Hunted Earth - The Ring Of Charon Part 17

Repairs first, though. Dianne peered carefully at the video display. As far as she could tell, part of the Rat's nose had been lopped off in the firstmoment of... of whatever had happened. Dianne blinked, realizing that she had not developed any more meaningful way of describing what she had seen.

Well, what the h.e.l.l had it been? What, exactly, had happened? Dianne felt something cold in her gut when she even considered the question.

But she had enough on her plate focusing on smaller problems. Whatever that thing was, it had done a number on her ship. It looked as if the first manifestation of that d.a.m.n blue-unwhiteness had come into existence right across the Rat's bow, leaving five centimeters of the ship's nose on the other side. The blue-unwhite plane must have sliced across the nose like a knife through a salami.

Perhaps a tiny sliver of debris was still floating out in s.p.a.ce somewhere, back in the Solar System.

Concentrate on what she could deal with. She looked again at the nose damage. The first five centimeters of the Pack Rat's nose weren't there anymore, and the nose jets' recessed nozzles were truncated, obviously s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up their thrust patterns. It was lucky they had fired at all, instead of simply blowing up. She could see scorch marks on the hulls, mute evidence that some reaction-rocket exhaust gases had gone where they shouldn't have. It had been close.

So, kiss the nose jets good-bye. She dared not press her luck by using them again. It was possible to fly the ship without nose jets. Difficult, but possible.

Still, the damaged nose was going to need some sort of repair. It could never survive reentry with bare metal exposed and the nose the wrong shape.

Even if she didn't fly the ship home, but merely to a s.p.a.ceside repair station, she did not want to go cruising around with the nose gone. The delicate components in there were never meant to be exposed to the temperature extremes of open s.p.a.ce.

She had to patch it.Spray foam. The number two arm had a foam nozzle on it, intended for dealing with just this sort of problem. She switched it on, and brought the arm in as close as she could to the nose.

Working with a fine spray and a delicate touch, she slowly built up layer after layer of ablative, heat-absorbing foam. The foam turned rock hard within seconds of hitting vacuum. The idea was that the stuff would survive long enough for one reentry. It would slough off as it melted, taking the excess heat of reentry with it as it ablated away.

It was a delicate job. The foam needed to be strong and well bonded, and needed to match the old contours of the nose as closely as possible.

Dianne wanted to hurry, to get through and get the h.e.l.l out of a chunk of s.p.a.ce where fields of unseeable blue-unwhiteness appeared and cut chunks out of your s.p.a.cecraft. But hurry could kill her. She knew that. She worked slowly and carefully, forcing herself to hold the hurried, overanxious side of her personality in check.

Finally the job was done. She pulled the manipulators away and examined her handiwork as seen from the remote camera mounted on the number three arm. It looked good. A clean job.

The number one and two arms backed away as she drew in the waldo controls. The ablative foam ought to hold together long enough for reentry.

Reentry. Was she really willing to take that risk?

She sat back and thought about it. Reentry was certainly riskier than going for an emergency docking with one of the orbital stations. NaPurHab was out of reach to her-and still didn't seem likely to be a healthy place to be. The other stations? She didn't have a line of sight on any of the major stations from this...o...b..t, and the comm channels were hopelessly screwed up. Probably most of the communications satellites were gone. She had no idea if the orbital stations were still there-or if they would remain where they were, or were capable ofdocking s.p.a.cecraft and taking in refugees.

On the other hand, Earth was there. She could see it. Whatever the h.e.l.l had been done, had been done to Earth. Orbital facilities had survived, or not, at random-she had been witness to that. She had a good strong hunch that the Rat wouldn't be here right now if she had been another hundred meters Moonward from NaPurHab.

And where the h.e.l.l would the Rat have been?

Where was the Moon? Back in the Solar System?

Good G.o.d. Where was the Sun?

She looked out across the Universe. More to the point, where was she? What was this place? She pushed the thought away and retracted the last of the manipulator arms. Worrying about that sort of thing wasn't going to get her home alive. She settled back into her console and fired up the navigation system. Working on manual only, doing her own naked-eye navigation, she set to work plotting out her reentry.

The unknown faced her on every side. This was going to be the most dangerous flyback of her life.

But she knew, already, that this was merely a tactical retreat. She would be back, back up here in s.p.a.ce, to find out what had happened and why.

Plastered with sweat, half-numb from exhaustion and shock, she prepared her crippled s.p.a.cecraft for the dangerous ride home, already planning her revenge, the coming day when she faced whatever power it was that moved worlds.

She was happier than she had ever been in her life.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

WormholeThe Caller was delighted. It had expected-or at least hoped for-a.s.sistance, in the form of an Anchor. It had never dared to dream the Sphere would send a sophisticated Portal Anchor, let alone new-breed World-eaters. Nor had it ever dared hope that such help might come so fast.

Anchors often arrived swiftly, but Portal Anchors were rarely sent, and periods equivalent to terrestrial years- even decades and centuries- had been known to pa.s.s before any material aid was sent through a Portal Anchor.

But even a non-Portal Standard Anchor would have served a vital purpose, of course. A Standard Anchor could provide a hole in s.p.a.ce, albeit a smaller one than a full Portal allowed. Anything that could be sent across normal s.p.a.ce could be sent through such a hole. Such as radio signals.

The Caller had sent its own dataset, over and over, to ensure accurate reception. It received signals back, with the data needed to reestablish sophisticated contact after so many silent eons. In effect, the Sphere and Caller were relearning each other's archaic dialect.

But now the Caller was receiving a substantive signal, not a mere language lesson. As was standard procedure, the Caller echoed the signal back to demonstrate that it had been received.

That required no thought. But considering the signal did. The Caller examined the message.

And was bathed in fear.

It was a long ride from Pluto to the Moon, no matter how fast the ship. At least it was almostover. They should be landing within an hour or so.

Sondra glanced up from her screenful of Moonside news and propaganda and looked across the tiny wardroom at Larry and Raphael. Lot of fun it had been, being cooped up in here with the two of them and Collier, Nenya's taciturn pilot.

Sondra thought about herself in connection with Raphael and Larry. The rushed flight of the Nenya demonstrated how important the three of them suddenly were, and not just on Pluto. That the Ring was suddenly important off Pluto was demonstrated by the fact that the repairs and upgrades on the Nenya were to be given top priority once they reached the Moon. With half the satellite's own infrastructure wrecked, that meant something.

Sondra had caught a mood in all the messages flitting back and forth: if Larry Chao and the Ring had got them into this mess, then only Larry Chao and the Ring could get them back out.

"Are you sure the charge values are for real?"

Larry asked, his slightly m.u.f.fled voice echoing out from his sleep cabin. He did most of his work in there, in a feeble attempt to give the others some privacy-but his voice still carried. No doubt he was speaking into the radio mike that seemed surgically attached to him these days. He had spent most of the trip arguing with some guy named Lucian Dreyfuss about data on the Earthpoint black hole.

At least now they were within reasonable radio range of the Moon. The speed-of-light delays were no longer quite so maddening.

Sondra desperately wanted some real privacy, to get away from the others and be by herself. Too bad the rest of the enormous ship was sealed off, filled with flexible fuel bladders. Only seven compartments were open-the control room, the wardroom, four coffin-sized sleep cabins, and a refresher chamber that provided an utterly unsatisfactory zero-gee shower.

Sixteen days. Sixteen days en route from Pluto tothe Moon. At least Larry had his work, sifting through the math and the physics, seeking after answers, solutions.

That was how he dealt with his guilt. So how the h.e.l.l was she dealing with her own? Without her encouragement and help, Larry wouldn't have worked up the nerve to do what he had done. Or was that even true? How responsible was she supposed to feel for the cataclysmic and utterly unforeseeable actions of another person?

She sighed and returned to her reading. She had gotten to the Naked Purple's p.r.o.nouncement.

Blatant nonsense, but at least it was a change of pace from listening to Larry arguing gravity physics.

We proudly proclaim our victory in ridding the Solar Area of the scourge called "Earth." Sondra frowned. More babble. "What's the Solar Area?" she asked Dr. Raphael. "I mean, in Purple talk."

Raphael set down his own book and thought for a moment. He seemed calm and at ease, as if he had found some part of himself on this flight, some part that had long been missing. "I used to know these things. Oh, yes. The Purples disapprove of the term Solar System, because it implies that there is organization and purpose in nature. Chaos is of course the primordial state and attempts to impose order were human attacks on nature. I may not have the logic precisely, but it's something like that.

It's hard to read more than a sentence from the Purps or the Octals or any of the other outfringers without running into some strange word or verbal construction. I believe you'll find the reasoning behind most of the odd language is no less tortured than the writing itself. Read some of that out loud, will you? I haven't heard any of it in years."

Sondra cleared her throat. "I'll try, but half of this stuff is in puns and alternate spellings. Probably sounds even more incoherent out loud. Let's see: 'For billions of years, an unnatural state of existencehas warped the Solar Area, as the entropy-reversing perversion of life and evil-ution has upended the right and natural progression to universal decay.

Now, thanks to the Naked Purple Movement, the Solar Area is cleansed of the source of this contagion, and the proper state of nature has been reestablished.

" 'Once again, this Purple tech-knowledge-ick-all breakthrough demonstrates the superiority of the Naked Purple way of Wisdom Through Ignorance/ants. When all have learned to ignore the ant-like humyn drive for order and stability, all cultures will be capable of / have such / big feats/feet.

" 'But for now, humyns of all genders on all worlds everywhere can begin life anew, out from under the oppressive yoke of Earth's Cultural Imperialism. The Naked Purple Movement has rendered this great service free of charge, but contributions and recruits to the Pointless Cause are always well-come... '

"Drivel," Sondra said. "Utterly unintelligible drivel."

"But oddly poetic in its own way," Raphael said mildly. "The remarkable thing is that there are people, a very few of them, who will believe, who will be impressed by that. They will entertain the possibility that a collection of eccentrics squatting in an abandoned prison crater could destroy planets. A few will join, or contribute. All it takes is one believer in a million to keep the Pointless Cause alive.

"Or at least that was true when the Purples had Earth's eight billion for an audience. Far fewer than a billion people live in the Solar System now, and they are extremely spread out. How will a ma.s.s nut group function in a Solar System of small, dispersed populations?"

"Well, it sure doesn't make sense. But at least thePurples wrote their piece in something that resembled prose."

"You have another sample?" Raphael asked with a chuckle.

Sondra had never seen the man so relaxed and open. There had been a fascinating person buried deep under all that anger. Getting away from Pluto seemed an utterly liberating experience for him.

"The Octal Millennialists. They put out a competing declaration-in base-eight notation. I suppose I could get the computer to translate it."

"I doubt it would be worth the bother. Even translated it wouldn't make much sense. The Octals select their wording for the interesting number patterns it produces in eight-mode."

"How do you know so much about all these groups?"

Raphael smiled. "My wife, Jessie. She was a great one for exploring, finding the odd and the strange and going to take a look. And there were a lot of strange things to see on the campuses, way back when. She had a special fondness for the outfringers, even flirted with the Glibsters when we were both doing our postdoctoral work. They aren't around anymore, but the Glibs and the Higginists were both in reaction to all the politically correct verbiage of the other groups. The Glib-Higs didn't care what they did, or meant, as long as it was said in an entertaining or amusing manner.

