Roger Allen - The Shattered Sphere

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.

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 vaporized, 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 realize 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.

Dianne Steiger sat in her captain’s chair and glanced over at where Gerald should have been. He was down there in the thick of it. And she was up here, orbiting this damn lump of rock, nothing more than a spectator. No, not a spectator. A warrior on a stretch of the battle line that had gone quiet for the moment. None of them would be down there, ready for the final battle, if not for her.

She had done her part, she and her ship, and her crew. Five years ago, before the Abduction, the ship had been in mothballs and Dianne’s career had been as close to over as made no difference. Then the Charonians had attacked, and everything had changed. Now here they were, Dianne Steiger and her ship, about to save the world, maybe.

Not bad , she thought. Not bad for a couple of mothballed has-beens .

They could see it, as it happened, with the naked eye. The Solitude Ring flickered awake, and the strange un-blue-white of a wormhole link came to life. The Adversary had activated the link, forced it to connect with the Moonpoint Ring in the Multisystem. It was heading in.

“Thirty seconds,” Eyeball said. “Show time. Fire up automatics.”

Sondra Berghoff reached over to set in the automatic sequencer, but then she swallowed hard, and thought of the button. Five long years ago, Larry Chao had set things so that he would send out the first pulse of collimated laser energy, not the computer. He had pushed the button that had made it happen, not some damn machine.

That beam of graser power had awakened the slumbering Lunar Wheel, and it had stolen the Earth. His finger on the button. No one else’s. That was what history would remember.

What if they failed today? What if the computer guessed wrong in the next twenty seconds, and Earth died as a consequence? No. It was not right . If Earth died, let there be someone to blame. Let it be a human decision, not that of a microcircuit.

And if they succeeded, let it be penance, of a sort, for her friend Larry’s finger on that button.

“I’m staying with manual,” Sondra said.

“What!” Eyeball shouted. “You nuts?”

The Autocrat stepped forward, about to speak, but then Sondra caught his eye. Their eyes locked for a heartbeat or two, and then he stepped back. He would not challenge her. Sondra looked back toward her partner on the controls.

“Shut up, Eyeball. No time to argue. Manual.” Now it was close. There was no time. The Mind of the Sphere could sense the Adversary coming close, unstoppable, uncontrollable . It made ready to do what it must, to sacrifice one world in order to save all the others. It gathered power unto itself, drawing down reserves from the storage rings, preparing to send the raw, massive burst of gravitic energy that would slam down on the luckless planet and accelerate it nearly to light speed , straight at the Adversary. Now was the time.