Hunted Earth - The Ring Of Charon Part 29

"Behind you!" Lucian said.

The T.O. whirled about to see.

"Oh my G.o.d," Lucian said. There were two of them, and for once they looked indisputably like robots. Animals did not have wheels. Each of the things had a low cylindrical body held horizontal tothe ground by two pairs of wheels. Each had four manipulator arms; long, hard-looking, fierce-gleaming metal, the end clamps cruel and sharp. The two of them paused for a moment about fifty meters from Larry and Lucian.

Time stopped for a long moment. "They know we're here," Larry said at last. There could be no doubt of that. There was something watchful, aggressive, in their posture.

And then they moved. Faster than Larry could make the T.O. react, they were on top of Lucian.

One of them reached out with those cruel claws and grabbed for his armored suit, lifting him high off the ground.

For a terrible moment, Larry could see into Lucian's helmet, see the shock on his face, his stunned horror. Lucian reached out an arm to him, seemed about to cry out- But then the robot spun about, and vanished down the tunnel shaft with him.

He was gone.

"Lucian!" Larry screamed, and the T.O. set off after him, dropping the forgotten induction taps.

But the other roller robot grabbed for the teleoperator. Larry, staring through the eyes of the T.O.'s remote cameras, dodged the first grab and kicked out hard at the manipulator arm. The arm swung back, rebounded against the robot's body-and then plunged deep into the T.O.'s carapace, seeking not to grasp, but to tear, to rip.

Larry screamed as the control rig shot pain-reflex shocks through his body. The electric charge was not enough to hurt, but Larry was not just in his own body anymore. He was in the T.O., and his chest had just been ripped open. The pain was real, in the place where all pain was real, in the mind, in the soul. He imagined his heart sagging out of hischest wall, shattered ribs hanging at obscene angles. His left leg buckled as a control circuit shorted. He swung out with his right arm, desperately trying to defend himself-but that razor-sharp claw sliced his arm off at the elbow.

Larry screamed again at the pain shock as his arm spun away. Real and imagined, seen through the soul and the TV cameras, he saw his arm shorting and sparking, spewing imaginary bright red blood from hydraulic lines. He saw hallucinated, bleeding flesh visible under the shattered metallic skin. And then another cruel slash, and Larry screamed in a voice that choked off as his head was hacked away from the teleoperator's body. The T.O.'s vision switched automatically to the chest cameras. Dead eyes that still could see watched in mindless terror as the T.O.'s head smashed to the littered, filthy ground and the little scavengers began to pick over the teleoperator's corpse.

They pulled Larry, screaming, from the control rig and put him under with the heaviest anesthetic they could find. While he slept, the technicians discovered that the induction taps, abandoned on the ground, were working, pulling in ma.s.sive amounts of data. The a.n.a.lysts understood none of it at first, but they rushed to beam it all toward the Saint Anthony, and to Earth.

Time pa.s.sed, and the rover-laborer brought its prize inside the Caller, to a place where it might beexamined more thoroughly. Even in the first moments of study, the Caller was startled, indeed astounded by what its rovers had found. This airless satellite was not a world where organic life should have been found. It was baffled by the crude artificial carapace that this creature lived in. Clearly, the carapace could not keep the creature alive for very long at all.

But the Caller could not invest time or energy in examining its find. Not until it had pulled this chaotic star system into some sort of order.

Still, the Caller's kind were adept at a.n.a.lyzing new life-forms and then preserving them. They needed such skills, for in each biological component of the Charonian life cycles were bits and pieces from a hundred genetic heritages.

This new creature might well provide more such useful data. The Caller put a small subset of its consciousness to work on the problem of placing this animal in suspended animation until such time as it could deal with the problem. A day, a year, a generation or a millennium from now, it could return to this puzzle at its leisure.

Marcia MacDougal tossed the datacube to the floor of her room and stared through the window at the Martian night. A debacle. An absolute, b.l.o.o.d.y debacle. Lucian Dreyfuss dead-or maybe worse, if her private fears were true. No one had seen him die-and she had just gotten through dissecting one of the Charonians. What might they do to Lucian?

