Dead silence. All three of them stared at Gruber’s image on the screen.
“Think about it,” Gruber said at last. “Talk it over. It’s a desperate, risky plan, but as best I can see, the only way out is through.”
◊ ◊ ◊
Two hours later, not much in the room had changed, except that Gruber’s image was off the screen. Sianna was sitting in the furthest corner of the room, sitting on the floor with her arms wrapped around her knees, trying to force herself to think. Think. Being dropped down a black hole. There had to be another way. There had to be. So think, damnation. What was it?
“Do you think it would work, Wall?” Eyeball asked Wally. The two of them were sitting at the beat-up conference table.
“It ought to.” He thought for a moment and then nodded enthusiastically. “Yes. It will work. The mass density is different, of course, but that shouldn’t matter. It’s risky, of course, but it sure beats getting pasted by a SCORE or being accreted onto the singularity.”
Sianna shut her eyes and took a deep breath. “Hold it,” she said. “Pretend I’m stupid. What exactly are you talking about, from the top?”
“What Gruber said,” he replied. “They play back the command sets that they’ve been capturing on Earth. They send commands to the Ghoul Modules, and order the Ghouls to open the wormhole for us. We go through the wormhole instead of piling into the singularity or getting smashed to pieces by the SCOREs.”
Sianna looked from Wally to Eyeball. The two of them were actually serious. “You can’t do that,” she protested. “There are over nine thousand people in the hab. You can’t drop it through a black hole just for the hell of it. There has to be another way.”
“Then lay it on down,” Eyeball said. “We got the ears, you got the words?”
“Yeah, Sia,” Wally said. “You got a better idea?”
Sianna hated being called Sia. And Wally was ganging up on her, siding with this Eyeball lunatic instead of her. Suddenly, she got mad, blind angry. It would have been a perfect moment to come up with the brilliant solution, to have the blinding flash of inspiration that would make everything okay.
The trouble was, she couldn’t think of a damn thing.
◊ ◊ ◊
Ohio Template Windbag, the Maximum Windbag himself, sat in his comfortable, frowzy old armchair, his hands folded over his ample gut, watching Eyeballer Maximus Lock-On pacing back and forth, listening to what she had to say.
“I don’t like it, boss, but I think the straights have it nailed down right. Was gonna do a bigburn correction, get our orbit up. But can’t go high orbit—get clobbered bigtime. We can’t go low without de-stabbing like crazy, badnews tidal effects. And can’t stay where we is without orbit rotting out.”
“Who you been yapping at?” Windbag asked.
“These two, some,” she said, indicating Wally and Sianna with a negligent flick of her wrist. “Been running my own data. And on the horn to Gruber,” Eyeball said. “She’s trying to square it up with the head hun Earthside.”
“Who? Bernhardt? Gruber didn’t sign off with him first?”
“Not before she talked to me. Guess didn’t want to push me, just drop idea. Our call, not theirs. But the straights have been picking the brains of that Lone World, tapping all its signals. These two have shown me some sims and data, and I buy it all. We gotta suck up what they spitting out. Nothing else for it. Deal’s real. Go in and through, not up and out.”
“Want to get this solid. You and Gruber and these two all asking me to okay dropping NaPurHab through the wormhole?”
“That’s the deal,” Eyeball said.
“You nuts for good this time? All anyone’s said ‘bout that hole for sure is they sure it ain’t home on other side.” He cocked his head toward Wally. “Ol’ Windbag Max got that straight?” he asked, clearly hoping to be told he was wrong. “Noway the Moon and the Sun and Mars and home on the hole flipside?”
“Ah, no sir,” Wally said. “The hole is locked on its default tuning, and we know they had to retune it to lock on to the Solar System. The Solar System is the one thing we know isn’t on the other side.”
“Hmmph. So gimme guesses?”
Wally shrugged. “We don’t even know if there is another side, for sure. We assume there must be, because they’re sending the SCOREs into the hole. My guess would be another Multisystem of some kind, but I don’t know.”
“Any one of you have any idea past that?”
No one replied.
