Roger Allen - The Shattered Sphere

“Come to think of it, the Adversary and the Charonians knew even less than we did.”

Another attacker came at the Adversary, and it dealt with the assault as effortlessly as always . The Adversary smashed through, its multi-megaton assailant, emerging unscathed, its course unchanged, and leaving another cloud of debris in its wake .

The immediate threat dealt with, the Adversary extended its senses outward and noted a different disturbance in the vicinity of its main target . It focused its attention there. Some odd sort of mass, quite different from the others it had seen, had come out of the link from the living system. Had the Adversary entertained any lingering doubts at all that this was the real target and that all the others were decoys, then the arrival of this strange object would have put those doubts to rest . The Adversary’s kind had long experience of the Charonians, and how they behaved. The unique link locus, the one with something, anything, different about it, was the real one. The Adversary was well pleased to have its previous conclusions confirmed . It moved smoothly on, toward the link and the rich feeding grounds beyond .

Sianna held on as the habitat bucked and kicked like a live thing. And she promptly put any thought that she was cured of claustrophobia right out of her head.

You bloody idiot, what the hell are you doing going down a wormhole down a wormhole down a wormhole ?—They were trying to send the hab through a tunnel of infinite length, and that tunnel was inside a hole that took up absolutely no space whatsoever. Sianna’s fear of being closed in rose to new heights, took on new meanings, as NaPurHab headed deeper into the hole, the ride getting progressively rougher as Eyeball fought to keep them moving down the centerline—and as the gravitation fluxes and tidal pulses struggled to tear them apart.

After an especially sharp bang and a thud, the overhead lights cut out and came back up and then went out and stayed out. A dozen new alarms started up, hooting and beeping and ringing, and Sianna could smell something burning.

At least the exterior monitors stayed on, even with the cabin lights out. The sideview cameras showed an un-blue-white tunnel wall of flailing storm, seething with power, rushing past the habitat, and that was bad enough. But the forward cam showed the view looking straight down the wormhole, down, down, down the seething, glowing tube, toward the tiny black pinprick that was the way out, the only way out, impossibly far off and getting no closer. Sianna clutched at the arms of her scruffy old crash chair and tried to tear her eyes away from that seething tunnel.

The passage seemed to go on forever in time and space, taking them further and further away from the Universe, deeper and deeper into the tunnel and the depths.

And then, abruptly, it was over—gone, all at once. The wormhole swept past the forward view, and the Universe beyond came into view, and they were up, and out, and through.

But through into what, and where? The forward camera showed a huge, sullen-red globe, a tiny, dried-up grey lump of a world, the black of space—

Suddenly the habitat was pitching over, starting to tumble, end over end.

“Damnation!” Eyeball called out. “Aft boom caught wormhole side. Sheared right off. Morons failed to retract or what?”

“Can you correct?” The Maximum Windbag had to shout the question to be heard over the alarms.

“Dunno!” Eyeball shouted back. “Shut up and stand by!”

Something broke loose behind Sianna’s head and went windmilling across the compartment to smash into the far wall. The lights on a whole bank of terminals flared and went out, and the hot smell of burnt insulation was suddenly stronger and more pungent. Wisps and tendrils of smoke filled the compartment. Air. They were going to run out of air and suffocate and die in the darkness .

Sianna shut her eyes so as not to see the darkness. She prayed to someone, anyone, she didn’t care who, to get them out of this get them out of this, now, please God now—

A whole bank of circuit breakers slammed shut with a bang, and the overhead lights came on. The ventilators kicked back in, and Sianna was desperately glad she hadn’t noticed them cutting out. The air cleared, and the control thrusters cut. Eyeball worked the conn, slowing the tumble, bringing the hab around to a steady, stable attitude. Eyeball let out a sigh of relief and leaned back in her crash couch.

The ops boards were still more red and amber than green, and new alarms seemed to be going off every time an old one was silenced. But they had made it. They were here, wherever that was, and they were alive.

At last all the alarms were turned off, and the command center was still, and quiet, for a moment.

“Well,” Wally said, speaking into the silence, “let’s not do that again.”

Sianna held the carrybag with one hand and started climbing the ladder, making her awkward way up to the zero-gee levels. It was four days since the hab had come through the wormhole, but the reality of it all hadn’t set in yet, at least not for Sianna.

What do we do now ? she wondered. No one knew. They were surprised enough just to find themselves alive. Most of the Purps weren’t yet thinking clearly enough to manage a state of shock.

Sianna found herself busying herself with small details. Make the tea—one the way Wally liked it, and the other for her. Make the sandwiches. Pack them in the carrybag. Go to where Wally was.

It might have been possible to think no further than lunch if she had been allowed to hole up in her cabin with her pillow over her head. Unfortunately, Eyeball had put Sianna and Wally in charge of charting the big picture, making it a trifle harder to escape.

Sianna reached the top of the vertical shaft and stepped into the horizontal corridor that led to the ob bubble. She swung her legs around and kicked off from the end wall, intending to send herself sailing smoothly down the corridor. Unfortunately, the weight of the carrybag in her left hand threw off her balance. She overcorrected and sent herself tumbling through the air, bouncing off the corridor wall. She caught at a handrail, bounced once or twice, and then steadied herself before making her way along the corridor in a more controlled fashion.

She shifted the carrybag full of lunch to her other hand, opened the hatch, and moved into the observation bubble. Wally, as usual, did not notice her arrival. The autoscan scopes had been working overtime since their arrival in-system, and he was busily pulling the data off them and logging it in to his simulator datapack.

Eyeball had just told them to get some sort of inventory of the system. Wally was way past that, already hard at work using his knowledge of the Earth’s Multisystem as a rough working guide to setting up a dynamic model of this system—and of what this system had once been.

“Wally,” Sianna said. “I brought back lunch.” She sat down, opened up the carrybag, and handed Wally a bulb of tea.

“Hey, great,” he said. “Keep forgetting to eat.”

“I know, I know. And I keep remembering to feed you,” she said, handing over a sandwich. She dug out a sandwich for herself and looked out the observation port.

There it was. Huge, brooding, smashed and dead, an overwhelming sight. The Shattered Sphere had named itself. Not even the Purps could dream of calling it anything else. Sianna could see a dozen craters of various sizes, and one or two impacts that had punched holes clean through. The Sphere was covered with a jagged, broken network of cracks.