The end of the firelance resting on the mass locus reddened more and more, grew dark and sullen as the gravity well deepened, redshifting the light more and more. The last shreds and fragments of Pluto slammed into the accretion cone, ripped themselves down to powder and gas, then to ions, falling, whirling, spinning, glowing, collapsing toward the voracious maw.
Larry watched the meters and licked his fear-dry lips. Soon. Soon. When the escape velocity reached the speed of light…
Suddenly there was a strange flickering across the screen as the last of Pluto fell into the beam. Just then, the light of the firelance guttered down to nothing, and not even the light of impact on the mass locus could escape. And the rest was darkness.
Larry looked up from his numbers and his meters, ignored the view from the monitor screens, and stumbled toward one of the Nenya’s few viewpoints. His own eyes. He had to see this with his own eyes.
In the wardroom. A port there. He stepped in, and saw a crowd there, people staring out the port. But suddenly their faces turned toward him, and they backed away. Whether out of fear or respect Larry neither knew nor cared. See. He had to see, with his own eyes.
He shoved his face up against the port, leaned in close enough that his breath froze on the quartz, turning the port into a foggy mirror, putting eyes in the quartz reflection that looked back at him.
His breath had frosted the station’s observation dome that first night of it all. That action, that tiny dusting of frozen moisture on a window, reminded him of the far-off victory when he had succeeded in focusing a pinprick of gravitic potential, a nothing, and held it steady for the briefest of moments—and had thought that to be a triumph. Now he knew better.
And, oh how happily he would give up that moment in order to give up this one, trade away his dreams to lose the knowledge he had purchased at such terrible price. The knowledge of destruction.
He reached out a weary hand and wiped his reflection away to look out at his handiwork.
Charon was gone.
Pluto was gone.
Lost, vanished, as if they had never been.
Only the Ring, the mighty and terrible Ring, survived. At its centerpoint, at the axis of the Ring, at the place around which all their desperate hopes revolved, was an impossibly tiny dot, utterly and forever invisible. A dot that contained all that been Charon, all that had been Pluto, all that had been the station and the bodies of their dead comrades.
A black hole.
A piece of darkness, and he had made it so.
Larry closed his eyes, and trembled, and wept. Then the exhaustion of collapse swept over him, and he knew no more.
chapter 25: Half a Loaf
Larry awoke after far too short a time, longing for a better rest, for proper sleep, for a chance to dream away some of the nightmares. But things were getting worse back in the Inner System. People, families, whole cities could die while he caught a few winks. There was no time.
And so he was back in his control chair, trying to make it all work.
At last the main monitor screen lit up.
SYSTEM READY FOR TUNING HUNT.
Good. He cleared the board, ran one last check, and let the automatics take over. A display light flickered once, there was a faint beep, and the search program ran. The Ring’s computers knew to within close tolerances Earthpoint’s modulation, intensity, focus, pulse rate. Now it had to hunt within that range, searching for the precise combination of values that would cause a lock.
It was up to the machines now. Larry moved back from the board. This was it, the end of the quest.
And yet only the beginning. There were endless battles left to fight.
The Ring sequencer worked relentlessly through all the myriad ways, testing, sensing as it made each adjustment. Larry watched it work, astonished by his own arrogance. His black hole was a scant few hours old, and here they were, using it in the most elaborate and complicated way imaginable. They should have performed tests, years’ worth of tests, accumulated an encyclopedia’s worth of data, before they tried something this far out on the edge.
But there was no time. People were dying.
Webling, utterly exhausted, had gone off to try to sleep. Larry sat in the control room, alone with Dr. Raphael, watching the display click through all the permutations.
But being alone was an illusion. Larry knew that outside that door the entire staff of the research station, the people he had just made refugees, were watching every monitor, every display. Watching to see if the Solar System would live. Oh, yes, he was far from alone.
Larry turned and looked at Dr. Raphael. No, at Simon. He had never called the man that. But maybe now was the time to speak the man’s name. Maybe that, too, would be a beginning, a start of saying many other things to his staunchest companion. “Simon,” he said, quietly.
