Roger Allen - The Shattered Sphere

Sianna thought she had followed that, but she wasn’t sure. She looked at Wally. “She’s going to do it?” she asked.

Wally gave Sianna a strange look. “Of course,” he said. “Isn’t that what she just said?”

“This is madness,” said Wolf Bernhardt, watching the displays in his office. “I cannot believe that you agreed to this.”

“I didn’t agree to it, Wolf,” Ursula Gruber replied. “I suggested it, as you know perfectly well. And, I might add, you approved it.”

“For which I should have my head examined most carefully,” Wolf said. “Was there no other way? No way for them to escape at lower risk?”

“No,” Ursula said. “Nothing. This is their last, best, desperate hope.”

“We are ready to send the command set?” Wolf asked. “You have the latest update?”

“Yes, Wolf, yes. Everything has been made as ready as possible. We send the wormhole command in approximately sixty-five minutes. And they are already very much committed. They did the first burn an hour ago, changing their course. They are spiraling in on the wormhole, and they don’t have the power to pull out.”

“And the sensors and the cameras?”

“Up and running. We don’t think we’ll get more than about sixty seconds of transmission radioed back before the wormhole closes down. Maybe much less. With some luck, that will be enough to know what sort of place they are in.”

“And then the hole slams shut, and we know nothing much?”

“Precisely.”

“They could all die the moment after the wormhole closes, and we would not know. Any hope of reopening the wormhole afterwards?”

“Oh, yes,” Gruber said. “So long as we have a mass, a large one—to send through it.”

“Why should the wormhole care if we send something or nothing through?” Bernhardt asked.

“Because we don’t think the Ghoul Modules are smart enough to do the compensations a full Ring can do,” Gruber explained. “The amount of mass to be transferred is a major variable in a wormhole transfer. Get it wrong by any substantial amount, and the Ghoul Modules won’t have the capacity to absorb the excess power. They’ll burn out.”

“So tell the Ghouls we are sending nothing—or something very small—through.”

“The minimal mass is too high. We don’t know any way of doing a zero-load setting on the Ghoul Modules. After all, the reason they are there is to manage mass transfers. Maybe we can find ways around that, but we don’t know how yet.”

“ ‘We don’t know.’ The motto for our era.” Wolf stood up, turned around, and looked out his glass-wall window at the great city outside, the sun just setting over the gleaming towers. “ ‘We don’t know,’ ” he said again. “Ah, well. We’re about to start learning very quickly.”

Somewhere in the aft areas of the habitat, the main maneuvering thrusters cut off. “Second main trim burn complete,” Eyeball announced. “We are in the groove. I think.”

Sometimes talking—or thinking—in Purpspeak was not such a good idea, and more or less standard English was a wiser choixe. Eyeballer Maximus Lock-On figured that piloting a habitat through a wormhole with groundhogs for assistants was just such a time.

And they were heading through, and no mistake. Of course, a mistake, they would be heading in, not through. Either NaPurHab made it through, or the singularity at this end of the wormhole was just about to gain a little weight.

The hab was as battened down as it was ever going to be. They had spun it down to zero rotation, zero gee. The solar collectors were stowed, all the loose cargo was in theory strapped down, all personnel had been ordered to emergency stations until further notice— producing the usual number of protests from the kneejerker set—and all the docshops were standing by. Everything that could be done had been. But everything sure as hell wasn’t much.

Closer, closer, drifting closer.

Eyeballer swallowed hard and tweaked back the attitude controls by just half a hair. She was not piloting by the numbers anymore, but by feel, by guess. They were deep inside the probabilities now, so tangled up in the variables that there was no longer time to set up the problem, let alone work through logical, mathematical solutions.

Too slow, Eyeball told herself. They were too slow, by the tiniest bit. What would happen if the wormhole slammed shut while the stern of the hab was still moving through?

“Stand by,” Sturgis said. “Variable projection shows us coming up on another Ghoul pulse. Probability peak in ten seconds.”

Eyeball glanced toward the prob display, absorbed the data on the display without really seeing it. “Got it, Walleye. Hanging.” Had to hand to the groundhog—he was good.

Obviously, the Ghouls were adjusting for the mass imbalance caused by NaPurHab itself. At least that gave Wall some sort of way of guessing what they would do next. If the Ghouls followed the trim pattern he was predicting, then the hab would have to slow down its approach again—by almost exactly the amount she had just gotten through speeding them up. Damnation! This was getting out of control. The Ghoul Modules were doing their best to stabilize the worm-hole, and Eyeball was constantly adjusting NaPurHab’s trajectory, trying to move with sufficient precision to make it through the hole, even as the hab’s movement destabilized the gravity patterns the Ghouls were trying to maintain. Two feedback loops combining to set up a meta-unstable synergy. Or something. She could write learned papers about it later. If they survived.

“Coming up on wormhole transit link activation,” Wally said. “MRI will send the command sequence to the Ghoul Mods in five seconds. Four, three, two, one—MRI sending commands.”

Eyeball felt her stomach turn to ice as nothing, nothing happened.

The wormhole would not open. They would crash into the singularity. But no. Speed-of-light delay, command-activation delay. It would take a little time, just a few seconds before—

Eyeball took her eyes off her control panels and risked a look through the main viewport. The wormhole came suddenly alive, pulsing, swirling, a strange serpentine tunnel with walls of swirling not-blue. The begloomed black-grey sky of the Multisystem brooded in the background, set off here and there with the dull red glow of reflected Spherelight on a dust cloud.

The undead Moonpoint Ring was a ring no more, but a band across the sky, too close to see more than a small piece of it at once. But she had no eyes for the ring. She looked back at the growing power of the wormhole.

“Pray God to save us, pray God to save us, pray God to save us.” A small voice at the back of the compartment was chanting the words over and over again, and, Eyeball realized, had been for some time. She glanced overshoulder. Sianna. Poor kid. How n hell had she got dropped into this mess? How any of them? Notime to thinkitall now.

Back to the transit calculations. Yawing just a bit, losing alignment, don’t over compensate, just the lightest of micropulses on the thrusters. Easy now. Easy.

“Tracking, tracking—the hab is closing on the singularity. A great deal of interference is being produced by the Moonpoint Ring and its interaction with the singularity,” DePanna said, as if she were talking about a little static during a call from her Aunt Minnie.

Dianne wished, not for the first time, that her detection officer could be a trifle more excitable. That hunk of iron and glass out there, with thousands of people on it, was about to drop straight on through into the unknown. Yet DePanna seemed more concerned by the fact that her display screens were difficult to interpret.