Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

And it was going to be needed soon.

Larry drummed his fingers nervously on the console. “Simon, there are things that I’m not sure of. I think that I’ve got the Charonian command-image system down. The Gravities Station’s engineers agree, and the Simulations work, and the data we’re pulling in now from the Keeper tap seem to confirm it. But there’s no time for more research. We won’t know if we’ve got it right until we start sending commands—and by then it will be too late to find out if things are going wrong.”

“All right,” Simon said. “Walk through it with me one more time. Assuming everything works, what are you going to do?”

“Well, the best we can hope for is to send false commands to the Lunar Wheel at a higher signal power than the real commands. Because we’re putting all our gravitic potential into signaling, and none into power relay, we ought to be able to shout at the Lunar Wheel louder than the Dyson Sphere—or louder than whatever auxiliary the Sphere is using to control the Wheel. Probably the Moonpoint Ring, but we don’t know.

“Then we can order the Lunar Wheel to relay our commands to its underlings. Marcia MacDougal recorded a large number of start-work commands sent by the Lunar Wheel to the Landers, and a few that seem to be stop commands. We send shutdown command sequences that ought to work. They should cause all the Landers to stop what they are doing and stand down. That should buy us enough time to learn the command language, and do more refined control—while holding the link to Earth open. If we get good enough with the command system, maybe we could bring Earth back .”

“It all sounds very promising. Suppose your commands don’t work?”

Larry folded his hands in his lap and looked down. “I have a contingency plan. But not one I want to use. It has to be decided ahead of time.”

“ What has to be decided?” Simon asked, as gently as he could.

Larry seemed unwilling to answer that directly. “Well, if nothing else works, Marcia found what seems to be an abort order. The Charonians were smart enough to put an off switch in every machine. It seems to be an order that can be used on any malfunctioning Charonian device or creature, in the event that it goes out of control, threatening others. She spotted it being sent to the Landers that went out of control and crashed. I can use that command—as a last-ditch effort—to tell the Lunar Wheel and the Moonpoint Ring and all the Landers to die. It’s a very simple command. There’s no question that we have it right. If we sent it in a general broadcast through the wormhole link, and direct from here it would give us permanent, complete, final shutdown. I have no doubt about that. But of course, there would be other consequences as well,” he said.

“ Consequences ?” Simon Raphael asked. “It would be a full-blown disaster! Without the Wheel, we’ll have lost our link to Earth! You yourself pointed out what a disaster that would be when Vespasian suggested killing the Wheel. Earth will still be in danger, exposed to a future breeding binge.”

“We’ve sent Earth our warnings,” Larry said. “Unless a miracle happens and we can bring the planet back here, I don’t really think there’s much more beyond that we can do, or will be able to do. Whether or not we are in contact, Earth will have to stop the breeding binge on its own.”

“But you yourself said the Dyson Sphere had to have a backup linkage system,” Simon said.

“If it does I bet the other end is maintained by the Moonpoint Ring in the Multisystem,” Larry said. “And the Moonpoint Ring will get the order to die at the same time the Lunar Wheel does. With both ends of the link destroyed, the wormhole will collapse. I don’t know if even the Dyson Sphere could find us again.”

“How can you even imagine doing such—” Simon Raphael was about to protest, when his eyes fell upon the clock. With every change of the numbers, the Solar System was suffering more and deeper wounds. Three more of the core-matter volcanoes on Venus, and six on Mercury. Port Viking’s dome coming apart at the seams, its air rushing out into the Martian night. Daltry’s law , he thought. There is always a worse catastrophe . “Forgive me. If it does come to that, perhaps we will find out how we can do such a thing. We’ve done all we can afford to do in order to prepare for this. There is no time. Begin it. And good luck.”

Larry took a deep breath, turned back to the controls and adjusted the release on the gravitic quanta containment. The Ring took on new power. Up until now the Plutopoint end of the wormhole had been at the lowest possible energy, a mere pinprick in the side of the main sky tunnel.

Now Larry amplified the power going into the Pluto aperture, in effect grabbing at space, grabbing at the pinprick and pulling it wider, until the pinprick was a gaping hole in space.

Simon Raphael watched the main display screen, with half an eye on the countdown clock. The Earthpoint-Moonpoint aperture was to reopen in another five seconds. Four, three, two, one—where there had been a tiny flicker of blue, suddenly there was a blazing flash of color—and a massive object was hurtling through space. Simon caught a glimpse of a gleaming, cigar-shaped object before it flashed out of camera angle.

“Good God. We caught a Lander!” Simon said. Suddenly, for the first time, the mad idea of building a worm-hole was real, was concrete to him. A Lander , an asteroid-sized half-living spaceship, had popped out of nowhere right in front of them.

“That poor dumb Lander had to have been targeted and programmed for one of the inner planets. Now what the hell is it going to do?” Larry asked gleefully. “Good start, and if we didn’t know before, we know now,” Larry said. “Our aperture is stronger than the Earthpoint aperture. The theory worked—the wormhole is drawn toward the most powerful gravity signal. Now we’re in the driver’s seat,” Larry said eagerly.

“But what will the Sphere do?” Raphael asked.

“Not the Sphere,” Larry said. “That’s our main hope. The Sphere would be smart enough to handle our attack. But from what I could get out of the reports from Earth, the Sphere delegates everything. My bet is the Moonpoint Ring is running autonomously by now.”

“So how will it react?”

“God only knows.” Larry was intent on his control panel. “There! There it is.” He threw an oscilloscope tracing on the main screen. “That’s the main command signal coming from the Moonpoint Ring through the wormhole. I’m going to shunt it toward us, try and pull as much of that signal in through our aperture as possible, so we can weaken the signal arriving at Earth-point.”

Malfunction! Terrible malfunction. Massive amounts of power were being drained away from the Link. The young and inexperienced Keeper Ring forced itself to think clearly. There had to be an answer, a solution stored in its heritage memory. But this circumstance was new, unique, utterly unknown in all the annals of the Sphere and its ancestors. It rushed to abort the next launch of a Worldeater through the aperture, knowing the terrible dangers of sending mass through an unstable wormhole .

But power. That was the real problem. Without sufficient power, the Caller Ring would be unable to complete its work. The Keeper Ring redoubled its efforts.

On the other end of the wormhole Link, the Caller Ring was equally mystified, equally frightened, and utterly helpless. Without power it was nothing.

“Here we go,” Larry said. “We’re sending a modulated pulsed gravity beam, at high power, in command mode, right down the wormhole. I’m ordering shutdown of all activity on Mars.” He pressed the button and wiped the sweat off his brow. “Hell! The Moonpoint Ring is increasing its command power feed to the Lunar Wheel through Earthpoint. I’ll have to shunt more power away and store it here to make sure ours is the stronger signal at the Lunar Wheel.”