Roger Allen - The Shattered Sphere

The Last World hung close in the sky, still in half-phase, appearing somewhat larger now than it had when NaPurHab had first arrived. Sianna had named it Solitude, and it seemed as if the name might stick—a fact that gave her immense pleasure. Not many people got the chance to name a world.

She looked down on it, and was surprised at her own reaction. She felt sorry for the poor thing. A lone world, a last world, a lonely world. An airless, waterless, lifeless lump of rock, all that was left of the control center for a mighty stellar empire. “Sorrow” might have been another name for the place.

It had taken the slightest of burns on the maneuvering jets to put the hab into an elongated elliptical orbit about Solitude. Eyeball might well decide some other orbit would be better later on, but this one at least kept them from crashing into the planet, which was the main thing for now.

Well astern of the hab, and getting further away by the minute, was the wormhole portal, a Ring-and-Hole set very much like all the ones back in the Multisystem. That was no surprise. Most of the SCOREs that should have been in orbit around it seemed to have gone missing. Only nine or ten were on station, their radars aimed out from the wormhole, clearly watching for something on its way in.

But the hab’s radar center had detected signals from at least four or five other clusters of SCORE radars, and visual checks showed that each cluster surrounded its own dormant Ring-and-Hole set. It would seem that the SCOREs the Multisystem Sphere had been sending through other wormholes back on the other side had been reinforcements for a number of sites on this side. But the SCORE counts were low at the other Ring-and-Hole sets as well. That was a good-size mystery right there—where were the rest of the SCOREs that had been streaming through the wormholes?

No doubt plenty more mysteries would crop up before some answers presented themselves. “So,” Sianna asked. “What’s the state of play?”

Wally took a swallow of tea and a bite of the sandwich. “Well, this place looks like what the Multisystem would look like if our Sphere stopped using gravitics to hold the place together. First, there’s the Sphere itself, and presumably a black hole of about one solar mass inside it.”

“Why do you assume the black hole?”

“No gravitic controls means Solitude has to be in a natural orbit, and that means something with enough mass to produce that much natural gravity. If the Dyson Sphere was built out of disassembled planets, it can’t have that much mass on its own—not by a factor of a thousand. So there has to be something massive inside it.”

Sianna nodded. “Right. I should have seen that. And it has to be a compact dark mass like a black hole. If it were a star, we’d see its light shining from inside the Sphere through the holes, and be detecting lots of heat energy.”

“Exactly. Aside from the Sphere, we’ve got Solitude, of course, and one Captive Sun that’s still around. It might have been in a natural binary relationship with the star the Charonians built the Sphere around.”

“Any more tracks on the other stars and their planets?”

“Plenty of them,” Wally said enthusiastically. “It’s going to take months for me to build up a simulation of the momentum exchanges that ejected them from the system. So far I’ve tracked seven definite ejected Captive Suns moving away from this system. Working backwards from their current velocity tells us it happened something like one hundred fifty years ago.”

“What about the Captive Worlds?” Sianna asked. “Are they still with their stars?”

“Not most of them,” Wally said. “But then you wouldn’t expect them to be. I just ran a quick-and-dirty simulation of the Multisystem, to see what would happen if the gravity control system shut off there . One or two planets per star stay anchored in their orbits. The rest are thrown around by momentum exchanges caused by various close passes between the Captive Suns. The planets in those pseudo-stable orbits go sailing off into space, or impact with other planets, or spiraled into their suns. Some of them end up in extremely eccentric orbits of the Sphere. Two or three impact on the Sphere— including Earth.”

Sianna shivered at that thought. Wally could put it all in terms of hypothetical, theory. But this place was death, and it was real. Suppose whatever killed this place went through the wormhole and visited itself on the Multisystem. “How did it die, Wally?” she asked. “What did all this?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Wally said. “Right now, you know everything I know. No, wait, there is one other interesting thing. As best I can tell, the co-orbital wormhole ring loop is still more or less intact.”

“Hmmm? What?” Sianna blinked and looked back toward Wally.

“Just like back in the Multisystem. There’s the Lone World, and then a whole system of modified and oversized Ring-and-Hole sets spaced at equal intervals along the same orbit. It looks as if there used to be sixteen—and all but two are up and running. The only damn things in this system that still are.”

“How can you tell which ones are operational, or how many there are?” Sianna asked. “We can’t possibly see more than two or three of them from here. The Shattered Sphere gets in the way of line of sight.”

“Yeah, but I rigged a whole set of alternate-mode gravity-wave detectors, the ones based on Charonian technology. The ones we built have never worked real well, but believe me, even on a bad detector, an active Ring-and-Hole set shows up very nicely, no matter how many Spheres are around.”

“They’re active?” Sianna asked.

“Makes sense they’d be the last thing to go,” Wally said. “They served as communications relays and cargo conveyors. Even if everything else went, as long as the wormhole ring loop was intact, Solitude could still maintain radio communications with the system, import new stars and worlds from other systems and move raw materials around this system.”

“But once the wormhole ring loop goes, you’re dead.”

“Right. So you set things up so it keeps running, no matter what. That’s why there are so many rings in the loop. You only really need three or six, but this system had sixteen—and fourteen survived whatever killed the rest of the system.”

“But what the hell are they using for power?”

“ That’s the other thing,” Wally said, suddenly grinning. “I finally cracked one of the mysteries about the Spheres that’s been bugging me from day one. Remember how we figured out the longitudinal lines were huge accelerator rings, super-big versions of the Moon-point Ring? But we could never figure out what the latitudinal lines were?”

“Yeah, so?”

“So with this Sphere dead, all the other power systems aren’t masking the readings. I nailed them. The latitude rings are power-storage rings, holding reserve energy. About thirty percent of the rings on this Sphere are still intact and carrying a charge.”

“And the wormhole ring loop is tapping into them?”

“At real, real, minimal levels. But I doubt they’ll last much longer. Everything’s decaying.”

Sianna looked out the viewport again, at the dead Sphere ami the dead Last World of Solitude. “Very impressive work, Wally. Find any other surprises out there?”

“Not really,” Wally said. “There’s the little stuff, of course. Asteroids, impact debris, dead COREs, other dead Charonians, and random skyjunk. This Sphere’s taken impacts from all kinds of stuff.”

“So this is what happens when a Sphere dies,” she said. “Sounds like that old poem, doesn’t it? ‘This is the way the world ends,’ ” she whispered. Though there was little as gentle as a whimper in the violence that had been wrought here. Smashed, broken worlds, stars flying off in all directions, planets being flung off into the frozen interstellar darkness. Sianna shook her head, staring out into the void with unseeing eyes.