Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

Sondra walked back across the room and sat down next to the older woman. “The problem, Dr. Webling, is that we’re stuck with a real-life question that’s even more ridiculous—how do you make a planet disappear? Answer me that and I won’t bother you anymore.”

The Observer felt good.

After all the endless years of waiting, it was doing what it had been created to do. Indeed, now it was entitled to a grander name than Observer. Now the work had begun, and it was a true Caller .

Caller.

The new name felt good, too.

A rush of pride swept through its massive form. But proud moment or not, the effort of Calling, and Linking, was not without danger, not without strain. Though the new-named Caller was drawing massive amounts of power through the Link, the mere act of establishing that Link had drawn down its own energy reserves. The power required to create the necessary massless gravity source had left it with just a few percent of its rated power remaining. Furthermore, the quakes were desperately uncomfortable, even painful. They could be stopped only if the old gravitational balance was restored. Massless gravity fields were inherently unstable. The Caller needed an anchor, a true gravity source to stabilize the Link at this end.

Help should come , must come through the Link. There ought to be a reasonable number of its relations surviving in the outskirts of this system, and they would assist as much as they could, but the Caller knew that the chances of success were far greater if help — and reinforcements — came through the Link .

First and foremost, it needed a true gravity source whose power it could tap. If that did not come, all was a failure. It would have surrendered its life planet for all time, and to no avail. Failure now would condemn the Caller to a slow, mournful death, trapped and powerless, watching its power reserves trickle away to nothing.

Help must come, the Caller told itself .

And then it did.

Vespasian nearly leapt out of his skin, then reached over and shut off the alarm. Jesus Christ, not another one.

Considering the crowded conditions of near-Earth space, there had not been all that many collisions so far. But each collision was a catastrophe.

Who the hell was going to hit now ? The data snapped onto his screen. Oh, no. God no. Not again.

Lucifer. The formerly Earth-orbiting asteroid Lucifer was going to pile it in again. Lucifer had smashed into the High Dublin Habitat a few hours before. There had to be thousands dead there, and not a prayer of survivors. On any other day, it would have been the most horrifying of disasters. On the day when Earth died, it was merely a sideshow. The debris of station and asteroid were spiraling through space, causing dozens of secondary impacts.

Even after the Dublin crash, Lucifer remained the most serious threat to the Moon and the orbiting habitats. Tamed by its human masters and towed into a stable path around the Earth over a century before, now it was free again, careering through space in a random orbit, threatening other habitats. So what was Lucifer going to clobber now?

The computer drew the schematic for him, and the color drained from Vespasian’s face as if he had seen a ghost.

And in a way, he had. The computers were projecting Lucifer to impact with Earth . The blue-and-white graphic image of the lost planet gleamed in the flatscreen, Lucifer’s impact trajectory shown as spiraling in. No one had had time to reprogram this particular impact warning system to tell it that Earth was gone. The computer was warning that Lucifer would strike Earth—if Earth were still there.

If only it could be so , Vespasian thought. He’d settle for an asteroid strike on Earth if it meant getting the planet back again. He reached up a finger to dump the warning and then stopped.

Vespasian frowned. This particular impact-warning program was a trend-projection system for constant-boost systems. It assumed that all accelerations would continue, and projected forward in time under that assumption. This program did not assume Earth’s gravity, or any other gravity field, as a constant. It merely watched radar tracks, calculated the forces preventing the track from moving on a straight line, and assumed those forces would continue.

So why hadn’t it called this impact a long time ago? It should have been able to call it long before now, if Lucifer’s orbit had remained unchanged.

Vespasian had checked Lucifer’s track an hour ago. Granted, they didn’t have a precise path for the rock yet, but it hadn’t been moving anywhere near Earth’s old location at that time. Now what the hell was happening? He called up a backtrack on Lucifer, running its recent actual trajectory from the tracking system.

Sonnuvabitch. The thing had taken a hard left turn, toward Earth’s old coordinates. But that was impossible. He checked the trajectory more carefully, examining not only direction of travel, but velocity.

The frigging thing was accelerating rapidly toward where Earth should have been. No, accelerating wasn’t quite right. That was active, and this was passive. No rockets on that rock. It was being accelerated by an outside force. It was acting like a falling body, moving toward a gravity source that was pulling it in.

Vespasian punched up the Earth-track camera, and had his wild hopes dashed. Earth was not there.

Vespasian leaned back, tried to think.

And got slammed out of his chair as the Moon’s surface shuddered with new violence.

The second series of quakes was every bit as powerful as the first, and did every bit as much damage. It seemed as if every structure weakened in the first jolt collapsed altogether in the second. New explosions of shattered glass, new fires were everywhere. Somehow, all the SubBubbles rode out the second-wave shocks without breaching. Most people knew enough to expect aftershocks, and so the later temblors at least lost the element of surprise.

Besides, the Lunar population was preoccupied with the far more terrifying loss of Earth. By now, hours after the event, the truth was starting to filter through and be believed. With the homeworld gone, they had little capacity for being frightened by a mere tremor.

The second set of quakes could not have been timed more precisely to foul up Lucian’s work. He had just begun to get a handle on the orbital tracking problem when Orbital Traffic Control lost power. The emergency battery power system was supposed to be able to run the whole traffic control complex during an outage. But it had been strained by the first quakes’ outages already, and was showing signs of decay. The power-management program cut in immediately and went into conservation mode, cutting off all nonessential uses of electricity.

Unfortunately, hypothetical modeling of speculative orbital projections went under the heading of nonessential use as far as the automatic power-management software was concerned. Lucian’s panel went dead and stayed dead. He couldn’t even program an override of the power-management system until his board came on.

All across cis-Lunar space, spacecraft and stationary facilities alike were out of control, tumbling through space in unpredictable directions.

Through all the long years and centuries since the first manned stations were put up, whenever a new facility was placed in an orbit of the crowded Earth-Moon system, computers and engineers would labor long and hard to place it in a safe path, to keep it away from all the thousands of other orbiting craft and stations.