“Well, send the Martian shutdown order again,” Raphael said.
Larry shook his head, and punched in a display code.
A highly complex visual image flashed on the main screen, the schematic of the Martian shutdown command. “Not if it contains an error. We can’t just send it again, the Wheel would just refuse it again.” He stared at the schematic, and muttered to himself, trying to read the symbols and codes.
“Can you fix it? Correct the error and send it again?” Simon asked.
Larry shook his head, the sweat popping out on his forehead. “Not in time, not this fast. The damn message is too complicated, and we don’t know the language well enough. And we can’t shunt any more power to our containment, unless you want to recreate the Big Bang right here and now. The Wheel is going to get everything Moonpoint sends—all the power, all the commands—and you can bet the Moonpoint Ring is going to increase its power relay.
“And now they know we’re in the power loop, that there’s an intruder in the system. When the Wheel gets a full power signal from Moonpoint, they’ll find a way to lock us out. Just change the damn frequency, probably. And it’ll all be for nothing.”
He hesitated for a long moment, and turned toward Simon, a desperate look in his eye. “Unless the Lunar Wheel isn’t there anymore.”
There was a pause, a deep beat of time while Simon Raphael looked at Larry, and understood what he was saying.
Simon Raphael felt a hard knot in the pit of his stomach. Fifteen minutes ago he had been rejecting the idea as a disaster, but now it was the only choice left. “Do it,” he said, Now he wished Larry had kept the whole plan to himself. Dr. Simon Raphael did not want this decision thrust upon him. “Do it. Send the order to die.”
Larry decided not to tempt fate by asking for confirmation. He shifted all the power he could draw, called up the signal he had so carefully constructed, and ordered the computer to send it down the wormhole with everything behind it. Not just to the Lunar Wheel—but through the Wheel to the Moonpoint Ring, and through open space, to every Charonian in the Solar System.
◊ ◊ ◊
The Caller Ring had never known such terror. What was happening? What monstrous enemy was doing these things? Suddenly its whole being twitched to attention, a hugely powerful signal grabbing at it, demanding its entire attention. The feel of the message, the voice, was still that of a stranger, an alien. But this time the command was unmistakable, sent in perfect syntax and modulation.
And it was the one signal that could not be denied, for it worked not through the Caller’s conscious mind, but through the very circuits that formed that mind. The command echoed through the Caller Ring, out on its every command link, to every Worldeater in the system. And rebounded through the Caller Ring itself.
Death.
Stop.
Halt.
Cut power.
Shut down.
Death.
With a strange, cold, fascination, it felt the signal, absorbed it, sensed it coursing through all the myriad links that made up the Caller. It could see the order crashing through all the components of itself.
There was only one hope. It had to set up a stasis storage, set part of itself into hibernation mode before the signal could destroy everything. Any portion of itself that was shut down would not hear the command, and would survive, inert. There was very little time left. Only microseconds at best. Almost at random, the Caller selected a portion of itself near the North Pole region and used every command channel it had to send the stasis order.
But then the signal reached the seat of consciousness itself.
Death.
Death.
Dea—
◊ ◊ ◊
The Keeper Ring shuddered, convulsed with pain. Death. Death. Death. It fought off the impulse to die, struggled to clamp down its outgoing comm system. If this hideous command echoed out further, out into the Multisystem, the catastrophe would be complete. The Sphere itself might be imperiled. With a last effort of will, it held the command to itself.
And died.
◊ ◊ ◊
The Sphere realised something was wrong. It switched its full attention back to the new Keeper Ring, milliseconds too late. It caught the last shreds of the death command on an outgoing signal, deftly countermanded it before it could travel outward. None of the Sphere’s other charges would be endangered.
But the Ring was dead, utterly inert. Something had attacked it, and killed it savagely.
Without a Keeper, the Sphere would have to monitor the new world directly, control its orbit personally. A further drain on its resources and attention. No world it had ever taken had caused it so much trouble.
