But even as that melodramatic idea flashed across his mind, another part of his mind knew that all was well, that the ship was performing as expected. And yet a third part of his mind was praying to God as hard as it ever had.
No sense in taking chances, he told himself.
The Terra Nova shut down her engines, and coursed through open space, toward a new world without a name.
* * *
The Nenya rushed away from the Moon, out away from the Sun, boosting toward the cold and dark of Pluto, toward the Ring of Charon, Tyrone Vespasian at the controls.
Dr. Simon Raphael sat in Larry Chao’s cabin, watching the Moon grow smaller in the monitor and wondering what it was like to live through decapitation.
Dr. Raphael had never worn a teleoperator control rig himself, but the experts said that the better the rig, the more realism it provided—and the more traumatic the psychic effects of an accident to the teleoperator.
The rig Larry had been wearing was one of the best.
The boy shifted in his sedated sleep, moaned, and rolled over. His left hand flopped out of the bed and Raphael took it, held it. Somewhere in the midst of all Larry’s terrors there might be some part of him that could sense a touch, and know it to be friendly, comforting.
Raphael looked over to the video monitor. He used the bedside control to cut away from the view of the Moon to a dynamic orbital schematic, an abstract collection of numbers and color graphics. But to Simon Raphael, there could be nothing more meaningful in the Universe. It was the Saint Anthony’s flight path, tracking its progress from the Moon to the Earthpoint black hole.
And Earthpoint was getting close.
* * *
The probe fell relentlessly, down toward the nightmare point where Earth had vanished, toward the strange throbbing blue flashes of light. Toward the place where huge and mysterious vehicles were materializing still, rushing out toward the surviving planets. Down toward the black hole, the wormhole that marked the spot where Earth had been.
All the latest data from Mars, from the Lunar Wheel induction taps, from all sources, had been radioed aboard the little armored craft. Whatever information the Solar System had gathered concerning its invaders would be aboard, ready for transmission to Earth.
If Earth was still there.
But the Saint Anthony was incapable of worrying about that. All it knew was that it needed to arrive in precisely the right spot, a point mere meters across, at a moment timed with utterly compulsive precision. Miss the point, fail to move through in the nanosecond between a pseudo-asteroid arriving and the wormhole slamming shut again, and the Saint Anthony would be just another submicro-scopic, infinitesimal part of the Earthpoint black hole.
The moment was coming closer. The Saint Anthony checked its alignment one last time.
The wormhole opened, precisely on time. The probe’s cameras saw the event from close range, broadcast it back to the Moon, taped it for a hoped-for transmission to Earth.
A gee-point craft burst out of nowhere, leapt through the hole at terrifying speed, missing an impact with the Saint Anthony by a scant few hundred meters before flying off into the darkness beyond.
The hole was open.
The probe fell in.
Vortices of space, time, light, gravity, twisted and swirled around each other in ways that should not have been possible, knotting themselves about each other. The wormhole went through the probe, instead of the other way around. Time stopped, space stopped, and then each turned into the other and ran backwards. Gravity became negative, and the black glow from outside the wormhole was the stars absorbing photons, using them to fission helium into hydrogen. Time fell in knotted loops around the craft, chasing itself backwards, forwards, sideways—
And then it was over, and the Saint Anthony was through.
* * *
Chelated Noisemaker Extreme/Frank Barlow was responsible for keeping the Naked Purple Habitat in contact with the outside Universe. But now, Earth was the only comm target, and it was dead easy to track from here. But on the other hand, without its comsat network, Earth’s own communications were sorely degraded.
Chelated’s boss, Overshoe Maximum Noisemaker, was much troubled by the situation. After all, the Noise-makers were charged with keeping comm from getting too good or too bad. And therein lay the problem. Did the ease with which they could signal Earth mean comm was good and needed screwing up? Or did the damage to the space communications net represent bad comm that needed tender loving care? And how many pinheads can dance on an angel? Chelated/Frank asked himself sarcastically. He was tired of all the almost theological worrying over minor points.
He was tired of it all. Tired of his Purple name, tired of thinking in circles, tired of not being allowed to do his job properly. It was his name that was bugging him most of all. Noisemaker just meant communications worker. Extreme was a bit less neutral, a derisive comment on how seriously he took his job. But Chelated. He had known that in Purpspeak it meant overdetermined and overeager. But it was not until last night that he found out the hard way from a cruelly informative young woman that it had a sneering sexual connotation. And they had been calling him that for months!
The hell with it. The hell with all the rules. While the powers-that-be dithered, Frank felt himself free to do his job properly, free to use his gear to observe the strange things NaPurHab now shared a universe with. He spent much of his time with all sensors locked on the wormhole, watching the massive vehicles drop into it, bound for who knew where. Frank was fascinated by it. He sat, for hours at a time, transfixed, staring at the hole in space.
So he sat when the Saint Anthony came through from the other side.
Frank Barlow/Chelated Noisemaker Extreme stared in astonishment as powerful video and radio signals lit up comm screens that had been dark for weeks. It took a long moment to understand what he was seeing. And then his fingers were flying over the control panels, setting up to record everything.
