The Shattered Sphere the-2

by Roger MacBride Allen

  “Ready for shunt reception,” Larry said. “NaPurHab reports they retain control of the wormhole ring. They are ready to change the transit coordinates. So far so good.”

  So far so good? This was the most dangerous moment of all. This was the moment when the Multisystem might act in some unexpected way, when the humans would begin to show their hand, when the Adversary might begin to realize something was wrong, when some bit of dead Charonian hardware might not respond in quite the way Wally expected.

  “Sending link sequence command,” Sianna announced. Now the wormhole transit loop was waking up in earnest, drawing energy from the surviving power storage rings on the Shattered Sphere, keying into each other. They were ready. As ready as they were going to be, anyway.

  Terra Nova

  In Close Orbit of Solitude

  Dianne Steiger sat in her captain’s chair and glanced over at where Gerald should have been. He was down there in the thick of it. And she was up here, orbiting this damn lump of rock, nothing more than a spectator. No, not a spectator. A warrior on a stretch of the battle line that had gone quiet for the moment. None of them would be down there, ready for the final battle, if not for her.

  She had done her part, she and her ship, and her crew. Five years ago, before the Abduction, the ship had been in mothballs and Dianne’s career had been as close to over as made no difference. Then the Charonians had attacked, and everything had changed. Now here they were, Dianne Steiger and her ship, about to save the world, maybe.

  Not bad, she thought. Not bad for a couple of mothballed has-beens.

  NaPurHab

  They could see it, as it happened, with the naked eye. The Solitude Ring flickered awake, and the strange un-blue-white of a wormhole link came to life. The Adversary had activated the link, forced it to connect with the Moonpoint Ring in the Multisystem. It was heading in.

  “Thirty seconds,” Eyeball said. “Show time. Fire up automatics.”

  Sondra Berghoff reached over to set in the automatic sequencer, but then she swallowed hard, and thought of the button. Five long years ago, Larry Chao had set things so that he would send out the first pulse of collimated laser energy, not the computer. He had pushed the button that had made it happen, not some damn machine.

  That beam of graser power had awakened the slumbering Lunar Wheel, and it had stolen the Earth. His finger on the button. No one else’s. That was what history would remember.

  What if they failed today? What if the computer guessed wrong in the next twenty seconds, and Earth died as a consequence? No. It was not right. If Earth died, let there be someone to blame. Let it be a human decision, not that of a microcircuit.

  And if they succeeded, let it be penance, of a sort, for her friend Larry’s finger on that button.

  “I’m staying with manual,” Sondra said.

  “What!” Eyeball shouted. “You nuts?”

  The Autocrat stepped forward, about to speak, but then Sondra caught his eye. Their eyes locked for a heartbeat or two, and then he stepped back. He would not challenge her. Sondra looked back toward her partner on the controls.

  “Shut up, Eyeball. No time to argue. Manual.” Now it was close. There was no time. The Mind of the Sphere could sense the Adversary coming close, unstoppable, uncontrollable. It made ready to do what it must, to sacrifice one world in order to save all the others. It gathered power unto itself, drawing down reserves from the storage rings, preparing to send the raw, massive burst of gravitic energy that would slam down on the luckless planet and accelerate it nearly to light speed, straight at the Adversary. Now was the time.

  Sondra checked her switches, watched the display, the timers. Too late, and there would be no time to make a full link over to the wormhole transit loop coordinates. Too soon, and the Adversary might sense the changeover and do something about it.

  The autosequencer’s countdown clock was still active, still counting down. Ten seconds. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four.

  Yes, she had been right. Too far off. The Adversary was slowing for the transit. It was going to be too far off when the sequencer hit zero. Three. Two. One. Zero. Minus One. Almost there. Another second, let it draw in closer. But not too long. Not too long. Minus Two. Minus—

  Sondra felt the right instant. She stabbed down at the button and sent the new coordinates on their way.

