Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

To hell with being a guide , he thought, glad that he had the day job to fall back on. He upped his pace to a dogtrot. He had to get to Traffic Control.

From the Aldrin Inn, Orbital Traffic Control should have been an easy five-minute walk. But the quake had turned everything upside down: even at a brisk jog, it took Lucian nearly half an hour to thread his way through the jammed intersections, powered-down slideways, and accessways cut by sealed airlocks.

Jesus Christ, Earth . Lucian stopped in his tracks and stared at nothing. Earth . He had managed to forget about the planet for a moment in the panic of the quake. Down here, they won’t know. Even if they did happen to see it through a monitor, they won’t believe it. Nobody knows. No one at Traffic Control will understand what’s happening .

Orbital Traffic Control was a madhouse. He could see that much through the smoked-glass windows that divided the control center proper from the administrative area. Too many people were standing, waving their arms, arguing silently into their headsets behind the soundproof glass. Too many consoles were on, too many lights glowed flame red instead of green.

Lucian flashed his ID at the control center entrance. By the time the sentry system cleared him through to the interior, Vespasian had spotted him and was on the way over, waving for Lucian’s attention. Lucian ignored him, grabbed a headset out of the rack and looked for an empty console. There, in the corner. There were things he had to check.

But Vespasian cornered him before he got halfway across the room. “Goddammit to hell, Lucian,” he began without preamble. “We’re in a helluva spot. All our navigation systems crashed all at once, right after the quake. Primary, backup, tertiary. All of them. Every damn ship is off course out there—the ones that haven’t vanished off the radar altogether. None of our course corrections work. We can’t figure out what—”

“The system’s working, Vespy,” Lucian cut in. “It’s just trying to compute for a gravity well that isn’t there anymore. Earth’s gone.”

Tyrone Vespasian was a short, heavy man of uncertain Mitteleuropean origins and very certain opinions. “What the hell are you talking about?” he snapped. “That’s ridiculous!”

“I mean the damned planet’s not there anymore!” Lucian walked over to the console with Vespasian right behind him. He ignored the older man, sat down at the console and powered it up. He found himself staring straight ahead, concentrating hard on the job at hand, excluding everything from his thoughts except the need to get this console on line.

“Earth can’t just vanish,” Vespasian objected. “I mean, jeez, sometimes I wish the damn groundhogs would go away, but—”

Lucian jumped back up out of his chair, grabbed his boss around the shoulders, and stared straight into his face through eyes half-mad with fear. “Earth is gone, dammit. I saw it happen with my own two eyes . I was on the surface, in the ob-dome, looking at it when it vanished. That’s what set off the quake. The tidal stresses vanished and the whole surface spasmed. There’ll probably be major aftershocks.”

Vespasian looked at him and swallowed hard. His face was sweating, and Lucian could see the light of fear in his eyes as well. “Planets just don’t vanish, Lucian,” he said in some sort of attempt at normal tones.

“This one did!” Lucian shouted. He gripped the older man’s shoulders harder, and then relaxed his grip, slumped down into his seat. He shut his eyes and forced himself to calm down. A planet. Yes, a planet. And everything on it. Eight billion people. All the oceans, all the ice caps and forests and animals, all the volcanoes and weather and deserts and trees. The molten core, the bottom of the ocean, the prairies and mountains. All of it gone .

No. No . He forced the thoughts, the fear, the panic from his thoughts. Don’t think about the Earth. Think about what we must do to save ourselves .

He opened his eyes and punched up the exterior surface camera that was permanently aimed at Earth.

“Look,” he said, not expecting to be believed. “That’s the camera locked down and targeted at Earth. Nothing there but stars.”

“So the camera was jostled in the quake,” Vespasian said in calming tone. “Dreyfuss, listen, I can use everybody I can get hold of right now, and I know maybe you’ve just been through a quake on the surface, but I don’t have time for this kind of—”

“Look at the background stars!” Lucian snapped. “That’s Gemini. Earth’s supposed to be in Gemini right now. Check with Celestial if you don’t remember.” Vespasian frowned and looked again at the camera. Lucian ignored him and punched up the playback on the camera. “Here we go. This is a replay off that camera for the last hour, in fast forward.”

Earth, or at least the recorded image of Earth, popped back into existence on the monitor screen. Clouds chased themselves across the surface, the terminator advanced over the globe as the playback rushed forward at high speed—and then, in a flash of blue-white, the planet wasn’t there anymore.

“Holy mother of God,” Vespasian said. “That can’t have happened. It’s got to be a camera malfunction.”

“Dammit, Tyrone, I saw it with my own eyes, and so did twenty-eight other people with me.”

“It’s nuts. It’s nuts. Optical illusion then.”

“Prove it. I’d love to be wrong,” Lucian said.

“I’ll do that,” Vespasian said. “Key this console to main ranging-radar output.” He punched a button on the intercom panel clipped to his belt loop. “Ranging radar, this is Vespasian,” he said into his headset. “Janie, scram your other operations for a moment and fire a high-power ranging pulse at Earth. Yes, now . I don’t care what the fuck else you got on your hands, you do it now .” Lucian switched in the radar operator’s audio and display screen.

“—kay, for Christ sake, here’s your damn pulse, Vespasian,” the operator’s voice announced angrily. The screen, cluttered with displays of dozens of craft in orbit, cleared as the radar op wiped her screen. A message flashed on the screen: ranging pulse fired. The display grid itself was blank.

And it stayed that way. After ten seconds, a new message flashed on the screen, no return, recycling. “Jesus Christ, what the hell kind of malfunction have we got here?” the radar operator asked. “We should have gotten a return in two-point-six seconds.” Now the radar operator’s voice was fearful.

“We don’t know, Janie,” Vespasian said in a hoarse voice. “Lucian here says Earth ain’t there no more. Do me a favor, recheck your gear and prove he’s crazy.”

He shut off the link and punched up another channel. “Comm, this is Vespasian. What’s your status on Earth comm channels?”

“Dead, every single one of them,” another disembodied voice announced from the speaker. “Must have been the quake. We’re running diagnostics now.”

Vespasian shoved Lucian out of the console chair and punched up an exterior optical circuit. The camera’s image of the surface popped up on one side of the screen while Vespasian did a celestial almanac lookup on the other side. He queried Earth’s current sky position as per the computer’s memory and fed it to the camera. The camera tracked smoothly, the current and ordered coordinates showing in a data line across the bottom of the screen. When the two matched, the field of view stopped moving—and displayed the same empty starfield Lucian had punched up three minutes before, as seen from another surface camera.