Besides, being in a black mood did not seem to have much effect on Eyeball’s competence or capacity for work. If anything, she seemed to perform better when she was good and angry.
Sondra and Eyeball were going to have to manage one of the most delicate phases of the whole operation. Their timing was going to have to be superb.
There. Good. The ring had taken the signal. The long-dormant ring began to awaken. Maybe they would pull this off after all. Of course, up here, they had the easy job.
Sondra knew enough of the Charonian language now that she had no real doubts that they could control this one ring. The team heading down to the surface of Solitude had the tough job.
After all—how the hell did you wake up a planet?
Hijacker II
On Final Approach to Solitude
Twelve hours later, the Hijacker II lit her engines for the final braking manoeuvre. The lander slowed, came to a halt, a nice, even hover. The pilot eased the craft to port and a bit forward in search of flatter terrain, and then gently moved back the throttle. A smooth, perfect landing, the first landing by any human spacecraft on a planet outside the Solar System—but everyone was too busy sealing their suits and getting to work to worry about history. Almost before the engines were cut, the airlock was open, and the first team members were on the surface, the first steps onto the new world going quite unrecorded.
But then, if this didn’t work, who the hell was going to be around to write the histories in the first place?
Three days. They had three days before the Adversary arrived.
All Wally Sturgis knew for sure was that he was one of the last ones down to the surface. The whole situation seemed quite unreal to him. It was, after all, the sort of thing he did in simulations, not in real life. If it had all been hypothetical, if he were controlling a computer model of a landing on Solitude and the rest of the plan, then he could have believed it was real.
This, though. Strange. Very strange.
Wally followed the last of the crew to the airlock and cycled through with Larry and Sianna. The inner doors of the lock shut, the air was pumped out, and the hatch opened out onto Solitude.
“So this used to be the Moon?” Larry asked. “Or like the Moon?”
Sianna nodded. “We ran the simulations of how a world like this would come to be. This is what Earth’s Moon would have become, if the Charonians had succeeded in taking the Solar System apart and building it into a Multisystem. The Lunar Wheel would have grown up and out from a single band deep under the surface, reaching out in all directions, building itself up into a control center, into the brains of the operation, into—this.”
They climbed down the exterior ladder, stepped away from the lander, and looked around. They were near Solitude’s north pole, and the Hijacker II was sitting on one of the few pieces of real estate in the area that was still dirt and rock, one of the few areas that the Charonians had not turned into… something else.
Once Solitude had been like any of the cratered, airless worlds that Nature seemed so fond of creating. It was about the same size and mass as the Moon, just a trifle larger and denser.
All around the lander, the surface was covered with low, misshapen domes, antennae, boxy metallic shapes, odd mushroom-shaped protuberances black as obsidian, and other forms even harder to identify or describe. No, strike that. The surface was not covered with the strange devices—the surface was made of them, their bases all merging one into the other, or else linked together by a brownish material that was dried up and flaking.
Larry knelt down and peeled a bit of the brown stuff up. “Wheel-skin,” he said. “Same stuff the Lunar Wheel is made out of.”
The skin did not cover everything. Some spots were formed out of fused soil and bits of slumped-over rock. Small, half-melted craters were still discernible in spots. Wally crouched down to get a look at the brown skin of the—the machine, if you could call it that. He was facing a low, five-sided obelisk, and reached out a hand to touch it. What the hell was it, and what was it for?
Wally looked up at the sky and drew in his breath. The Shattered Sphere swallowed up half the sky, a black-red wound that reached from horizon to horizon, its smashed, ruined face broken and terrifying. A huge crack staggered across its surface from behind the horizon. Giant craters marred its surface. That thing was big enough that Earth’s old orbit could fit comfortably inside. And they were trying to take it over, to use for their own purposes.
Keep your head down, Wally told himself. Look at the surface, not at the sky.
Wally put his back to the Sphere—and spotted a red claw, just peeking out from behind a stand of the black mushroom-shapes. Was it still alive, somehow? His stomach tightened just a bit, and he stood up, went around the side of the mushrooms, and took a look.
A small mobile Charonian, about a half meter long, beetle-shaped and fire-engine red, flipped over on its back, ten legs in the air, its manipulator claws dangling uselessly. It was, to Wally’s relief, very clearly dead. A repairman? Larry and Sianna followed him over to take a look.
“Looks like a relative of the scorps we got in the Solar System,” Larry said.
Sianna turned and looked farther out into the odd field of machinery. “They’re all over the place,” she said. Wally looked around, and immediately started spotting more of the repair bugs, all of them bright coloured, and all of them dead, scattered all over the surface. Colour-coded repair bugs?
“Hey, over here,” Larry said. Wally and Sianna walked to where he was standing. A repair bug seemed to have succumbed with its front end dangling over the edge of some sort of hole. Wally pulled the handlight from his suit and pointed it down the hole. It was a long vertical shaft about twenty-five centimetres across. Far too narrow for a human to go down, but just the right size for the shocking-pink beetle that had keeled over at its entrance. The shaft had ladder rungs set into one side of it. His light was not powerful enough to reach the bottom.