And Larry Chao, heavily sedated, had been packed aboard the Nenya for transport back to Pluto, trucked off like a sack of potatoes. There was not time to wait for his recovery on the Moon. Hewould have to pull himself together on the flight home.

A b.l.o.o.d.y disaster, completely needless. The induction taps were functioning perfectly just lying on the floor of the shaft, beaming their signals straight up, in ideal line-of-sight conditions. They could have simply dropped the probes down the shaft and accomplished every bit as much.

But there was something worthwhile that could be gleaned from the disaster. Her intuition told her that. Somewhere in the transcripts, in the videotapes, the data-tap recordings, there was an answer, an answer worth all the struggle and fear and confusion.

That answer might not be enough by itself. But with the data pouring out of the induction taps, with the clues they were gathering here on Mars, maybe it would be the last, key piece in the puzzle.

And she had to find it.

CHAPTER TWENTY.

Naked Purple Contact The engines lit. No test firing this time, but in earnest. At long last the Terra Nova was going places.

The ma.s.sive ship shuddered, lurched forward, and blasted her way free. Forward, up, and out.

The Terra Nova, too long a prisoner of Earth orbit, broke her shackles and reached for open s.p.a.ce.

Dianne Steiger-Captain Dianne Steiger, she reminded herself-gloried in the ma.s.sive, crushing acceleration. They were doing four gees already, and the Terra Nova could keep that up for hours.

There was power here, incredible power justwaiting to be translated into distance and speed.

Not that much of it was to be put to use just yet, of course. The Terra Nova's engines needed a high-power throat clearing, but once that was complete, the flight plan called for a throttle-down to one-gee boost. Already Dianne could feel the acceleration easing off.

No one had established a system of nomenclature yet for the Multisystem. How should so many new worlds be named? They needed a system of names that would prevent confusion.

The navigators simply referred to the nearby planet as Target One and left it at that. The trip to Target One would have barely warmed up a normal interplanetary ship's engines, never mind those of a starship. For a ship meant to cross trillions of kilometers, this little journey of a few million kilometers was nothing. They would be there in two days. Even that fast a trajectory would require only a half hour of one-gee thrust. Less with the initial four-gee boost factored in.

Pinned to her crash couch on the bridge, Dianne loved every moment of the rocket burn. All was going well.

She felt justified in having ordered the rush launch of the ship. Getting away was the main thing. No matter if some of the crew and their gear had been piled on at the last moment. They were moving, before the weirdnesses of the enemy could stop them. On their way, before some utterly human bureaucratic snarl could be invented to delay them.

Already, there had been mutterings that sending an exploration ship might provoke the builders of the Multisystem. Dianne didn't want to give that argument time to gain strength. Better to chance a shipboard glitch and launch now.

She was playing a risky game-but to her, the Terra Nova was a known factor. She knew how farshe could push the big ship, what it could take, and what it couldn't. The unknown risks were the aliens and humans who might stand in the way. Better to get a jump on all of them, at a trivial risk to the ship, rather than giving them all time to stop the flight.

Officially they were boosting for the Sphere, but everyone knew perfectly well that was hogwash.

They were going no further than the next planet inward. Dianne was prepared to press on from there if all was going well-but not in the direction of the Sphere. Not for a long time. She smiled with pleasure and watched her status boards, all of them glowing green.

On the next couch over, her second-in-command was not enjoying the ride nearly so much.

Gerald MacDougal, exobiologist, crossing s.p.a.ce to a world presumably br.i.m.m.i.n.g with unknown life, wondered exactly why he had wanted so much to take this trip. At this precise moment, he could think of nothing but the groaning metal around him. He knew the ship could take this thrust, and ten times as much; knew that it was normal for load-bearing members to make a little noise now and then; but his fertile imagination could not be bothered with mere facts. In his mind's eye, he could see collapsing bulkheads.

