Roger Allen - The Shattered Sphere

“How did it happen, Wally?” she asked again. “What killed the Sphere?”

He shrugged. “I’d love to know. We have that three-dee clip from five years ago, of something smashing into a Sphere and pushing through, but that still doesn’t tell us anything.”

Sianna stared out at the dead world she had named. “This is a sad place,” she said at last. “Death, decay, collapse.”

They had all thought of the Multisystem Sphere, of the Charonians, as the enemy, and that was right as far as it went. But it did not go far enough.

There were enemies that human, Charonian, all life battled against: Death. Entropy. Collapse. Life of any sort reversed entropy, brought order to the Universe, and made a haven for more life. The lesson of the Shattered Sphere was slowly dawning on Sianna: this was Earth’s future if humanity somehow succeeded in defeating the Charonians . Like it or not, willing or no, the Multisystem was now Earth’s haven, and it had to be protected. But that was too much to say to Wally, too much to express.

Besides, he was already done with his sandwich, and back at his work. He had already forgotten she was there. Sianna sighed and turned her back on the viewport. She sat down and got back to her own work.

Actually, her own work was a trifle on the undefined side, as Wally was doing the whole job that had been assigned to both of them. Sianna knew damned well that it would be all but impossible to pry any part of it away from him, and, worse, that the two of them working together would probably do the job less well than Wally working by himself.

Wally saw the Universe as a species of wind-up toy to be taken apart, figured out, and put back together. Once the puzzle was solved, he lost interest and moved on.

Sianna liked to think she had the imagination to find the problems in the first place, the ability to step outside and see things no one else had. She could interpret the puzzle, take the pieces Wally put together and make them into more than the sum of their parts.

But to do that, she had to at least get a look at the pieces. The hab’s databanks were already full to bursting with images and readings of all sorts. Sianna had taken on the job of looking at all of it, feeding the raw data to her skull, knowing it all from the ground up.

She fired up her terminal, called up the scope log, and started scrolling through it. More small objects of debris located, more of the Sphere’s surface mapped, higher-resolution images of Solitude. All good, important data, but none of it new, unexpected, nothing that made her ask questions.

But then something caught her eye. Not an object, but an event, about two hours back. According to the log reports, no one had reported at the time, which was not surprising, given that things were more than a little busy about the habitat.

Sianna called up a full data playback and was rewarded with the image of a brilliant flash of light, along with a hell of a lot of radio-frequency, gamma, X-ray, and infrared radiation. Sianna frowned. What the hell could have produced that much radiation all over the spectrum? A nuclear explosion? Some black hole absorbing a huge amount of mass all at once?

How big had it been? How far away? The autoscope had logged the sky coordinates, but it had no way of reporting a range.

She brought up the radar ranging data, going back to the moment when NaPurHab had arrived in-system, and cross-linked it against the coordinates for the energy flash.

NaPurHab’s radar system had been meant for use in a traffic-control system, and it had certainly done good service with all the incoming cargo vehicles not so long ago. The Purps had pressed it into service as an early-warning system against spaceborne debris, as the Shattered Sphere system seemed to be even more full of skyjunk than the Multisystem.

Like all active radar systems, the hab’s gear sent out timed bursts of radio signals. Some portion of a given signal would reflect off a target and bounce back. By measuring how long the signal took to make the round trip, radar systems could compute the precise distance to a given target. Of course, the further off a target was, and the smaller its reflecting surface, the weaker the returning signal would be.

Local-traffic control systems didn’t need to be all that powerful. The hab’s hackstaff had done their best to hot-wire their traffic radars into a debris detector, but NaPurHab did not boast the most gifted technicians in the known Universe, and they had moreover done the job in a hurry with rather limited resources.

Sianna had no idea what the energy burst had been, or whether it had come from ten thousand kilometers away or ten thousand light years. Sianna was not really expecting to get any useful data at all out of the cobbled-together system.

She certainly wasn’t expecting to be astonished one more time.

Let alone terrified.

“What is our struggle with the Charonians about? That I can tell you in one word. There is something they stole from us, something we want back again. Something that has been at the bottom of every quarrel, every battle, every war in human history.

“In that one word, we fight to get one thing back from the Charonians.

“Power.”

Dusk was falling, night settling over the city. Herr Doktar Wolf Bernhardt, Director-General of the Directorate for Spatial Investigations, Chairman of the Governing Board of the Multisystem Research Institute, stared down at his folded hands, at his empty desk, and faced the fact that, for the first time in years, there was nothing for him to do. At the end of the day, nothing demanded the attention and the authority of Wolf Bernhardt. And worse, much that he had done had proved to be of no use whatsoever.

“All of it for nothing, eh, Ursula?” he asked.

Ursula Gruber let off pacing back and forth along the length of the room and turned to look at her superior. “I beg your pardon?” she said.

“I said it’s all for nothing. All of the effort to rescue NaPurHab and Terra Nova . All the struggle to resupply them before the SCOREs could come and cut them off from us. All the panicked effort to get three scientists to the Terra Nova . Now Sakalov is dead, and if they are lucky, Sturgis and Colette are merely stranded with a habitat full of buffoons on the other side of a wormhole. Unless they are dead, too. And all of it based on guesses that were dead wrong, too. The SCOREs weren’t the least bit interested in Earth, just the Moonpoint Ring. All our preparations have been utterly wasted.”

“It’s not over yet, Wolf,” Ursula replied. “And there’s no question that you did save NaPurHab—or at least gave it a fighting chance. Perhaps that won’t do us much good here in the Multisystem, but the people on the habitat are still alive. If nothing else at all, your spacelift got enough propellant to them so they could adjust their flight path and make it through the wormhole. They’d have been smashed by the SCOREs or have crashed into the singularity if it weren’t for you.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps. If they even survived the passage. But now we are to lose the Terra Nova as well. What good can come of Steiger going down the wormhole?”

“A great deal,” Ursula replied. “What more could they accomplish here in the Multisystem, at lower risk than the wormhole transit?”

“I know, I know,” Wolf said. “And they may be able to learn a great deal, do a great deal, on the other side.”