She blinked and looked again. Yes. Lucian was walking on nothing, striding upward and forward.
“Marcia—he just started flying!” Larry said over her headphones.
“Follow him,” she said. “This is the first impossible thing he’s done since he woke up. It could be important. He’s been in fog, tunnels, and enclosed, covered spaces. Maybe he’s been looking for the sky all this time. He wanted to show us something in the sky.”
“But he’s not walking on anything!”
“Neither have you been,” she said. “You’ve been in illusion the whole time. You think that’s the real lunar surface under your feet? Just walk like you’re climbing stairs, the way he is. He’s controlling the illusion. If he thinks you’re moving upward, you’ll move upward. Follow him!”
“Um, ah, okay.” The image lurched from side to side as Larry moved in exaggerated upward steps. “I’m, ah, climbing,” he said. “My God, it’s working. I’m following him up. My God!”
The view tilted upward as Larry looked toward Lucian, several meters above him. “Can you see?” he asked. “He’s stopped moving his legs. He’s just flying along. I’m going to try it, see if it makes him think I should fall.”
Marcia watched anxiously and the picture stopped bucking and swaying. Larry had stopped moving his feet. No, he wasn’t falling. How could Larry fall when he was still in the T.O. rig in the chamber just down the passage? Illusion was befuddling stuff.
Never mind. For whatever reason, Lucian no longer needed Larry to pretend to move in order for Lucian to take him along. Perhaps Lucian was getting better at controlling his environment—if you could call a self-induced delusion an environment.
But then she noticed what Larry was seeing, and forgot about such trivia.
The stars were changing.
They were shifting position, rearranging themselves, coalescing, some growing brighter, and others fading away. Something was coming closer, growing bigger.
A Sphere. A Dyson Sphere. The twin of the one they had seen in the images from the Multisystem.
“Oh my God,” she said. “We’re in. Lucian’s showing images from the Heritage Memory.”
“Images of bloody what?” Selby asked.
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Marcia said.
The Dyson Sphere was suddenly huge, and close, surrounded by a cloud of Captive Suns and Captive Worlds. An ordered, stately dominion, all its stars and planets dancing attendance on the Sphere.
Then, from out of the darkness, something came, flashing out of a hole in space. There was a flurry of action, too fast to see. The screen filled with a jumble of images and symbols that came too fast to see or understand. “Let’s hope the recorders got that,” Vespasian said. “Could you make sense of it?”
“Not me,” Marcia said. Selby shook her head no, but did not speak. Instead she watched the screen.
Something was moving in from the outer Multisystem, a bright orange spark of throbbing light.
“What the devil is that?” Vespasian demanded.
“No idea,” Selby said. “But either it’s bloody huge or this is some sort of schematic symbolised display, things scaled up.” Now there was movement on the screen as a swarm of objects converged on the orange dot of light. “If those are Charonians, this must be scaled up. They don’t have anything that can move like that much above asteroid-size. At least so far as we know.”
One after another, and then in great swarms, the Charonians moved toward the intruder, smashed into it—and were destroyed, smashed down to nothing. The intruder moved inward, toward the Sphere, unstoppable. More and more defenders moved in, each wave more frantic than the last, as the intruder came closer to the Sphere. Then the screen blanked for a moment, and there was another flurry of incomprehensible symbols and schematics before the image of the intruder and the Sphere reappeared.
“What in blazes the devil are we looking at?” Vespasian asked.
Marcia shook her head without taking her eyes from the display screen. “I don’t know exactly,” she said, “but it looks familiar. I’ve seen something like this before.”
“What are you talking about? How could you have—”
“Ssssh. Quiet. Let me watch.”
Now the intruder was dodging and weaving, ducking the cloud of Charonian defenders. It broke through the last of them and moved toward the Sphere, closer and closer.
With one last lunging thrust, it smashed into the Sphere, punching a hole in it, diving inward. For a brief moment, nothing seemed to happen—and then the intruder, the dot of light, erupted from another place on the Sphere and moved outward, dragging along a second bright point of light with it.