“Thanks for the bigtime info,” the Windbag growled. “Could the Hab survive there? Would there be enough light to the solar collectors, or not too much? We can adjust some, but by enough? Stable orbit possible? Low enough radiation density?”
Wally turned his palms up helplessly. “No way to know.”
“Can we even get hab through hole? This is a pretty bigtime tin-can.”
Wally nodded vigorously. “Oh, yes. We should be able to do it. It will take some very tight work, and some very good piloting, but it’s doable.”
“Um, sir?” Sianna said, struggling to find her voice. “There is another factor I think you really need to consider.”
“Yeah? Like what?” the Windbag asked as he gave his beard a thoughtful scratch.
“The SCOREs are setting themselves up to keep something from getting out of that hole. What, we don’t know. But obviously whatever it is has to be on the other side of that hole.”
“You don’t think we should do this, do you?” the Max Windbag asked.
“No, no sir, I don’t. I think it’s close to suicidal.”
“Got any instead ideas? Something we could live through, maybe?”
“Not really.”
“Thanks for the bigtime help,” the Windbag said. He stood up and started pacing the compartment, not speaking for a while. “Time,” he said at last. “We on the clock?”
“Ticking loud,” Eyeball agreed. “Earthside numbers crunch to fifty hours, maybe sixty, sixty-five tops. I get near-same. Orbit won’t hold past that. Practically every perturb is goosing us in closer. Past six-five hours max, we’ll be too deep in the hole’s gee-well to climb back out. High-speed orbital decay after that. And we pile it in.”
“Can’t stabilise where we are for lit-bit longer?”
“That’s with us duking it out to hold orbit. Can’t raise orbit without SCOREs doing for us. Can’t hold orbit exactly, perfectly steady with all the grav action round here. Means we drift in, no mistake.”
“Gimme some odds,” Windbag said, with something close to a note of pleading in his voice. “What if we don’t go down the tube? Say I put it all down on staying here. Gimme a bet.”
Eyeball made a thumb-out fist and then turned thumbs down. “Near enough zip makes no nevermind. This crate can’t dodge SCOREs. We stay, we pile it in. SCORE-splat or hole-smash. Dumpster locked.”
“Fershure?”
“Nailed. No odds.”
“No odds. No odds at all,” the Windbag said. “Don’t cut me much, does it?”
“Zip or less,” Eyeball said.
The compartment went silent as the Windbag stood there, motionless, thinking.
“Odds not much better if we take the dive,” he said. “Hole run deathride, otherside hostile, the scarything the Charos are trying to keep out. But zillion-to-one beats zero.”
He sat back down in his chair, with his forearms on the arms of the chair, his hands gripping deep into the worn fabric. He stared straight ahead, at nothing at all, the distracted, far-off look of a chess player on his face. But a vein was throbbing at his temple, and his eyes were flat and hard.
“All right,” he said at last. “All right. Gotta call a Purple Deluxe Meet. Pull in all the honchos and honchettes, tell them about it, get ‘em close enough to realworld that they sign off on it. But that’s my gig, not yours. You got work to do.”
“Tell me straight,” Eyeball said. “No mistakes, no saywhats later on this one. Go Code?”
“Go C
ode,” the Windbag agreed, his voice a whisper. “Go Code it is.” He looked up at Eyeball, at Wally, at Sianna, and the fear was plain in his eyes. “Do it,” he said. “Gear us up and get us down that hole.”
chapter 26: It Goes In Here…
“Theory is a fine thing. But if it were the only thing, we would not need the real world. If we could rely on theory, then theory would protect us from everything else. When the experiment went wrong, we could simply hold a strong, well-thought-out, sensible theory up and show it to Mother Nature, and she would be forced to revise her policies.
”That, of course, is not how things work, though God knows there have been times when I wished it were. I have long since lost count of the number of people who have sent me letters or notes or datapacks that prove that the Abduction never happened. They have all sorts of numbers and data and formulae that prove the Earth was never stolen, that it was all a mistake or an illusion or a clerical error or a Belter plot.