"But the Purple-they're special. Or at least they used to be. They've forgotten what they were, and that's a kind of tragedy. The whole structure of the Naked Purple Movement was built on finding goals-such as inciting the nonviolent collapse of human civilization-that were outrageous, and utterly impossible. The goals they chose were not only unattainable, but deliberately unattainable. In fact, in the beginning, I believe they called themselves La Manchans, or Don Qs, after DonQuixote and his windmills. The whole idea of an unreachable goal was to leave the seeker ever striving, forever searching, never resting. Chasing an absolute, an ideal, meant never getting where you were going, which left you forced to realize none of us complete the journey of life alive. It was supposed to make you treasure the small accomplishments you did make.

"There were purposes behind the original Purple.

Not merely shock, but shock for a reason. To jolt people out of their complacency, remind them that the world was not all it could be-and, by urging people on to a higher goal, at least get their minds moving again. If society ostracized you for thinking on your own, you were forced to learn of your own inner goals, thus strengthening the individual.

"Jessie showed me that it was that contradiction, and that need to strive further on, that was the true, hidden point of the Pointless Cause." Raphael got a distant look in his eye. "Nowadays the Purple philosophy is merely blather that makes sure everyone expresses their individuality in the same way, sees to it that all are equally nonconformist.

But getting mixed up with the Tycho convicts poisoned them. Jessie predicted that would happen, before she died." Raphael shook his head. "She'd be sorry to see she was right. Nothing is left but anger in the Tycho Purple. Anger, and a sense that the Universe owes them a living. Their philosophy is a game of prattling words for arrogant people, cooked up to justify what they would have done anyway.

"There has always been anger in the Purple-but once upon a time there was hope, as well. Nowadays the Purple hope has become mere sullenness."

Sondra was stunned, not by Raphael's words, but by the fact that they had come from the lips of what had been such a bitter old man. "Jessie sounds like a remarkable woman," Sondra said at last.

"Oh, she was," Simon Raphael said wistfully.

"That indeed she was. I've been remembering justhow remarkable."

A tone sounded, and Collier, the pilot, spoke over the intercom, his voice calm and confident. "Now thirty minutes from touchdown on the Moon. If you set your monitors to the external view cameras, you should see quite a nice show."

Sondra breathed a sigh of relief. The endless flight was nearly ended. She turned on the monitor, not to see the pa.s.sing landscape, but to watch for any signs of engine problems on these final maneuvers. She looked up for a moment as Larry emerged from his cabin, moved to his crash couch, and strapped himself in. He looked as nervous as she did. Both of them had felt certain that the trip would wreck the Nenya's engines. The Nenya had run here from Pluto on constant boost the whole way; no way to treat engines that weren't really designed for such work. The technique had gotten them here in sixteen days, but other than that, Sondra didn't see much to recommend it. The ride was uncomfortable-and frightening.

Constant boost meant accelerating the first half of the trip at one and a quarter gee, and then braking at one and a quarter gee on the second half of the run. Sondra didn't even want to think about the h.e.l.lacious maximum speeds they had achieved at turnover. On the plus side, Sondra told herself, the Moon's one-sixth gravity would seem an absolute luxury once the Nenya landed.

Larry watched the Moon's scarred and cratered surface leaping toward them, and suddenly concerns over the nature of black holes seemed far less important. He clenched his hands into a death grip on the crash couch's armrests, shut his eyes,and saw images of the Nenya slamming into the Moon. No good. He opened his eyes again. The engines were humming along, seeming to run far too leisurely to counteract a fall toward a planet.

Then they cut out altogether, and that was far more disturbing. He fixed his eyes on the monitor as the harshly cratered surface swept past, moving faster, getting closer with every moment.

The engines flared to life again, slowing into a sensible hover. The Nenya eased herself down onto the landing field. The engines shut down, and the ship landed with a gentle and anticlimactic b.u.mp.

