Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

“Can I take it from the fact that you haven’t stopped me, that you both approve of my actions?” Larry asked, in a voice that was struggling to be calm and steady.

“No one,” Dr. Raphael said, with an effort, “no one is ever going to approve of your plans, especially given recent events. They seem too much like a disaster we have already witnessed. But neither Dr. Webling nor myself see any choice in the matter.

“You obviously planned not to tell anyone until it was too late. Just out of curiosity, how were you going to string us along? What were you going to say or do to allay our suspicions?”

Larry shook his head, his expression blank. “I don’t know. That was the thing I hadn’t figured out.”

“Then I suggest,” Raphael said coldly, “that you get on with the parts you did figure out.”

Power, Larry told himself.

Power . That was what it was all about. Power, gravity power, was what the Charonians had. Power allowed them to take over solar systems, steal planets, tear worlds apart—without any thought of objections from the inhabitants.

Larry checked the next step on his list. Shift the override control to manual . It was the absence of power that left the people of the Solar System helpless.

So, the question came back, how to get some of that power into humanity’s hands? Rotate colliding beam focus transfer to 270 degrees . Ultimately, of course, the Dyson Sphere was the source of that power, and there was not a hope, not a dream of matching that.

But even the Sphere needed conduits to send its power outward. Fusion boosters to third-stage warming . Larry was deep into his work now, barely aware that the outside world, that anything outside the Ring, its control room, and his intellect existed.

As far as power was concerned, the Lunar Wheel barely entered into the issue. It used the power, yes. Directed it and controlled it. But all its power came from elsewhere.

The power could not come from the Earthpoint black hole, either. By definition, nothing could come out of a black hole, except through the process of its own evaporation. The stream of elementary particles caused by that process was nowhere near enough to drive the vast operations going on in the Solar System.

The only other possible source for the power was the Dyson Sphere itself, using the Earthpoint black hole in wormhole mode as power conduit, relaying power to the Wheel. For three seconds out of every 128, Earthpoint flicked open into a wormhole, a link between the worlds. And it was then , when the huge asteroid-sized physical objects were sent, that the power had to be sent as well. Gravity power, modulated gravitational energy. How the Dyson Sphere produced it, Larry did not know, or care. He would worry about that tomorrow.

If there was a tomorrow.

Larry forced that thought from his mind, determined to focus on the problem at hand. He did not notice as Webling slipped into the room and sat down next to Raphael. High-power channel rotators in operational position . The power got to the Wheel. That was the important thing. When the Ring was in gravity-scope mode, you could see the Wheel laden with that power, watch it absorb, store, transmit it out across the Solar System to all the monsters tearing the worlds apart. You could see it sending out the command-images ordering the Venusian Landers to build that hideous thing pumping core matter out of the world, ordering the Ganymede Landers to dig in deeper.

That was the power and command cycle that gave the Charonians their strength.

Suppose that mere humans were able to tap into that power cycle? Were able to draw down gravitic power, and so deny it to the Wheel? Cut in on the communications circuits and order the invaders to stop what they were doing?

Suppose humanity had its own black hole?

But black holes were made out of mass. Lots of it.

Board ready. Ring ready in new configuration. Ready for manual activation . Larry stared for a long moment at the sequence indicator. He realized that he could have configured for an automatic start this time, too. But no, once again, he had set it up to take a manual start, a human finger pushing a button to start the whole desperate gamble rolling.

“Go ahead, Mr. Chao,” a gruff old man’s voice said. “Do what you must do to Charon.”

Larry flinched in startlement. He turned around to see Dr. Raphael and Dr. Webling there. He had no idea how long they had been there. “It is Charon first, is it not?” Raphael asked.

“Yes… yes sir. But ah, well, I really don’t have any good models on how much time we’ll have. Once we have a momentum of accretion, we really shouldn’t stop—”

“The station has been evacuated, Mr. Chao,” Dr. Webling said, her voice strained and under tight control. What emotions was she struggling to mask? Fear? Awe? Anger?

And toward what or whom were those emotions directed? No, ask the plain question, Larry told himself. Just how afraid of me is she? Will they all fear me, forevermore ?

“Everyone is aboard the Nenya?” he asked in surprise. How wrapped up in his work had he been, that he had missed the comings and goings of the shuttle craft? Good God, isn ‘t there anything in my life besides work? Isn’t there even anything else I can see ?

“It’s time to begin this,” Dr. Raphael said.

“And end it,” Webling agreed, in a tense whisper.

Larry lifted his finger, held it over the button, and pressed it down.

A signal, a simple radio signal of only a few watts in power, leapt across the depths of space toward the Ring.

Simplicity, and smallness ended there.

The immensely powerful Ring that girdled Charon sprang to life, shifting and channeling gravitic energy in ways that its designers had never imagined. Perhaps in some nomenclatures it would be more accurate to say the Ring bent space, realigned the areas of potential, but this assault on a world was too violent to be described by a mere bending and folding. The Ring crushed the space around Charon, beating it into a new form like red-hot iron on an anvil. It grabbed at Charon’s gravity field and focused it, creating a gravitic lensing effect, concentrating the entire worldlet’s gravitic potential at one point.

But not a point in the interior. A point on the surface, directly in the center of the hemisphere facing Pluto. It was Larry’s old experiment in focusing and amplifying gravity. But this time the point of million-gee force was stable, and solid. Now Larry knew how to maintain such a point source for as long as he wanted, draining the gravitic potential out of the entire world and focusing it in one tiny point.

For a time, a brief time, the satellite held firm, retained its near-spherical shape. But then the new and violent tidal stresses on it began to take hold.

The core, for billions of years at the focus of Charon’s gravity field, was suddenly at the gravity field’s periphery. Like a ship that has lost its anchor, Charon was suddenly a world cut adrift from the ancient gravity well that had molded it, formed it over all the lonely aeons of its existence. With the loss of gravity’s anchoring effects, the worldlet began to crumble. First the surface matter, and then more and more core material began to fall upward , toward the new gravitic locus.

Ancient crater fields trembled, shuddered, smashed themselves to pieces as impossible landslides slumped sideways over the surface, pounding and tumbling toward the locus. Deep in the interior, layers of frozen gas and rock that had not moved in a billion years began to shift, bulge upward toward the locus on the surface. Heat, caused by compression and friction, warmed ice and rock that had slumbered near absolute zero since long before the first living thing had emerged from Earth’s primordial sea. The heated ice and rock expanded, hissed, boiled, exploded. Vast sheets of the tortured surface suddenly blasted forth, streamers of glowing gas and pulverized rock arcing out into space, then falling down onto the hungry locus of gravity.