The news from home poured in, and Frank watched in awe. He looked down and realized that his hand was on the intercom phone. His first and understandable reflex was to call his supervisor, Overshoe Maximum Noisemaker.
But what the hell would Overshoe do? Sit there and contemplate the proper response under the Naked Purple philosophy? Calculate how this development could best be turned to the benefit of the Pointless Cause? Hold a meeting of all the brothersandsisters?
No, he told himself. Frank felt a higher duty than to Overshoe. And besides, this was a message for Earth, not for the Purples.
He powered up his best antenna and focused it on Earth, tuned it to the main comm signal for JPL. The folks at JPL were the ones who should take this call.
* * *
The Saint Anthony was a robust piece of hardware. The trip through the hole had been rough—it probably would have killed a human being—and it did scramble a few systems. But the probe’s builders had expected such problems, and built the Anthony to be able to bounce back.
The Anthony took a few seconds to sort itself out and restart its major systems. And then its video sensors began searching for the one sight that could answer the most questions.
It found what it was looking for, and recorded as many images as it could before the first signal-back period. It gathered the data it had collected and fired it all off down the hole on the tightest beam it could manage.
* * *
Larry opened his eyes, and found himself safe in bed, feeling far too heavy. “What’s… what’s going on?” he asked.
“You’re on board the Nenya,” a gentle voice told him. “We’re flying you home to Pluto.”
He looked to his side. Dr. Raphael was sitting next to him. Larry blinked once, twice, and looked around. He noticed a video screen in the corner of the room. It was showing a status display of some kind.
Raphael noticed what he was looking at. “It’s the Saint Anthony,” he said. “The probe just dropped through the hole a few seconds ago.”
Larry sat up a bit more and looked again at the screen. All the display values were at zero. The largest frame on the screen was supposed to show the video from the probe—but it too was black. A knot formed in his stomach. The probe had already met whatever fate was reserved for it.
Another clock display showed the time since entering the black hole. Larry leaned forward, watching it, scarcely daring to breathe. One hundred twenty-eight seconds passed.
“Any second now,” Raphael said.
And the screen scrambled and cleared.
To show a fuzzy, low-quality, long-range video frame.
Of Earth. Unmistakably of Earth. The planet lived.
Tears sprang into Larry’s eyes. Raphael turned to him, and the two men flung their arms about each other.
Earth. Earth was still there, surviving in a strange and frightful Universe. The homeworld lived, surrounded by peril.
But then, that had always been true.
* * *
Earth’s radio astronomers should have been happy people: Earth’s new sky was full of very bright radio sources.
The trouble was, none of the radio sources meant anything. As far as anyone could tell, every one of the worlds in the Multisystem was ringed by a set of close-orbiting radio emitters, immediately and confusingly tagged as “COREs.” The COREs seemed to serve no other purpose than to jam any investigations of other radio sources in the system.
They had another problem—there weren’t that many dishes left to work with, or radio astronomers left to work on them. As with most of astronomy, research in the radio frequencies had long ago moved off Earth.
A few ground-based dishes were still in operation on Earth, and there were a few ground-based scientists to work them. Those dishes were in use every moment, struggling to understand this brave and fearful new world of which Earth was suddenly a part. Most of them were targeted on the Dyson Sphere—and none on the Moon-point black hole.
They all missed the Saint Anthony’s signals, until NaPurHab clued them in.
When Chelated/Frank’s call came in, Wolf Bernhardt was, for what seemed the first time in weeks, sound asleep. His assistant ignored strict orders not to wake him for any reason, and yanked him from his cot the moment the first message came in. By the time Wolf arrived at JPL’s main control room and sat down in front of his console, JPL’s comm dishes had locked in on the Saint Anthony and queried it directly. The computers were pulling down the main body of data—everything the Solar System had learned about its invaders. Starting with the name, strange and cold. The Charonians. Wolf spoke the word to himself, as if it were a mantra against further danger. As if giving the enemy a name explained them, made them understandable and controllable.
The video monitors and text screens were scrolling off the most incredible data—asteroids attacking planets, a black hole taking Earth’s place. Fantastic knowledge.
But Wolf Bernhardt—tired, disheveled, still not quite awake, was in no mood for wonderment. He focused on the question of answering back, and fast, before those coldly named Charonians could interfere. One data channel gave the instructions for responding—among other things, the data capacity and format for the laser transponder that would attempt a relay to the Solar System. Screens full of information came in. The Solar System was giving Earth all it knew—Earth had to return the compliment. But would they have the chance? The Saint Anthony could broadcast to Earth constantly on all sorts of frequencies—but could only send back toward the Solar System on one laser beam through the wormhole, for three seconds every 128 seconds.
The probe was sure to have a limited lifespan. Earth would have to get its highest priority information beamed back to the probe and fast.
He stared unseeingly at the display screens and slumped back in his chair. Think. Clear your mind and concentrate. A mug of coffee appeared unbidden at his elbow, and he muttered a distracted “thank you” to the unseen person who delivered it. He took a first thoughtful sip of the coffee, still not even really aware that it had been given to him.