“That’s the Shattered Sphere sequence!” Marcia said. “Frame by frame, exactly the same images that the Sphere in Earth’s Multisystem sent to the Lunar Wheel. The transmission we intercepted.”
But this image did not stop the way the Shattered Sphere imagery had. The two bright sparks of light did not pass out of the field of view. This time the view stayed with them. They moved out, away from the Sphere, toward a Ring-and-Hole pair in the farthest reaches of the system. They dove toward the hole—and disappeared.
But even then the imagery did not end. Instead it swung back toward the Sphere, showed it pitching and wobbling, its stately, ordered spin decaying into a chaotic tumble. Clearly, the Sphere was dead. Without the Sphere to regulate and control the orbits of the suns and worlds, the whole system of stars and planets careened out of control. The image pulled back to show the Captive Suns beginning to drift away, toward the depths of interstellar space.
Stars made close passes to each other, and their gravity fields stripped planets away, ejecting worlds into the darkness, or pulling planets down into collisions with Captive Suns or into direct impacts with other worlds.
The system was a ruin.
The image faded to black, and then Lucian’s voice spoke to the darkness, to Larry, to the team in the control room. “There is it,” he said. “Sleep now tired. Very tired.” And that was all. Darkness and silence.
Marcia punched up the intercom key. “Larry,” she said. “Did you get that? Larry?”
But there was no answer. She tried it again. “Larry? Larry, come in.” Suddenly worried, Marcia got up from her console and rushed down the cable-snaked corridor, Selby at her heels. They rushed past the glaring worklights, to the chamber where the techs had assembled the TeleOperator’s exoskeleton.
By the time they got there, the techs already had the exoskeleton open. They were taking him down. His skin was pasty-white, his body limp as a rag in the arms of the techs. For a half-second, Marcia thought he was dead, but then his face twitched, his arm raised up. The techs moved him over to a cot on the other side of the room and lay him down there.
“I don’t know,” the head tech said before Marcia could ask anything. “Looks like it might be some sort of sensory overload reaction. Too much comes in at once and your brain just shuts down. You pass out cold. If that’s all it is, then he’ll be okay after he comes to.”
But then Larry made a low grunting noise, rolled over on his side—and started to snore.
“He’s not unconscious,” Marcia said. “He’s asleep. Dead asleep.”
“Well, wake him up!” Selby said. “Ask him what all of that meant!”
“No,” Marcia said. “Let him sleep. The poor man certainly deserves it.” She looked down at him, and shook her head. Dear God, what he had been through. Today, and in his life. If ever a man deserved a little peace, it was Larry Chao. “Let him sleep,” she said again. She turned and looked at Selby. “If he has any answers, they’ll just have to wait until he wakes up. God knows we have enough to work on until then.”
chapter 18: In the Can
“In all our attempts to understand the behaviour of the Charonians, our most common failing is in neglecting to remember they are partly living. There is an animal side to these creatures, living beings that are part and parcel of the cybern
etic synergisms called Charonians. We think of Charonians as machines, as computers, as robots, as self-propelled spaceships and automated terraforming construction systems. The Charonians are all of these things—but only half their heritage is mechanistic.
”The machine side of the Charonians responds to logic, to orders, to programming. But consider the living side. The living side responds to the same primordial urges that drive all animals, all living things. Fear, excitement, the urge to procreate, the herd mentality, whatever warped and distorted shreds of instinct that still whisper through the lifecode of a hundred worlds. We imagine the overmind, the controlling consciousness of the Charonians, as making its will known through logical, rational, cold, hard orders issued to other machines.
“That all might well be the case. But it might well be just as accurate to think of a nervous shepherd trying to cajole a herd of frightened sheep back toward safety—or a ruthless hunter shouting commands to a pack of half-trained wolfhounds.”