And its new star system! Its hope for a new Multisystem, a refuge against the coming onslaught. Gone. Lost. And with the Link to the new star system shattered, there was no way to know how this thing had happened.
The Sphere realised that new star system was not merely lost—it had been deliberately taken away.
For the first time, the Dyson Sphere realised that it had not one enemy, but two.
And the second enemy knew how to deny it a star system.
But who and what had done this thing? The Sphere set to feverish work, sifting through the wreckage of the dead Keeper Ring’s memory. There had to be clues. There had to be a way to get the Link back.
If there was not, the Sphere was doomed. For its first enemy would not stop at killing a single Keeper Ring.
◊ ◊ ◊
Frank Barlow, lately known as Chelated Noisemaker Extreme, looked down at his instruments, and out the porthole at the Moonpoint singularity. Suddenly there was no activity. The whole farging thing had shut down. As best he could tell with low-power, low-sensitivity, jury-rigged sensors, there was no gravity modulation going on at all. The Ring had stopped controlling the Moonpoint black hole, and the wormhole wasn’t there anymore.
Somehow, the folks back in the Solar System had killed the Moonpoint Ring.
He sat there, staring at nothing, for a long time. Better call Ohio, even if he was busy as hell trying to save the hab, now that the COREs had probably made resupply from Earth impossible. Now NaPurHab would have to be self sufficient, or die.
He pressed down the intercom key. “Ohio, this is Frank,” he said. “Something’s happened down here.”
“What’s that?” Ohio’s voice asked.
Frank Barlow licked his lips, looked again at the dead and silent instruments, and told Ohio Template Windbag what all of Earth was about to find out.
“Well, Walter,” he said. “All of a sudden, it looks like we’re on our own.”
chapter 26: Before the Hunt
The command to die spread out from the Moon, coursing across the Solar System in all directions. On Venus, on Mars, on Mercury and in the Asteroid Belt, on the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn and Uranus, the Landers heard—and stopped.
The spin storms of Jupiter faded away, the core-matter volcanoes on Venus and Mercury thundered to a halt, the surface strippers that had mauled Mars so badly stopped their deadly upblasts of rock and stone. The orbiting Landers, busily preparing to process the wreckage of worlds into usable form, shut down before they had properly begun. All the half-living, half-machine Landers stuttered to a halt.
The dust clouds faded from the skies of Port Viking. The domed cities of the gas-giant satellites peeked out from the rubble that surrounded them, and discovered they were still alive. VISOR coursed over a planet no longer in torment.
But the price was high. For no one had made the slightest progress in physically locating the Multisystem.
Without the Keeper Ring and Caller Ring, Earth was lost, utterly lost amid all the myriad suns.
◊ ◊ ◊
Sleep had come at last. Fitful, fearful, unsettled, but sleep, a long enough rest to do some good—and a chance for the nightmares to work themselves out. Sleep and then awakening. Simon and Larry sat in the wardroom, lingering over coffee, happy at least
to be alive. The viewscreen was on, and the stars shone in at the breakfast table.
“Half a loaf,” Simon said. “We are alive, and Earth is alive—but we are lost to each other. I was wrong to call that a disaster, Larry. Even if we never do find each other, at least we survived, Earth and the Solar System. We’ll be all right. They’ll be all right.”
“Do you really think so?” Larry asked.
Raphael shrugged. For some reason, even after the long nightmare just past, he felt good this morning. Tomorrow or the next day would be time enough for survivor guilt. Right now, against huge odds, he, the Solar System, and the Earth had made it through the night alive. That was reason enough to celebrate. “I don’t see why not. The planet itself is intact, its climate is stable. Only human technology was damaged in the jump—and our friends were recovering from that even before we lost contact. They have blue skies, green grass, the oceans, the forests. Why wouldn’t they be all right?
