Hunted Earth - The Ring Of Charon Part 9

"Young man, what in heaven's name is going on?" Mrs. Chester demanded in an imperious voice, as if Lucian were responsible for preventing disasters.

Lucian ignored the welter of voices and stared at the impossible sky, his mind racing for an explanation. What in the name of G.o.d could create the illusion of a planet vanishing? He dreamed up a half dozen theories. A black dust cloud wandering through the Solar System, a bad prank by some grad students on one of the s.p.a.ce habitats, flinging a king-size occulting disk in front of Earth, a sudden weird flaw in the dome's gla.s.s that filtered out Earth-colored light. But none of his ideas made sense, or were even physically possible.

Then if there were no way to make it seem the Earth was gone, then it had to be that- Lucian never had the chance to complete the terrifying thought. The first moonquake hit.

The Moon's entire existence had been shaped by the tidal stresses imposed by Earth's ma.s.sive gravity well. Internal stresses in the Moon's crust, stresses that had existed before the first trilobite ever swam Earth's seas, were suddenly no longer there. With the strain patterns of a billion years suddenly relieved, the Moon's crust snapped, like a rubber band let go after being stretched out. Thefirst of the shock waves smashed into the surface, sending everyone in the dome sprawling.

Lucian, standing on the low tour-guide dais, was flung into the air, tumbling end over end in the Moon's leisurely gravity.

It was the quake that convinced Lucian of the impossible truth. The sudden, appalling shock of the very ground beneath his feet, flinging him about, made the disaster real. He slammed into the floor of the dome and clung to it, digging his fingers into the rubber matting.

Suddenly his mind was clear. A legend spoke to him, and told him what to do.

"Accept the situation, think and act," his father's voice whispered to him. His father, Bernard Dreyfuss, hero of the SubBubble Three disaster. A thousand-ten thousand more would have died, if Bernard Dreyfuss had not kept his head. "Most people panic when they are in danger. Not our family." That was family lore, the family law, Lucian told himself. "We think in a crisis, boy," his father had told him. "That's why we survive. When the terrible, the frightening, the incredible happens, accept it and act while the others are still in shock.

It's in your blood to do it. Trust that and act."

He looked up in the sky. All his life, all the centuries humanity had lived on the Moon, all the endless millions of years before that, the Earth had hung in that one spot in the Lunar sky, the one unmoving object among the wheeling Sun and stars. It had hung there, always.

And it wasn't there now. d.a.m.n it, accept that.

No one was going to believe it, but accept it. It had happened. How? How had it been wrecked? Had it exploded?

Stop it. Accept the incredible. The how of it didn't matter just now. The ground below his feet rattled again, and he heard a little girl whimper in fear. It refocused his mind. He could do nothing forthe people of Earth, but the loss of the planet had consequences here, now.

And he had responsibilities. For starters, the people in this dome. He did not even notice that he had stopped thinking of them as tourists and groundlings.

They needed help. If the ground danced again, and the dome cracked this time... He had to get them safely down below, down into the panicked ant heap the city must be by now..

It struck him that down below they wouldn't know about Earth yet.

Earth. Dear G.o.d, Earth. He looked again at the frightened people all around him. Earth people.

They needed help. Help in getting below to safety, help in avoiding panic.

Keeping their minds off whatever had just happened to their world was vital. Focus them on the immediate danger. Don't let them have time to think.

Lucian stood up carefully, adopting the cautious, wide-legged stance of a man expecting the ground to give way. "Everyone, please listen carefully." He must have gotten some sort of tone of authority into his voice; they all quieted down and turned to him.

Calm them. Downplay the situation. "You are in no immediate danger, but safety regulations require the evacuation of these domes after even a minor tremor." There was nothing remotely "minor" about the temblor they had just experienced, but Lucian was perfectly willing to minimize the danger if it calmed these people and got them the h.e.l.l out of here.

"Please form a single-file line and move in an orderly fashion back down the entrance ramp."

Warn them of the turmoil below. "Please bear in mind that everyone under us in the city felt that tremor too, so things might be a little chaotic down there."Fine, that will keep them from being shocked- but won't they get completely freaked if they see the G.o.dd.a.m.n natives in an uproar? Panic is contagious. How to keep them from catching it-or causing it? Of course. Appeal to their pride. "The people below will be scared, and we're scared-but let's not let other people's fear panic us. Show them tourists can handle a crisis just as well as Conners.

Now let's move, quickly. "

He jumped down and made his way through the crowd to the exit ramp. He started ushering the people down, and found himself pleasantly surprised at how cooperative they all were. He spotted a young woman who looked levelheaded toward the head of the line and took her by the arm.

What was her name? Deborah, that was it. "Listen, Deborah," he said. "We'll need to keep the whole crowd together until we get back to the hotel. Hold them at the entrance to the main concourse while I take up the rear."

If we get that far. Lucian knew full well what a quake could do to the underground tunnel-and-dome system that made up Central City.

A collapse, a major pressure breach, a jammed lock, and they would be trapped. He thrust the thought from his mind. Just get them down below.

He never even noticed he had managed to make himself forget the main problem: Earth was gone.

Dianne Steiger flinched back from the madness.