“I would be delighted to find they were right. Mother Nature, the laws of the Universe, reality— whatever you call it—is not that cooperative. Things don’t go according to plan. God knows I have better reason to know that than most. It remains true that we never know for sure if it will work, or what, exactly, will happen, until we try it. That, after all, is why they are called experiments.”
—Dr. Larry Chao, unpublished essay
Terra Nova
Near-Earth Space
THE MULTISYSTEM
Dianne Steiger sat at the command chair on the bridge and tried to force the exhaustion from her mind. The news from NaPurHab. Incredible. Absolutely incredible. Into the wormhole. Nine thousand plus people, dropping through into the unknown. God help them all. By the time the Terra Nova arrived at NaPurHab’s position, NaPurHab wouldn’t be there anymore.
Dianne was frightened for the people in the Naked Purple Habitat, but she had something more than a humanitarian interest in the fate of NaPurHab. She had her own ideas, her own theories—and her own nightmares.
At least the COREs were giving them less trouble. Only a handful of close encounters, and no more actual attacks. But even that was worrisome. Dianne could not get rid of the irrational feeling they were being herded.
Soon, very soon, she would have to make a decision. Bail out, abort the mission, and head meekly off into the depths of space—or else press on, head for the rendezvous point, and then…
She had spent too many long nights staring a hole in the overhead bulkhead, brooding over what the Charonians were, and where they came from—and who or what it was they feared.
Fear. Charonian fear. That was the key that turned the lock, the question that would lead to the answers. Dianne had watched the SCOREs appear, watched the Ghoul Modules come in and commandeer the corpse of the Moonpoint Ring, watched the way things had turned hard-edged recently. Up until a few months ago, the system had reminded Dianne of a huge, lumbering beast that could go where it wanted and do what it would. Now it was moving in panicky fear. Something, somewhere had told the Sphere that some threat was suddenly near. Things were nearing their climax.
And she was damned if the Terra Nova was going to miss the party.
NaPurHab
Sianna Colette opened the door to her quarters and stuck her head out into the corridor. After the incident with the cleanup robot the night before, she was not going to venture into the hab’s public ways without careful consideration. NaPurHab was a madhouse. But that, Sianna thought, was the normal part. What was remarkable was the degree to which it was managing to organise itself and prepare for what everyone was calling the Big Dive, a term that seemed to come out of nowhere.
But then everything around here seemed to come from nowhere. Nothing made sense. The Boredway Gang started a petition that protested not the Dive, but the existence of the wormhole itself. She had learned the fine old Purple tradition of signing someone else’s name—preferably an outsider’s name—to a petition when someone shoved a page full of scrawls, scribbles and x’s, all purporting to be Sianna’s own signature, under her nose. She had signed Wolf Bernhardt’s name.
But the hab did, after all, work. It kept its citizens alive, and managed to hold itself together. The Purp had to be doing something right. Certainly the manic enthusiasm with which the entire populace was preparing for the Dive was impressive. Even if the cleaning robots did chase people around now and again.
The coast seemed to be clear, more or less, except for the man editing the graffiti on the opposite wall. Sianna stepped out into the corridor, determined that, this time, she would find her way to the Eyeball Central—the navigation room—without getting lost. She made her way through the tangle of passageways turned into living spaces, and living spaces turned into found art, and lost art turned back into passageways.
At last she came upon the hatchway marked I-BALLS OWNLEE. She had made it this time, without needing to ask directions of a local who might improvise a fictional route, or send her in exactly the wrong direction, just to demonstrate the foolishness of linear thinking, or something. Or else tell her she was going to be given false directions, and then give exact, precise, and accurate instructions on how to get there.
She stepped inside and closed the hatch behind her with a distinct sense of relief. In here, things were relatively sane. More or less. After all, Wally was there.
Sianna had been working herself to exhaustion every night, dragging herself back to her cabin only when her eyes just would not open any longer. But Wally had always been there when she left, and there when she arrived the next day. Sianna didn’t think Wally had left Eyeball Central in the last two days. He was right where she had left him last night, hunched over a video display, staring intently at something or other, not even aware she had come in. Sianna didn’t even try to offer him a greeting. Just like old times.
