Hunted Earth - The Ring Of Charon Part 30

Earth's radio astronomers should have been happy people: Earth's new sky was full of very bright radio sources.

The trouble was, none of the radio sources meant anything. As far as anyone could tell, every one of the worlds in the Multisystem was ringed by a set of close-orbiting radio emitters, immediately and confusingly tagged as "COREs." The COREs seemed to serve no other purpose than to jam any investigations of other radio sources in the system.

They had another problem-there weren't that many dishes left to work with, or radio astronomers left to work on them. As with most of astronomy, research in the radio frequencies had long ago moved off Earth.

A few ground-based dishes were still in operation on Earth, and there were a few ground-based scientists to work them. Those dishes were in use every moment, struggling to understand this brave and fearful new world of which Earth was suddenly a part. Most of them were targeted on the Dyson Sphere-and none on the Moon-point black hole.

They all missed the Saint Anthony's signals, until NaPurHab clued them in.

When Chelated/Frank's call came in, Wolf Bernhardt was, for what seemed the first time in weeks, sound asleep. His a.s.sistant ignored strict orders not to wake him for any reason, and yanked him from his cot the moment the first message came in. By the time Wolf arrived at JPL's main control room and sat down in front of his console, JPL's comm dishes had locked in on the Saint Anthony and queried it directly. The computers were pulling down the main body ofdata-everything the Solar System had learned about its invaders. Starting with the name, strange and cold. The Charonians. Wolf spoke the word to himself, as if it were a mantra against further danger. As if giving the enemy a name explained them, made them understandable and controllable.

The video monitors and text screens were scrolling off the most incredible data-asteroids attacking planets, a black hole taking Earth's place.

Fantastic knowledge.

But Wolf Bernhardt-tired, disheveled, still not quite awake, was in no mood for wonderment. He focused on the question of answering back, and fast, before those coldly named Charonians could interfere. One data channel gave the instructions for responding-among other things, the data capacity and format for the laser transponder that would attempt a relay to the Solar System. Screens full of information came in. The Solar System was giving Earth all it knew-Earth had to return the compliment. But would they have the chance? The Saint Anthony could broadcast to Earth constantly on all sorts of frequencies-but could only send back toward the Solar System on one laser beam through the wormhole, for three seconds every 128 seconds.

The probe was sure to have a limited lifespan.

Earth would have to get its highest priority information beamed back to the probe and fast.

He stared unseeingly at the display screens and slumped back in his chair. Think. Clear your mind and concentrate. A mug of coffee appeared unbidden at his elbow, and he muttered a distracted "thank you" to the unseen person who delivered it. He took a first thoughtful sip of the coffee, still not even really aware that it had been given to him.

All right, then. a.s.sume the enemy was going to destroy the probe in the next five minutes, so that he would have only one chance to report on Earth's situation. What did the Solar System need to knowfirst? h.e.l.l, that was obvious.

The Sphere. The Sphere was literally and figuratively at the center of all this. But explaining the situation would take time-and that would delay the first message. Second things first then.

Just dump everything that they had, in whatever order they could, while drafting a proper message.

He pressed a key on his comm panel. "Todd, locate all the science summaries since the Big Jump and start transmitting them at the coordinates and frequencies listed on status page four. Send it priority two. I'll be sending a priority one in a few minutes."

He pulled a keyboard out and started to write.

What was the first thing to say? "Earth," he began, "has survived. We have been captured and placed in a huge artificial multistar system dominated by a Dyson Sphere. Many deaths and injuries were caused by loss of s.p.a.ce infrastructure and orbital destabilizations. Night sky from this location reveals few stars outside Multisystem, apparently due to sh.e.l.l of obscuring dust. Efforts to locate the Sun in the sky therefore not yet successful, Earth's location relative to Solar System unknown. Distance from Earth unknown, but, as observations from the Solar System never located this remarkable star system, we can base a distance estimate on how far away one would have to be not to detect the Multisystem. On that basis, range estimated to be at a minimum of several hundred light-years, with no Upper limit. Perpetrators of Earth-theft unknown. Purpose of Earth-theft unknown..."