The older man looked up, startled. It was clear that he understood the significance of the moment. “Yes, Larry?”
“Simon, where are we? I mean, even if this works, what does it gain us? If we stop them, where do we go next?”
Simon thought for a moment, and then offered up a sad smile. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “Maybe nowhere. Maybe we win this battle and lose the war. We’ve just barely begun to have an idea of who and what we’re fighting. But at least we’ll have bought time. We’ll be in a position to survive, to regroup. We’ll have hope. And Earth will be safe, at least for the moment.”
Larry was about to reply when the alert buzzer went off. He checked his board and suddenly felt the adrenaline surging through his body. “We have a lock,” he announced. He powered up the external monitor and zoomed the camera in on the centerpoint of the Ring, where the invisible Plutopoint singularity hung lurking in the darkness. Suddenly, impossibly, there was a flash of unwhite, unblue, a flicker of color in the black. And then it was gone. Larry watched, unmoving, scarcely daring to breathe, waiting.
One hundred twenty-eight seconds later it flared again, and Larry let out a shout of triumph that nearly scared Simon Raphael to death. They were in.
“Now,” he said, “we start tapping into the Lunar Wheel’s power feed.”
◊ ◊ ◊
The education of the new planet’s Keeper Ring was barely completed. The Keeper had been handling the Link on a solo basis for only the briefest period of time, but it had the procedure down to a comfortable routine. Maintain the Link, allow the aperture’s innate recycle time to complete, stimulate the wormhole aperture to open, direct a Worldeater through the aperture, pull down gravitic quanta from the Dyson Sphere and direct them through the aperture at the same time. Complete all the transactions before the aperture destabilised and collapsed. And then, maintain the Link while the aperture recycled.
It was simple, straightforward, and the thing the Keeper had been bred to do. The Keeper took the mechanical equivalent of pride and satisfaction in the work, and in the fact that the Sphere had removed its last direct monitors, trusting the Keeper with the responsibility.
But no matter how great the Keeper’s competence, no matter how vast its heritage memory, time was still the great teacher, and very little of that had passed.
The Keeper Ring—and the Sphere—paid the price for the Keeper’s inexperience when the anomaly occurred. It took the Keeper only microseconds to realise something was wrong. The Keeper sensed a strange sensation on its Link to the new star system. A dip in power, a double echo on the last few pulses, as if the Caller Ring on the other end were answering twice. The Keeper increased the draw-down from the Sphere’s power feed to match the increased demand while it ran diagnostics on the situation. No need to call the Sphere for help. The Keeper felt confident it could handle the problem on its own.
◊ ◊ ◊
It had to be his imagination, but to Larry it seemed as if the Ring of Charon were visibly surging, pulsing with power. It had never been designed to store this kind of gravitic potential, but the Gravities Station staff had learned a great deal in his absence.
They had devised a way to use part of the Plutopoint singularity’s potential to form a toroidal gravity bottle, a gravity-field containment that knotted a toroid of space between the Ring and the black hole, curving space back on itself into a doughnut shape centred on the singularity. The containment could store the gravitic potential until it was needed.
And it was going to be needed soon.
Larry drummed his fingers nervously on the console. “Simon, there are things that I’m not sure of. I think that I’ve got the Charonian command-image system down. The Gravities Station’s engineers agree, and the Simulations work, and the data we’re pulling in now from the Keeper tap seem to confirm it. But there’s no time for more research. We won’t know if we’ve got it right until we start sending commands—and by then it will be too late to find out if things are going wrong.”
“All right,” Simon said. “Walk through it with me one more time. Assuming everything works, what are you going to do?”
“Well, the best we can hope for is to send false commands to the Lunar Wheel at a higher signal power than the real commands. Because we’re putting all our gravitic potential into signalling, and none into power relay, we ought to be able to shout at the Lunar Wheel louder than the Dyson Sphere—or louder than whatever auxiliary the Sphere is using to control the Wheel. Probably the Moonpoint Ring, but we don’t know.