  The un-blue-white of the wormhole link flickered and shifted, and then settled down again.

  “Linkage!” Eyeball shouted. “We have solid link to the first wormhole aperture in the wormhole loop.”

  Sondra slapped another button, and sent a lockout command, ordering the Solitude Ring to take no further changes until after transit. The Adversary would not be able to change the setting back. “Damnation!” the Autocrat said. “It’s spotted the change.”

  The Adversary did not understand. Something was wrong. Something had shifted the wormhole coordinates. But that was impossible. It could not be. But it was happening. Stop. Stop. Whatever had happened could not be right. Stop. Stop. Stop—

  The Adversary was braking, trying to come to a halt before it went into the hole. Slowing, but not stopping. It had too much momentum, too much velocity. Closer. Closer. And then, miraculously, it went in. The wormhole winked shut behind it.

  But had they done it? Had they really diverted it? Or had it made it through to the Multisystem? Had the Earth already been reduced to slag?

  The overhead speaker came alive. “This is Sakalov Station,” Gerald MacDougal’s voice announced. “We got it,” he said. “We have the Adversary.”

  The Mind of the Sphere braced itself, steeled itself against battle, and watched as the wormhole opened—and then shut again.

  Nothing. Nothing had come through.

  Astonishment did not even begin to express its reaction.

  Sakalov Station

  “We have it, but we won’t keep it long,” Sianna said, triumph in her voice. The Adversary in a stasis orbit, held inside a pinched-off wormhole moving at the speed of light, a hugely complex wavefront trapped inside the wormhole transit loop. The same way the Multisystem had held the Earth during the Abduction.

  There was a difference, of course. The Sphere had some place to put Earth, some way to get it back out of the wormhole loop. But Sakalov Station didn’t want to put the Adversary anywhere at all.

  She remembered the conversation, back when all such things had been mere idle lab chat. Wally had been explaining how the Multisystem’s wormhole transit loop had held Earth in a stasis orbit for thirty-seven minutes.

  “Just out of curiosity,” Wolf Bernhardt had asked, “what would happen if the Sphere was unable to provide enough power? Would the Earth have dropped out of the stasis orbit?”

  “Well, yes, that would be the problem,” Wally had said. “You’d get an uncontrolled spontaneous evaporation of the pinched wormhole.”

  “And what would that mean?” Bernhardt had asked.

  Wally had tried to make light of it. “E = MC squared. Earth’s mass would be expressed as energy.”

  Yuri Sakalov had been there, still alive. “Which would of course be a great inconvenience to us,” he had said, his tone quite sarcastic. “However, it would almost certainly be enough to destroy the Sphere, and probably vaporize most of the planets of the closer-in Captive Suns as well.”

  And there it was. The Adversary had much lower mass than a planet, of course. One lunar mass was about an eightieth the mass of the Earth. But that was still a hell of a lot of mass to express as energy. The team on Solitude had no way to do a controlled release from the pinched wormhole, even if they had wanted to. No way to turn the damn thing off at all. The Adversary would stay in the transit loop until it ran out of power. The effort of holding was already a substantial drain on the small reserves in the Shattered Sphere’s power storage rings.

  Sianna watched her power indicators, and tried to work against the clock. With the Adversary moving at the speed of light, if they could hold out a full ninetee
n minutes, that would give the Adversary time to go halfway around the Sphere before it blew.

  But that was wildly optimistic. The power levels were dropping like rocks. They’d be lucky if it lasted five minutes and got around the limb of the Shattered Sphere before it blew.

  And if it went off too close to Solitude? Too close to the Terra Nova and NaPurHab? We’ll be dead, obviously, Sianna told herself. Good way to go, saving the home planet.

  There was no way to control something this big. Not with the speed-of-light delays involved. The command to shut down, to cut the power, would not even arrive at the other side of the transit loop for those nineteen minutes. Hell, the other side of the loop could have blown out or shut down already, and there would be no way of knowing it.

