Roger Allen - The Shattered Sphere

“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 colored, and all of them dead, scattered all over the surface. Color-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 centimeters 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 signaling systems. The Wheel down below would pipe its commands up to the surface here, to other centers 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. Analyze. 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 between two faces of the pyramidical 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 favor?”

“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.

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 savor 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.

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 pressurized 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.