Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

“The only other thing I’ve managed to confirm is so obvious it’s barely worth mentioning,” Marcia said. “The bigger they are, the smarter they are, without any relation to machine versus animal or any other variable. Not really a hot news flash, is it? The carrier bugs are just drones,” Marcia went on. “They can only be programmed to fetch and carry. The scorpion-level animals and robots are a bit more flexible. They’re capable of receiving and handling more information, and of dealing with more varied situations—though not always successfully.

“The Lander creatures are smarter than the scorpion-level types—but not by so much as might be expected. I’d score them as being about as bright as cocker spaniels. I assume the Lunar Wheel is far above the Landers in intellect. Sort of a thought chain instead of a food chain.

“But I’ve got a theory I haven’t really proved yet. Down on the lower levels, each creature or robot seems to receive its initial ‘education’ by means of a massive data download from the next level up on the thought chain. I’ve got a great tape of a Lander ‘teaching’ a batch of new scorpions by downloading subsets of its own information to the scorps.”

“Wait a second.” Sondra stood up. There was an answer in there somewhere, a big one. “You’ve been out in the field looking at the Charonians on Mars, and I’ve been here looking at what the Wheel and the Sphere have been doing. We haven’t put the two halves together.” Even as she spoke, Sondra suddenly saw it. The answer was staring them all in their faces! She forced herself to move forward in an orderly fashion, making sure all the links of the logic chain were there. “Before I dozed off, I was watching a transmission from the Wheel to a Lander. It could be interpreted as the Wheel ‘teaching’ the Lander a subset of its information. So how far up does it go?”

Marcia nodded, her face betraying slowly mounting excitement. “So scorps teach bugs. Landers teach scorps. The Wheel teaches the Landers. But who teaches the Wheel ?” she asked.

Sondra grinned in triumph. “Bingo.” She was on the right track. That was the real question, the one all the others led towards. “It’s got to be the Sphere, or whoever it is that runs the Sphere. They must be the ones who teach entities on the level of the Wheel.”

“Wait a second,” Marcia said. “The reports from Earth show that the Moonpoint Ring thing orbiting Earth in the Multisystem is just like the Lunar Wheel inside the Moon in our system, except that the Earth’s Moon-point Ring isn’t buried inside a satellite. It had no need for camouflage. But if the Moonpoint Ring is new , it will need teaching. The Sphere could be doing a memory download to the Moonpoint Ring right now .”

Sondra nodded eagerly. “I get it! If Earth could listen in, they might get some real answers. They’d hear from the real masters, the real Charonians who created all. these nightmares.”

“Yes! My God, yes. We could tap right into their instructions to their machines.” Marcia stood up, tried to think. They would have to transmit this idea to the Moon at once, have the Saint Anthony’s controllers radio instructions to the probe through the wormhole.

Marcia glanced at the wall clock, trying to figure how much time was left before they lost the Anthony . Just under thirty-six hours. There was time to send the message, if they started now. She was about to say that to Sondra. But then the quakes started.

The Sphere had sent its orders, and Sphere orders were something the Caller could not even conceive of resisting.

And the orders said that now was the time. The Caller ran a last check of all its far-scattered underlings. Not all, or even a majority, were ready for action. But many units were prepared, and the Sphere had placed the highest urgency on the Caller’s task. Strange that a job that might take decades, or centuries, should have to be so rushed — but a century from now, the crisis would surely come, and survival might well depend on the hours, the minutes, the seconds saved now.

The Caller focused gravity beams of massive power and fired them at the worlds. The beams of gravity were infinitely more powerful than the ones fired by the Ring of Charon—and no effort had been made to render these beams harmless. Far from it .

The Caller sent the command coursing over the gravity beams to all the completed installations, all across this star system. Along with the commands, embedded in the very gravity beams that sent the orders, it sent power as well. The Worldeaters sucked it all in, eager for more .

On Mars, on Venus and Mercury, on the Jovian and Saturnian satellites, the Worldeaters began to earn their names. The Worldeaters took the beams, formed them into gravity fields that did what nature never intended. Around each amalgam of Worldeaters, in whatever shape they formed, the planetary crust began to tear itself open, to heave itself up into the air. The Worldeaters themselves, deeply anchored into the planetary subsurfaces, clung tight, held on.

All but a few. Even Worldeaters could fail, and die. On Mars one failed, and another on Mercury, the huge beings torn up from their moorings, flung up into the sky by their own gravity beams, tumbling insanely across the sky until they crashed and died.

But their fellows strove on, ripping down into the subsurface rock. The debris was pulled in toward the artificial gravity sources that hovered, like so many children’s balloons, over every cluster of Worldeaters. Now fully energized, the gee sources grabbed violently at anything below them that was not strongly secured. But matter pulled in by the gee sources did not accumulate around them. Second-stage gravity beams, wrenchingly manipulated by the Worldeaters, threw the debris up , out, directly away from the planet, accelerating it at incredible rates .

Within minutes, from every rocky or icy world inside Saturn’s orbit, streams of pulverized planetary crust were fountaining up into space. The red stone of Mars, the ice of Ganymede, the acid-leached rock of Venus, and the Sun-scorched skin of Mercury were blasted up into free space, arcing out into clouds of dust that rapidly enveloped the planets.

Huge vortices, hurricanes and tornadoes of fantastic size, roared up from the surfaces of Jupiter and Saturn. The huge spin-storms stretched out from the gas giants, extending their reach far beyond the normal limits of the atmosphere, stretching themselves into bizarre tendrils of gas that arced and spiraled across the sky, releasing megatons of atmosphere into free orbit.

At Saturn, the gas jets slammed into the ring plane, disrupting orbits of the ring particles, knotting the gorgeous patterns of Saturn’s diadem into chaos. The jets of atmospheric hydrogen and methane and complex hydrocarbons boiled up from inside the huge world to splash across space.

All across the Solar System, the stuff of worlds was thrown into orbit. The spaceside Worldeaters set to work, grabbing at the gas and dust and rubble, spreading gravity nets to gather it all up.

And it did not end. The jets, the rubble streams, the storms gathered force, tearing at the fabric of all the worlds. From Mercury to Saturn, the Worldeaters tore away, clawing the flesh from the planets.

The Solar System began to die.

The images streamed unendingly across the video screen. Towering pillars of flying stone and dust and ice and gas surging up into the skies of Mars, Mercury, Venus, Ganymede, Titan, Tethys. Monstrous spin-storms arcing up into orbital velocity from Jupiter and Saturn. The Landers were attacking.