“Down below,” Larry said, “this has got to be just like the Lunar Wheel and the Moon, only much further along in its development. The Wheel here has built clear up to the surface, and built all this.”
Wally looked around again, studying the shapes of the objects that covered the surface. What was all this stuff for? And then it came to him. “So,” he asked, “is this an antenna farm?”
“I’d say so,” Sianna replied. “At least some of these things look like detectors and signalling systems. The Wheel down below would pipe its commands up to the surface here, to other centres elsewhere in the system.”
“But how the hell are we going to tap into it all?” Wally asked. He started walking again, looking for something. What, he did not know.
Three days, he told himself again. How the hell could that possibly be enough time? Never mind that. Concentrate. Solve the puzzle. Analyse. The dish shapes were clearly some sort of radio-band antennas, and the spike-shapes probably omni-directional antennas. But not everything Charonian had a clearly functional shape. He couldn’t guess what everything was just by looking at it. That cable, there for example, running between two of the pentagonal obelisks. It could be anything.
Wait a second. “Um, ah, Larry? Larry, come here a second.”
“What is it?” Larry asked as he headed toward Wally.
“This cable. I saw some photos of Lucian Dreyfuss in suspended animation. This cable here—”
“Yes!” Larry said. “It’s the same stuff as the tendrils the Wheel had plugged into him.”
“Thought so.” Wally traced the cable back down to one of the obelisks and knelt down in front of it. “Access cover,” he said. “There has to be an access cover.”
“How come?” Sianna asked. “Why couldn’t it be sealed for good?”
“Wally’s right. There are dead maintenance bugs all over the place,” Larry said. “What good is a repair team if it can’t get to the hardware?”
“There,” Wally said. “Look.” He pointed at a narrow gap betwee
n two faces of the pyramidal top. He pulled a flat-bladed screwdriver off his suit’s tool belt and stuck it into the seam, working it back and forth.
“Careful,” Sianna said.
The seam resisted for a moment, and then one face of the pyramid popped back just a bit, leaving a gap wide enough for Wally to get his gloved fingers in and bend it back. Wally put away his screwdriver and put his hands around the side that had popped free. “Gimme a hand, Larry.”
Larry got in next to him, and the two of them pulled.
It took some pretty hard pulling, but they managed to bend it back to get a look inside. Wally aimed his handlight into it and peered inside.
“Bingo,” Wally whispered to himself.
“Yes indeed,” Larry said. “The same sort of tendrils as on Lucian.” The tendrils terminated into various points in a sort of honeycombed surface inside. “I’ll bet you whatever you want we can use the same tapping techniques as they used on Lucian Dreyfuss.”
“It’s only fair,” Sianna said with an evil grin so wide Wally could see it through her helmet. “The Charonians used those tendrils to hook a dead man up to their machines. What do you say we return the favour?”
“Sounds good to me,” Wally said, his mind already on test probes and circuits. He took another look inside. Three days? Hell, with the datasets they had now, and the hardware they had brought along, he’d have a link into the main wormhole loop center in three hours.
NaPurHab
Sondra Berghoff awoke, her eyes snapping open all at once. Four hours’ sleep. The longest rest she had had since the Terra Nova had cast off, two and a half days before. Sleep. A guilty luxury, and one that she could ill afford. There was so much to do. But it would do no one any good if she could not see straight to run the controls. One chance. That was all they would get. One chance to stop it, or else the Adversary would get through.
She lay still, just for a moment longer, trying to savour the moment. After all, they were dealing with major energy sources and powerful entities. If things went wrong, this could easily be the last time she awoke, the last time she got out of bed.
Or even if things went right.
The Mind of the Sphere felt new disturbances up in the network, feeble twitchings and quiverings from places that had been dead long years. As a person with an amputated limb, so too the Mind felt sensations from parts, not of itself, but of its ancestor, that were no longer there. Something strange was going on, something disturbing, and the sensations had been growing more powerful. They had started shortly after the mysterious transits through the wormhole net.
But the Mind had no time to worry about such things. Not with the Adversary so near. No doubt the strange sensations were some sort of sensor malfunction. It would repair the flaws later.
If it lived.
Sakalov Station
North Polar Region
Solitude
Sianna Colette walked back from the Hijacker II toward the bubble-tent, trying to convince herself she was ready. Though how could anyone be ready? Years would not have been enough time to prepare, and they had had only a handful of days. But now the hour had come. The last seventy-two hours had passed in a blur. Somewhere in there, they had wired into the datataps, assembled the bubbletents, moved in the equipment, and started linking into Solitude’s control system. The bubbletent was half-buried in equipment hooked up this way and that to the tendrils and cables and components that made up Solitude’s control system. But now the bubbletent had a name. She paused by the entrance and read it again.
Sakalov Station. Gerald MacDougal had thought of it, and painted the words over the tent entrance, so everyone could see them whenever they came back from the lander. After all, Yuri Sakalov had spent five years—and given his life—in the search for Charon Central, the command center for the Multisystem. Now, in part thanks to him, here they all were, at the command post of a Sphere system, albeit not the one he had searched for. He would have loved to be here.
