Roger Allen - The Shattered Sphere

The images told a horrible story. The dust clouds around Mars, the horrible damage done to Saturn’s rings, the chaotic disruption of Jupiter’s weather patterns.

Either there were different breeds of Lander for each planet, or else every Lander had the ability to adapt to any kind of world. Mercury, Venus, and Mars all had suffered Landers on their surfaces. The Landers had proceeded to tear up the planetary surfaces and propel them into free space.

The Martian satellites had been completely destroyed. The Asteroid Belt was in chaos—many of the asteroids had been disguised, dormant Landers all along. Once the disguised Landers awakened, they launched themselves to the attack. Most headed straight for the major worlds, but some set to work attacking other asteroids, everything from nameless, numberless hunks of rock forty meters across right on up to Ceres itself.

Jupiter’s Red Spot wasn’t there anymore, nor was much of the planet’s banding system. The Landers had disrupted the planet’s weather system, setting up artificial spin storms that accelerated Jupiter’s atmospheric gases past escape velocity. The Jovian moons were savaged as well. Saturn and its satellites were in as bad a shape or worse, with the added tragedy of the ring system’s destruction. At the time Anthony had died, Landers were reported moving for Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. All the worlds were under attack.

Except one , said a tiny voice inside Sianna’s head.

Well, yes. There was an exception. One world went untouched. But that was so obvious that no one ever gave it any thought.

The Moon.

What was that old saw about exceptions proving the rule? Sianna had never really understood that one. But maybe at least the exception could tell her something about the rules.

No Lander had ever moved on the Moon. Even when the Multisystem Sphere had started sending its own Landers through the wormhole to support the attack on the Solar System, they had all headed for the other worlds. None had made the mere 300,000-kilometer trip to the Moon.

The standard explanation for that was that the Moon had been pretty well infested with a Charonian presence as it was—after all, the Lunar Wheel was there, sixty or so kilometers down below the surface, circling right around the Moon from pole to pole.

Why would the Charonians attack one of their own, as it were? The explanation was close to self-evident. But that was not enough for Sianna. Not this morning. Something about it jangled in her head, teased at her. It was part of the puzzle, another hint coming at her from her own subconscious. Let it come. Let it come.

One thing she was able to establish as she slogged through the Saint Anthony data: the thirty-seven minutes were real—or at least the SA thought they were. Every time-stamp on the data from every source aboard the probe showed exactly the same time discrepancy—37 minutes, 23.43 seconds to be precise.

With that settled, she needed to see one other thing. She had seen it many times before, of course. But that whisper inside herself told her to look at it again, look at it now, for it was part of the whole.

The Saint Anthony had transmitted one image, along with all the others, of an event no human had ever witnessed. It was a moving three-dee image, a holographic movie, transmitted by the Multisystem Sphere through the wormhole into the Solar System and then intercepted by comm workers on the Moon. Indeed, it was the first Charonian imagery ever decoded. She punched it up and watched it run.

A massive Sphere, the color of old dried blood, hung in the sky, spinning slowly. Faint lines were etched into its surface. They looked like lines of latitude and longitude .

Suddenly, the Sphere’s rotation began to wobble, skewing about more and more erratically. Two spots on its upper surface began to glow in a warmer red, and suddenly flared up and flashed over into glare-bright white. The flare was over as soon as it began. Two blinding-bright points of light swept out of the Sphere’s interior and vanished out into space . The Sphere itself was left behind, tumbling wildly, with a pair of massive, blackened holes torn through its surface .

The ruined thing vanished and was replaced by the original image of a whole Sphere, rotating steadily and smoothly on its access. The wobble set in again, the flashover happened, and the two glowing dots rushed away. The original intercepted message had looped over and over again, repetition perhaps being the standard Charonian way of emphasizing something.

Back when they had first intercepted and decoded the image, no one in the Solar System had the faintest idea what the image could be. Now everyone knew. The Sphere in the image was a Dyson Sphere, identical to the one that ruled the Multisystem. There could be no doubt of that.

Equally certain, the data transmitted by the Saint Anthony showed that all the Charonians in the Solar System had plunged into frantic, hasty activity the moment the image arrived, as if it were a warning of coming danger. That interpretation was clearly anthropomorphic. Humans might read the image that way, but would Charonians? What did the image mean? Was it a prediction of what was to happen to this Dyson Sphere? Was it a warning of what might happen? Was it an image of some other Dyson Sphere?

Or was the smashing of a Sphere good news, somehow—the cosmic equivalent of a huge egg hatching? That seemed damned implausible, but no one knew. And what were the two things that flew out of the Sphere?

Likewise puzzling was the apparent rotation period in the image. The Sphere in the image spun at about three rotations per minute. The Multisystem Sphere had a rotation period of about 1.3 standard years. If you assumed the Sphere in the image loop rotated at the same speed and worked the time scale out, then the events displayed in the thirty seconds of imagery had taken something like six months in real life. That made sense at the scale of the Multisystem Sphere. Scale the image loop up to the physical size of the real Sphere, run it at the same speed as the image loop, and the Sphere would be rotating at something over light speed. Most analysts believed the rotation could best be explained as evidence that the image was stylized in some way. That seemed plausible, if a trifle pat.

But the image itself fit. Fit into what , Sianna did not yet know, but it fit. The more Sianna stared at the endlessly repeating destruction of the Shattered Sphere, the more sure she was that the imagery held a clue to whatever it was she felt herself on the verge of finding.

But what the hell was she looking for? She was beginning to think that her subconscious already knew the answer, whereas she barely knew the question.

Sianna did not feel herself to be on the best of terms with her subconscious: it seemed to her that it often made her work to get what it already had. It was going to make her stumble her own way toward the inspiration that would set it all free. The clues, the knowledge, were inside her head, but her subconscious was going to make her find the stimuli, the images, the words, that would bring it all to the fore. So, how best to give her subconscious a poke?

Wait a second.

Wally. Sianna blinked at the screen and the images in it. She had been staring at the loop of imagery, the Sphere smashing, the two objects flying out of it, over and over again for ten minutes without seeing it. She shut her eyes and afterimages of the dying Sphere danced behind her eyelids. Sianna leaned back in her chair, opened her eyes, and looked up at a blank spot in the ceiling. Wally.

Something Wally had been talking about, something that whispered at the bottom of her skull. A hint, a guide toward an idea. Something that prodded her toward whatever it was she was looking for. His Charon Central and her thirty-seven minutes. Could the two be linked, somehow? Or was she just grasping at straws?