—Dr. Ursula Gruber, Speculations on the Enemy, MRI Press, 2430
The Guardian was one of many. Hundreds of its kind orbited this world, and thousands more patrolled the skies over the other planets of the Multisystem. The Guardian was far down in the Charonian hierarchy, and its freedom of action was severely limited. It had no significant capacity for free will. All it could really do was whatever it was told to do, and it had been told to detect and destroy any large body that threatened the world it guarded—a protection this world was much in need of.
For reasons unknown, this world seemed to suffer from far more than its share of space debris—much of which, erupted from the planet itself. How that could be, the Guardian neither knew nor cared. Perhaps the objects rising off the planet were the spawn of some sort of aberrant rogue Breeders, though they did not match any of the profile points for rogues. But such complexities were beyond its comprehension and well outside its area of concern. All it knew was that it must destroy whatever threatened the world that it guarded.
But the Guardian was not pure machine. The organic part of its being was a tiny, but vital, fraction that gave the Guardian some small shred of what might be termed imagination, some minute capacity for abstract thought.
These abilities allowed the Guardian to conceive of its own capacity for error, let it look forward to the consequences of those mistakes. Normally these were of no great consequence. But just at present the Multisystem was on edge. Through all the myriad communications links and nets ran the murmur of danger, the rumour of fear. The emotional underlay built on itself, reinforced itself. The Guardian was growing more wary, more fearful, and therefore more zealous. It watched for error, and struggled to prevent it, or foresee it.
It might have misread the orbit of this object, failed to account for the variable that would cause that body to shift its orbits, failed to realise those seemingly inert objects were actually rogue Breeders that might awaken at any time and savage a fallow world.
Far better to attack a hundred truly harmless lumps of skyrock, reduce them to unthreatening rubble, than to let a single truly threatening target get through.
And yet, there were always limits to capacity, varying degrees of threat, the need to conserve today’s resources so as to be prepared for tomorrow’s dangers. There was even, as a secondary consideration, the safety of the Guardian itself. Guardians had no particular need or desire for self-preservation—but were acutely aware that the Multisystem as a whole needed to conserve resources. The Guardian would be happy to sacrifice itself—if the gain to the Multisystem outweighed the loss of an asset.
The Guardian could not meet all potential threats to the world it shielded. Especially not now. Not when there was so much activity, and when soon, very soon, things would get even busier. And yet . . . and yet… its superiors were forcing the Guardian, all the Guardians, into higher and higher states of alert. The Guardian, of course, obeyed its orders, but it also responded to the tone, the mood, the emotion behind an order. Fear, real, deep fear, lay behind the commands from on high, and that fear was seeping into the Guardian, even as it was instructed to conserve its energy, choose its targets carefully, stand ready for the greater battles to come.
Go forward/hold back; be vigilant now/prepare for future battle; kill all possible enemies/make no wasteful mistakes. The dissonance was most disturbing.
The Guardian longed for better, clearer guidance—but preparation for battle was going on at every level of the hierarchy, and every being was swamped as the entire Multisystem girded itself for the coming crisis.
It had a job to do. It could focus on that, find solidity and sureness there.
A target headed out from the planet on a long, looping trajectory that would lead it out toward the singularity and back toward the planet, coming dangerously near it. It might well be perturbed into a planetary impact course. The target was a significant potential threat that the Guardian could deal with easily. The Guardian swung itself about and calculated an intercept course. It came about broadside to the target, and moved toward it at maximum acceleration.
Within seconds, the Guardian was moving at sufficiently high velocity to pulverise the object. It ceased acceleration, made a tiny course correction, and prepared for impact.
The Guardian smashed into the target, sending debris spinning off into space in all directions, leaving a new crater in the Guardian’s exterior, bits of twisted metal and plastic fused into its surface. The impact left the Guardian a trifle shaken for a moment or two, but that was to be expected.
The Guardian slowed itself and settled into a new patrol orbit.
Watching.
Waiting.
Afraid.
Kourou Spaceport
Earth
THE MULTISYSTEM
Wolf Bernhardt paced the floor of the control center. He was exhausted, barely able to keep his eyes open, but too wound up even to imagine rest. Halfway there. Halfway. Half the cargo carriers on their way. Loss rates were high—not as high as feared, but not as low as hoped.