All right, then. Assume the enemy was going to destroy the probe in the next five minutes, so that he would have only one chance to report on Earth’s situation. What did the Solar System need to know first? Hell, that was obvious.
The Sphere. The Sphere was literally and figuratively at the center of all this. But explaining the situation would take time—and that would delay the first message. Second things first then. Just dump everything that they had, in whatever order they could, while drafting a proper message.
He pressed a key on his comm panel. “Todd, locate all the science summaries since the Big Jump and start transmitting them at the coordinates and frequencies listed on status page four. Send it priority two. I’ll be sending a priority one in a few minutes.”
He pulled a keyboard out and started to write. What was the first thing to say? “Earth,” he began, “has survived. We have been captured and placed in a huge artificial multistar system dominated by a Dyson Sphere. Many deaths and injuries were caused by loss of space infrastructure and orbital destabilizations. Night sky from this location reveals few stars outside Multisystem, apparently due to shell of obscuring dust. Efforts to locate the Sun in the sky therefore not yet successful, Earth’s location relative to Solar System unknown. Distance from Earth unknown, but, as observations from the Solar System never located this remarkable star system, we can base a distance estimate on how far away one would have to be not to detect the Multisystem. On that basis, range estimated to be at a minimum of several hundred light-years, with no Upper limit. Perpetrators of Earth-theft unknown. Purpose of Earth-theft unknown…”
* * *
Arrangements were not yet complete. The Sphere had not done all that needed doing to see after its new charge. The captured world was still exposed to some slight dangers, some unlikely hazards.
One of those dangers seemed to have been realized. An object, of fair size, had appeared through the wormhole link to the planet’s old system. It was not unheard of for debris to fall through a wormhole, but this was an unusually large fragment, and falling straight toward the newly acquired world at some speed. Though there was no real danger, the Sphere never took unneeded chances.
Another world was near enough to divert one of its Shepherds to meet the danger. The Sphere contacted the nearby world’s Keeper Ring and ordered the diversion. Almost immediately, a Shepherd swung out of its orbit and toward the intruder.
The Sphere noted another, larger object departing the vicinity of the new world, indeed headed for a close pass of the nearby planet that was providing the Shepherd.
But the large debris fragment was not on a collision course. If, somehow, the situation changed, then the planet’s Shepherds could handle the problem. The Sphere directed its attention elsewhere, checking again on the far-off danger that threatened the Sphere.
Far off, yes. But slowly getting closer. Disaster was yet decades off. But every moment of that time would be needed in order to avert disaster.
Every moment. The Sphere sent yet another message-image to the new system’s Caller, urging it on to greater speed.
* * *
The Anthony’s arrival was reported to the Terra Nova just as Dianne Steiger headed to her cabin for the evening. There was little the Nova could actually do, other than download the probe’s data and distribute it to the science staff.
Captains were supposed to delegate authority. Dianne decided to let her subordinates handle that job for her.
Dianne Steiger slept best in zero gee, and now was a time when she needed that sleep. It had been a busy time, getting the Nova launched, and she was exhausted. She was asleep the moment she slid between the sheets.
Five seconds or five hours after she lay down, a buzzer sounded by her bedside and she snapped to sudden wakefulness. She fumbled for the unfamiliar controls, got the lights on, and found the intercom switch. “Steiger here.”
“Ma’am, LeClerc here.” A tiny viewscreen popped on, and showed LeCl
erc’s earnest young face. “Sorry to disturb you, but this seemed important. We’ve got something on the radar plot board. One of the COREs just boosted for Earth.”
Dianne blinked and sat bold upright. “Say again. Our fusion core did what!”
“Sorry ma’am. I meant one of the radio sources orbiting the Target One planet. One of the COREs. One just broke orbit and started heading toward Earth. Boosted at an incredible rate, thirty gees at least, and then shut down. Ah, stand by, computer’s giving me a refined trajectory. Make that headed close to Earth. I read it now as intercepting that probe, the Saint Anthony. Here’s the plot.” LeClerc’s face vanished, to be replaced by an orbital schematic.
Dianne peered at it and swore. “Oh, hell. The party’s over. How long until intercept?”
“Forty-eight hours, four minutes. Though we still need to refine that a bit.”
“How close a pass will we get with the CORE?”
“Won’t come within ten thousand kilometers of us, according to the current track.”
A stray thought popped into Dianne’s head. “Wait a second. I ordered passive-only detection. How are you tracking the CORE at this range?”
“Hard not to track it, ma’am. These damn CORE things absolutely glow in radio frequencies. Bright enough that they seem to jam out all the natural radio sources.”
“Very well. Make sure Earth knows what’s happening, so they can use those forty-eight hours. Any theories on why the things didn’t come after us?”
“No, ma’am. Unless maybe they’re just waiting until we get closer.”
“‘That’s not very comforting. Thank you, LeClerc. You did right to wake me. Stay on top of it.”
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