Roger Allen - The Shattered Sphere

The Mind of the Sphere felt a second strange pulse move through the wormhole web, a rough, crude movement through the net. Then, shortly thereafter, a third pulse this one coming from outside, somehow, from a wormhole aperture no Charonian had ever formed. But like the first two illicit wormhole transits, this one terminated in the default link station in the dead system—the same link point the Mind had sent its own forces through, the same link point the Adversary was driving for.

Were these passages some strange new scheme of the Adversary? The Mind’s fears were instantly aroused. It examined the records of the link in more detail. No, no. This was not the Adversary. It was all too coarse, too crude, too awkwardly done, too cautious.

But it was something. Something to do with the strange troubles that had surrounded the last world brought into the Multisystem, such a brief time before. For a moment, the Mind considered the idea of destroying that world now, as a precaution, and expending the massive energy needed to bring another planet forward to serve as a projectile weapon.

But no. That would drain its energy reserves to dangerously low levels. And these were such small and weak interlopers. Certainly there had to be more frugal means to defend against them, if need be. Surely it would make more sense to conserve its projectile planet, keep it for its intended use.

Besides, the Mind could always destroy the troublesome planet later, after all this was over.

There was a lot going on. Communications to establish with NaPurHab, navigation setting to work out, observational procedures to work out, once they figured out what they were looking at. But Gerald was happy to let the captain and the comm officer dicker and bicker with NaPurHab and sort out the rest of it. He had a ship to manage.

He quickly confirmed what he had been hoping for—the ship was safe, at least for the moment. No damage from the wormhole transit, none of the handful of SCOREs in the neighborhood showing any hostile intent, and no other danger on the immediate horizon.

He punched up the intercom and set it to general announcement. “This is the executive officer,” he said. “All sections, secure from special shifts and resume normal shift rotation. Resume normal watches. Everybody get some rest.”

They had made it. They had gone through the wormhole, and not so much as a scratch on the paint job. Gerald glanced toward the main screen as the tracking officer put up a live feed of NaPurHab. It was little more than a sharp-edged spot in the screen at this range. Dianne already had headphones on, no doubt talking to the Maximum Windbag himself.

The passage must have been much tougher on the hab. It had to take some real courage to take her through , Gerald told himself. We had it easy . The Terra Nova was much newer and smaller and more compact, built more robustly and maintained with much more care than the hab.

Gerald smiled to himself. The Terra Nova and NaPurHab had just crossed into the unknown, and he was thinking about comparative maintenance schedules. But after a passage like that, it was time to get things back to as near normal as possible as fast as possible. To every thing, there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven , Gerald reminded himself.

But they were suddenly some unknown number of light-years from Earth, and some rather disturbing questions appeared, unbidden, in Gerald’s mind. This far from home, were they indeed still under heaven? And unto what purpose—unto whose purpose—was this time to be given?

“Okay, that’s a lock,” Windbag said to the commlink. “See your team in our maxmeet shop, twentyfour from now.” The Windbag cut the commlink to the Terra Nova and sighed.

He punched up the stern exterior camera shot and was rewarded with a view of the TN with the Charonian wormhole control ring behind it. Nice looking ship, but that was not exactly the key factor here. The Windbag found himself wishing bigtime he did not have to deal with a ship full of straights just now. He knew he shoulda been slap-happy glad to get ’em. Like to get heavily lonesome in these parts, and NaPurHab could use all the help it could git. The TN had all kinds of hardware and braintrust types who knew how to run things. Evenso, now wuz not-time for distractions. He had enough on his plate without the TN screaming for attention.

But still they had to have a maximum meet, all the honchos and honchettes. They had to slap together some way of surviving out here, and plain-fact-one was that they were gonna need each other.

But that didn’t make it fun.

Sianna looked around herself and realized that she had blundered onto the Boredway again. How many wrong turns could one person make? Quite a few, as it turned out. The whole hab was a madhouse.

Boredway was anything but boring at the moment, as tangled in frantic activity as an overturned ant heap. The air was filled with the smells of burnt insulation, sweating bodies, hot metal, and bonding chemicals, a tech crew just down the way trying to repair something while a cargo crew was struggling to make sense of the cargo canisters that had been strapped in any which way in the aft sections of Boredway. A few hundred meters forward, some sort of protest group was forming up. God only knew what they were protesting— or whom they were protesting to.

Sianna decided to risk a shortcut through Loopaway turf. If she could avoid any more wrong turns, it would cut twenty minutes off her trip.

She remembered the old joke about time being nothing more than nature’s way of keeping everything from happening all at once. For a while, it seemed as if it didn’t work this side of the wormhole. It had been a busy few days.

The captain of the Terra Nova and her executive officer had come aboard, looking more than a bit disoriented—understandable, considering they had both spent the past five years aboard one ship. Of course, NaPurHab would be disorienting no matter where you came from.

There had been another energy burst the day before—a multiple one this time—as the “object” slammed into a half-dozen SCOREs at once, with every scope on the hab and the Terra Nova watching it. The object was tracking closer and closer, heading right for the wormhole.

The object. It was coming this way, at high velocity. And when it got here, it was going to force open the wormhole and kill the Multisystem, and that would kill the Earth.

Oh God. How to stop it. How to stop it? Or were they just going to have to sit here and watch it happen?

At least life was chaotic enough to take her mind off things. Somewhere in the swirl of comings and goings, in between Purpgroups of this or that philosophy, while the frantic repair crews were rushing to patch up the systems that had been damaged in the passage of the wormhole and the tech teams were juggling like mad to keep the hab working with the solar collectors suddenly delivering a third less power than before, it had all turned from strange to familiar. Sianna had gotten used to it all, and that scared her.

Sianna stopped at the turning that always got her muddled and hesitated a long moment before taking the middle way. Yes, this was the right way. She recognized the stain on the wall. Straight along this way, then down two levels, and she’d almost be there.

Oh, it had been a time, with all the big events seeming to produce little ones in their wakes. A riot or two had broken out, a sit-in had been staged in the Maximum Windbag’s office. Meantime, certain residents of both ship and hab had decided on a change of scenery. Two dozen Purps had applied for crew positions on the Terra Nova , while twice that number of the TN ‘s crew had applied for Naked Purple citizenship, which was a great nuisance, as the Purple Citizen’s Council had ruled there was no such thing as a Purple Citizen three years before and then disbanded.