Arrangements were not yet complete. The Sphere had not done all that needed doing to seeafter its new charge. The captured world was still exposed to some slight dangers, some unlikely hazards.

One of those dangers seemed to have been realized. An object, of fair size, had appeared through the wormhole link to the planet's old system. It was not unheard of for debris to fall through a wormhole, but this was an unusually large fragment, and falling straight toward the newly acquired world at some speed. Though there was no real danger, the Sphere never took unneeded chances.

Another world was near enough to divert one of its Shepherds to meet the danger. The Sphere contacted the nearby world's Keeper Ring and ordered the diversion. Almost immediately, a Shepherd swung out of its...o...b..t and toward the intruder.

The Sphere noted another, larger object departing the vicinity of the new world, indeed headed for a close pa.s.s of the nearby planet that was providing the Shepherd.

But the large debris fragment was not on a collision course. If, somehow, the situation changed, then the planet's Shepherds could handle the problem. The Sphere directed its attention elsewhere, checking again on the far-off danger that threatened the Sphere.

Far off, yes. But slowly getting closer. Disaster was yet decades off. But every moment of that time would be needed in order to avert disaster.

Every moment. The Sphere sent yet another message-image to the new system's Caller, urging it on to greater speed.

? ? ?The Anthony's arrival was reported to the Terra Nova just as Dianne Steiger headed to her cabin for the evening. There was little the Nova could actually do, other than download the probe's data and distribute it to the science staff.

Captains were supposed to delegate authority.

Dianne decided to let her subordinates handle that job for her.

Dianne Steiger slept best in zero gee, and now was a time when she needed that sleep. It had been a busy time, getting the Nova launched, and she was exhausted. She was asleep the moment she slid between the sheets.

Five seconds or five hours after she lay down, a buzzer sounded by her bedside and she snapped to sudden wakefulness. She fumbled for the unfamiliar controls, got the lights on, and found the intercom switch. "Steiger here."

"Ma'am, LeClerc here." A tiny viewscreen popped on, and showed LeClerc's earnest young face. "Sorry to disturb you, but this seemed important. We've got something on the radar plot board. One of the COREs just boosted for Earth."

Dianne blinked and sat bold upright. "Say again.

Our fusion core did what!"

"Sorry ma'am. I meant one of the radio sources...o...b..ting the Target One planet. One of the COREs.

One just broke orbit and started heading toward Earth. Boosted at an incredible rate, thirty gees at least, and then shut down. Ah, stand by, computer's giving me a refined trajectory. Make that headed close to Earth. I read it now as intercepting that probe, the Saint Anthony. Here's the plot."

LeClerc's face vanished, to be replaced by an orbital schematic.

Dianne peered at it and swore. "Oh, h.e.l.l. The party's over. How long until intercept?""Forty-eight hours, four minutes. Though we still need to refine that a bit."

"How close a pa.s.s will we get with the CORE?"

"Won't come within ten thousand kilometers of us, according to the current track."

A stray thought popped into Dianne's head.

"Wait a second. I ordered pa.s.sive-only detection.

How are you tracking the CORE at this range?"

"Hard not to track it, ma'am. These d.a.m.n CORE things absolutely glow in radio frequencies. Bright enough that they seem to jam out all the natural radio sources."

"Very well. Make sure Earth knows what's happening, so they can use those forty-eight hours.

Any theories on why the things didn't come after us?"

"No, ma'am. Unless maybe they're just waiting until we get closer."

"'That's not very comforting. Thank you, LeClerc.

You did right to wake me. Stay on top of it."

As if any human being could stay on top of what was going on in a place like the Multisystem.

Part Five

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE.

Thought Chain

Tyrone Vespasian caressed the Nenya's controls.