Eyeball came in a minute or two after Sianna, and offered Sianna a smile, of sorts. A tricky woman, Eyeball was, and not too much interested in the Purple way of doing a thing if that way did not suit her. Her lab space was immaculate. No rubbish heaved in corners, no drawings scribbled on the walls. Wolf Bernhardt himself kept no tidier an office.
“Good morning,” Sianna said.
“Morn,” Eyeball said. “Least morn or less. Losing track.”
“I know the feeling,” Sianna said. “But we’re getting there.”
“ ‘Less there’s getting us,” Eyeball said, rather cryptically. She sat down at a workstation and got back to work.
Sianna nodded, to herself as much as anything. Talkative group. Of course, to be fair, Eyeball had to plan the precise trajectory through the wormhole, working off the numbers Sianna and Wally were developing on exactly where and when and what size the worm-hole would be.
Analysing the wormhole events that had let the SCOREs pass through was Sianna’s job.
She had spent a good part of yesterday running playbacks of all the recorded passages of SCOREs through the hole, getting precise timings, positions and trajectories for all the events.
Well, back at it. Sianna told herself. She sat down at the console next to Wally’s and punched up the recorded images of the worm-hole events. She could have cued it up at the point she had left off the night before, but instead she ran it from the beginning, fast-forwarding through repeated blue-white flashes of the wormhole bursting open, the SCOREs heading through, the wormhole slamming shut behind them.
Sianna stared at the screen, watching the wormhole opening and shutting, at the stream of SCOREs heading into it. Opening, shutting, on, off, in, out, on, off.
Wait a second. Sianna had been a bit slouched down in her seat. Now she sat straight up. Wait a second. On-off, pos-neg, yes-no, zero-one, dot-dash. The most basic signalling system. Signaling… Yes!
“Wally,” she said, “Wally!”
Wally looked up from his datapack, and turned to look at Sianna. He was clearly surprised to see her, but that was no surprise.
“Huh? What? What… what is it?
” he asked.
Eyeball looked up from her own work. Sianna hurried on with her question before Eyeball could shush her.
“What would happen to an inert wormhole aperture with the same default settings as this one when this one opens up and something goes through? Like, say, the Earthpoint Singularity back in the Solar System. What would happen?”
Wally frowned and looked off into space for a second. “Well, if current theory is anywhere near right, in some dimensional domains, Earthpoint and Moonpoint are contiguous. Well, more than contiguous. They aren’t just two adjacent planes in space, but two sides of the same plane, coplanar. Anything that affected one would have to affect the other. And of course the other side of the Moonpoint Wormhole is coplanar with whatever it’s linking up with.”
“Huh?” Eyeball asked. Straight or Purple, that seemed to be the standard response to one of Wally’s explanations.
Wally looked around and found two sheets of scratch paper. “C’m‘ere,” he said. “I’ll show you.” The two women got up and stood over him at the console. He put one sheet of paper down on the counter top, then put a second sheet on top of it. “The sheets of paper are the wormholes, and the space between them is the plane of normal space that divides them.” He lifted a corner of the top piece of paper and pointed to the one below. “Here’s the bottom sheet, the first wormhole. The bottom side of it exits out to wherever the SCOREs are going. Top side opens up here in the Multisystem, in the middle of the Moonpoint Ring.” He dropped the corner of the upper sheet back down on top of the first. “Top sheet. The bottom side of it also opens here in the Multisystem, but the top comes out from the Earthpoint Singularity back in the Solar System.”
“Yeah, I got it,” Sianna said. This much she knew.
“Almost,” Eyeball said. “Go on.”
“Well, you could think of it in generations. Call the point we’re heading for Point X. Point X is the grandfather singularity, and it produced the Moonpoint Singularity. Moonpoint is the father to the Earthpoint Singularity back in the Solar System. Earthpoint would have to have similar resonance characteristics to its father and grand father, Moonpoint and Point X. Sort of like genetics. Characteristics would be passed down, with some variance—though not much. There’s probably no more than a fourth-power variance between them at best, enough to differentiate the Moonpoint from Earth-point and Point X.”
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