Larry barely had time to breathe before there was a banging and clanging belowdecks. A young man stuck his head up through the deck hatch and looked around until he spotted Larry. "Larry O'Shawnessy Chao?" he asked.

Larry stood up, more than a little wobbly in the one-sixth gee. "Yeah," he said, recognizing the voice from his arguments over the radio. "You're Lucian Dreyfuss."

Lucian popped up through the hatch with a disconcerting bounce and grinned. He stuck out a hand, and Larry shook it with as much vigor as he could. Larry looked Lucian over. He was a short, wiry, high-strung-looking sort, very much the opposite of the roly-poly, easy-going Lunar stereotype. His face was narrow and pale, and his smile seemed to have a lot of teeth in it. His reddish brown hair was cut in a rather longish crew cut that stood bottle-brush straight on his head. His handshake was a bit too firm. His short-sleeved shirt revealed well-muscled arms. He was a year or two older than Larry, and there was something in his grin that said he thought he was ahead on points, as if there were already a compet.i.tion between them.

Lucian looked around the room. "Dr. Berghoff, Dr. Raphael, welcome to you as well. Follow me down through the access port. I have a runcartwaiting on the city side of the lock. The conference will convene as soon as you arrive. The port crew will see to your luggage. They're all in a bit of rush down at the conference center, to put it mildly.

There's been some wild rumors shooting around the stuff coming in from VISOR-" He abruptly stopped talking, as if discussing the rumors would only delay his finding out the truth. "Once you arrive, the meeting will start immediately." He gestured the three of them down the hatch with what struck Larry as an oddly professional a.s.suredness, as if he were used to playing guide.

"Immediately?" Dr. Raphael asked.

"Ah, yes sir."

"I see," Dr. Raphael said, with a rather concerned glance at Sondra and Larry.

They were all still in their traveling clothes, chosen for comfort on a cramped ship, and not for appearance. Larry was wearing one of his loudest shirts, and it was a safe bet that his purple shorts did not match it, as the shorts did not match anything. Great outfit for a historic meeting, Larry thought. Sondra was at least somewhat better off in a frowsy black coverall, but it definitely looked like it had been slept in, with a few crumbs from breakfast on the lapel. Raphael, in his sensible slacks and pullover shirt, seemed the height of formality.

"Ah, well, it's our words and not our fashion sense they're interested in, I suppose," Raphael said.

"Yes, sir," Lucian said with a glance at his watch, clearly not paying much attention to anything but the march of time. "Shall we go?"

The three visitors followed him, a bit uncertainly.

He led them through the deck hatch, then the ship's airlock, down a flexible accessway that was long and steep enough to lead them underground into an elaborate airlock complex. A squad of workers in pressure suits were checking each other'sequipment. "Repair crew," Lucian announced.

"Going to soup up your ship-we figure this isn't going to be the last time she needs to make a fast run." Larry glanced at the worried expression on Dr. Raphael's face, and couldn't help but feel a pang of sympathy. He was the director of the station, and the Nenya had always been the lifeline, the ticket home if it all went wrong, a talisman that made it all seem safer.

Things were moving too fast. Lucian led them from the airlock complex and out into a city tunnel, to a small open-body electric car. Lucian took the driver's seat and the others got aboard.

Larry's rear end had barely met the seat when Lucian hit the accelerator. The tires squealed, and the runcart took off at speed down the narrow, dimly lit tunnel. Ten minutes ago Larry had been scared to ride a landing s.p.a.cecraft. It did not take him long to decide that a ballistic landing on the Nenya was downright safe compared to being Lucian's pa.s.senger in this go-cart.

"You three are the last to arrive," Lucian shouted above the roar of the air whipping past them down the tunnel. "Things are happening fast, even since my last comm signal to you. Marcia MacDougal from VISOR is supposed to have some sort of really hot numbers."

"Do our numbers still hold up?" Larry shouted back, trying to forget that he was clinging to the seat frame just as hard as he had held onto his crash couch on the ship.