, right behind the ship’s pilot. She didn’t even know the man’s name, or the names of any of the Autarch’s five crew members. All of them were nameless, faceless, utterly taciturn, and sworn to unquestioning obedience to the Autocrat.
She had not seen any of them show any facial expression except something midway between a poker face and rigor mortis. Robots showed more in the way of reaction.
Suppose they couldn’t immediately dock with the Terra Nova or NaPurHab for some reason, and she was stuck with these guys for a month or two? Suppose the Charonians or the Adversary had destroyed the big ship and the hab, and she was marooned with these guys for life?
Well, at least the crew members weren’t the only ones on board. She turned and looked to her right, to the Autocrat. There were at least some signs of life and thought in his face. A strange man, to say the least, but at least he was capable of conversation.
She looked over to Marcia MacDougal, and Larry. A miracle they were here. No doubt if anyone survived long enough to write history books of the period, the books would record how those two had come along because they were experts in gravitation and Charonian language. That was even accurate, as far as it went.
But it wasn’t true, of course. They were here because they had to be. Look at the expressions on their faces. Both staring straight ahead, tense, alert, expectant. Marcia was going in search of her husband. And Larry. Larry was going in search of what he always sought, and would never find. Absolution.
Sondra turned back to the main viewscreen and watched what the others were watching—the image of the Ring of Charon. They were face-on to the Ring, its running lights a hoop of blue diamonds in the dark, the Ring itself a perfect circle in the sky. No change yet, but it would come soon.
Too soon. Why in the hell had she felt so honor-bound to go along on this ride? Why wasn’t she back on board the research station where she belonged, feeding numbers to the computers?
The Ring’s running lights dimmed, went out, and re-lit in blood red. Stand-by. Almost ready. The team would be loading the last of the command strings to the Ring. A faint patch of dimness appeared at the centerpoint of the Ring, just barely visible at first and then almost fading out. Were they having trouble getting the lock? But then the luminous spot grew brighter, larger, stronger, rippling with power. Yes, yes, it was working.
The center of the nimbus grew darker, harder, more focused—and then flared over into a strange un-blue-white and settled down, rock-hard and solid.
The Autarch’s engines fired, and the ship moved forward, straight for the hole in the sky and whatever lay beyond.
Down a wormhole, Sondra told herself. Down a human-made worm-hole. Good God. She could not even begin to sort out the emotions that washed over her. Fear, excitement, pride, astonishment, panic, and half a dozen others all mixed up together. They were going in. They were going in.
Just before they reached the wormhole, the Autocrat turned to Sondra and smiled. “I expect,” he said, “that it will be an interesting trip.”
NaPurHab<
br />
THE SHATTERED
SPHERE SYSTEM
The Windbag stared out the viewport in his office, not at the Shattered Sphere or at Solitude, but at the Ring that ran the wormhole they had come through. The wormhole was where the action was, no doubt. The Windbag was worried, and getting more so. What the hell to do? Colette and Sturgis’s objectional “object” was on a collision course with the wormhole. Leetle invisible thing was killing every SCORE in its path. Could it really kill Sphere? Sounded loony, even if their charts and graphs looked real, even if Eyeball said they were on the money.
But what to do about it even if the “object” wuz real deal? How was a hab full of headbangers scraped off the walls of every town on Earth gonna stop an invisible object that converted SCOREs to guacamole?
The Windbag was at that melancholy point in his reflections when there was a flare of un-blue-white light from the wormhole. The Windbag frowned. Another SCORE? Thought the last of them had come up. Too damn far away to get a visual at this range. Maybe the radar johnnies could tell him something. He had his hand out to punch up the codes and ask them, when the screen blanked and presented a live radar image. The caption line reported that the imagery was coming from the TN.
His intercom warbled, and the Windbag slapped at the accept switch, knowing who it had to be before he heard a word. The woman had been checking in about a million times a minute.
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