It had been too long since Vespasian had done anything but watch others go into s.p.a.ce. He was more than pleased that he had convinced Daltry hispiloting skills were sharp, and that the Gravities Research Station would have use for his knowledge of the Earthpoint wormhole's behavior.

His face darkened. There was another, truer reason for his flying off to Pluto. With Lucian gone, he had to get off the Moon, run away from his pointless guilt, his sense of loss.

He couldn't have done anything to prevent Lucian's dying. But there should have been something. And by piloting this craft, by tending to the still-weakened Larry Chao, perhaps he was performing penance.

Larry. He was back there, in his cabin. There was a boy who had seen more than his share.

And done more. One 25-year-old kid pushes one b.u.t.ton, and the history of humanity is changed for all time.

He checked his gauges carefully, and made sure the Nenya was holding together. If these gravity geniuses didn't get back to Pluto, history might end altogether.

"So what's happened while I've been out?" Larry asked, his voice weak and thin.

"Quite a bit," Simon Raphael said, trying to hide his worry. The lad had been under sedation almost constantly for three days-but coming out of it this time, he seemed far more calm and rational than he had before. But even if he was recovered enough to sit up for a time, he was clearly not yet well. Though there was nothing physically wrong with Larry, his mind had suffered a cruel enough shock to weaken his body as well. His subconscious was responding, trying to recover from injuries he had never actually suffered.Raphael spoke, pretending for Larry's sake that he did not notice anything wrong. "We're not really getting anything new. Just updates. One word we're getting from everywhere: the structures are going up. Eyewitness and video reports from Mars, the radar teams at Venus, Sun-side overflight missions on Mercury. Observations of all Jupiter and Saturn's major satellites. They're all reporting the same thing-huge structures are rising on the equators of all the worlds.

"And more and more of both types-the gee-point asteroids and the faster gee points coming through the wormhole-are just placing themselves in parking orbits and waiting once they arrive at their target planet. What they're waiting for, I don't know. There also seems to be some sort of disturbances in the equatorial weather bands of Jupiter and Saturn, and there have been several sightings of asteroids entering Jupiter's atmosphere. G.o.d only knows how the Charonians are managing that, or what it means. Except that they can survive inside a gas giant. No one can figure out how the Charonians are staying alive on Mercury and Venus and Ganymede, either. The biologists say it's patently impossible-except the Charonians are doing it.

"The first gee-point asteroids have only just arrived at Ura.n.u.s, and Neptune can expect visitors in a few days. Pluto's turn is coming if the trajectory projections hold up. The Moon still hasn't been touched, presumably because the Wheel lives there.

"The big structures are different shapes on each world, though I doubt that means anything. It matches the patterns at smaller scales. Every Lander has variants on the auxiliary creatures and machines that attend it, but they all do the same work. On Mars, the Charonian structures are pyramids. On others, ma.s.sive cylinders, or enormous hemispherical domes.""Things are moving toward a climax," Larry said.

"The last of the Martian pyramids will be complete in a day or so. What happens then? What happens when enough of the big structures are complete on the other worlds?"

Raphael smiled. "Maybe all the orbiting gee-point objects crash, and use the big structures for target practice."

"Charming thought," Larry said. A few of the Landers had malfunctioned, crashing instead of landing gently. There was one confirmed crash on Venus, two at Ganymede and one impact on Mars, on the other side of the globe from Port Viking, just a few hours after the Anthony went through the wormhole. Thankfully, the Martian impacter was a small gee point, moving fairly slowly when it hit. It had punched a h.e.l.l of a big hole in the surface, but had not caused any casualties or damage to inhabited areas. "The crashed Landers are the closest thing to good news we've had since the first commlink with Earth," Larry said. "They at least show the enemy is fallible. But times are bad when an asteroid crashing into a world is good news.

"The thing is, I get the feeling that the asteroid strikes should be telling me something," Larry went on. "Something important. But the gee points'

parking themselves in orbit worries me most of all.

