Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

“It’s the Sphere saying ‘I’m ready for a new world,’ ” Sondra said excitedly. “Maybe because it’s caught a new star and has more room for worlds.”

Marcia nodded. “Okay, so that explains why they stole the Earth, and why they’re taking such good care of it. But why are they mining the other worlds here?”

Sondra considered that for a moment. Try to think like the Dyson Sphere , she thought. What would be important to the Sphere ? And then it hit her. Sondra’s heart started pounding in her chest, and her palms went damp with sweat. “Think for a second,” she said. “The original Charonians built the seedships to carry their offspring to new worlds, to make new Charonians. Then the seed-ships took power for themselves, and decided the important thing was to make more seedships, spread themselves out among the stars.

“And then the seedships built a Dyson Sphere, and it took over, and it decided…”

The two women were deadly silent as the thought sunk in. “The Dyson Sphere decided the important thing was to make more Dyson Spheres,” Sondra said at last. “So, millions of years ago, it modified the seedships’ programs one more time, played with the gene pool one more time. To make all the other forms into part of a Sphere-reproduction system. And what the hell did we think Dyson Spheres were made out of?”

Marcia shook her head numbly. “My sweet God. And we were rushing to save Earth . It’s every other world in the Solar System that’s in trouble.”

“ Planets ,” Sondra said, not hearing Marcia. “You make them out of disassembled planets .”

Marcia spoke very quietly. “That’s what the Landers are doing. Now that they’ve got Earth out of harm’s way, they’re taking the Solar System apart to build a new Dyson Sphere. They’ll shred the planets, the moons, the asteroids down to nothing , take them apart and use that material as raw material to build a shell around the Sun. They’ll start up a new Multisystem here.”

Sondra stared blankly at the computer screen for a long moment and then came back to herself. “We have to tell them,” she said. “Before the dust clouds thicken again and all the radio wavelengths are jammed. We have to get the word out.” She started typing furiously.

But Marcia wasn’t paying attention. She stood up and returned to the window, back to the sky full of fire. Out there, the Landers were tearing Mars apart, blasting its stones and sand up into the sky. Now she understood. But would understanding do any good? They were as far as ever from being able to stop it, from being able to do anything about it. Mars was still being torn to shreds.

It wasn’t fair. She did not want to die like this. Not alone. “Oh, Gerald,” she said to the sky. “Gerald my love.” He was alive, and he had reached out across unimaginable distances, sent his words to her. That should have been some comfort, some solace.

But it was not. Instead anger flared inside her.

Gerald lived. How could she die, when she suddenly had a new reason to live?

The three men aboard the Nenya sat in the ship’s wardroom, reading printouts of the messages from the Terra Nova and Mars.

Larry shook his head. “I knew the Lander crashes on Mars should have told me something. This part here, about the possibility of a Lander crashing on Earth to wipe out the dinosaurs. That was it. That was what was in the back of my mind. I should have seen that.” Larry continued reading.

At last they were all finished examining the new information. Raphael put down his copy and turned to the others. There was a deadly silence in the compartment. Raphael looked at Larry and Vespasian, and spoke. “If Sondra and Marcia’s theories are anywhere near right— and I think they are—then the Solar System is doomed. The Charonian Landers will tear every world apart.”

“There must to be a way to stop them,” Larry said.

“The Core Cracker,” Vespasian said.

“What?” Larry said.

“The big bomb, the really big bomb the Belt Community was supposed to build,” Vespasian said. “We still have contact with Ceres. We could send a message to the Autocrat. Way back when, they were going to blow up Mercury with it, give themselves a bigger and better asteroid belt to mine. If we could get it, get it here, we could smash the Moon with it. That kills the Lunar Wheel. With the Lunar Wheel gone, the rest of the Char-onians would shut themselves down, and the rest of the Solar System would be saved.”

Raphael found himself nodding, considering the possibility, and that made his blood run cold. Only weeks ago, someone’s using a Core Cracker on the Moon would have been the greatest disaster imaginable, something to be prevented at all costs. But Chancellor Daltry had warned that there was always a worse fate possible. Now a man who lived on the Moon was suggesting the destruction of the Moon, and of all the human life on it, as a solution , something better than the alternative. “It’s a terrible price to pay, Tyrone. But you might be right.”

“No,” Larry said. “We can’t. We can’t kill that many people and dream of justifying it. Especially when there’s no promise that it would work. If I were programming the Charonians, I’d set the gee points and Landers to keep working if they lost contact with the Wheel. It’s fairly clear that the Wheel pulls gravity power in from the Earthpoint black hole and transmits it to the gee points, but there must be some sort of backup system. I’d bet the Dyson Sphere could send commands and power directly through the wormhole and run the show that way.

“Besides, even if the plan worked, we’d have lost the last contact with Earth—and sooner or later, unless we learn how to prevent it, Earth is going to be used for a breeding binge. That will cost more lives than we could save by destroying the Moon. And we don’t even know if the Core Cracker exists, or if the Autocrat would agree to release it even if it did.”

“Can we sabotage the Wheel, wreck it without smashing the Moon?” Vespasian asked. “Maybe just a small nuclear warhead dropped down the Rabbit Hole?”

Larry shook his head. “No. Nearly all the same arguments apply. There must be backup procedures, some way for the Dyson Sphere to regain control if the Wheel fails. And even if we succeed, and shut down the gee points and the link to the Dyson Sphere, we lose any hope of ever contacting Earth again, ever helping them.”

“Then is there any way to seize control of the Wheel?” Vespasian asked. “Go down there again, rewire it somehow, make it do what we want it to do. Use it to order the gee points to knock it off.”

Larry shook his head, but there was something less negative about the way he did it, as if he saw a possibility. “We don’t know the codes. Even if we did, I still don’t see how we could use them. We’d have to use the same signaling procedure the Sphere uses, and use stronger signals. That wouldn’t be any problem on the radio bands, but now we know they used modulated gravity waves for signaling as well, beaming both through the wormhole. We could fire up the Ring of Charon again and use it to send another signal. But we couldn’t possibly send a stronger gravity-wave signal than the Sphere. Not unless we had our own—”

Larry stopped for a moment. Not just talking, but stopped, all of him, as if his mind were suddenly so busy with a thought that he couldn’t spare any part of his mind for movement. “My God. We’ve learned enough to do it. I could—”

His voice faded out, and he muttered to himself. “Yes, it could be done.” He turned to Raphael and Vespasian with a gleam of enthusiasm in his eye. “Maybe we could take over the Wheel.” Suddenly, his fece fell. “If we knew the codes.”