Roger Allen - The Shattered Sphere

Gerald MacDougal stood by the entrance to the lock, and nothing in the Universe mattered but the fact that the lock was about to open. Marcia. Here. Now. Alive.

Shattered Spheres and invisible objects that killed SCORES and wormhole transits to habs full of lunatics. None of it was of the least importance. Marcia. Here.

It was impossible, it couldn’t be true, and it was happening. Five years and more since he had last seen her, since he had touched her. Five years since the Charonians had torn them apart—and now the Autarch of Ceres and NaPurHab were bringing them together. It made no sense at all, but that didn’t matter either.

The airlock hatch swung partway open, and then paused for a moment. Gerald stepped forward, his heart slamming in his chest.

And then the hatch swung clear, and she stepped through.

Marcia. Here.

They were in each other’s arms before either of them knew it. His body remembered the feel of her close and warm against him, and some part of himself that had been lost for far too long was suddenly there again. He breathed in the smell of her hair, wrapped his arms around her and held her. Never again. Never again would they be separated.

They let go of each other just enough so that they could take that quarter step back to look in each other’s eyes, and he knew that he was seeing what she saw. An age line or two, a grey hair that had not been there before—but none of that mattered either. The last five years had not happened. They had always been together, and they always would be.

She reached her hand up and caressed the side of his face, pulled him close, and they kissed.

They drew back again, after a time, and looked at each other again. “Hello, Gerald,” Marcia said, her voice warm and low. “Did you miss me?”

Sianna Colette sat and listened, sat and watched, as the meeting lumbered on. There he was. That was him . Larry Chao, the man, the monster, the ogre who had caused the Abduction. She—or at least her subconscious— had been expecting someone nine feet tall with fangs. But not a man, a rather ordinary, shy, gentle-looking man with dark hair and a haunted look in his eyes.

But there were other matters in hand. “There is no doubt in my mind at all,” Chao was saying. “The object that Miss Colette and Mr. Sturgis have been tracking is the Adversary, the danger that terrifies the Sphere that holds Earth captive. The danger that could kill Earth and everything on it. The Multisystem Sphere will not hesitate to throw Earth at the Adversary in order to kill it.”

“How canbe that?” Eyekill said. “Can’t quite believe it’d take Earth-smash to clobber that thing. Wally, Adversary is what size, tops?”

“No way to know,” Wally said. “My really rough guess is that it is about the size of a very small asteroid. Say, less than a kilometer across. Maybe a lot less.”

“How massive is it?” Captain Steiger asked.

“Well,” Wally said, “We’ve tracked a bunch of debris within orbits perturbed by near passes of the Adversary. We can work from there directly into a computation of its gravitation, and thus its mass. It comes out to something on the order of a lunar mass.”

“It weighs as much as the Moon and it’s too small to see ?” Steiger asked.

Wally shrugged and smiled. “Strange matter is pretty strange,” he said.

“There is not much funny about this, Sturgis,” Steiger said. “A mass the size of the Moon striking the Earth is not a joking matter.”

“But would it even work?” MacDougal asked. “I mean, would it kill the Adversary? It seems to me that this Adversary has taken a lot of punishment.”

“Should work great,” Eyeball said. “Charos accelerate Earth to high-nuff speed, you bet. Force equal mass times acceleration. Big enough mass, enuff accel, no prob.”

“Nuff to zap strange matter?” the Windbag asked. “Turn it to normal matter or mebbe energy? E-equals-MC-square it?”

E = MC 2. That phrase tickled something in Sianna’s memory. Not the formula itself. But sometime, somewhere, when someone had said it. What had it been about? Suddenly this meeting seemed very familiar, as if she had been through all this before. Some other meeting, or bull session, or whatever, when someone had not been believed and that equation had come up in conversation.

“Don’t think so,” Eyeball was saying. “But you can kill me without turning my body into energy pulse. High-speed impact with Earth oughta benuff to break bonds between strange atoms, reduce Adversary to thin cloud of by-themself atoms. Kill it bigtime.”

“Sides, if it don’t work, Earth death anyho,” the Windbag pointed out. “Adversary kills Sphere, Earth loses orbit, and whammo.”

“That’s getting just a bit off the point, isn’t it?” Steiger said. “I really don’t care how Earth would die. I don’t want Earth to die in the first place.”

“Which brings us,” the Autocrat said, “back, once again, to the question of alternatives. Is there anything we can do?”

“How about wrecking the wormhole?” Sondra Berghoff asked. “We could blow up the Ring around the black hole so it couldn’t be used to tune and amplify the wormhole signal.”

Gerald MacDougal shook his head. “If that would do any good,” he said, “then the Charonians would have done it long ago.”

“The Ring’s dormant anyway,” Sianna said. “We can detect a few trace signals to show it could be activated, but it didn’t power up at all when the SCOREs or our ships came through. The other side provided all the power and control.” Something in her own words teased at the idea in the back of her head. Dormant. Not dead. Dormant .

“And presumably the Adversary would do the honors for its own transit,” Captain Steiger said. “Besides, I don’t know that we could rig up powerful enough bombs to be sure of destroying the ring—and the SCOREs on guard duty around the wormhole aperture would take out our missiles anyway.”

“How about some sort of particle beam at the Adversary?” MacDougal suggested. “Something with enough directed energy to do some damage. Maybe induce the strange matter to reform into normal matter.”

“Sure, no problem, if we had a twenty-year research schedule and an unlimited budget and a hell of a lot of luck,” Steiger replied. “Besides, none of us are particle physicists. Where would we even begin?”

“Could we be diverting?” Eyeball asked.

The Autocrat frowned and turned to look at her. “I beg your pardon?”

“Divert it. Shunt the Adversary some other way ’sides through the wormhole?”

Yes. Yes. That was it. Or at least it was close . Sianna looked from one face to the next. One more hint, one more notion from the outside, and she would have it. She knew she would.

“How?” the Autocrat asked.

Sianna looked hard at Eyeball, willing her to give an answer that would set free the idea Sianna was trying to have.

Eyeball shrugged. “Dunno.”

Oh, hell. No joy there. All illusion anyway. There was no idea— just the wish for one, so strong it made her think she was really close to something.

“Could we divert to the Solar System?” the Autocrat asked. “Find some way to retune the wormhole so the Adversary came out there instead of the Multisystem?”

There was a moment’s shocked silence, no one quite sure what to say. But then Eyeballer Maximus Lock-on found words. “You cold fish or loonie? Set that thing loose in Solar Area ? How many it kill there?”

“I see no reason for it to kill anyone at all in the Solar System,” the Autocrat said, rather primly. The Purps obviously irritated him deeply. For some reason, their determination to call it the Solar Area seemed to be the thing that grated most on him. “It is in search of the sort of energy source the Charonians’ Spheres contain. There is no such there.”