Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

That answer might not be enough by itself. But with the data pouring out of the induction taps, with the clues they were gathering here on Mars, maybe it would be the last, key piece in the puzzle.

And she had to find it.

The engines lit. No test firing this time, but in earnest. At long last the Terra Nova was going places.

The massive ship shuddered, lurched forward, and blasted her way free. Forward, up, and out. The Terra Nova , too long a prisoner of Earth orbit, broke her shackles and reached for open space.

Dianne Steiger— Captain Dianne Steiger, she reminded herself—gloried in the massive, crushing acceleration. They were doing four gees already, and the Terra Nova could keep that up for hours. There was power here, incredible power just waiting to be translated into distance and speed.

Not that much of it was to be put to use just yet, of course. The Terra Nova’s engines needed a high-power throat clearing, but once that was complete, the flight plan called for a throttle-down to one-gee boost. Already Dianne could feel the acceleration easing off.

No one had established a system of nomenclature yet for the Multisystem. How should so many new worlds be named? They needed a system of names that would prevent confusion.

The navigators simply referred to the nearby planet as Target One and left it at that. The trip to Target One would have barely warmed up a normal interplanetary ship’s engines, never mind those of a starship. For a ship meant to cross trillions of kilometers, this little journey of a few million kilometers was nothing. They would be there in two days. Even that fast a trajectory would require only a half hour of one-gee thrust. Less with the initial four-gee boost factored in.

Pinned to her crash couch on the bridge, Dianne loved every moment of the rocket burn. All was going well.

She felt justified in having ordered the rush launch of the ship. Getting away was the main thing. No matter if some of the crew and their gear had been piled on at the last moment. They were moving, before the weirdnesses of the enemy could stop them. On their way, before some utterly human bureaucratic snarl could be invented to delay them.

Already, there had been mutterings that sending an exploration ship might provoke the builders of the Multisystem. Dianne didn’t want to give that argument time to gain strength. Better to chance a shipboard glitch and launch now.

She was playing a risky game—but to her, the Terra Nova was a known factor. She knew how far she could push the big ship, what it could take, and what it couldn’t. The unknown risks were the aliens and humans who might stand in the way. Better to get a jump on all of them, at a trivial risk to the ship, rather than giving them all time to stop the flight.

Officially they were boosting for the Sphere, but everyone knew perfectly well that was hogwash. They were going no further than the next planet inward. Dianne was prepared to press on from there if all was going well-but not in the direction of the Sphere. Not for a long time. She smiled with pleasure and watched her status boards, all of them glowing green.

On the next couch over, her second-in-command was not enjoying the ride nearly so much.

Gerald MacDougal, exobiologist, crossing space to a world presumably brimming with unknown life, wondered exactly why he had wanted so much to take this trip. At this precise moment, he could think of nothing but the groaning metal around him. He knew the ship could take this thrust, and ten times as much; knew that it was normal for load-bearing members to make a little noise now and then; but his fertile imagination could not be bothered with mere facts. In his mind’s eye, he could see collapsing bulkheads.

He felt a touch of claustrophobia. Monitors and view-screens and graphic flight-path displays were all very well, but there weren’t any real windows on the bridge. He felt himself to be in a cramped metal cave, a coffin in space, hurtling toward a needless doom. His thoughts turned to Marcia. He did not want to die, now or anytime, without seeing her first.

But even as that melodramatic idea flashed across his mind, another part of his mind knew that all was well, that the ship was performing as expected. And yet a third part of his mind was praying to God as hard as it ever had.

No sense in taking chances, he told himself.

The Terra Nova shut down her engines, and coursed through open space, toward a new world without a name.

The Nenya rushed away from the Moon, out away from the Sun, boosting toward the cold and dark of Pluto, toward the Ring of Charon, Tyrone Vespasian at the controls.

Dr. Simon Raphael sat in Larry Chao’s cabin, watching the Moon grow smaller in the monitor and wondering what it was like to live through decapitation.

Dr. Raphael had never worn a teleoperator control rig himself, but the experts said that the better the rig, the more realism it provided—and the more traumatic the psychic effects of an accident to the teleoperator.

The rig Larry had been wearing was one of the best.

The boy shifted in his sedated sleep, moaned, and rolled over. His left hand flopped out of the bed and Raphael took it, held it. Somewhere in the midst of all Larry’s terrors there might be some part of him that could sense a touch, and know it to be friendly, comforting.

Raphael looked over to the video monitor. He used the bedside control to cut away from the view of the Moon to a dynamic orbital schematic, an abstract collection of numbers and color graphics. But to Simon Raphael, there could be nothing more meaningful in the Universe. It was the Saint Anthony’s flight path, tracking its progress from the Moon to the Earthpoint black hole.

And Earthpoint was getting close.

The probe fell relentlessly, down toward the nightmare point where Earth had vanished, toward the strange throbbing blue flashes of light. Toward the place where huge and mysterious vehicles were materializing still, rushing out toward the surviving planets. Down toward the black hole, the wormhole that marked the spot where Earth had been.

All the latest data from Mars, from the Lunar Wheel induction taps, from all sources, had been radioed aboard the little armored craft. Whatever information the Solar System had gathered concerning its invaders would be aboard, ready for transmission to Earth.

If Earth was still there.

But the Saint Anthony was incapable of worrying about that. All it knew was that it needed to arrive in precisely the right spot, a point mere meters across, at a moment timed with utterly compulsive precision. Miss the point, fail to move through in the nanosecond between a pseudo-asteroid arriving and the wormhole slamming shut again, and the Saint Anthony would be just another submicro-scopic, infinitesimal part of the Earthpoint black hole.

The moment was coming closer. The Saint Anthony checked its alignment one last time.

The wormhole opened, precisely on time. The probe’s cameras saw the event from close range, broadcast it back to the Moon, taped it for a hoped-for transmission to Earth.

A gee-point craft burst out of nowhere, leapt through the hole at terrifying speed, missing an impact with the Saint Anthony by a scant few hundred meters before flying off into the darkness beyond.

The hole was open.

The probe fell in.

Vortices of space, time, light, gravity, twisted and swirled around each other in ways that should not have been possible, knotting themselves about each other. The wormhole went through the probe, instead of the other way around. Time stopped, space stopped, and then each turned into the other and ran backwards. Gravity became negative, and the black glow from outside the wormhole was the stars absorbing photons, using them to fission helium into hydrogen. Time fell in knotted loops around the craft, chasing itself backwards, forwards, sideways—