“Sir, assuming the SCORE does not change course, it will hit the event horizon of the black hole in about forty-five seconds—but, ah, sir, I don’t think it’s going to hit it. I think it’s going to go through.”
“But the Ring is dead!” Bernhardt protested. “There is no worm-hole!”
As if on cue, the visual-band image system flared and flashed with the strange not-blue-white of a wormhole opening. Joanne gasped in surprise along with everyone else in the ops center.
“My God, Beadle, you are a good guesser,” Bernhardt said in a half-whisper.
“Thank you, sir,” she replied, most disconcerted, “but I’m usually not this good.”
“The hole,” Bernhardt whispered. “Why the devil are they going into the hole?”
chapter 24: Tremors
“Too many people fail to make the distinction between the concept of dichotomy and that of opposites. We assume that, if there are two possibilities, the two are therefore opposite. This is in some cases true: Black is the opposite of white.
”However, male is by no means the opposite of female. There is nothing to prevent some other planet developing three sexes, and certainly plenty of Earth life gets by with no sexes at all. In a Universe that includes unliving matter—like rocks—death is not the opposite of life. Much that we declare dead is truly alive—a rotting corpse is literally alive with the micro-organisms that are consuming it. Much that we regard as alive in some way—the weather, music, laughter, literature—are in literal fact lifeless.
“And the human perspective of the Universe is not the opposite of the Charonian perspective. They are not even two points along a one-dimensional spectrum. The two are merely two points. Other points— that is to say, quite literally, other points of view—could be charted anywhere in relation to these first two points.”
—Gerald MacDougal, first officer’s log, published in Aspects of Life, MRI Press, 2430
Wheelway, North Pole Sector
The Lunar Wheel
THE MOON
Larry Chao had no business being down in the Wheelway, but he was there. He walked along for quite a while, lost in thought, with no real aim, but the going was easy enough that it did not matter, even once he had walked past the last of the overhead lights. His thoughts were quite unclear, even to himself. The talk he had given, the dangers he had discovered—and the unquiet ghost of Lucian Dreyfuss—all whispered in his mind.
His pressure suit’s headlamps lit the tunnel tolerably well, and Larry was not much in the mood for a lot of light anyway. Besides, the lighted signs indicating the side caverns served well enough as beacons in the darkness.
At length he found himself near the sign for Chamber 281, the most famous of the side caverns. Larry had always wanted to get a look at it, and now seemed a perfectly good time to do so. He turned off the main Wheelway into a small antechamber that opened out onto a much larger inner chamber. A transparent wall was rigged up inside the antechamber, so this smaller room could serve as an observation platform for the big room. The air inside the big room was clear, the ambient atmosphere of the Wheelway pumped out and replaced with nitrogen gas. An airlock arrangement permitted access to the interior. Even though the site was deserted, the worklights were on.
Chamber 281 was where they had found the most spectacular collection of dinosaur remains. Even after four years of work, they were just beginning to learn what the room could tell them. Two skeletons and a rather ratty-looking dinosaur mummy had been propped up on huge display boards near the observation chamber for the edification of passersby. Larry was fairly certain the mummy was a tyrannosaur, but he had no idea at all what the others were.
He knew, intellectually, that the creatures had been down here for tens of millions of years, but still, somehow, it was hard to believe it at a gut level. The behaviour of this being or that eighty million years ago hadn’t seemed as if it had that much meaning for life in the present day, any more than the dynastic wars of 15th century England, or the imperial collapses all through the 20th century had any meaningful consequence to the life of Larry O’Shawnessy Chao in the 25th century.
Except they did, of course. It was easy to trace the strands back, show that if this king had not defeated that usurper, if this government had held together, then all of subsequent history would be changed.
But that was dry, academic theory. The past, the human past, was dead. It did not come alive from out of nowhere, full of dangers all had thought put to rest long ago.
Not so the Charonian past—or the Adversarial past. How could a race of beings from the time of the tyrannosaurs come back, come to life, today, now?
In one moment Larry was staring down at the monsters of Earth’s past.
—And in the next the cavern was bucking and twisting, writhing like a live thing. The transparent wall bulged, flexed, and smashed open. Larry went tumbling through the air and was slammed into the side wall of the cavern as the whole room shook, spasmed.
Loose bits of rock and debris tumbled free all around him. Half-stunned, Larry wrapped his arms around his head, trying to shield the helmet of his suit. The display boards holding the mummified tyrannosaur bucked and swayed and then toppled forward, sending the head of the monster smashing down into the observation room. Larry pulled his legs back just before the razor-sharp teeth could come down on them.
He pulled back from the leering head as far as he could and hunkered down in the corner, as tools and gadgets and bits of dead Charonian and dead dinosaur tumbled down on to him. A scorp claw caromed into the side of his helmet and put a deep scratch in his visor.
Moonquake, Larry told himself, but even as he thought it, he knew it could not be right. He had ridden out a quake or two since he had been on the Moon, and this was different. The ground was not shuddering from deep below. The whole cavern was spasming, somehow. At last the bucking and heaving began to subside.
