Roger Allen - The Shattered Sphere

Of course, if DePanna had gotten emotional, Dianne would have relieved her of her duty. But being upset with someone else’s reaction helped keep Dianne from getting too upset herself.

“They shouldn’t have done it,” Gerald said. “It’s suicide.”

“What choice did they have?” Dianne asked. “It was suicide to stay where they were.”

“I know,” Gerald said. “I know—but even so.”

All the Earth was watching NaPurHab’s battle, its struggle to ride the rapids of gravity, the shoals of warping space, fighting past doom and disaster—toward what?

A dozen screen displays were running at once, and Dianne was trying to watch all of them. But the direct feeds from NaPurHab’s external cameras meant the most. They would show what sort of place NaPurHab got to.

Assuming it got to anywhere at all.

Getting closer, closer, toodamn close. The gaping mouth of the hole was getting larger and larger—but was it large enough? Did those straights back on Earth really think they had a strong enough capiche on this thing to pry the hole open big enough for something the size of a hab to punch through?

Back off. Bail out. Abort this. This is crazy . But there was very little point in listening to the panicked gibberings of her hindbrain. They had passed the point of no return long, long ago. We’re going to slam into that damned hole anyhow, anyway , she told herself. Shush. Quiet, concentrate.

“Ghoul Modules commencing compensation,” Sturgis reported. “Attempting to use gravitics control to pilot us in. Right on predicted schedule.”

“Oh, good,” Eyeball said. Wally had predicted that the Charos might try and manipulate the hab’s course, setting it into the ideal transit path for a SCORE with the mass of the hab—which was not the right path for the hab. Eyeball would have to compensate for the attempted corrections as well.

“Confirming attempt at gravitic course compensation,” Wally said.

Eyeball suppressed the urge to swear. The man sounded pleased that the Charonians were going to take another crack at killing them all. After all, it proved that he had gotten the problem right. Wally was born to the Naked Purple. “I’m getting the distortion now,” Eyeball said.

Then the sounds started. The hab itself creaked, once, quietly, and then subsided. Too many shifting stresses were grabbing at the structure and the fabric of the poor old hab. Eyeball knew it was but a precursor of some truly serious noise. The tidal stresses were going to build up ferociously in the next few minutes.

The theory was that the hab could take it—but the damn thing was so old. NaPurHab had passed through a lot of hands before the Purps had taken possession. Eyeball was reasonably sure the original designers had not intended the thing to hold together for 150 years, let alone be dropped through a wormhole.

But none of that mattered now. NaPurHab had run out of choices long ago. A thousand things could go wrong, a thousand ways they could all be destroyed. Whether the hab crashed into the event horizon, was smashed by the SCOREs, was ripped apart by tidal stress, or was destroyed by a clumsy pilot at the helm, the result would be the same. She could get this exactly right, and they could still all get killed. Somehow, that made her feel better.

They were skewing to port just a tad. She tweaked the att jets a trifle and took a deep breath.

“Tidal forces becoming significant,” Wally announced, and, as if on cue, there was another low moan as a support shifted its load.

Eyeball tried to ignore her fears. G et it right . No excuses, no second chances, no apologies. An alarm bell sounded behind her, and then another, and another. But they hadn’t held an alarm drill since Eyeball had joined the nav team. Hull breach? Power short? The galley out of coffee? Never mind. She had to pilot this thing and there was nothing she could do. Let the others worry about everything else. Someone cut the alarms and silence returned, at least for a moment. Closer, closer. She could see the motion now, without any effort, see the wormhole coming closer, swelling wide. Or was the worm-hole aperture actually expanding? A sudden, hard jolt punched at the habitat, and the main lighting system cut out. A sort of rippling shudder moved over Eyeball, and she grabbed at the yaw controls, fighting to keep the hab on the right course and heading, even as the massive tidal forces strained to tear it apart.

Closer, closer, the inner depth of the hole now visible. Eyeball looked up to see how far off the Moonpoint Ring was from here— and saw nothing but the not-blue-white nothingness of the wormhole wall. They were inside it, swallowed whole by the hole, or maybe swallowed hole by the whole.

But they couldn’t be in or through, or over, or across—not yet. No. Eyeball could see nothing on the other side. The seconds felt like hours. A new, deeper, shuddering vibration grabbed at the hab. Something wrenched at them, pulled at them, flared across them.

Eyeball looked up again, ahead, toward their destination. An enormous blood-black shape, far too large to be seen as a whole, swallowed up half the horizon, its huge surface smashed and pitted and scored. And there, dead ahead, a wizened little ruin of a world seen in half phase hung over the huge black-red form beyond.

The Naked Purple Habitat moved forward, down into the wormhole, toward the strange worlds on the other side—

—And then they were gone.

“It’s been said that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I’ve often wondered if there is a direct relation, or an inverse one, between the amount of knowledge and that of safety. There are times, I’m quite sure, when a little knowledge is dangerous—while a large amount is positively fatal .”

Larry Chao waited until everyone else had gone to bed before he went to see her, until there was no chance of being interrupted or overheard. He had thought it all out very carefully, and it seemed to him that he needed Marcia MacDougal. He could do the flight alone, yes. But that was not the point. Well, not all of it, anyway. He had personal reasons to get back to Plutopoint, no question—but it was also his duty to go there. If they were detecting radio signals, Plutopoint and the Ring of Charon were where the action was. That was where he was needed. Get back to Pluto, and then…

No. Don’t think past that , he told himself. Don’t get ahead of yourself .

And he had the ship to get him there, get him there fast, if they would let him use her. The Graviton , the gravity-beam ship. The test program was nearly complete. They would have started piloted tests in another week or so anyway. If he could get flight clearance, the door would be open. Sondra Berghoff would back him, and provide the gravity beams for the flight.

But no one would let Larry Chao do a solo flight. Not if he had learned anything about people these past few years, and come to understand that he was close to halfway around the bend as it was.

But with Marcia MacDougal—sensible, clear-headed Marcia MacDougal, expert in Charonian visual symbolism—as part of the deal, it would work. He could sell it.

But first he had to sell it to her. And he thought he had a way to do that, too. Maybe not the straightest, purest way—but a way. And if Larry had it figured right, it was even fairly honest.

He got to the door of her room and knocked. There was a brief pause, and then a bump and a thud or two. The door came open a crack, and Marcia peered around the corner. “Larry,” she said with a yawn. “What brings you around at this hour?”