That's a signal that the Charonians are ready for the next phase-whatever that next phase is."

d.a.m.n it, who or what were the Charonians?

Who controlled that Sphere? And from where?

"Sorry," Larry said. "My mind's wandering. There are too d.a.m.n many questions." Larry thought of the recording of the shattered sphere Marcia MacDougal had picked up from the first tap on the Lunar Wheel. At least that was clear now-and yet still a mystery. "Can you call up the sphere image Marcia showed us?"

Raphael worked the controls on his notepack.

The wallscreen cleared and showed a sullen redglobe glowing in the darkness. And there was the burn-through, the twin sparks of fire leaping away from inside it and racing away.

Raphael set the holographic image to repeat, and brought up a series of images of the Dyson Sphere as relayed from Earth via the Saint Anthony.

"They're the same," Raphael said. "They have to be the same. They both display the same surface markings. As if someone had etched in lines of longitude and lat.i.tude. The patterns are identical."

"But the images of the Sphere relayed by the Anthony show nothing that suggests any such thing ever happened to it," Larry objected, staring at the two images.

"Perhaps the burn-through is on the other side of the Sphere, on the hemisphere not visible from Earth." Raphael suggested.

"No, this Sphere, Earth's Sphere, isn't wobbling or tumbling. It's very clearly under control," Larry said.

Raphael nodded. "You're right. But then what does the message-image of the shattered Sphere mean? Is it a premonition? A warning? What sort of enemy would be powerful enough to endanger a Dyson Sphere? An ent.i.ty that can grab stars and planets, that can call upon the entire power output of a star. What could be powerful enough to dare attack that?"

Larry shrugged helplessly. "Why were there two stars inside the Dyson Sphere?" He shook his head.

"A side issue. The physicists can worry about it later."

"They're all side issues," Raphael said, a bit heatedly. "Compared to figuring out the Charonians' next move, everything else is a side issue. Let's try to tackle the situation from another tack. Maybe there's some clue in when things happen, their order." He pulled out his notepack and called a chronology of events up onto thescreen.

"Okay, but if the Charonians ignore human activity, so should we," Larry said. He took the notepack from Raphael and worked the controls for a moment. "Besides, we have no idea what they would chart as a major or minor event. Let's blank out the human events and just chart all the Charonian actions, no matter how trivial, against time." Larry set the system for graphic display on the wallscreen, a red dot against a white background for every single thing that happened.

Raphael looked up at the display and drew in his breath. From the moment Earth vanished until the time the Lunar Wheel received the first image of the shattered Sphere, the pace of events was leisurely at best. It was immediately after that image that things were thrown into a panicky rush and started to happen in frantic haste, all over the Solar System. The image of the shattered Sphere had stimulated the Wheel to action.

"To me, that pattern says the shattered Sphere image scared the merry h.e.l.l out of the Wheel,"

Larry said. "So why should a picture of a Sphere scare it? What do we know about the Sphere, anyway?" He lay back in the bed.

Raphael took back the notepack, looked over the summaries. "Let me see. According to what we have from Earth, there are at least eight G-cla.s.s stars around the Dyson Sphere, held in place by gravity control. Uncounted terrestrial-sized worlds around each star, perhaps ten or twenty around each."

"So what are those worlds to the Charonians?"

Larry asked, staring at the ceiling. "Prisoners?

Science experiments?"

A weird and chilling idea popped into Raphael's mind. "Or perhaps toys? Or pets? They're certainly being well cared for, if Earth is any example. None of us dared dream that Earth would have survived in such good shape."Suddenly, Larry sat up again. "That's it. What they're doing is keeping Earth safe. That's the point.

You've just reminded me of a dumb idea I tossed out a long time ago. Maybe they got the Earth out of the way before the rough stuff began here in the Solar System. Earth was being taken out of harm's way. Maybe the rough stuff is about to begin, here."