Larry got to his feet, moving carefully, cautiously. He made his way out of the cavern, out into the main corridor. The lighted sign over the chamber entrance was out. He switched his suit lights back on and a beam of light speared out into the darkness, the air filled with billowing brown dust. The walls, the floors, the ceiling of the Wheelway were still quivering. That was when it struck Larry. The corridor was not being shaken; it was shaking itself.
This was no Moonquake. Larry knew that, knew it down in his soul. This phenomenon was every bit as alien to the Moon as Larry himself.
The Lunar Wheel itself was coming back to life, somehow, a spasm of activity five years after Larry himself had killed the massive being by sending it the command to die.
Every indicator, every test, every probe had confirmed that the Wheel was utterly dead, that every Charonian in the Solar System, from the greatest to the smallest, had died when Larry sent out the death order.
But clearly, somehow, some part of the Wheel had survived. Somehow its corpse was still capable of action, of movement.
But why did it choose now to move?
And then he knew. He knew. And negotiating his way down a pitch-black tunnel to safety was suddenly trivial, meaningless. A door, a way out, was suddenly open. But the dangers of the past had returned, infinitely more deadly than the teeth of a tyrannosaur. He had to get to a comm center. He had to get word to the Ring of Charon, to Sondra Berghoff.
His mind was racing, his heart pounding with excitement as he thought it through. It meant danger, yes, that was clear. But it might mean hope, as well.
The second pulsequake knocked him off his feet, but that was of no consequence. He waited it out, clinging to the floor of the bucking, twisting Wheelway as best he could. When it stopped, he got up and moved on.
Kourou Spaceport
Earth
THE MULTISYSTEM
It did not make sense. Wolf Bernhardt stared at the screen, as if he could will the data to be logical and coherent. The SCORE had going through the wormhole. What was it all about?
He looked toward Jo
anne Beadle, her eyes still locked on the display screen. “Very well,” he said, in as brusque a tone as he could. “It has gone into the hole. So, where does that wormhole lead? Back to the Solar System?”
“I don’t think so, sir. If our theories about what happened are right, the Ring can never be returned. The tuning adjustment mechanism has got to be huge and complex—and there’s just no way it survived in any sort of reparable state.”
“Then what are you saying?” Bernhardt asked.
Beadle licked her lips nervously and looked up at Director Bernhardt. “I’m saying that’s a detuned hole out there.”
“Detuned? So it goes nowhere? That SCORE just sent itself off into oblivion?”
“No sir. I’m not an expert, but as I understand it, a detuned wormhole drops back to a, ah—I suppose you’d call it a default mode. Every transit pair of black holes has its own natural resonances. Leave them alone and they will revert to that tuning.”
“So why couldn’t the Ghoul Modules tune this one?”
“The parts of the Moonpoint Ring that could do it are one big fused lump. Nothing can budge the Moonpoint Ring away from its default tuning, ever again.”
“And you’re sure that the default is not the same as that of the ring in the Solar System?”
“Couldn’t be. The whole point of the Moonpoint Ring is to serve as a tuning system to force the black hole off its default tuning. Besides, don’t forget the people back in the Solar System closed their end of the hole as well.”
“If that is so, then where does that damn SCORE think it’s going?”
Joanne shook her head. “I don’t think anyone is that good a guesser, sir.”
Terra Nova
Deep Space
The full staff was on the bridge, everyone hushed, quiet, tense. Not that there was much point to having anyone at all on the bridge just now. The ship was days away from being able to do much of anything besides watch.
The Terra Nova was moving toward NaPurHab at a crawl, well below the relative velocity that would attract the interest of the COREs that still circled the Earth—at least according to the Earthside theorists and their simulations. Dianne smiled to herself, but there was no pleasure in the expression. Sakalov. Sakalov had been one of those theorists—and had died for the crime of guessing wrong. Perhaps there was some justice in the theory spinners putting themselves on the line, but sometimes the price of justice was too high.
Besides, there was no justice if Sakalov died for being wrong. All the theories were wrong. No one had predicted the SCOREs heading into the singularity. So what the hell else had they got wrong?
“Talk to me, Gerald. What the hell is going on?” Dianne asked. “I thought the SCOREs were supposed to land on Earth and breed.”
“Be thankful we were wrong,” Gerald said. “But we may have other problems.”
“What do you mean—”
“SCORE X002 coming up on closest approach,” Lieutenant DePanna announced. She was the detection officer for the watch, and Dianne was glad to have her. DePanna knew how to interpret what she saw.
Dianne watched on the screen, ready to see this one follow the other into the wormhole.
“Closest approach in five, four, three, two, one—peripoint.” DePanna checked her boards. “X002 is not, repeat not, on a course into the wormhole. It is moving at a tangent to a wormhole intercept course. It is coming about. X002 has ceased manoeuvring. Course projections running now. We show X002 now in a circular polar orbit of wormhole, radius 2,231 kilometres.”
“Now what the hell does that mean?” Dianne demanded.
“No idea, ma’am,” DePanna said in a smooth, steady voice. “Stand by. Something more.” She checked her instruments and looked up in surprise. “SCORE X002 radars cut off,” she said.