“True, they don’t have spaceflight anymore, thanks to those CORE devices ready to shoot down anything that flies. But the Naked Purple Habitat’s orbiting the Moon-point singularity, and the Terra Nova is somewhere out in the Multisystem. That’s two spaceside assets. There should be a lot to learn about the Multisystem, the domain of the Sphere from deep space. They have a few cards to play.”
“I suppose. But what really scares me is that I’ve gotten the Dyson Sphere’s attention,” Larry said. “We’ve had a real blessing in disguise all this time: the Sphere, all the Charonians, were utterly unaware of human beings. But they’ll have to take notice of someone stealing a whole solar system out from under them, and killing all their operatives here. I may very well have made the Charonians into a desperate enemy.”
Simon Raphael looked startled. “I can see them as an enemy. But why do you call them desperate?”
Larry hesitated for a moment. “There’s that one image I can’t get out of my mind, that picture of the shattered sphere. I don’t think the Sphere just wanted the Solar System. I think it needed it. And still does. As a refuge, as a hiding place, or maybe as a diversion, a decoy. I don’t know. We don’t know what that picture of the shattered sphere means, but we do know that the moment the Lunar Wheel received it, every Charonian in the Solar System went into panic overdrive.
“And there’s the way all the Charonians hid themselves in the Solar System. Think about that. Somehow we all took it for granted, never really considered that they had to be hiding from somebody. The Landers, disguised as asteroids, as comets in the Oort Cloud. Think about the way the Lunar Wheel was dug into the Moon. My God, what is there out there powerful enough to smash open a Dyson Sphere, frightening enough to scare something the size of the Lunar Wheel into hiding?”
Larry shrugged. “We can give it a name, I suppose. I’ve been thinking of it as the Sphere Cracker. But what is it? What does it want? Maybe it hunts for Dyson Spheres the way the Charonians hunt for life-bearing planets. And maybe the Earth’s Dyson Sphere is just about ready to be cracked open. What happens to Earth then? Imagine what would happen to the Multisystem if the Sphere weren’t there to keep the orbits stable.”
Larry stopped, and stared out the viewscreen. The Ring of Charon wheeled sedately through the darkness, as if nothing in the Universe had ever gone wrong, or ever could. At last he spoke again. “I don’t think Earth is going to be safe for very long at all. Not with a Dyson Sphere saving it for use as a breeding cage. Not with a Sphere Cracker out tracking down the Sphere.”
“Safe,” Simon said. “When have any of us ever been truly safe? Sometimes we’ve had the illusion of safety, but there’s always been something out there that could kill us. Name one person who’s ever lived through being alive.”
Larry smiled at the old joke, but then the sadness overtook him again, a wave of homesickness swept through him. Could it truly be that he would never see Earth, see home, again? “Will we ever find them again, Simon? We lost Earth once, and had to hunt for it through the worm-hole. Now we have to hunt for it again, but working blind. Can we find it this time, with the Lunar Wheel dead?”
Simon smiled gently, and nodded. “I think so. We know about wormholes, and Dyson Spheres, and we’ve got a Solar System full of alien technology to pick through. There must be some clue somewhere, buried in all those memory stores. And Earth will be looking for us, as well. We’ll find each other. In a week, or a lifetime, or a millennium.”
Larry smiled at last, and looked out the viewport, out past the Ring of Charon that had destroyed—and then rescued—so much. Past the invisible Plutopoint black hole imprisoned in the Ring’s centerpoint, past the wreckage of alien invaders strewn across the Solar System, past the battered planets shrouded in dust and his far-scattered friends picking their ways out of the rubble, past the ghosts of the dead lost in this fight, past the far-off gleam of the loving Sun that the Charonians had sought to entomb in a new Dyson Sphere—past all fear to the clean, clean stars.
Gravity power and wormhole links. Those were the keys to the stars—and Earth was out there somewhere, waiting for the good people of the Solar System to put that key to the lock and find them.
