Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

“ ‘Safe.’ You suggest putting us in orbit around the wormhole or black hole or whatever it is that I refuse to believe in—that thing that’s where the Moon should be. You suggest putting us in orbit inside the circumference of the Big Ring. And you call it ‘safe.’ ” Ohio Template Windbag shook his head sadly. “I take back everything I’ve ever said about your command of Purpspeak. Obviously you can make a word do whatever you want it to do.”

Coyote Westlake had remembered a lesson of her childhood back in Nevada: live with what you could not change. Her bizarre predicament was now routine. She was trapped without a ship or a radio aboard an asteroid that was accelerating smoothly to absurdly high velocities by means she could not understand. She had even gotten used to it all, even used to the impossibility of it all.

Up until a few days ago, space had made sense. She had known the rules. She was a rock miner. She tracked down smaller asteroids, rocks too small to interest the big-time boys. She bored through the rocks, refined whatever metals and volatiles she could find on the spot, and hauled her refined goods back to make a sale. She had some fun on Ceres or one of the big habs, and then back out again. It was a stable, understandable life.

The world surrounding her was equally understandable. The asteroids moved in predictable patterns, and she knew how to keep her ship ticking, knew she would die if she got it wrong, knew how to play a dicker with the traders. It was simple.

Back on Earth, that had never been true of her world. Hell, she had never been sure who or even what she was. Never sure if she was completely human, natural born, a woman who just got born ugly; or if she was a bioengineered “upgrade” that didn’t quite work out. Big boned, too tall, her too-white face too hard edged.

Maybe her parents were a pair of drifters who dumped her on the creche steps—or maybe instead of parents mere was a lab somewhere that did the same after the technicians realized they had blended the genes wrong. She had held all the Nevada jobs—prostitute, card dealer, con grifter, divorce lawyer—and had never been happy. The freaks of Earth generally, and of Las Vegas specifically, disturbed her. L. V. Freestate drew them all: Cyborgs, Purples, head-clears, twominders. They all started to get to her, because she was never quite sure if she was one of them.

Out here, she still didn’t know, but it didn’t matter. She was herself. Taking care of herself. Even if that was a mite tricky in the present circumstances.

She had worked as well as she could with the limited hardware aboard the tank—as she now thought of the hab shelter. She spent her days at the bottom of a cylinder five meters across and fifteen meters high, and was determined at least to make her situation as tolerable as she could. She had gotten her bunk off the ceiling and put it on the floor. She’d rigged lines and ropes so she could climb up to the control panel, and had reset all the restraints and handholds to allow her to move more easily.

The trickiest job was reprogramming the hab’s tiny position-reporter computer to provide her with tracking data. She felt a real need to keep at least a rough track of where the hell she was going. If she was doing her crude astrogation right, and assuming a constant acceleration and turnaround halfway there, RA45 was headed straight for Mars.

She still had not the faintest idea as to why this was happening. Who was doing this? Toward what goal? And how? She had rigged her exterior-view camera on the longest cable she could manage and spooled the cable out far enough for the camera to give her a view of the asteroid’s aft end, trying to get a look at the engines that were doing this.

But there were no engines, there was nothing at all back there. Just more rock. Damn it, something was accelerating this rock. If the something wasn’t outside the rock, it had to be inside the asteroid, somehow. But then how was the acceleration even happening ? A rocket inside the rock couldn’t work. That meant a reactionless drive.

Enough of the anything-for-a-buck Las Vegas Free-state tradition had stuck with her that it occurred to her, even in her current predicament, that a reactionless drive ought to be worth something.

That, and the risk of madness by boredom, were enough to set her to work trying to solve the puzzle. She took her first crack at it by sitting and thinking. This drive seemed to have some attributes of a rocket, and some attributes of a gravity field. Like a rocket, it obviously could be started and presumably stopped at will. Like gravity, it worked without throwing mass in one direction to move in another.

But gravity couldn’t be pointed in one direction—it radiated out spherically from the center of a mass.

But if the whole rock were simply falling forward under the influence of some sort of external gravity field, her body would have been pulled along by the gee field precisely as much as the asteroid itself. The relative acceleration between herself and the asteroid would be exactly zero—in other words, she should have been in free-fall, effectively in zero gee.

But she was in a very definite five-percent field. Or was it five? That was still just a guess. There had to be a way to measure it.

What was accelerating her? A magic rocket that didn’t need propellant or fuel or nozzles, or magic gravity you could point in any direction?

She sat there on the bottom of her tank and worried at the puzzle, perfectly aware of what she was really doing: struggling to keep her mind off another little problem. No matter how the propulsion system worked, she was going to be in a hell of a mess when this rock piled into Mars.

Chancellor Daltry was demonstrating a fair talent for running tight meetings, Larry decided. Things were moving right along.

And Larry was also getting the very clear impression that Daltry was going to be the one making the final decisions here.

“I now call on Dr. Marcia MacDougal,” the chancellor said. “We have heard some stunning facts today, but I believe Dr. MacDougal can match them. I had the opportunity to talk with her before the meeting, and I must say that she has come up with some remarkable results. Dr. MacDougal.”

Larry watched the wiry, ebony-skinned woman stand and cross to the audiovisual controls at the far end of the room. She was plainly nervous. “Thank you, Chancellor. I’ve made what I think might be a real breakthrough—but I don’t know what it all means. I know this will sound backwards, but I think it might be best if I start at the end, and then jump back to the beginning and work my way forward.”

She plugged a datablock into place and punched a few buttons. The lights dimmed and an image appeared in the air over the table. A massive sphere, the color of old dried blood, hung in the air, spinning slowly. Larry frowned and stared at it. A red dwarf star? But why so dim? And why were its edges so well defined?

Then he noticed faint lines etched into the surface of the object, barely visible against the dark background. “Could you enhance those surface lines a bit?” he asked. Marcia worked the controls and the lines brightened.

“Longitude and latitude,” someone in the darkness said.

“That’s what I thought, at first,” Marcia said. “It’s as good a guess as any, I suppose.”

“What the hell are we looking at?” Lucian’s voice asked.

“A movie,” MacDougal replied. “A three-dee, alien movie. What it’s a film of , I don’t know. Watch for a moment.”

Suddenly the sphere’s rotation began to wobble, skewing about more and more erratically. Two spots on its upper surface began to glow in a warmer red, and suddenly flared up and flashed over into glare-bright white. The flare was over as soon as it began. Two blinding-bright points of light swept out of the sphere’s interior and vanished out of the frame. The sphere itself was left behind, tumbling wildly, with a pair of massive, blackened holes torn through its surface.