Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

Larry watched the meters and licked his fear-dry lips. Soon. Soon. When the escape velocity reached the speed of light…

Suddenly there was a strange flickering across the screen as the last of Pluto fell into the beam. Just then, the light of the firelance guttered down to nothing, and not even the light of impact on the mass locus could escape. And the rest was darkness.

Larry looked up from his numbers and his meters, ignored the view from the monitor screens, and stumbled toward one of the Nenya’s few viewpoints. His own eyes. He had to see this with his own eyes.

In the wardroom. A port there. He stepped in, and saw a crowd there, people staring out the port. But suddenly their faces turned toward him, and they backed away. Whether out of fear or respect Larry neither knew nor cared. See. He had to see, with his own eyes.

He shoved his face up against the port, leaned in close enough that his breath froze on the quartz, turning the port into a foggy mirror, putting eyes in the quartz reflection that looked back at him.

His breath had frosted the station’s observation dome that first night of it all. That action, that tiny dusting of frozen moisture on a window, reminded him of the far-off victory when he had succeeded in focusing a pinprick of gravitic potential, a nothing, and held it steady for the briefest of moments—and had thought that to be a triumph. Now he knew better.

And, oh how happily he would give up that moment in order to give up this one, trade away his dreams to lose the knowledge he had purchased at such terrible price. The knowledge of destruction.

He reached out a weary hand and wiped his reflection away to look out at his handiwork.

Charon was gone.

Pluto was gone.

Lost, vanished, as if they had never been.

Only the Ring, the mighty and terrible Ring, survived. At its centerpoint, at the axis of the Ring, at the place around which all their desperate hopes revolved, was an impossibly tiny dot, utterly and forever invisible. A dot that contained all that been Charon, all that had been Pluto, all that had been the station and the bodies of their dead comrades.

A black hole.

A piece of darkness, and he had made it so.

Larry closed his eyes, and trembled, and wept. Then the exhaustion of collapse swept over him, and he knew no more.

Larry awoke after far too short a time, longing for a better rest, for proper sleep, for a chance to dream away some of the nightmares. But things were getting worse back in the Inner System. People, families, whole cities could die while he caught a few winks. There was no time.

And so he was back in his control chair, trying to make it all work.

At last the main monitor screen lit up.

Good. He cleared the board, ran one last check, and let the automatics take over. A display light flickered once, there was a faint beep, and the search program ran. The Ring’s computers knew to within close tolerances Earthpoint’s modulation, intensity, focus, pulse rate. Now it had to hunt within that range, searching for the precise combination of values that would cause a lock.

It was up to the machines now. Larry moved back from the board. This was it, the end of the quest.

And yet only the beginning. There were endless battles left to fight.

The Ring sequencer worked relentlessly through all the myriad ways, testing, sensing as it made each adjustment. Larry watched it work, astonished by his own arrogance. His black hole was a scant few hours old, and here they were, using it in the most elaborate and complicated way imaginable. They should have performed tests, years’ worth of tests, accumulated an encyclopedia’s worth of data, before they tried something this far out on the edge.

But there was no time. People were dying.

Webling, utterly exhausted, had gone off to try to sleep. Larry sat in the control room, alone with Dr. Raphael, watching the display click through all the permutations.

But being alone was an illusion. Larry knew that outside that door the entire staff of the research station, the people he had just made refugees, were watching every monitor, every display. Watching to see if the Solar System would live. Oh, yes, he was far from alone.

Larry turned and looked at Dr. Raphael. No, at Simon . He had never called the man that. But maybe now was the time to speak the man’s name. Maybe that, too, would be a beginning, a start of saying many other things to his staunchest companion. “Simon,” he said, quietly.

The older man looked up, startled. It was clear that he understood the significance of the moment. “Yes, Larry?”

“Simon, where are we? I mean, even if this works, what does it gain us? If we stop them, where do we go next?”

Simon thought for a moment, and then offered up a sad smile. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “Maybe nowhere. Maybe we win this battle and lose the war. We’ve just barely begun to have an idea of who and what we’re fighting. But at least we’ll have bought time. We’ll be in a position to survive, to regroup. We’ll have hope . And Earth will be safe, at least for the moment.”

Larry was about to reply when the alert buzzer went off. He checked his board and suddenly felt the adrenaline surging through his body. “We have a lock,” he announced. He powered up the external monitor and zoomed the camera in on the centerpoint of the Ring, where the invisible Plutopoint singularity hung lurking in the darkness. Suddenly, impossibly, there was a flash of unwhite, unblue, a flicker of color in the black. And then it was gone. Larry watched, unmoving, scarcely daring to breathe, waiting.

One hundred twenty-eight seconds later it flared again, and Larry let out a shout of triumph that nearly scared Simon Raphael to death. They were in.

“Now,” he said, “we start tapping into the Lunar Wheel’s power feed.”

The education of the new planet’s Keeper Ring was barely completed. The Keeper had been handling the Link on a solo basis for only the briefest period of time, but it had the procedure down to a comfortable routine. Maintain the Link, allow the aperture’s innate recycle time to complete, stimulate the wormhole aperture to open, direct a Worldeater through the aperture, pull down gravitic quanta from the Dyson Sphere and direct them through the aperture at the same time. Complete all the transactions before the aperture destabilized and collapsed. And then, maintain the Link while the aperture recycled.

It was simple, straightforward, and the thing the Keeper had been bred to do. The Keeper took the mechanical equivalent of pride and satisfaction in the work, and in the fact that the Sphere had removed its last direct monitors, trusting the Keeper with the responsibility.

But no matter how great the Keeper’s competence, no matter how vast its heritage memory, time was still the great teacher, and very little of that had passed.

The Keeper Ring — and the Sphere—paid the price for the Keeper’s inexperience when the anomaly occurred. It took the Keeper only microseconds to realize something was wrong. The Keeper sensed a strange sensation on its Link to the new star system. A dip in power, a double echo on the last few pulses, as if the Caller Ring on the other end were answering twice. The Keeper increased the draw-down from the Sphere’s power feed to match the increased demand while it ran diagnostics on the situation. No need to call the Sphere for help. The Keeper felt confident it could handle the problem on its own .

It had to be his imagination, but to Larry it seemed as if the Ring of Charon were visibly surging, pulsing with power. It had never been designed to store this kind of gravitic potential, but the Gravities Station staff had learned a great deal in his absence. They had devised a way to use part of the Plutopoint singularity’s potential to form a toroidal gravity bottle, a gravity-field containment that knotted a toroid of space between the Ring and the black hole, curving space back on itself into a doughnut shape centered on the singularity. The containment could store the gravitic potential until it was needed.