Sakalov Station. It sounded good, right—if “station” wasn’t too grand a name for a pressurised tent in the middle of an alien antenna farm. She headed into the airlock, cycled through, and took her suit off. She found herself working a bit more carefully than usual, stowing her suit, the helmet, the gloves as if doing so were some ritual of preparation. As indeed it was. She stopped to check her appearance in the mirrored visor of an empty suit, tidied her hair, straightened her collar. This was it. This was it.
Sianna took three deep breaths, and then told herself she was ready. She left the airlock section and threaded her way through the forest of hardware back to the main control panel at the far end of the bubbletent.
The rest of them were there already, busily testing all the connections one last time, reviewing the command sequence for errors. No second chances.
Larry Chao, his face intent and hopeful as he checked over the last of the displays: this was his chance to pay some of it back. Wally, running a test on the comm system that had hotwired into Solitude’s hardware. It all seemed to be working, from what Sianna could see.
Gerald and Marcia MacDougal stood a few steps back from the main control system, hand-in-hand, the same looked of anxious worry on both their faces. Sometimes the two of them seemed like one person, the way they stayed together every moment of the day.
Sianna took her seat, between Larry and Wally, and started checking her board. Get all the details right. No simulation this time. No dreams of the dead. No assumptions as to what the enemy was up to, or guesses as to who and what the enemy was. This was it.
She set to work, commanding the dead and ancient circuits of Solitude to bring the Rings of the wormhole transit loop up to standby power, getting them ready, linking them one to another.
Fourteen Ring-and-Hole sets, each linked to the others, co-orbital with Solitude, forming a great circle about the Shattered Sphere. They were controlled by the planet beneath her feet. And Sianna, Sianna, was controlling the planet. Her fingers started to tremble even as she thought of it, but she forced herself to settle down.
“All right,” Larry said, his voice and manner calm. “We’re coming up on it. Everybody, look sharp and take it one step at a time.”
And suddenly, gradually, they were no longer preparing, but doing. It had started. Sianna looked up at the right-hand screen, hooked into the long-range cameras, and spotted a dark blob moving through the darkness.
The Adversary had arrived, had drawn close enough to be visible.
“All right,” Wally said. “Here we go.”
Every eye was on the right-hand display as it showed the Adversary moving in, closer and closer to the wormhole aperture, moving fast enough that its motion against the starfield was noticeable even at this range.
“Doesn’t look like much, does it?” asked Gerald MacDougal.
The Adversary was a dark, lumpen sphere, pocked here and there with small, low, dimpled craters—all the evidence there was of the SCOREs’ previous attacks.
“There go the SCOREs,” Sianna said, needlessly. The left-hand tactical display showed the movement quite plainly.
The SCOREs moved in to make one last, desperate attempt against their ancient enemy. Sianna hoped with everyone else that they would succeed, and knew they could not. But if, somehow, the SCOREs could kill this thing, then all the risks and dangers of their own plan could be avoided.
The Adversary came in, moving fast, diving straight for the worm-hole aperture. The eight surviving SCOREs moved in, rushing toward it, closing in from all directions. Then, in the space of a heartbeat, they appeared in the same frame as the Adversary. All eyes shifted to the right-hand screen just as the SCOREs reached their target. There was a brilliant, ravening flare of light, an explosion that seemed to go on and on, a ball of flame and fire that bloomed out into space, flared up, setting the sky alight—and the Adversary moved out through the burning cloud, its surface glowing just a trifle from heating effects, but for all intents and purposes, unchanged.
<
br /> Sianna found she had been holding her breath, and she let it out in a sigh of disappointment and frustration. In a minute or less, the Adversary would reach the wormhole, force itself through, come out the other side—and then, it would happen.
Would the Sphere use the Earth as a kinetic impact weapon immediately, or would it first launch the cloud of SCOREs about the Moonpoint aperture in another futile attempt to stop this thing? Or would it send Earth and the SCOREs crashing in all at once? What difference could it make if Earth were destroyed two minutes from now, or two and a half minutes? All of it, gone. The oceans vapourised, the forests incinerated, the cities and towns smashed and shattered, a world of corpses and shattered, ruined bodies flung out into space—Don’t think about it, Sianna thought. Keep it from happening. Don’t think about it.
“Ready for shunt reception,” Larry said. “NaPurHab reports they retain control of the wormhole ring. They are ready to change the transit coordinates. So far so good.”
So far so good? This was the most dangerous moment of all. This was the moment when the Multisystem might act in some unexpected way, when the humans would begin to show their hand, when the Adversary might begin to realise something was wrong, when some bit of dead Charonian hardware might not respond in quite the way Wally expected.
“Sending link sequence command,” Sianna announced. Now the wormhole transit loop was waking up in earnest, drawing energy from the surviving power storage rings on the Shattered Sphere, keying into each other. They were ready. As ready as they were going to be, anyway.
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