Gravity power, wormholes, the simple knowledge that intelligent life had once existed elsewhere, even if it were now mutated into something strange and incomprehensible. The sure knowledge that the stars were reachable. They had learned a great deal from their tormentors, back here in the wounded wreck of the Solar System. And there was a great deal more to learn, locked in the broken machines and dead servants of the enemy.
And what of the Earth, surrounded by the wonders of the Multisystem, with who knows how many habitable worlds just out of reach? The knowledge Earth and Terra Nova might find was limitless.
For there must be other wormholes in the Multisystem, other links to other multisystems, links to ancestors and relatives of this Sphere, reaching in all directions of space, back to every place the Charonians had journeyed in uncounted millions of years.
Look at it that way, look at it the right way, and humanity was not merely clinging to life, battling for survival, but quite accidentally poised for new and great adventures, both here and on the lost Earth.
Today was for rest.
Tomorrow the Hunt for Earth could begin.
Glossary
Terms, Ship Names, and Locations
Amalgam Creature. A merged group of several Landers. See Lander.
Autocrat of Ceres. The absolute ruler of the largest asteroid, and the only effective instrumentality of law or justice in the Belt Community. The Autocrat’s reputation for draconian justice serves to prevent most from daring his wrath.
Barycenter. The center of gravity for any orbiting system; the point around which two bodies in an orbital relationship revolve. In most systems, for example the Sun-Mars system, or the old Earth-Moon system, the larger body contains such a large fraction of the system’s mass that the barycenter is actually inside the large body. In the case of more nearly equal masses, for example Pluto-Charon, the barycenter can be a point in open space between the two masses.
Belt Community. A loose political association of the larger and more sensible governments in the remarkably disorganised Asteroid Belt.
Biosphere. That hollow sphere of space around a star in which a life-bearing planet can survive. Although other variables are involved, the basic constraint is simple: inside a biosphere, solar radiation is neither too strong or too weak, and Earthlike temperatures are possible.
Caller, Caller Ring. Charonian term for the object (or possibly life-form) exemplified by the Lunar Wheel. This form is extremely similar to a Keeper Ring such as the Moonpoint Ring.
Carrier bug. One of the lowest-level Charonian type, capable of only the simplest fetch-and-carry duties. Alternatively, any of the low-level Charonian types.
Central City. The principal city and capital of the Lunar Republic. Formerly called Central Colony.
Charonians. Named for the Ring of Charon, the hypothetical aliens co
ntrolling the massive machines discovered after the Earth’s vanishment.
Conner. A citizen of the Lunar Republic. Derived from colonist and/or con artist, in the days when Conners were dismissed as both. Previously a pejorative term, now generally accepted.
COREs, Close-Orbiting Radio Emitters. Any of a large number of identical objects in various orbits around all the worlds of the Multisystem. Their powerful radio signals—emitted over a wide spectrum of frequencies—serve as an effective jamming mechanism.
Dyson Sphere. A huge sphere built entirely around a star, so as to provide huge surface area (hundreds of billions times the surface area of Earth) and/or to capture all of the star’s power. Named for twentieth-century scientist Freeman Dyson.
Earthpoint. That point in space, relative to the Moon and the rest of the Solar System, where the Earth once was. The Earthpoint black hole, also known as the Earthpoint singularity or wormhole, now occupies this space. See Moonpoint.
Event Horizon. The minimum distance from a black hole required before time and/or light can escape—or, to put it another way, the minimum distance required before events are possible. The stronger a gravity field, the slower time moves and the more light is redshifted. If the field is strong enough, time and light are slowed to a complete stop. Also defined as the point where the local escape velocity equals the speed of light.
Event Radius. The distance, usually measured in light-minutes or light-hours, between two points. The event radius is so called because no event can have any effect at a given distance until light (or radio waves or other electromagnetic energy) has had time to cross that distance. Referred to as a “radius” because light expands out spherically. Not related to Event Horizon.
Hunted Earth Omnibus Page 43