  “Power levels reaching critical,” Larry warned. “We’re going to start losing Ring-and-Hole sets real soon now. Might have lost ’em already, ’cept we don’t know it because of signal delay.”

  Sianna checked the display board. There was a strange little flicker in the main power ring energy-level display, a dip and a spike that shouldn’t have happened.

  Wally frowned and peered at the display. “That’s funny,” he said. “I wonder if—”

  The skies lit up as the station went dark.

  For a thousandth of a second, between the moment the wormhole loop collapsed and the moment when its very being was converted into a blast of light, the Adversary struggled to escape, straining against the very fabric of space to break out of the impossible trap into which it had fallen. But there were things beyond even the capacity of the Adversary.

  Throughout the galaxy, other units of the Adversary, deep inside wormholes, nestled safely on the surface of neutron stars, felt the death of part of themselves, and were astonished.

  Such a thing had never happened before.

  A torch of light, a flarepoint of energy, ripped out from the transit loop as the fourth Ring-and-Hole set failed, its structure too weak to maintain a wormhole link. The mass of the Adversary, folded into a pinched wormhole, was distilled back out into the Universe as a gout of thundering flame. It burst out, swelled into a searing-bright ball of fire, blasting the failed Ring into nothingness. The blast bloomed out and touched the surface of the Shattered Sphere, smashing a huge new hole in it, doing massive new damage, mutilating the corpse of the once-powerful Sphere.

  Tongues of flame shot up into space, vaporizing whatever bits of space debris came near. The blast of light and power expanded out into space.

  It was over.

  Thirty-three

  The Way Back

  “In a mechanistic, deterministic universe, the same reaction to the same situation will always produce the same result. A living thing confronting a dead universe will quickly learn that a certain set of actions always works, while another set always fails. This is not the case in a universe full of living things. A mouse might learn that one falling rock acts much like another, but one circling hawk will not always act like the next. One hawk might be looking the other way, another not hungry. Still another hawk might attack in response to the mouse’s own actions—something a falling rock would not do.

  “We humans, confronting a living, ever-changing universe over which we had but little control, have learned to make it up as we go along. The Charonians, on the other hand, learned eons ago which rules worked in their unchanging, utterly controlled habitat, where they were the only living things of any consequence.

  “I believe that this goes far in describing the difference between Charonians and humans, and is the reason that the Adversary defeated them, while we defeated the Adversary. To put it another way, human intelligence is opportunistic, while Charonian intelligence is algorithmic. If this is so, then we must take every opportunity in future to change the circumstances, rendering Charonian algorithms worthless.”

  —Larry Chao, Operations on the Shattered Sphere: Conclusions and Recommendations, Datastreemdream Prezz, NaPurHab, 2432

  Solitude

  THE SHATTERED SPHERE SYSTEM

  They were in their pressure suits, getting a look at the damage to the station. Gerald and Marcia walking hand-in-hand even in their suits, Larry and Sianna walking a step or two behind.

  Up in the sky, on the leading limb of the Shattered Sphere, a huge new crater sat at the center of a massive scorch mark. There was already talk of launching an expedition to the Shattered Sphere, getting a look at a dead one before having much more to do with a live one.

  “Well, the Charonians didn’t much care for parasites,” Gerald MacDougal said, pointing to Adversary Crater, as it had already been named. “I wonder how they’ll feel about symbiotes.”

  “That’s a strange way to look at it,” Sianna said.

  “How so?” Gerald asked. He stopped and turned toward her, his broad smile plainly visible behind his visor. “We saved the Multisystem Sphere, didn’t we? We kept it alive.”

  “Yes, but not because we wanted to,” Sianna protested. “Because we wanted to save ourselves and our planet.”

  “That’s what all good symbiotes do,” Larry said with a smile. “Take care of their hosts to take care of themselves.”

