Roger Allen - The Shattered Sphere

“Those are the SCORES. Wally’s enhanced them to make them visible, of course,” Bernhardt said, his attention on the sim and not on Sianna. “In reality, they are about as dark as lumps of coal, under one hundred meters across. Fairly bright in radar frequencies, once you know where to look. We had a hell of a time detecting them with our ground-based gear. Terra Nova hasn’t been doing sky survey work, and she’s missed them so far. NaPurHab just started watching for them. But once they get this data, you can bet they’ll be looking for them. Wally, can you lose the Captives and the other objects we’re not interested in?”

Suddenly the suns and planets vanished, and only the dots of light were left. Sianna noticed they seemed to be concentrated in one quadrant of the sky.

“How long ago is this image?” Bernhardt asked.

“Ah, this is a real-time image,” Wally said. “Or close enough, really. Latest data from the automatic tracking systems. Enhanced and enlarged, of course, or we wouldn’t be able to see anything at this scale.”

“Hmmph. Backtrack thirty days, speed up the time display by factor ten thousand, and move forward to the present time,” Bernhardt said.

After a moment’s pause, the image jumped and skewed as Wally set in the new commands. Then the three-dimensional ghosts of reality settled down. The Earth’s rotation was obvious now, one day taking just over eight and half seconds. Sianna looked past the planet to the sky beyond.

Now the dots of light were smaller, dimmer, and spread out in a rough toroid of space that spanned half the sky.

But the images were moving, coming closer, converging, moving toward one point in the sky in front of Earth. The inner edges of the toroidal area converged on each other until the dots of light were moving in a loose, flattened spherical volume of space, following behind the ring. The tiny dots grew closer, brighter, and the ring moved in, still somewhat ahead of the smaller points of light.

Sianna stepped around to the Sunstar side of the simulation and watched it from there. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of the things were moving in toward Earth. It took just under five minutes for the imagery to run up to the present moment and then stop dead at the real-time position. One thing was clear from watching the displays: the objects were moving, not toward Earth, but toward the Moon-point Ring. What the devil did they want with the Ring?

“What are they?” Sianna asked. “Where do they come from?”

“As to the first, we don’t know, though we have some unpleasant guesses,” Bernhardt said. “The detection teams that spotted them called them Small COREs, because that’s what they look like and act like. That got shortened to SCOREs very quickly. As for why they come from where they do, I have an idea, but no proof. The SCOREs are too small to track easily much past the distance we have displayed here, but if you backtrack their course, they seem to come from a rough halo of space around the Sphere. Roughly speaking, Earth is looking down at the north pole of the Sphere, and the rough halo suggests—”

“These were launched from facilities around the Sphere’s equator,” Sakalov said.

“Precisely. What that means, I don’t know. Maybe they were launched from some sort of portals around the equator of the Sphere. Maybe they were launched from your south pole Charon Central site and moved Sphere-north from every point along the Sphere’s circumference. We don’t know. I might add that we have several indications that there are similar streams of SCOREs moving toward most of the Captive Worlds. We can’t tell for sure, precisely because these objects are so hard to track and detect. But we have spotted some small objects that resemble these SCOREs moving toward some of the other Captives. In any event, there is tremendous new activity in the Multisystem. We have no idea why it should happen at this moment, but I doubt it is good news for Earth.”

Sianna noticed something. There was a different class of objects coming in ahead of the others. Wally had them color-coded red. She counted sixteen of them. “What are those?” she asked, pointing at them.

“They are different,” Bernhardt said. “Faster, larger, moving in a more direct path than the other ones. And they are rather complex in shape. We can’t tell much more than that yet, but they are certainly not the simple oblong typical of most spacegoing Charonians.”

The director stepped around to the other side of the sim from Sianna and pointed at the larger objects. “Note that these larger units seem to be leading the SCOREs in, moving a trifle faster,” Bernhardt said. “It would seem they must be in place first before, ah, other events.”

“Maybe they are a repair kit for the Moonpoint Ring,” Sianna suggested.

The director frowned. “An interesting thought. Better than anything else we’ve come up with. In any event, the SCOREs are likewise making for the Moonpoint Ring. We assume they are heading there for some sort of preparation or processing before they… well, before other events. Wally, run the images forward in time at the same rate, showing our best-guess projection.”

The ring and the SCOREs moved closer and closer to Earth. The larger objects arrived and merged, rather vaguely, with the image of the Moonpoint Ring. From that, Sianna gathered that the research teams were sure the big objects were headed for the Ring, but had no idea what they were going to do upon arrival.

“Ah, sir, NaPurHab orbits the black hole at the center of the Moonpoint Ring,” Sianna said. “What happens to it in all this?”

“We think its orbit should remain stable. But we don’t know. We have of course notified the Purple leadership, and they will be watching, I assure you. There is still some time left before there is any possibility of danger.” Bernhardt didn’t seem much interested in the problem, as if he were more interested in something else than the thousands of people aboard the habitat. “It’s just about here that the first of the SCOREs will be visible to the amateur telescopes,” he said. “No hope of keeping the lid on it past then. We have between now and then to prepare for their—ah—arrival.”

Suddenly it dawned on Sianna. Calling them SCOREs had misled her—as perhaps it was meant to mislead the public. She had envisioned them merely as little brothers to the big COREs, taking up positions around the Earth.

But no, these were not COREs. Bernhardt thought they were invaders, attackers. This was the beginning of a Breeding Binge.

Breeding Binges had just been theory up to now, though there was a lot of evidence supporting the theory, much of it plainly visible on some of the closer Captive Worlds. Binges were the whole reason for the Multisystem. The Charonians needed planetary surfaces for breeding during one part of their life cycle.

The night before, she had stared at the ceiling, wondering when the Breeders would come and make use of the Earth. Now she knew.

Her mind was racing, her body bathed in fear sweat. Time started up again in the simulation, and the SCOREs and the large objects moved in toward Earth and the Moonpoint Ring. The SCOREs—the invaders, the Binge Breeders—came in, did a close pass around the Moonpoint Ring, and then turned toward Earth. They came closer and closer, reached the planet—and disappeared. For one crazy moment, Sianna felt a wave of relief. She gasped, and realized she had been holding her breath. They would vanish. Everything would be all right. She had imagined the Binge Breeders landing, crashing, tearing into the landscape, but no, it was going to be all right.

“We can’t show the damage or the ground action in a space-based simulation, of course,” Bernhardt said. “But it will be severe. Wally, you’re still working on the ground sims?”