Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

But no, the quiet was not that absolute. With every pulse from nothingness to sky, with every pulse back again to the solidity of the tangible Universe, she thought she heard and felt a low rippling boom shudder through the ship, almost too low to hear.

That gave her hope that she had gone mad. For there could be no sound in space. Could there? But was she in any normal version of space?

She realized belatedly that every alarm on the Pack Rat’s control board was lit up and screaming. Dianne dared not move her hands from the control yoke long enough to shut them off. Outside the viewport was an insane pinwheel of white, red and blue-white stars. No, not stars: suns , close enough for their disks to be visible, close enough to be blindingly bright. She checked the rear monitor to see Earth in strange colors, lit by the light of stars it had never been meant to see.

Acting more by instinct than logic, Dianne fired the Pack Rat’s nose jets to back away from the churning madness of the sky, a few hundred meters back toward the imagined safety of Earth.

Damn it! There was something seriously wrong with the nose jets. They seemed to have been badly damaged in the first jolt, and tended to tumble her toward portside. Dianne held on and leaned into the port jets, and managed to back off in a more or less straight line. Her nose yawed over a bit, but this time she let the Rat have its head, let her tumble a bit. She might need her reaction gas later. The wall of white appeared again. With the Pack Rat’s nose looking to one side when it appeared, this time she saw the edge of the nothingness, a knife-sharp boundary between the nothing and normal space. It suddenly struck her that perhaps the nothingness was stationary, and it was she herself that was moving, falling into a series of holes in space that opened before her.

Herself, and NaPurHab, and the Earth , falling into the holes. HolyJesusChrist. The Earth .

A new hole yawned wide. New stars snapped back into being on the other side. And then another hole appeared before them. On the other side of this one, Earth, the hab and the Pack Rat hovered under an impossible hell-red plane, a throbbing scarlet landscape stretching overhead to infinity in all directions. Regular markings that resembled lines of latitude and longitude scored the surface. Dianne could feel the star heat burning on her face. But this could be no star. Its surface was not gaseous and moving, but distinct, solid, concrete.

But then a new hole opened and that vision vanished as well.

Dianne held the control yoke in a death grip and prayed that she was going insane. Her own personal madness was far preferable to a universe that could indulge in such lunacy.

The sky was falling. Gerald MacDougal lay faceup on the ground, his hands clawed into the earth, hanging on for dear life, watching it coming down.

The sky was blue, noonday bright, in the middle of the night. And not true daylight, but a deep blue skycolor he had never seen before. How could that possibly be?

A disk of white/not-white appeared in the sky and swelled outward over the clean blue Vancouver sky, stretching out in all directions until all the world was blotted out. Bigger and closer it came, sweeping all before it, coming closer, closer—and then it passed through him, leaving darkness where daylight had been. Stars that were strangers to Earth shone down in a night that should not have been, casting a cold light that sent a shiver through Gerald’s heart.

The ground trembled again. Earthquake . Gerald shut his eyes and prayed. He had spent some time in Mexico and had developed a good set of earthquake reflexes there. It had been the first ground tremor, rather than the strange shifts in light, that had awakened him and sent him outside in the first place.

Again the sky fell, the cloud of nothing swelling out, sweeping down. The hole in the sky swallowed Gerald, swallowed the land he was on, and left behind still another skyworld. From horizon to horizon, it turned to fire, a hell-red glow, brightest in the north. The lush and lovely greensward of Vancouver looked as if it had been dipped in blood.

In that moment Gerald knew that this was Judgment Day. God, in His Infinite Wisdom, had decreed the long-awaited End of Days foretold for thousands of years. Here was the Rapture, the Shout, the Trump of Doom. He closed his eyes again and prayed, prayed hard . For who could be sure of Salvation? He thought of his wife, Marcia, far away on that station orbiting Venus, and a small part of him smiled. In Heaven, families long divided would be reunited. He prayed for her, too, and found some comfort there. An unbeliever, but a good woman, a kind and loving woman who followed her heart and used her God-given talents. How could a just Lord deny her Paradise?

If any of them survived this Judgment. Fear rattled his faith.

By a sheer act of will, he forced his eyelids open. Still praying, still praising the Lord with all his heart, he watched. He was determined to witness the End of all things. Few indeed would be privileged to see such a sight. He was to be a Witness of Doom. He did not wish to annoy the Lord by refusing to see the sight set before him.

But, all things being equal, to witness such events was an honor he would gladly forgo.

Wolf Bernhardt, astronomer, sat inside on the floor in the dark, with no thought for the sky. He picked himself up off the floor, moving carefully in the sudden darkness. The lights had gone out right in the middle of the first quake. He knew, already, that the quake and the gravity wave could not be a coincidence. He had no proof, no evidence whatsoever—but he knew . Somehow, the gravity beam had disturbed the San Andreas Fault—and the San Andreas practically ran through the parking lot of JPL. No wonder the temblor had been so violent.

But how could the microscopic power of a gravity wave jolt something as massive as a planetary fault system? It didn’t make sense. But the seismologists hadn’t predicted a quake, either. The Californians at JPL were forever boasting to visiting scientists that the seismo-predictions hadn’t been wrong once in the last fifty years.

Until today.

But how could a gravity beam do this? There had to be more to it. The gravities people out on Pluto had discovered something far greater than they had imagined.

The lights came back on, and Wolf got back into his chair. The autocamera came back to life and swiveled back to focus in on him. “Hello again to you on Pluto,” he said. “You may have set something off down here. There was a quake here in California, though we can’t know what caused it.”

More of the reserve power system was coming back on-line. He looked up at the communications status board and noticed that the comm line from Pluto had dropped out. Damn it ! All the comm lines had dropped, and all the backups. “Pluto, it looks as though we have lost incoming contact with you. I will keep transmitting in the hope that you can receive me.” He glanced at another set of meters, displaying the readouts from the gravity-wave sensors.

And then he stared at the readouts. Impossible. Flat-out impossible. The Ring of Charon was supposed to be sending a steady pulsing signal from a single direction. The meters were showing a chaos of gravity signals of all strengths coming from all directions. Then, even as he watched, all of the readouts went dead at once. A warning bar appeared across the screen:

A strange little thud quivered past his feet, shaking the whole building. An aftershock? It didn’t quite feel like one. Too sharp, too abrupt and focused. It seemed to come from the direction of the gravity sensor lab, in a building a few hundred meters away. A new warning bar appeared: