Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

Would it even work? No matter how many worlds they destroyed, no matter how much mass they swallowed up, it meant nothing if they could not break into the Char-onian power and control loop. Larry sighed, and his voice cracked just a little. “Then we proceed?”

Raphael nodded. “There’s no turning back now.” He pressed an intercom key. “Mr. Vespasian, this is Raphael. You may move us out of the barycenter now.”

For purpose of observation and measurement, the barycenter had some distinct advantages as a control station site, but because it was on a direct line between the locus mass and Pluto, it had some far more distinct disadvantages when firing a gravity beam from one point to the other. Vespasian wasted no time gunning the Nenya’s engines, moving his ship a prudent five thousand kilometers straight out from the barycenter.

Larry checked his sequencer, confirmed that the Ring was ready for the next phase, and pressed that damnable start button again.

The Ring of Charon focused down on the locus mass, this time bending the shape of space around it to direct most of its gravitic potential down on a tiny point on the surface of Pluto, suddenly subjecting that point to a field a million times as powerful as the planet’s surface gravity. A gravity field pulling that one point up , away from the planet. Just like what the Charonians do , Larry thought.

Almost instantly, a brilliant beam of ruby red light linked the locus mass with Pluto’s surface as a pencil-thin stream of matter ripped itself out of the planet and accelerated toward the locus. Heated by friction and particle collisions, the matter stream lit the frozen world in a terrifying crimson light. But the heating progressed further, and the in-falling end of the matter stream, accelerating toward the neutronium sphere, glowed hotter and hotter, a blue-white sword of light, a firelance of light stabbing into space toward the Ring of Charon’s center-point, knifing into the bull’s-eye with dreadful precision.

And then, from the viewpoint of the Nenya , the locus end of the firelance began guttering down back toward the red. Not because it was slowing, but because it was speeding up, reaching relativistic speeds, moving fast enough that its light was redshifted, its color dimmed down toward red by the velocity at which it was moving away from the Nenya .

The Ring began to shift its target point on Pluto, moving the contact point across the surface, expanding the focus point slightly, deliberately unfocusing the edges of the beam to reduce the gravitic potential toward the perimeter of the beam. Torn by the hideous violence of the gravity beam’s assault, its underpinnings pulled away as interior core material was pulled skyward, the Plutonian landscape was shredded apart. Pulverized by the massive tidal effects of the variable beam, the solid surface was reduced to shattered rock and superheated volatiles that blasted into space.

Larry watched, the tears running down his face, as Pluto collapsed in on itself. It hadn’t been a large planet, or an important one. The astrophysicists had never even quite decided whether it was a true planet in its own right, or merely an escaped Neptunian moon or a bit of oversized skyjunk. But it had been a world , a place, a unique part of God’s Universe, a border marker for the inner frontier of the Solar System.

And now it was going, going, gone.

And he had killed it.

“The station’s still holding together,” Raphael announced, a strange note of pride in his voice. “We’re getting some impressive readings on all the telemetry channels. The world crumbling beneath her feet, and the station still stands. We built that place well, didn’t we?” Simon Raphael asked, turning toward his colleague. His face was pained, sorrowful, and his expression was mirrored in Jane Webling’s face. He reached out, and took her hand. It had been a lonely place, cold in a way no heating system could warm, a place of drawn-out defeats. But the station had been a home to both of them as well.

Larry got up from the control console, leaving the Ring to run itself. It was all on automatic now, the sequence moving too fast for a human eye to follow.

He went to the side of the two older scientists, and joined them in watching the relays from the Gravities Research Station’s external cameras. He recognized the camera angle. It was the same view, the old, unchanging view from the observation dome. Before his eyes saw it as it now was, his mind remembered how it had been for so long, immutable—the craters, the empty plain, and, close to the horizon, the jagged, shattered remains of the first stations, ruins exposed to the stars. And the graveyard, a few frozen corpses from the first missions here, hastily covered over a generation ago, carefully hidden from the dome’s line of sight.

And the now-missing happy blue marble of Earth sometimes gleaming in the night.

Now, nothing was as it had been.

He opened his eyes to the present time. The ground was shuddering, boulders leaping up into the sky, pressure vents blasting open as they watched, sending geysers of superheated liquid streaking upward. The shattered remains of the first and second stations tumbled over, collapsed into the bubbling cauldron of the melted land. And for a brief, terrible moment, the graves gave up their dead. A steam vent blasted open the ground below the graves, and Jane Webling cried in horror as the bodies of old friends were thrown upward, hurtling over the horizon.

Now the ground under the station lurched downward, and the camera slumped over, fell on its side. A boulder slammed into the dome, smashing it open. The interior of the dome frosted over in the blink of an eye, and the contents of the room were a sudden blizzard of whirling debris. The viewscreen went blank as the camera was yanked free from its cable.

Like so many candles snuffed out with the rippling speed of a gusting wind, all the other indicators and readouts from the station flickered out and went dead.

Larry turned back toward his control console and checked the sequencer display. The locus mass had grown appreciably, and the Ring was able to refocus the gravity beam to even greater power. He switched one of the monitors to an external view camera and looked for a long last time at Pluto.

The planet was collapsing, shrinking, fast enough that he could see it happening. A haze of dust and debris and gas was a funeral shroud for the doomed planet. A huge, roiling cone-cloud of debris was climbing up the gravity beam, matter spiraling down into the maelstrom from all over the planet, pulled in toward the beam.

The Ring adjusted the focus again, centering the beam on the point directly under the locus mass, widening the beam to draw in a wider and wider swath of matter. The faster the locus absorbed matter, the faster the strength of the beam grew, and the faster it tore matter from Pluto.

The planet’s matter howled up the gravity cyclone, the superheated glow of ionized matter blazing across the sky. The locus absorbed more and more matter, giving the Ring more gravity potential to work with. The Ring tightened down the vise, compressing the locus down upon itself ever more tightly.

Larry watched the gee meters, the amplification meters. They were rising even more rapidly than he had planned. Closer and closer to the point where nothing, not even light, could escape from the microscopic pinpoint that now held all the matter that had once been a moon, the pinpoint that was swallowing a world. “Coming up on it,” he announced, and no one had to ask what he meant. He closed his eyes, and exhaustion swept over him, tried to claim him one more time. But no, not yet.

The end of the firelance resting on the mass locus reddened more and more, grew dark and sullen as the gravity well deepened, redshifting the light more and more. The last shreds and fragments of Pluto slammed into the accretion cone, ripped themselves down to powder and gas, then to ions, falling, whirling, spinning, glowing, collapsing toward the voracious maw.