“Then we can order the Lunar Wheel to relay our commands to its underlings. Marcia MacDougal recorded a large number of start-work commands sent by the Lunar Wheel to the Landers, and a few that seem to be stop commands. We send shutdown command sequences that ought to work. They should cause all the Landers to stop what they are doing and stand down. That should buy us enough time to learn the command language, and do more refined control—while holding the link to Earth open. If we get good enough with the command system, maybe we could bring Earth back.”
“It all sounds very promising. Suppose your commands don’t work?”
Larry folded his hands in his lap and looked down. “I have a contingency plan. But not one I want to use. It has to be decided ahead of time.”
“What has to be decided?” Simon asked, as gently as he could.
Larry seemed unwilling to answer that directly. “Well, if nothing else works, Marcia found what seems to be an abort order. The Charonians were smart enough to put an off switch in every machine. It seems to be an order that can be used on any malfunctioning Charonian device or creature, in the event that it goes out of control, threatening others. She spotted it being sent to the Landers that went out of control and crashed. I can use that command—as a last-ditch effort—to tell the Lunar Wheel and the Moonpoint Ring and all the Landers to die. It’s a very simple command. There’s no question that we have it right. If we sent it in a general broadcast through the wormhole link, and direct from here it would give us permanent, complete, final shutdown. I have no doubt about that. But of course, there would be other consequences as well,” he said.
“Consequences?” Simon Raphael asked. “It would be a full-blown disaster! Without the Wheel, we’ll have lost our link to Earth! You yourself pointed out what a disaster that would be when Vespasian suggested killing the Wheel. Earth will still be in danger, exposed to a future breeding binge.”
“We’ve sent Earth our warnings,” Larry said. “Unless a miracle happens and we can bring the planet back here, I don’t really think there’s much more beyond that we can do, or will be able to do. Whether or not we are in contact, Earth will have to stop the breeding binge on its own.”
“But you yourself said the Dyson Sphere had to have a backup linkage system,” Simon said.
“If it does I bet the other end is maintained by the Moonpoint Ring in the Multisystem,” Larry said. “And the Moonpoint Ring will get the order to die at the same time the Lunar Wheel does. With both ends of the link destroyed, the wormhole will collapse. I don’t know if even the Dyson Sphere could find us again.”
“How can you even imagine doing such—” Simon Raphael was about to protest, when his eyes fell upon the clock. With every change of the numbers, the Solar System was suffering more and deeper wounds. Three more of the core-matter volcanoes on Venus, and six on Mercury. Port Viking’s dome coming apart at the seams, its air rushing out into the Martian night. Daltry’s law, he thought. There is always a worse catastrophe. “Forgive me. If it does come to that, perhaps we will find out how we can do such a thing. We’ve done all we can afford to do in order to prepare for this. There is no time. Begin it. And good luck.”
Larry took a deep breath, turned back to the controls and adjusted the release on the gravitic quanta containment. The Ring took on new power. Up until now the Plutopoint end of the wormhole had been at the lowest possible energy, a mere pinprick in the side of the main sky tunnel.
Now Larry amplified the power going into the Pluto aperture, in effect grabbing at space, grabbing at the pinprick and pulling it wider, until the pinprick was a gaping hole in space.
Simon Raphael watched the main display screen, with half an eye on the countdown clock. The Earthpoint-Moonpoint aperture was to reopen in another five seconds. Four, three, two, one—where there had been a tiny flicker of blue, suddenly there was a blazing flash of color—and a massive object was hurtling through space. Simon caught a glimpse of a gleaming, cigar-shaped object before it flashed out of camera angle.
“Good God. We caught a Lander!” Simon said. Suddenly, for the first time, the mad idea of building a worm-hole was real, was concrete to him. A Lander, an asteroid-sized half-living spaceship, had popped out of nowhere right in front of them.
