Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

If there was not, the Sphere was doomed. For its first enemy would not stop at killing a single Keeper Ring .

Frank Barlow, lately known as Chelated Noisemaker Extreme, looked down at his instruments, and out the porthole at the Moonpoint singularity. Suddenly there was no activity. The whole farging thing had shut down. As best he could tell with low-power, low-sensitivity, jury-rigged sensors, there was no gravity modulation going on at all. The Ring had stopped controlling the Moonpoint black hole, and the wormhole wasn’t there anymore.

Somehow, the folks back in the Solar System had killed the Moonpoint Ring.

He sat there, staring at nothing, for a long time. Better call Ohio, even if he was busy as hell trying to save the hab, now that the COREs had probably made resupply from Earth impossible. Now NaPurHab would have to be self sufficient, or die.

He pressed down the intercom key. “Ohio, this is Frank,” he said. “Something’s happened down here.”

“What’s that?” Ohio’s voice asked.

Frank Barlow licked his lips, looked again at the dead and silent instruments, and told Ohio Template Windbag what all of Earth was about to find out.

“Well, Walter,” he said. “All of a sudden, it looks like we’re on our own.”

The command to die spread out from the Moon, coursing across the Solar System in all directions. On Venus, on Mars, on Mercury and in the Asteroid Belt, on the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn and Uranus, the Landers heard—and stopped.

The spin storms of Jupiter faded away, the core-matter volcanoes on Venus and Mercury thundered to a halt, the surface strippers that had mauled Mars so badly stopped their deadly upblasts of rock and stone. The orbiting Landers, busily preparing to process the wreckage of worlds into usable form, shut down before they had properly begun. All the half-living, half-machine Landers stuttered to a halt.

The dust clouds faded from the skies of Port Viking. The domed cities of the gas-giant satellites peeked out from the rubble that surrounded them, and discovered they were still alive. VISOR coursed over a planet no longer in torment.

But the price was high. For no one had made the slightest progress in physically locating the Multisystem.

Without the Keeper Ring and Caller Ring, Earth was lost, utterly lost amid all the myriad suns.

Sleep had come at last. Fitful, fearful, unsettled, but sleep, a long enough rest to do some good—and a chance for the nightmares to work themselves out. Sleep and then awakening. Simon and Larry sat in the wardroom, lingering over coffee, happy at least to be alive. The viewscreen was on, and the stars shone in at the breakfast table.

“Half a loaf,” Simon said. “We are alive, and Earth is alive—but we are lost to each other. I was wrong to call that a disaster, Larry. Even if we never do find each other, at least we survived, Earth and the Solar System. We’ll be all right. They’ll be all right.”

“Do you really think so?” Larry asked.

Raphael shrugged. For some reason, even after the long nightmare just past, he felt good this morning. Tomorrow or the next day would be time enough for survivor guilt. Right now, against huge odds, he, the Solar System, and the Earth had made it through the night alive. That was reason enough to celebrate. “I don’t see why not. The planet itself is intact, its climate is stable. Only human technology was damaged in the jump—and our friends were recovering from that even before we lost contact. They have blue skies, green grass, the oceans, the forests. Why wouldn’t they be all right?

“True, they don’t have spaceflight anymore, thanks to those CORE devices ready to shoot down anything that flies. But the Naked Purple Habitat’s orbiting the Moon-point singularity, and the Terra Nova is somewhere out in the Multisystem. That’s two spaceside assets. There should be a lot to learn about the Multisystem, the domain of the Sphere from deep space. They have a few cards to play.”

“I suppose. But what really scares me is that I’ve gotten the Dyson Sphere’s attention,” Larry said. “We’ve had a real blessing in disguise all this time: the Sphere, all the Charonians, were utterly unaware of human beings. But they’ll have to take notice of someone stealing a whole solar system out from under them, and killing all their operatives here. I may very well have made the Charonians into a desperate enemy.”

Simon Raphael looked startled. “I can see them as an enemy. But why do you call them desperate?”

Larry hesitated for a moment. “There’s that one image I can’t get out of my mind, that picture of the shattered sphere. I don’t think the Sphere just wanted the Solar System. I think it needed it. And still does. As a refuge, as a hiding place, or maybe as a diversion, a decoy. I don’t know. We don’t know what that picture of the shattered sphere means, but we do know that the moment the Lunar Wheel received it, every Charonian in the Solar System went into panic overdrive.

“And there’s the way all the Charonians hid themselves in the Solar System. Think about that. Somehow we all took it for granted, never really considered that they had to be hiding from somebody. The Landers, disguised as asteroids, as comets in the Oort Cloud. Think about the way the Lunar Wheel was dug into the Moon. My God, what is there out there powerful enough to smash open a Dyson Sphere, frightening enough to scare something the size of the Lunar Wheel into hiding?”

Larry shrugged. “We can give it a name, I suppose. I’ve been thinking of it as the Sphere Cracker. But what is it ? What does it want? Maybe it hunts for Dyson Spheres the way the Charonians hunt for life-bearing planets. And maybe the Earth’s Dyson Sphere is just about ready to be cracked open. What happens to Earth then? Imagine what would happen to the Multisystem if the Sphere weren’t there to keep the orbits stable.”

Larry stopped, and stared out the viewscreen. The Ring of Charon wheeled sedately through the darkness, as if nothing in the Universe had ever gone wrong, or ever could. At last he spoke again. “I don’t think Earth is going to be safe for very long at all. Not with a Dyson Sphere saving it for use as a breeding cage. Not with a Sphere Cracker out tracking down the Sphere.”

“Safe,” Simon said. “When have any of us ever been truly safe? Sometimes we’ve had the illusion of safety, but there’s always been something out there that could kill us. Name one person who’s ever lived through being alive.”

Larry smiled at the old joke, but then the sadness overtook him again, a wave of homesickness swept through him. Could it truly be that he would never see Earth, see home , again? “Will we ever find them again, Simon? We lost Earth once, and had to hunt for it through the worm-hole. Now we have to hunt for it again, but working blind. Can we find it this time, with the Lunar Wheel dead?”

Simon smiled gently, and nodded. “I think so. We know about wormholes, and Dyson Spheres, and we’ve got a Solar System full of alien technology to pick through. There must be some clue somewhere, buried in all those memory stores. And Earth will be looking for us, as well. We’ll find each other. In a week, or a lifetime, or a millennium.”

Larry smiled at last, and looked out the viewport, out past the Ring of Charon that had destroyed—and then rescued—so much. Past the invisible Plutopoint black hole imprisoned in the Ring’s centerpoint, past the wreckage of alien invaders strewn across the Solar System, past the battered planets shrouded in dust and his far-scattered friends picking their ways out of the rubble, past the ghosts of the dead lost in this fight, past the far-off gleam of the loving Sun that the Charonians had sought to entomb in a new Dyson Sphere—past all fear to the clean, clean stars.