Roger Allen - The Shattered Sphere

Sondra checked her switches, watched the display, the timers. Too late, and there would be no time to make a full link over to the wormhole transit loop coordinates. Too soon, and the Adversary might sense the changeover and do something about it.

The autosequencer’s countdown clock was still active, still counting down. Ten seconds. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four.

Yes, she had been right. Too far off. The Adversary was slowing for the transit. It was going to be too far off when the sequencer hit zero. Three. Two. One. Zero . Minus One. Almost there. Another second, let it draw in closer. But not too long. Not too long. Minus Two. Minus—

Sondra felt the right instant. She stabbed down at the button and sent the new coordinates on their way.

The un-blue-white of the wormhole link flickered and shifted, and then settled down again.

“Linkage!” Eyeball shouted. “We have solid link to the first wormhole aperture in the wormhole loop.”

Sondra slapped another button, and sent a lockout command, ordering the Solitude Ring to take no further changes until after transit. The Adversary would not be able to change the setting back. “Damnation!” the Autocrat said. “It’s spotted the change.”

The Adversary did not understand. Something was wrong . Something had shifted the wormhole coordinates. But that was impossible. It could not be. But it was happening. Stop. Stop. Whatever had happened could not be right. Stop. Stop. Stop—

The Adversary was braking, trying to come to a halt before it went into the hole. Slowing, but not stopping. It had too much momentum, too much velocity. Closer. Closer. And then, miraculously, it went in. The wormhole winked shut behind it.

But had they done it? Had they really diverted it? Or had it made it through to the Multisystem? Had the Earth already been reduced to slag?

The overhead speaker came alive. “This is Sakalov Station,” Gerald MacDougal’s voice announced. “We got it,” he said. “We have the Adversary.”

The Mind of the Sphere braced itself, steeled itself against battle, and watched as the wormhole opened — and then shut again .

Nothing. Nothing had come through.

Astonishment did not even begin to express its reaction.

“We have it, but we won’t keep it long,” Sianna said, triumph in her voice. The Adversary in a stasis orbit, held inside a pinched-off wormhole moving at the speed of light, a hugely complex wavefront trapped inside the wormhole transit loop. The same way the Multisystem had held the Earth during the Abduction.

There was a difference, of course. The Sphere had some place to put Earth, some way to get it back out of the wormhole loop. But Sakalov Station didn’t want to put the Adversary anywhere at all.

She remembered the conversation, back when all such things had been mere idle lab chat. Wally had been explaining how the Multisystem’s wormhole transit loop had held Earth in a stasis orbit for thirty-seven minutes.

“ Just out of curiosity ,” Wolf Bernhardt had asked, “ what would happen if the Sphere was unable to provide enough power? Would the Earth have dropped out of the stasis orbit ?”

“ Well, yes, that would be the problem ,” Wally had said. “ You’d get an uncontrolled spontaneous evaporation of the pinched wormhole .”

“ And what would that mean ?” Bernhardt had asked.

Wally had tried to make light of it. “E = MC squared. Earth’s mass would be expressed as energy .”

Yuri Sakalov had been there, still alive. “ Which would of course be a great inconvenience to us ,” he had said, his tone quite sarcastic. “ However, it would almost certainly be enough to destroy the Sphere, and probably vaporize most of the planets of the closer-in Captive Suns as well .”

And there it was. The Adversary had much lower mass than a planet, of course. One lunar mass was about an eightieth the mass of the Earth. But that was still a hell of a lot of mass to express as energy. The team on Solitude had no way to do a controlled release from the pinched wormhole, even if they had wanted to. No way to turn the damn thing off at all. The Adversary would stay in the transit loop until it ran out of power. The effort of holding was already a substantial drain on the small reserves in the Shattered Sphere’s power storage rings.

Sianna watched her power indicators, and tried to work against the clock. With the Adversary moving at the speed of light, if they could hold out a full nineteen minutes, that would give the Adversary time to go halfway around the Sphere before it blew.

But that was wildly optimistic. The power levels were dropping like rocks. They’d be lucky if it lasted five minutes and got around the limb of the Shattered Sphere before it blew.

And if it went off too close to Solitude? Too close to the Terra Nova and NaPurHab? We’ll be dead, obviously , Sianna told herself. Good way to go, saving the home planet .

There was no way to control something this big. Not with the speed-of-light delays involved. The command to shut down, to cut the power, would not even arrive at the other side of the transit loop for those nineteen minutes. Hell, the other side of the loop could have blown out or shut down already, and there would be no way of knowing it.

“Power levels reaching critical,” Larry warned. “We’re going to start losing Ring-and-Hole sets real soon now. Might have lost ’em already, ’cept we don’t know it because of signal delay.”

Sianna checked the display board. There was a strange little flicker in the main power ring energy-level display, a dip and a spike that shouldn’t have happened.

Wally frowned and peered at the display. “That’s funny,” he said. “I wonder if—”

The skies lit up as the station went dark.

For a thousandth of a second, between the moment the wormhole loop collapsed and the moment when its very being was converted into a blast of light, the Adversary struggled to escape, straining against the very fabric of space to break out of the impossible trap into which it had fallen. But there were things beyond even the capacity of the Adversary .

Throughout the galaxy, other units of the Adversary, deep inside wormholes, nestled safely on the surface of neutron stars, felt the death of part of themselves, and were astonished.

Such a thing had never happened before.

A torch of light, a flarepoint of energy, ripped out from the transit loop as the fourth Ring-and-Hole set failed, its structure too weak to maintain a wormhole link. The mass of the Adversary, folded into a pinched wormhole, was distilled back out into the Universe as a gout of thundering flame. It burst out, swelled into a searing-bright ball of fire, blasting the failed Ring into nothingness. The blast bloomed out and touched the surface of the Shattered Sphere, smashing a huge new hole in it, doing massive new damage, mutilating the corpse of the once-powerful Sphere.

Tongues of flame shot up into space, vaporizing whatever bits of space debris came near. The blast of light and power expanded out into space.

It was over.

“In a mechanistic, deterministic universe, the same reaction to the same situation will always produce the same result. A living thing confronting a dead universe will quickly learn that a certain set of actions always works, while another set always fails. This is not the case in a universe full of living things. A mouse might learn that one falling rock acts much like another, but one circling hawk will not always act like the next. One hawk might be looking the other way, another not hungry. Still another hawk might attack in response to the mouse’s own actions—something a falling rock would not do.