“That poor dumb Lander had to have been targeted and programmed for one of the inner planets. Now what the hell is it going to do?” Larry asked gleefully. “Good start, and if we didn’t know before, we know now,” Larry said. “Our aperture is stronger than the Earthpoint aperture. The theory worked—the wormhole is drawn toward the most powerful gravity signal. Now we’re in the driver’s seat,” Larry said eagerly.
“But what will the Sphere do?” Raphael asked.
“Not the Sphere,” Larry said. “That’s our main hope. The Sphere would be smart enough to handle our attack. But from what I could get out of the reports from Earth, the Sphere delegates everything. My bet is the Moonpoint Ring is running autonomously by now.”
“So how will it react?”
“God only knows.” Larry was intent on his control panel. “There! There it is.” He threw an oscilloscope tracing on the main screen. “That’s the main command signal coming from the Moonpoint Ring through the wormhole. I’m going to shunt it toward us, try and pull as much of that signal in through our aperture as possible, so we can weaken the signal arriving at Earth-point.”
◊ ◊ ◊
Malfunction! Terrible malfunction. Massive amounts of power were being drained away from the Link. The young and inexperienced Keeper Ring forced itself to think clearly. There had to be an answer, a solution stored in its heritage memory. But this circumstance was new, unique, utterly unknown in all the annals of the Sphere and its ancestors. It rushed to abort the next launch of a Worldeater through the aperture, knowing the terrible dangers of sending mass through an unstable wormhole.
But power. That was the real problem. Without sufficient power, the Caller Ring would be unable to complete its work. The Keeper Ring redoubled its efforts.
◊ ◊ ◊
On the other end of the wormhole Link, the Caller Ring was equally mystified, equally frightened, and utterly helpless. Without power it was nothing.
◊ ◊ ◊
“Here we go,” Larry said. “We’re sending a modulated pulsed gravity beam, at high power, in command mode, right down the wormhole. I’m ordering shutdown of all activity on Mars.” He pressed the button and wiped the sweat off his brow. “Hell! The Moonpoint Ring is increasing its command power feed to the Lunar Wheel through Earthpoint. I’ll have to shunt more power away and store it here to make sure ours is the stronger sign
al at the Lunar Wheel.”
“But we don’t have that much storage capacity,” Raphael said, leaning over the control console. “We’ll have to dump the power, or use it to amplify our own command signal.”
“Can’t,” Larry said tersely. “Everything’s at capacity already and there’s no way to dump it except through the Ring of Charon. Put any more power through the Ring and we’ll melt it. And we don’t have any storage capacity left in the gravity containment.”
◊ ◊ ◊
There was something wrong with the incoming commands, and nothing could be more terrifying to a Caller Ring. It was getting two command signals at once, and neither made any sense. The weaker one advised that increased power was on the way—but if anything, the power transmission was dropping again. The second command signal was loud, blaringly loud and powerful. It took a supreme effort of will to resist blind obedience to it. But its command syntax was garbled slightly, and there was something odd, disturbingly unfamiliar about it—and the orders did not make sense. A stranger’s voice, commanding wrongful acts. The Caller Ring was badly frightened now. What could it be? What was happening? It sent a reply signal to both senders.
◊ ◊ ◊
The Keeper Ring was stunned. The Caller was clearly receiving an alien signal. Why was the Caller being ordered to cease disassembly of one world? Who or what was ordering it? How was it that the increased power the Keeper sent was not received?
The Keeper Ring upped its output to the Caller Ring again.
◊ ◊ ◊
“Damn all that’s holy. Son, we’re spiking high,” Raphael said. “The gravity containment is completely saturated. We can’t shunt any more power to it. We have to let the power through to the Lunar Wheel or melt out the Ring.”
“Not yet,” Larry said. “Just a little bit—hold it, signal coming back. Computers working to interpret. Stand by.” Larry stared at the display screen, and his face turned ashen grey. “Oh my God. We’ve failed. The Wheel is saying our command was garbled, and indicates receipt of two command signals. We didn’t jam the Moonpoint signal hard enough.”
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