Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

Bernhardt grinned and looked up at Gerald, then back to Dianne. “I like this. I always appreciate a little ambiguity in circumstances. I find it brings out the best in people. As I’m sure it will in Gerald here. I’ve just decided to make him second-in-command as well as chief scientist.”

Gerald blinked and stood up straight. “What?”

“It only makes sense,” Wolf said smoothly. “After all, the main concern of this mission will be the research of extraterrestrial life, specifically the creatures that have done this to Earth. And you are an exobiologist. You have thought on all these matters. Besides, as we’ve just seen, the two of you clearly think alike.”

“But I know nothing of ship handling, or navigation, or anything related to running a spacecraft. If anything happened to Dianne—”

“Then I suggest you see to it that nothing does happen to Dianne until you have learned all those things. We have no time for all the precautions we should take. We need data now . And what Dianne Steiger will need from you is advice.”

Wolf turned his attention back to Dianne. “Very well, Captain Steiger. I hereby draft you into the service of the Directorate of Spatial Investigation and appoint you master of the starship Terra Nova , with orders to proceed directly for the Dyson Sphere. Have a pleasant trip. Our lawyers will have a nice fight when you get back.”

He leaned back over his desk, checked off one more item on his list of things to do, and got on with his work, leaving Dianne and Gerald to find their own way out.

NaPurHab, the Naked Purple Habitat, was the scene of bedlam, but that was nothing new. It was routine bedlam, the usual chaos. Ohio Template Windbag had an idea that many among the brothersandsisters (“blisters,” in the latest approved parlance, though many were holding out for “sisthers,” or perhaps “sibsters,” instead) didn’t even know something farout had happened.

Ohio sat in the graffiti-splattered comm and control room, behind Chelated Noisemaker Extreme. Ohio’s eyes were fixed on the main monitor. He stared at the image of the Big Ring, hands wrapped around the wide girth of his belly.

Even before the Earth had done its little dance, taking NaPurHab with it, NaPurHab had ridden a rather eccentric orbit, figure-eighting between Earth and Moon, swinging close over each world before flying out to the other. It wasn’t all that stable an orbit for a habitat, and NaPurHab had always needed a lot of course corrections. It had been about the only orbit slot in the Earth-Moon system open to a habitat when the old owners of the hab had built the thing, long before the Purples took it over.

NaPurHab had been close to Earth, just about to swing around the planet and head back toward the Moon, when the Big Jump had gone down. The first pass over the Big Ring hadn’t been that bad. Scary and low, and that was one weird thing to fly over, but the run was double-you slash oh incident. Still, it had been nice to get away from the alien Big Ring, and swing back toward the familiar— if sinfully life-corrupted—face of Earth.

But all good things come to an end, and the pass over Earth was done with now. NaPurHab was headed back out to where the Moon oughta be, out toward the Big Ring. And therein was the flaw. NaPurHab’s orbit had gotten a bit more jostled than anyone had thought. On this second pass, NaPurHab was going to go inside the Big Ring.

Worse, NaPurHab would strike the Earth on the return trip, just north of Johannesburg. Not good. And Earth wasn’t in much position to help there. The Mom planet had her own probs at the moment, to put it mildly—and NaPurHab had never done much to make itself popular to groundhogs. After all, the whole Earthside crazies movement had sprouted from NaPurHab, and the whole farging point of the crazies was to cheese off the normals.

No, never mind help what couldn’t come in time no-how: privately, at least, Ohio couldn’t blame the Earthsquares for nuking NaPurHab if it came to that. NaPurHab would be a goner anyway. Why flatten a chunk of southern Africa too? Given a choice between Jo-Berg and NaPurHab, the answer came back as about twenty kilotons rocketed into the collective Purple keister. Of course, in his public capacity of Maximum Windbag, Ohio would have to come down hard on Earth for the dastardly deed. Better do it beforehand, tho, cause there weren’t gonna be a chance on the flipside. Best to hope that Chelated could pull this one out.

“So, Chelated, talk to me,” Ohio said. “We got the gas in tank for the gig?” They could have had their talk in straight English, but the former Frank Barlow needed the practice in Purpspeak. It was a key precept of the Purple philosophy that Humpty Dumpty was right: the speaker, and not the words spoken, should be the master. But even for a temporary contract employee, the man’s grasp of the lingo was pretty bad. Too logical a mind, or something.

Ohio could see the man moving his lips, parsing out his response to himself before answering. “Not even close, Bossmeister. Nothing like the fuel to be cool and raise the Earthside half of the ride.” Not bad, Ohio thought. For Purpspeak, that was fair, if a little too readily understandable.

“Then we dead, Ned?” Ohio asked.

Chelated had to think again. “Be steady, Teddy. We got one other set of dice to roll. We got the gas, barely, to lay down an orbit inside the Big Ring.”

“ Inside ? We dunno even what the hell izzat the center of the Ring.”

“Hell, bossman, something at the center has mass, fershure. Even if we can’t see it. Uhh… we got those unwhiteblue flashes coming from it every hundred twenty-eight seconds. And they’s some kinda big herd o‘ unheard of thangs, big dude thangs, nearly the size of the habitat, in damn close close orbit of the blueflasher at the center. They moving plenty damnscary quick. And after every blueflash, they’s one less big dude around the blueflasher.”

“Say what? Oh, the hell with it, Frank, switch to English. You’re giving me a headache.”

Chelated/Frank breathed a sigh of relief. “Thanks, Walter. I’ve got one already. What I was trying to say was that there is definitely something at the center.”

“Just how big a mass?”

“Well, I derived that from our own motion. The blueflasher weighs just about as much as the Moon. Pretty wild for something so small we can’t even see it through the big telescopes.”

“And the ‘big dude thangs’? What does that translate to?”

Frank shrugged. “Actually, that’s as good a name as any. Large objects, roughly the size of this habitat, several hundred of them, moving very fast in very close orbit around the blueflasher at the center. Beats the hell out of me what they are. But after every flash, the tracking computer says there’s one less of them. Like the large objects are going into the blueflasher. Or through it.”

Ohio/Walter sighed and wished for the old days, back when he was teaching high school in Columbus, and not trying to keep ten thousand yahoos alive inside a tin can in space. Things were bad when setting up a close orbit around a wormhole was the solution to a problem. Better to pretend it wasn’t true. Lying to himself beat going crazy. “Frank, I’m a reasonable man, so I know you’re not trying to tell me what you seem to be trying to tell me. I refuse to believe in wormholes. But circularize us around the centerpoint anyway. If you think that’s our best shot.”

“With the fuel we’ve got, it’s our only shot,” Frank said, a bit worriedly. “I don’t see any other way of getting into a safe orbit.”