He felt a touch of claustrophobia. Monitors and view-screens and graphic flight-path displays were all very well, but there weren't any real windows on the bridge. He felt himself to be in a cramped metal cave, a coffin in s.p.a.ce, hurtling toward a needless doom. His thoughts turned to Marcia. He did not want to die, now or anytime, without seeing her first.

But even as that melodramatic idea flashed across his mind, another part of his mind knew that all was well, that the ship was performing as expected. And yet a third part of his mind was praying to G.o.d as hard as it ever had.No sense in taking chances, he told himself.

The Terra Nova shut down her engines, and coursed through open s.p.a.ce, toward a new world without a name.

The Nenya rushed away from the Moon, out away from the Sun, boosting toward the cold and dark of Pluto, toward the Ring of Charon, Tyrone Vespasian at the controls.

Dr. Simon Raphael sat in Larry Chao's cabin, watching the Moon grow smaller in the monitor and wondering what it was like to live through decapitation.

Dr. Raphael had never worn a teleoperator control rig himself, but the experts said that the better the rig, the more realism it provided-and the more traumatic the psychic effects of an accident to the teleoperator.

The rig Larry had been wearing was one of the best.

The boy shifted in his sedated sleep, moaned, and rolled over. His left hand flopped out of the bed and Raphael took it, held it. Somewhere in the midst of all Larry's terrors there might be some part of him that could sense a touch, and know it to be friendly, comforting.

Raphael looked over to the video monitor. He used the bedside control to cut away from the view of the Moon to a dynamic orbital schematic, an abstract collection of numbers and color graphics.

But to Simon Raphael, there could be nothing more meaningful in the Universe. It was the Saint Anthony's flight path, tracking its progress from the Moon to the Earthpoint black hole.And Earthpoint was getting close.

The probe fell relentlessly, down toward the nightmare point where Earth had vanished, toward the strange throbbing blue flashes of light. Toward the place where huge and mysterious vehicles were materializing still, rushing out toward the surviving planets. Down toward the black hole, the wormhole that marked the spot where Earth had been.

All the latest data from Mars, from the Lunar Wheel induction taps, from all sources, had been radioed aboard the little armored craft. Whatever information the Solar System had gathered concerning its invaders would be aboard, ready for transmission to Earth.

If Earth was still there.

But the Saint Anthony was incapable of worrying about that. All it knew was that it needed to arrive in precisely the right spot, a point mere meters across, at a moment timed with utterly compulsive precision. Miss the point, fail to move through in the nanosecond between a pseudo-asteroid arriving and the wormhole slamming shut again, and the Saint Anthony would be just another submicro-scopic, infinitesimal part of the Earthpoint black hole.

The moment was coming closer. The Saint Anthony checked its alignment one last time.

The wormhole opened, precisely on time. The probe's cameras saw the event from close range, broadcast it back to the Moon, taped it for a hoped-for transmission to Earth.

A gee-point craft burst out of nowhere, leapt through the hole at terrifying speed, missing animpact with the Saint Anthony by a scant few hundred meters before flying off into the darkness beyond.

The hole was open.

The probe fell in.

Vortices of s.p.a.ce, time, light, gravity, twisted and swirled around each other in ways that should not have been possible, knotting themselves about each other. The wormhole went through the probe, instead of the other way around. Time stopped, s.p.a.ce stopped, and then each turned into the other and ran backwards. Gravity became negative, and the black glow from outside the wormhole was the stars absorbing photons, using them to fission helium into hydrogen. Time fell in knotted loops around the craft, chasing itself backwards, forwards, sideways- And then it was over, and the Saint Anthony was through.

Chelated Noisemaker Extreme/Frank Barlow was responsible for keeping the Naked Purple Habitat in contact with the outside Universe. But now, Earth was the only comm target, and it was dead easy to track from here. But on the other hand, without its comsat network, Earth's own communications were sorely degraded.

Chelated's boss, Overshoe Maximum Noisemaker, was much troubled by the situation.

After all, the Noise-makers were charged with keeping comm from getting too good or too bad.

