Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

But in ships two klicks across? No one built them that large. The whole idea was absurd.

But then, so was the idea of asteroid-sized bodies materializing out of the empty spot in space where Earth had so recently been.

Lucian stared at his screens, praying for understanding. It didn’t come.

The Caller saw the intruder diving toward its Anchor. This was by no means a surprising development. Of course the Anchor’s massive gravity well would attract debris. The Caller immediately sent a message through the Link, requesting a temporary halt to operations. Nothing material could ever damage the Anchor itself, of course, but a disintegrating asteroid could certainly damage the new arrivals as they streaked through the worm-hole. It did not matter. Now the Caller had the Anchor as a power source. Now it had all the time and power it could ever need—and this asteroid would be out of the way in a few minutes.

Lucian, still staring at the mysterious blue flashes, was startled to see them stop coming, and startled again to see an asteroid-sized fragment moving in toward Earth’s previous position. The new radar track had an ID tag on. This one, the computer could identify. Lucifer. Sweet Lord, Lucifer .

Lucian jumped up, unplugged his headset, and hurried over to Vespasian‘ console. “Vespy, are you watching the Lucifer track?” he asked.

“I’m on it, Luce.”

Tyrone Vespasian glanced away from his console and rubbed his jaw nervously. Lucian stood behind him, watching in silence as the radar tracked the wreckage of Lucifer tumbling through space, pitching and wheeling wildly. The huge worldlet was tumbling, out of control. What was happening? Earth wasn’t there. But Lucifer was falling toward something . And falling fast. Vespasian checked the real-time track.

Hell’s bells . It was moving toward that gravity source at ten klicks a second, and accelerating. He asked the computer for an impact projection. Twenty minutes. That was too fast a fall. Tyrone Vespasian had been running orbital traffic systems for a long time. He knew the space around Earth and the Moon intimately, almost by feel. He knew, instinctively, what sort of forces Earth and the Moon would impose on a body in a given position. And Lucifer’s acceleration was wrong, just a shade high.

With Lucifer’s acceleration toward this gravity known, it was dead-simple to measure the mass of the gravity source—or, at least, the total mass of the gravity source plus Lucifer, and subtract Lucifer’s listed mass. Probably it had lost some fragments after Dublin, but the result would be close enough.

Result of calculation: 1.053 Earth masses. It couldn’t be Earth. Not unless the planet had gained a few gigatons in the last few hours. Besides, this gee source was invisible .

Holy Christ . Invisible gravity source. Vespasian suddenly realized what was out there. But he couldn’t believe it. He wouldn’t believe it.

He checked the impact projection clock. He wouldn’t have to believe it for another eighteen minutes. He powered up the maximum-gain telescopic camera and trained it on the dot of light that was Lucifer. The camera zoomed in, the electronic amplifiers came on, and the typical rough potato-shape of an asteroid was tumbling in the center of the screen, tracking and velocity information appearing in a data window in the lower-right corner of the screen. Vespasian watched the fall of Lucifer, willing himself not to believe the evidence of his own eyes.

The ravaged asteroid started to die. The spin stresses were sheering off massive boulders and environment huts from the main body of the asteroid. The main mass of the asteroid was soon surrounded by a thin, rapidly dispersing cloud of fragments large and small, falling, diving into the piece of space where Earth should have been.

Down, down, closer and closer, moving not in a straight line toward Earth’s old position, but in a tight parabola that spiraled in, moving faster every moment.

At about the point where Earth’s surface should have been, tidal stresses began to make themselves felt, even over the relatively short distances involved. The gravity gradient started shredding larger chunks off the asteroid. Lucifer’s tumble got faster, adding to the stresses tearing it apart. Impacts between fragments came faster and faster, each smashing more fragments free. Lucifer disintegrated altogether, with no one piece of rock any longer distinguishable as the parent body.

The cloud of debris that had once been Lucifer spiraled down into the gravity well, falling deeper and deeper, whirling in a tighter and tighter spiral, faster and faster, approaching significant fractions of lightspeed. Bright flashes erupted in the depths of the gravity well as massive fragments smashed into each other at utterly incredible speeds.

The flashes and sparks rose to a crescendo, leapt up to a whole new level of violence. Bursts of radiation flared out across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Gamma rays, X rays, ultraviolet, visible, infrared and radio blazed out from the gravity source. Then, just as suddenly as it had peaked, the violence ebbed away. A flash, a flicker, and then one last ember red flare that snuffed itself out with the suddenness of a candle flame caught by the wind.

And then there was nothing. Nothing at all.

“Radar, give me a scan of Earth-space,” Vespasian said.

“Running now,” Janie’s voice replied. “No return. I say again, no return signal of any kind.”

Lucian leaned in closer to the screen. “Jesus, Vespy, how could that be ? What the hell happened to the asteroid? Shouldn’t there at least be debris?”

“It’s gone,” Vespasian said. “Think about it. Think about your college astronomy courses. What sort of gravity source can suck up an entire asteroid and leave nothing behind? No debris, no signal, no radiation, nothing. Lucifer just got sucked down into a black hole.” And now Vespasian knew how Earth could have gained five percent more mass. He had just seen a demonstration. Wherever Earth had gone for those few hours, it had been crushed down to nothing just as Lucifer had been crushed. Maybe Earth had got caught by a black hole with five percent of Earth’s mass. Either way, it didn’t matter. There was no more doubt, at least in his mind. He knew what had happened to Earth. Not how, or where, or why, but what. “A black hole with the mass of planet Earth,” he whispered. “A black hole that used to be Earth.”

The meeting was not going well, Sondra decided. Larry was stubbornly refusing to believe that Earth was destroyed, Webling seemed incapable of anything but shooting down theories—having none of her own to offer—and Sondra found herself helplessly spouting out one damn-fool idea after another. If we three are the big gravity experts who are going to save humanity, we are in big trouble , Sondra thought.

Larry was still in a sulk, and Webling was just on the point of spinning out another objection when suddenly the door burst open. Dr. Raphael rushed into the room, carrying a datablock and a thick sheaf of printout. “The communications duty officer woke me,” he said without preamble. “This just arrived from the VISOR station at Venus,” he said, his voice breathless and weak. “The comm officer woke me to give it to me, and she was right to do so.”

Sondra was surprised. Raphael didn’t like anything disturbing his sleep. She looked at Raphael’s death-white face. Something had scared him, scared him bad. But what the hell could scare anyone more than Earth disappearing?