  “I suppose,” Sianna said, her tone a bit doubtful. “I don’t much like thinking of the human race in quite that way.” She turned around to look at Solitude Ring, hanging off in the middle distance. It had taken a bit of damage from the Adversary blast. Prize crews from the Terra Nova were already seeing about getting it up and running again. They expected to have working wormhole links to the Ring of Charon in the Solar System, and to the Moonpoint Ring in the Multisystem, within another week or two. They wouldn’t be stranded here for long. A lot of people were going to be on their way back. There were going to be quite a few reunions.

  Gerald and Marcia had walked on ahead, leaving Sianna and Larry alone. Sianna was glad enough to give them some privacy—but also glad that she and Larry had a little of their own. She didn’t know him at all, but she wanted to. Not to conquer her schoolgirl fears of him, either. She wasn’t a girl anymore. Not after the last few weeks. She couldn’t have survived them without doing some very fast growing up.

  But she could see a lot of herself in Larry. Both of them had been forced to deal with fear and loneliness. Both of them wondered about the Universe. And neither of them was ever going to fit in very well. “You know,” she said. “We have a lot in common, you and I.”

  “Really? I don’t think anyone would like to think of themselves as being like me,” he said.

  “I don’t mind.”

  “Thanks very much,” Larry said. “But seriously, I like talking to you, too. You’re the first person in a long time who didn’t treat me like a sideshow freak, or come to me just because you needed something. It’s nice.”

  “So,” she said, turning to him, “what happens now?”

  “What do you mean?” Larry asked, moving back a step or two.

  Sianna reddened. That was not what she’d meant. “I mean, what happens with the Earth?”

  “Huh?”

  “Wally says he’s doubled what we knew about Charonian command codes since we got here. He says he should be able to rig as many ships as we like with beacons that will tell the COREs and SCOREs to leave them alone. And we know a hell of a lot more about running wormholes than we did. Pretty soon we’ll know how to make them sit up and beg.”

  Larry shrugged, exaggerating the gesture because of the pressure suit. “I suppose that’s true,” he said. “So?”

  “So tell me, what do we do about Earth?” Sianna asked. “I came to you because you’re the expert on moving planets.”

  Larry looked at her, hurt and startled. Then he realized she was teasing him, and relaxed. “I don’t know about expert,” he said, “but what did you have in mind?”

  “Well, do we leave Earth where it is, or take it back home? If we can get to the other worlds in the Multisystem, really get out there and explore those worlds, maybe colonize them, there’s a lot to
be said for leaving Earth right where it is. Or do we take it back home to the Solar System, just for sentimental reasons?”

  Larry seemed surprised by the question. He gave her a funny look, as if he weren’t sure whether she was serious or not. At last he burst out laughing, a long and joyous sound that sounded good to Sianna. “I don’t have an answer for you,” he said. “But if that’s our most serious problem, I’d say we were in very good shape indeed.”

  Wally Sturgis could not resist. Simulations were all very well, but here he was on the actual control panel, running the system that operated a planet-sized mind—and he had used it to destroy a real-life menace. It would be hard to go back to imaginary worlds after that!

  Besides, there was so much he could do here. There was still lots of functioning hardware, and lots more that it ought to be possible to fire up. Lots of ways to get the network reconnected. And they were learning more and more Charonian command code all the time. Which brought Wally back to the idea that he could not resist.

  It was obvious that the Multisystem had retained some sort of link with the Shattered Sphere system, if only through the sensors that had allowed it to monitor the movements of the Adversary. It hadn’t taken Wally long to find those sensors—or find a way to subvert them.

  A carefully crafted message, in carefully written code, ought to do the trick. It would almost be a post-hypnotic suggestion—unless you wanted to think of it as a computer virus. All it had to do was plant the idea in the Sphere’s head. Except of course the Sphere didn’t have a head. Never mind. The important thing was that the Sphere would not even know that it had received an instruction. Let the thing think it was its own idea.