“But the COREs never cut their radar,” Gerald objected. “Yes sir,” DePanna said. “That’s what I thought too—” Something on her displays caught DePanna’s attention, and she started adjusting her detectors. “—and we were both right. Radars still active, but redirected. I am running backscatter and beam-leakage analysis. Stand by. Ah, Captain, as best I can tell, SCORE X002’s radar is now directed in a tight beam, focused on the singularity.”
“Oh, come on!” Dianne said, baffled and infuriated. “This is ridiculous. Why aim it at the wormhole? They can’t tell where it is?”
“I don’t know, ma’am. But that’s what it’s doing. X003 coming toward closer approach.”
“And what the hell is this one going to do?” Dianne demanded. “A song-and-dance routine?”
Gerald MacDougal rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “No song and dance,” he said, “but if we consider that the primary function of a CORE is to detect and destroy spaceborne objects that threaten something the Charonians value, maybe we get toward an answer.”
“What do you mean?” Dianne asked.
“I mean if we assume the SCOREs are behaving rationally, and further assume that their behaviour programming is based on the COREs, that suggests that these SCOREs are getting into position to strike at something. Then if we consider what positions they are taking—”
“X003 has entered the wormhole. X004 is taking up an equatorial orbit.”
“My God,” Dianne said. “Half of them taking up parking orbits on this side of the hole, and the other half going through it. They’re trying to stop something from coming through the hole. First line of defence on the other side, and the second line here on this side.”
“Yes,” Gerald agreed. “They’re watching for something they expect will come through it.”
“But why not just slam the wormhole shut?” DePanna asked.
“Because they can’t,” Dianne said. “Whoever is on the other side is able to force the wormhole open. What other answer could there be?”
“None that I can see,” Gerald replied. “I’ve been thinking on this a lot. The Charonians are getting ready to fight something, even though we don’t know what. Much of the evidence points toward their fighting something stronger than they are. It’s hard to imagine that, I know, but there’s more evidence of it right out there.”
“My God,” Dianne said. “If something on the other side of that hole can force the wormhole open against the Charonians’ will, we are in deep trouble. It just takes one CORE to knock out a mid-sized asteroid, and hundreds of SCOREs are headed this way. What the hell can fight back against a hundred SCOREs crashing into it? If that’s even the way SCOREs fight. We don’t know.”
“We don’t know damn much of anything,” DePanna said, showing a bit more emotion than she usually did.
Gerald stared at the display screen as another SCORE moved into a parking orbit. “We don’t know much yet,” he said, “but things are happening. We’ll know more soon. But I don’t think we’ll enjoy knowing it.”
Windbag Central (Command Center) NaPurHab
From where Eyeballer Maximus Lock-on was sitting, twas no great deal sussing the slides of the SCOREs. Half the damnthings were heading straight for the hab, or near enuff. NaPurHab’s orbit was so damn close to the singularity that anything heading for it had to slide rightby the hab. Eyeball could not help but whirry on the whatif re if the hab’s orbit round the black hole carried it right into the path of one of those mothers. At a guess, the SCORE would just smash right through the hab and keep right on going likit hadn’t hit anythang.
At least some SCOREs were scooting into various orbits around Moonpoint. Eyeball didn’t have to worry bout dodging them.
But Eyeball had other things to sweat ‘sides SCORE orbits—like incoming cargo and the stability of the hab’s own orbit. Neither was in the greatest shape, and the two problems were more knit to the SCOREs than might seem at firstglance.
The S in SCORE might stand for “small,” but them whizbangs was plenty big—and plenty massive. Their gravity fields were jogging the hab around just a bit as they passed. Likewise, the Ghoul Modules were popping the wormhole open and shut, and using gravity
waves to do it. Lots of perturbs coming at them.
She was gonna hafta boost this can into a higher, more stable orbit real soon, or hab was toast for sure. Cept no way to do it with the cargo still streaming in, and incoming SCOREs all over the place. The hab was a big old lump of a tub, easy to hit and hard to pilot. Chance of taking a major impact was way too high to risk manoeuvring. Best wait until it all settled down, at least somewhat.
If ever did.
The Ring of Plutopoint
Charon Command Station
THE SOLAR SYSTEM
“We detected the second gravity-wave pulse eight minutes after the first,” Sondra said, reading off her notes. “We picked it up as a harmonic of one of the sub-frequencies we were working on. Of course we immediately retuned to zero in on that frequency. Then the third pulse came about ten minutes after the second, and they’ve been coming at intervals of between five and sixteen minutes ever since.”
“And you have never picked up anything like this before?” the Autocrat asked.
“No, never, not since we turned the Ring on.”
“And what does it mean?” the Autocrat asked.
“Before I get to that, there’s something else you need to know,” Sondra said. “Just a few minutes ago, I received a high-priority signal from Larry Chao on the Moon, reporting a moonquake at exactly the same moment we picked up the first pulse, with a follow-on quake exactly when we picked up the second pulse.”
“But don’t gravity waves move at light speed? No gravity wave that the Moon detected could possibly reach us here at the same moment, unless the wave generator was exactly the same distance from both points, on a plane exactly between the two points, here in the Solar System.”
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