Roger Allen - The Shattered Sphere

“They never erase anything down there,” Dr. Sakalov said, quite cheerfully. “Tell me, Wally: do you think that you could set up a search that would find what we’re looking for?”

“Sure I could,” Wally said. “All it would take is a good ArtInt searching for vague source coding in the old data, correlating the backtracked orbital coordinates in question. Next we run that against Gruber’s new data, and then…” His voice trailed off as he caught the boss’s eye.

Bernhardt glared at Wally and then at Sianna with something of the irritation and impatience he was famous for. “None of this has very much to do with why I wanted to see you all.”

“It doesn’t?” Sianna asked, suddenly feeling quite deflated. She sat back down in her chair.

“No, it doesn’t,” Bernhardt said. “Oh, I suppose there is a tangential connection, but it is merely—” Bernhardt stopped dead and shook his head. “Dear God, now you have me doing it. No. We will stay on the subject this time. In my job, sometimes I have to act like a scientist with a theory, and sometimes like a general fighting a war. A scientist would wait until there was proof that the Lone World was Charon Central. A general has to take more chances than that, gamble that the proof will be forthcoming. I have to take a chance like that now.

“As you know, the SCOREs are on their way—and we all know the probable aftermath of their arrival. We must assume that, once they get here, it will be impossible to launch anything off Earth. As you know, we have a massive effort under way to resupply our off-Earth assets before that time. We are launching everything we can toward NaPurHab. Food, equipment, fuel, what have you. I have already ordered Terra Nova to break off her attempt to land a prize crew on a CORE. She has confirmed that she intends to return to Earth space and dock with NaPurHab.

“From there, she intends to proceed, however her captain sees fit, toward precisely one goal. If Captain Steiger decides to pursue the immediate goal at once, so be it. However, I would expect that she will instead invest in months, perhaps years, of research, study, rehearsal and simulation. However, sooner or later, she is to proceed toward the Lone World, land on that planet, and attempt to seize control of the Multisystem.”

“Good God,” Sakalov said. “But how has there been time to plan this, work out procedures?”

“There hasn’t,” Bernhardt said. He stood up and turned to face the window wall, a mere thickness of glass between him and the deep canyons of Manhattan. “We have been setting up the resupply mission for weeks, based on standing contingency plans, ever since we spotted the incoming SCOREs.

“But that is almost incidental. If the Lone World is Charon Central, and if we can somehow get to it and make it ours, even if we merely find a way to kill it, cripple it—then we will have won. The risks are great, and there are any number of guesses piled on guesses. But if I wait until I am sure of my facts, then we will have lost the moment. The SCOREs will have reached Earth, and God only knows what happens then.

“But there is something else. The Terra Nova has asked for more than supplies. She has asked that we send her… send her some expertise. I have reached that conclusion that to do so would be very risky—but potentially, most valuable.

“But there is little time, and little cargo space available. If I had my way, the Terra Nova would rendezvous with a full complement of our greatest experts on the Charonians. But that cannot be. I have no time to examine all the personnel reports, interview candidates, request volunteers, all of that. So I am left with my own instincts, my hunches, my feelings.

“So I am going to send them you three.”

There was dead silence in the room. Sianna could not believe what she was hearing.

“I will send you three,” Bernhardt said again. “A wise old man who still knows how to learn, a genius who does not know all that she is, and a dreamer of visions that lead to truth. I will not make any pretense that you have any choice in the matter, or that I am looking for volunteers. There is no time . The charter establishing my office gave me the power to draft whomever I wish for whatever task I wish in order to protect the people of Earth.”

Sianna stood up, feeling a bit dizzy, and opened her mouth to protest. But no words came. Bernhardt just kept right on talking.

“So. There is only one question I have for each of you,” he said. “How soon can you leave?”

“We forget what our lives were like back then, before it all happened, back when Earth and Moon shared a sky, and the Solar System was whole and complete. We thought we were alone in the Universe. We thought we were safe. No one had ever heard of the Charonians. No one even knew the Wheel was buried under the Lunar surface until Larry woke it up and it dropped Earth through a black hole.

“We will never regain that innocence—but we can only judge Larry Chao by the standards of the Universe that existed up until the moment he pressed that button.

“In that lost world of the innocent past, he must be found not guilty of committing any intentional wrong. But Larry Chao has never stopped trying to atone for what he did—at a cost to himself that few of us would be willing to face.”

Three days after the first attempt to contact Lucian Dreyfuss, they were almost ready to try again.

Larry Chao was doing his best to sit still as the techs hooked him in to the virtual reality system, trying not to think about what came next. They were going to fire this thing up and run him through the moments leading up to his own death. All right, not his death, but as close to it as Larry wished to come. When the Charonians had attacked in the tunnel five years ago, the T.O. had been destroyed while Larry was controlling it, and it had been realistic enough to convince Larry he had died, at least for a while. The nightmares had taken a long time to go away—and they had come back last night. But no, don’t think about it. The one bright side was that Larry had been “killed” a few seconds after the Charonians grabbed Lucian and made off with him. Lucian, therefore, had not witnessed Larry’s death and, therefore, was not reliving it, over and over again. Larry would not have to re-enact his own decapitation.

The down side was that, for whatever reason, the slice of time Lucian was looping through over and over started just a few seconds before the Charonians attacked. The idea was to break the loop before the Charonians hit, force Lucian to perceive a sequence of events fed to his optical and audio centers, not by the Charonians, but by the human virtual reality teams. In effect, they would feed Lucian a hallucination to break him out of psychosis. Of course, Larry had been dropped into psychosis by experiencing the real events through the TeleOperator five years ago, but that was beside the point. Even Larry had to admit the possible reward was worth the risk.

They had used a limited-mobility setup the first time they had tried to break through to Lucian, but this time they were using a full TeleOperator control rig, identical to the one Larry had used five years ago in the Rabbit Hole. This time, the T.O.‘s inputs and outputs were not hooked up to an actual robot body, but to a computer simulation of a robot body.

Larry’s entire body still had to be completely encased in the T.O. control unit, which was, in effect, an exoskeleton with the operator inside. Later, when they had the thing powered up, the machinery would respond to his slightest motion, and he would be able to move his arms and legs and head freely. But until the power-amp circuits were on, the T.O. was so much inert metal and his body was completely immobilized by the weight of the machinery. Even when the thing was powered up, Larry would not actually walk when he moved his legs—the rig had him suspended in mid-air. His body would stay still while his simulated self moved about. He was, and would be, in the center of it all, but absolutely unable to move. That summed up the last five years of Larry’s life pretty well.