And therein lay the problem. Did the ease with which they could signal Earth mean comm was good and needed s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up? Or did the damage to the s.p.a.ce communications net represent badcomm that needed tender loving care? And how many pinheads can dance on an angel?

Chelated/Frank asked himself sarcastically. He was tired of all the almost theological worrying over minor points.

He was tired of it all. Tired of his Purple name, tired of thinking in circles, tired of not being allowed to do his job properly. It was his name that was bugging him most of all. Noisemaker just meant communications worker. Extreme was a bit less neutral, a derisive comment on how seriously he took his job. But Chelated. He had known that in Purpspeak it meant overdetermined and overeager.

But it was not until last night that he found out the hard way from a cruelly informative young woman that it had a sneering s.e.xual connotation. And they had been calling him that for months!

The h.e.l.l with it. The h.e.l.l with all the rules. While the powers-that-be dithered, Frank felt himself free to do his job properly, free to use his gear to observe the strange things NaPurHab now shared a universe with. He spent much of his time with all sensors locked on the wormhole, watching the ma.s.sive vehicles drop into it, bound for who knew where. Frank was fascinated by it. He sat, for hours at a time, transfixed, staring at the hole in s.p.a.ce.

So he sat when the Saint Anthony came through from the other side.

Frank Barlow/Chelated Noisemaker Extreme stared in astonishment as powerful video and radio signals lit up comm screens that had been dark for weeks. It took a long moment to understand what he was seeing. And then his fingers were flying over the control panels, setting up to record everything.

The news from home poured in, and Frank watched in awe. He looked down and realized that his hand was on the intercom phone. His first and understandable reflex was to call his supervisor, Overshoe Maximum Noisemaker.But what the h.e.l.l would Overshoe do? Sit there and contemplate the proper response under the Naked Purple philosophy? Calculate how this development could best be turned to the benefit of the Pointless Cause? Hold a meeting of all the brothersandsisters?

No, he told himself. Frank felt a higher duty than to Overshoe. And besides, this was a message for Earth, not for the Purples.

He powered up his best antenna and focused it on Earth, tuned it to the main comm signal for JPL.

The folks at JPL were the ones who should take this call.

The Saint Anthony was a robust piece of hardware. The trip through the hole had been rough-it probably would have killed a human being-and it did scramble a few systems. But the probe's builders had expected such problems, and built the Anthony to be able to bounce back.

The Anthony took a few seconds to sort itself out and restart its major systems. And then its video sensors began searching for the one sight that could answer the most questions.

It found what it was looking for, and recorded as many images as it could before the first signal-back period. It gathered the data it had collected and fired it all off down the hole on the tightest beam it could manage.

? ? ?Larry opened his eyes, and found himself safe in bed, feeling far too heavy. "What's... what's going on?" he asked.

"You're on board the Nenya," a gentle voice told him. "We're flying you home to Pluto."

He looked to his side. Dr. Raphael was sitting next to him. Larry blinked once, twice, and looked around. He noticed a video screen in the corner of the room. It was showing a status display of some kind.

Raphael noticed what he was looking at. "It's the Saint Anthony," he said. "The probe just dropped through the hole a few seconds ago."

Larry sat up a bit more and looked again at the screen. All the display values were at zero. The largest frame on the screen was supposed to show the video from the probe-but it too was black. A knot formed in his stomach. The probe had already met whatever fate was reserved for it.

Another clock display showed the time since entering the black hole. Larry leaned forward, watching it, scarcely daring to breathe. One hundred twenty-eight seconds pa.s.sed.

"Any second now," Raphael said.

And the screen scrambled and cleared.

To show a fuzzy, low-quality, long-range video frame.

Of Earth. Unmistakably of Earth. The planet lived.

Tears sprang into Larry's eyes. Raphael turned to him, and the two men flung their arms about each other.

Earth. Earth was still there, surviving in a strange and frightful Universe. The homeworld lived, surrounded by peril.

But then, that had always been true.? ? ?