Roger Allen - The Shattered Sphere

Bailey looked annoyed. “You know so much, you want to give out the info?”

“Ah, no, no. Please, forgive me.”

“Okay, we think their arrival has something to do with the Ghoul Modules—”

“The what ?” Sianna interrupted.

“Oh, right, you weren’t around for that one,” Bailey said. “That’s what the Purps are calling the large Charonian devices that are docking themselves to the Moonpoint Ring. The last of them docked to the ring this morning, and they seem to be pumping power into the ring. It looks very much to us as if they are there to bring the dead ring back to life, reactivate it. Ghouls.”

“But why?” Sianna asked.

“To proceed with the Sphere’s original purpose in setting up the Moonpoint Ring,” Sakalov said. “To get through to the Solar System and start building a new Multisystem there.”

“Hey, real smart,” Bailey said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “But our team has been thinking on this for more than five seconds, and if you can prepare yourself for a shock, they see another possibility. We think it’s meant to be used as a bolt-hole. We’ve known for years the Sphere was afraid of something. Maybe that something is getting close and the Sphere wants a back door. Some hole it can open up, go through, and pull the hole in after itself.”

“The Dyson Sphere is way too big to get through the Moonpoint wormhole,” Wally objected.

“But the Lone World is the real Sphere,” Sianna reminded him. “It’s the brains of the outfit. The Lone World could go through the hole with a whole slew of smaller Charonians and set up shop someplace new, build a new Sphere.”

“What would it use for power once it was cut off from the gravity generators in the Dyson Sphere?” Wally asked.

“Who knows?” Sianna replied. “Maybe it can store power. Maybe it could absorb solar power in a pinch. If the Lone World drops itself through a wormhole, it’ll have done its homework so it can survive on the other side.

“The bigger question is—why is it setting up our Moonpoint Ring for its bolt-hole? It must have links to a zillion wormholes. Why does it want to go through ours?”

Bailey nodded, as if he were actually conceding that someone else besides himself might be capable of having an idea. “Good question. The answer is it isn’t going to go through the Moonpoint Hole. Best we can tell, the Sphere is getting dozens of old wormholes ready. At least we see a lot of things that look like Ghoul Modules headed toward a lot of other inactive rings in the Multisystem.”

“Misdirection,” Sakalov said thoughtfully. “Another little bit of evidence that the Sphere—or the Lone World—is in a war, a battle, a fight, with somebody . You don’t set up deception plans unless there is someone who needs deceiving.”

“Or if you want someone to think you’ve run when you haven’t,” Sianna cut in. “The Lone World creates a hundred places it might run, and then it hides in-system, leaving its enemy thinking it’s gone through one of the holes.”

“So where would it hide?” Bailey asked. “You’re talking about a world the size of Earth’s Moon here.”

Sianna shrugged. “Hide in plain sight. Disguise itself as a normal planet. Hide inside the Dyson Sphere. For all we know, its interior is a whole maze, designed specifically to conceal the Lone World in time of danger. Who knows?”

“Hmmph. Maybe so. You people are supposed to be the experts on all that stuff. But maybe we should get back to what you three will be doing.”

“And what will we be doing?” Sakalov asked. “How will we be getting to the Terra Nova ?”

“That part I don’t know,” Bailey said with an evil grin. “We’re just getting you as far as the hab. The Nova will come and get you herself, I guess.”

“Yes, yes, we know that,” Sakalov said. “But how are we to get to NaPurHab?”

Bailey laughed unpleasantly, and Sianna disliked him even more.

“Permods,” Bailey said.

“Oh, dear me,” Sakalov said. “I was afraid you were going to say that.”

“What are permods?” Wally asked.

“There’s no way a regular passenger ship would make it past the COREs,” Bailey said, ignoring Wally’s question. “Not the way they’re behaving recently. Too big, too good a target. We’re going to stuff you in personnel modules and put your mods in with a bunch of cargo containers on three different ships on three different days.

“And we’re going to have our own little deception plan, by the way. We’re going to throw all sorts of decoys and chaff and electronic countermeasures into the mix. Saturate the COREs’ patrol zones with so many targets they won’t be able to handle them all.”

“What do you estimate as the loss rate for cargo while your countermeasures are running?” Sianna asked.

“Twenty percent,” Bailey said. “But we think your odds are going to be a lot better than that in the permods. Tougher targets.”

“How much better?”

Bailey put the cigarette up to his mouth and took a good hard pull on it. He shifted his gaze away from Sianna and looked down at his coffee cup. “We figure the odds on any one of you getting hit by a CORE are eighty-five percent against. You’ll be sent during the period of maximum countermeasures. Besides that, your permods will be carried in small, fast cargo carriers. You ought to make it.”

Dr. Sakalov sighed and shook his head. “The odds are about what I expected them to be. But I have been dreading the idea of traveling by permod.”

Wally frowned and looked at Sakalov. “Permod? Personnel modules? What’s wrong with them?”

Bailey smiled unhappily, pulled the butt of his cigarette out of his mouth and dropped it in his coffee cup, where it went out with a phut and a hiss. “Oh, you’ll find out,” he said. “You’ll find out soon enough.”

Sianna Colette, dressed only in the flimsiest of hospital gowns, having had the last proper shower she was going to have for a long time, steeled herself to enter the suiting room. Come on. She could do this. Wally had done this. Sakalov had done this.

Suiting room. There was a laugh. A nice, non-threatening name borrowed from other facilities where they really did put you in pressure suits.

Sianna stepped out into the suiting room, wearing nothing but the paper-thin robe she was going to have to lose in a minute, feeling far colder than could be explained by the slight chill in the room. The suit technician, a rather grim-faced middle-aged woman in a rumpled blue jumper, was waiting for her.

Sianna wanted to look anywhere but at the suit tech, but she forced herself to stare the rather bored, surly-looking woman in the eye. No, she was only imagining all that. There was nothing at all unpleasant about the woman’s expression. Sianna just could not shake the idea that she was being punished, and therefore the suit tech ought to look angry with her. Try as she might, though, she could only keep eye contact for a few seconds or so. The tech scared her.

Something about the woman’s face put Sianna in mind of Madame Bermley, the chief warder at the first boarding school Sianna had been sent to after her parents died.

That school, as a consequence, had also been the first school Sianna had been kicked out of—and Bermley had been the one to do the kicking. Bermley had always had it in for Sianna, always seemed to be able to brush past her young girl’s brashness and bring all the frailties and fears underneath to the surface.

Sianna looked away, pretending to be deeply interested in the blank wall behind the tech, but she could see, out of the corner of her eye, that the tech was looking her up and down, just the way Bermley had, and Sianna’s skin came out in blushes and goose bumps all at once.