Roger Allen - The Shattered Sphere

“How so?”

“Think of the wormhole as a long thin tunnel. If the Terra Nova had been lined up with one end of it, we could have seen all the way down it, and we would have picked up NaPurHab’s signal as the hab beamed it out of the tunnel. But we’re well off to one side of the wormhole—and the moment they entered it, the tunnel wall cut off the radio link.”

“So the lack of data doesn’t mean they were killed instantly, or anything like that?” Dianne asked.

“No. All the telemetry was more or less normal up until the moment of cut-off. We were getting a lot of indications of structural stress, but that was to be expected, and it was well within tolerance.”

“So this is the best we have,” Dianne said, getting up to look at the video frame. She stared at it for a long time, searching it, trying to pull meaning out it—and succeeding. This told her things. Including things to do.

“So there’s a planet in front of a Sphere like ours. One clear frame of video can’t tell us much past that,” Gerald said, after the silence had dragged on for a bit.

“The hell it can’t,” Dianne said. “There are lots of dogs not barking in here.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Read your Sherlock Holmes,” she said. “When a dog that always barks stays silent, that’s a clue too.”

“Ah. Okay. So what don’t you see here?”

“Shadows,” Dianne said. “No multiple shadows, no illumination at all in the darkened hemisphere of that little world.”

“Meaning?”

“Only one light source. If that red-black is the surface of another Sphere like ours, then it should have two or three dozen Captive Suns orbiting it, the way ours does. Any planet there would have seven or eight captive stars shining on it at any given moment. And yet there is only one light source here. That tells me this Sphere has lost nearly all of its captives.”

“Okay, I guess. What else?”

“The surface of the Sphere. It’s banged up as hell. Lots of impacts on it. It’s not protecting itself against debris.” Dianne stabbed a finger down on one of the larger features. “And that looks like a wide-angle crack going all the way through the surface of the Sphere. It’s much darker than the bottom of the other cracks and craters.”

She shifted her finger to point out a pair of straight lines crossing at right angles, almost out of the frame toward the bottom. “And that looks a hell of a lot like one of the ‘latitude’ lines intersecting a line of ‘longitude’ on our Sphere, seen from damned close-up.”

Gerald stared at the image himself, stepped back from the screen for a minute to get a better look. “You’re right,” he said. “I was just seeing that as two long straight cracks, but you’re right. Hey wait a second.”

Gerald thought for a minute, then turned to the table and grabbed a datapack. “We’ve got the optical data on the cameras NaPurHub was using,” he said. “Let’s see. Factor in the focal length of the lens, assume those lines are the same width as the ones on our Sphere, and that gives us a scale. Get the apparent width of the lines and we’ll have a range to the Sphere in the picture.” He measured the line width ami punched the numbers into the datapack. He looked at the answer, then ran the problem again. “I don’t believe it,” he said. “It couldn’t be that close.”

“ How close?” Dianne asked.

“Twenty-two million kilometers,” Gerald said. “NaPurHab came out twenty-two million kilometers from the surface of a Charonian Sphere.”

“A dead Charonian Sphere,” Dianne said. “A Sphere that can’t hold onto its stars, that can’t prevent impacts on its surface. And to hell with being close to the Sphere. Remember what Sturgis and Colette figured out, that the Lone World here, in our Multisystem, was Charon Central, the brains for the whole operation.”

She stabbed her finger down on the video image again. “ That is the Lone World, Charon Central for the system NaPurHab is in. It is orbiting the Sphere directly. It is the place from which the Charonians controlled this system . Maybe it’s the Last World in that system, too, the only one left.

Gerald looked at his captain with something between fear and excitement in his eyes. “It makes sense,” he said. “I think you’re right.” He looked at the image again, and worked it all through, nodding to himself. “Yes,” he said. “It’s got to be.”

“So,” Dianne said, “There we have it.” Suddenly she knew what to do. “So now what?” she asked.

“I beg your pardon?” Gerald asked, turning away from the image.

“What next?” Dianne asked again, leaning in close, her eyes intent.

“We were supposed to rendezvous with NaPurHab. Now what?” If Gerald saw the same answer, then there was at least some rational basis for it.

Gerald’s eyes lit up. “I think,” he said, “that we should give serious consideration to proceeding with the rendezvous—at an alternative location.”

“You thought it was too dangerous for the Purps to try the passage. You said so yourself. Why would it be safer for us?”

“The circumstances are different. Because they went through, we know there’s another side. And we know there is something over there that can kill Spheres. That’s knowledge we need.”

“But we don’t even know if the Purps survived. They could have been destroyed the moment after we lost contact.”

“The Terra Nova can take more punishment than they could. And, we can’t survive here that long ourselves. Beating one CORE was a triumph. We can’t make a career out of it. Sooner or later, one of them is going to get us.”

“We could shift our trajectory away from Moonpoint, and regroup,” Dianne suggested. “Get well away from all the planets and all the COREs and SCOREs, take a month or a year to think it through.”

“No,” Gerald said. “What would wasting time change, except that the Ghoul Modules could shut the Moonpoint Ring down again? We go in after them. That Last World alone ought to tell us more about the Charonians than anything else we’ve ever seen. A month or two ago we were hoping to learn more by boarding a CORE. Now, maybe we have the chance to explore the mind of a Charonian Sphere. Compared to exploring an unguarded Command Center and a Sphere, what is there for us here?”

Dianne took a deep breath and then let it out. Now the idea, the mad idea, was out in the open. “Good,” she said. “I needed to hear you say it. I wanted to be sure I wasn’t crazy.”

“What about the SCOREs on the other side?” Gerald asked. “Won’t they try and stop us?”

“I don’t think so,” Dianne said. “Not if we’ve got the rest of this figured out. They’re trying to keep something from coming through the hole going the other way. The SCOREs on this side are blocking anything coming out of the hole. That only makes sense if the SCOREs on the other side are there to block anything going in . We ought to be safe enough heading outward.”

Gerald nodded his head abstractedly. “Ordinarily, I’d say that was mad optimism. The risks are far too high. But with all the other chances we’d be taking, that one seems almost trivial.”

Dianne smiled sadly. “When the chance of getting smashed to atoms by SCOREs on the other side of a wormhole seems trivial, then I say things are in a pretty bad way.”

Gerald laughed. “Let’s you and me get to work, and maybe we can find some way to make them better.”

“One of the tricky things about researching NaPurHab’s arrival in the Shattered Sphere system, and what happened afterward, is that neither the people in the Solar System nor the people in the Multisystem knew the whole story. It’s hard, now, after the fact, to remember the appalling ignorance we all suffered under. Everyone had holes in their knowledge. Big enough holes that, for all intents and purposes, no one knew what the hell was going on.