But so far, so good.
“Confirming CORE P322 impact with Cargo Craft 47,” Joanne Beadle announced. “CC47 destroyed.”
“Manifest?” Wolf asked, not even looking toward her. Was it something irreplaceable? Would they have to rush a new cargo craft to replace it, send a new craft up against higher odds than the one that had been destroyed?
“Just a moment. Ah, medical supplies, sir. But it’s a duplicate. Redundant to CC15, which NaPurHab has already taken aboard. No need for re-launch.”
“That’s something, anyway.” But what about the cargoes—and lives—he could not afford to lose?
Launch Bay Eight
Kourou Spaceport
“We have a green board,” the bland, artificial voice announced over the comm speaker. “Launch in one minute.” It was just as well that the restraint system had activated, and that Sianna was completely immobilised, with the airbags inflated down from above to hold her body in place. Otherwise she would have been severely tempted to reach up and claw the damned speaker right out of the console. That damned robot voice was getting on her nerves. Repeating the same bloody message every half minute, nothing changing but the time. The display screen had switched to a countdown clock, the numbers flicking downward in over-big, over-bright letters. She wanted to turn her head away, but the restraint pads had inflated around her head as well, holding it quite gently but quite firmly in place. You could snap your neck by having your head turn when a high-gee boost kicked in, and the permod designers had taken no chances.
“We have a green board,” the voice said again. “Launch in thirty seconds.”
Sianna could feel the sweat on her body, the airbags pinning her in place. She was hot. She concentrated on that, trying not to worry about other things. After all, being in a box, and being restrained, utterly immobilised into the bargain, could be enough to drive a claustrophobic person completely around the bend, if that claustrophobic person thought about it.
At least it was almost over. In another thirty seconds, she would be on her way. Wait a second. Over? Nowhere near. She would have three days in this thing.
If she had three days. No one wanted to tell her what the loss rate really was, what her odds of survival really were. How many cargo vehicles were making it through? Ninety-nine out of a hundred? One out of a hundred? Half? None? And even if the odds were good now, the very reason for making the lift now was the knowledge that the odds were about to get much, much worse. Suppose they were too late, and the SCOREs and COREs had shifted from passive defence to aggressive attack right now?
Still, the sooner they lit the candle on this thing and got moving, the sooner she would get out of this machine. Out. Dear God, out. It wasn’t just a word, it was a prayer for deliverance. She had only been in here two hours, and she was already half out of her mind. How the hell was she going to say sane for three days?
“We have a green board. Launch in twenty seconds.” There was a pause, and then—“We have a green board. Launch in ten seconds. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Zero.”
With a shuddering, towering roar, the booster leaped into the sky. Sianna was shoved down into the padding beneath her, and a brutal fist slammed down into her gut. The crushing load shocked her, amazed her. How could anything be so heavy? How could she be so heavy? The air was squeezing its way out of her lungs, she could feel her heart straining to move her blood. And then—and then—
And then she could feel unconsciousness coming near, offering her a release from all the terrors and fears. She reached for it, and took it, and knew no more.
◊ ◊ ◊
Joanne Beadle stared at the ops screen and tried to remember what sleep, real sleep, felt like. She had grabbed a catnap here and there over the last few days, but not real sleep, head on a pillow, body on a bed and no one to bother you for eight solid hours.
She blinked, rubbed her eyes, and yawned. Watch the screens. Watch the screens. Ignore Wolf Bernhardt hovering behind her. He had been there ever since that Colette person had boosted away, long hours ago. But pretend he’s not there. Watch the screens and pray, and wonder when to do the very little she could do. For the most part the COREs moved far too fast, manoeuvred far too violently, for there to be any hope of a human-built spacecraft avoiding them. But for this all-out effort, at least some countermeasures were available. Ground-based radars were ready to throw powerful jamming signals into the sky, and cargo carriers full of decoy targets were ready to send the enemy chasing after dozens or hundreds of targets—but no one was ready to use those just yet. Not when that might give the enemy time to react.
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