The sky flared up in a field of unseeable whiteness that swept toward and over her and then vanished, taking the sky with it. Her ship lurched drunkenly and pinwheeled wildly-tumbling, pitching, yawing,tumbling end over end. Fighting the errant controls, she managed to stabilize the Rat on one, two, three axes. Stable again. She stared in shock at what was, and what was not. The stars and the slender crescent Moon beyond had been swallowed up in that whiteness that was there and then gone. Stars, but not the stars of Earth, sprawled across the sky once again. Only Earth and the ugly bulk of NaPurHab, now several kilometers distant, remained of the familiar Universe.

Until the blue-whiteness snapped into being and lunged toward her once more But no, it was not whiteness, but nothingness.

For a split second, her eyes decided it was utter black, but that was wrong too. There was not even black to see. Unless it was a blinding white, or a fog leaping for her mind through the viewport.

Whatever it was, it flashed over the ship once again.

This time her ship held att.i.tude. The Universe, or at least a universe, snapped into existence in front of her. Again, it was not a sky she had ever seen. No Moon, no High New York, none of the familiar constellations.

At least there were stars and a proper sky. She checked her stern cameras. Below and behind her, the fat crescent of dayside Earth was suddenly night, barely visible but for the gleaming of starlight. Was the Sun gone? Before she had time to wonder how such a thing could be, the new sky vanished into a new world of that black/white nothingness. An unseen fist slapped at her ship and the Pack Rat fell off its axes again, tumbling madly.

Even as she brought the nose steady, yet another new sky appeared. And the whiteness, and the mad tumbling. Then a true sky. And then it happened again, the whole nightmare cycle.

Again.

And again.

And again.The sky outside the ship thundered in silence, exploding, vanishing, destroying itself, renewing itself over and over. Dianne's hindbrain told her such violence should have been deafening, should have made a noise that would rattle the ship apart-but the cold vacuum of s.p.a.ce kept all sound at bay, and the nightmare outside her ship was reeling past in utter quiet.

But no, the quiet was not that absolute. With every pulse from nothingness to sky, with every pulse back again to the solidity of the tangible Universe, she thought she heard and felt a low rippling boom shudder through the ship, almost too low to hear.

That gave her hope that she had gone mad. For there could be no sound in s.p.a.ce. Could there? But was she in any normal version of s.p.a.ce?

She realized belatedly that every alarm on the Pack Rat's control board was lit up and screaming.

Dianne dared not move her hands from the control yoke long enough to shut them off. Outside the viewport was an insane pinwheel of white, red and blue-white stars. No, not stars: suns, close enough for their disks to be visible, close enough to be blindingly bright. She checked the rear monitor to see Earth in strange colors, lit by the light of stars it had never been meant to see.

Acting more by instinct than logic, Dianne fired the Pack Rat's nose jets to back away from the churning madness of the sky, a few hundred meters back toward the imagined safety of Earth.

d.a.m.n it! There was something seriously wrong with the nose jets. They seemed to have been badly damaged in the first jolt, and tended to tumble her toward portside. Dianne held on and leaned into the port jets, and managed to back off in a more or less straight line. Her nose yawed over a bit, but this time she let the Rat have its head, let her tumble a bit. She might need her reaction gas later. The wall of white appeared again. With the Pack Rat's noselooking to one side when it appeared, this time she saw the edge of the nothingness, a knife-sharp boundary between the nothing and normal s.p.a.ce. It suddenly struck her that perhaps the nothingness was stationary, and it was she herself that was moving, falling into a series of holes in s.p.a.ce that opened before her.

Herself, and NaPurHab, and the Earth, falling into the holes. HolyJesusChrist. The Earth.

A new hole yawned wide. New stars snapped back into being on the other side. And then another hole appeared before them. On the other side of this one, Earth, the hab and the Pack Rat hovered under an impossible h.e.l.l-red plane, a throbbing scarlet landscape stretching overhead to infinity in all directions. Regular markings that resembled lines of lat.i.tude and longitude scored the surface.

Dianne could feel the star heat burning on her face.

But this could be no star. Its surface was not gaseous and moving, but distinct, solid, concrete.

But then a new hole opened and that vision vanished as well.

Dianne held the control yoke in a death grip and prayed that she was going insane. Her own personal madness was far preferable to a universe that could indulge in such lunacy.

The sky was falling. Gerald MacDougal lay faceup on the ground, his hands clawed into the earth, hanging on for dear life, watching it coming down.

The sky was blue, noonday bright, in the middle of the night. And not true daylight, but a deep blue skycolor he had never seen before. How could that possibly be?A disk of white/not-white appeared in the sky and swelled outward over the clean blue Vancouver sky, stretching out in all directions until all the world was blotted out. Bigger and closer it came, sweeping all before it, coming closer, closer-and then it pa.s.sed through him, leaving darkness where daylight had been. Stars that were strangers to Earth shone down in a night that should not have been, casting a cold light that sent a shiver through Gerald's heart.

The ground trembled again. Earthquake. Gerald shut his eyes and prayed. He had spent some time in Mexico and had developed a good set of earthquake reflexes there. It had been the first ground tremor, rather than the strange shifts in light, that had awakened him and sent him outside in the first place.

Again the sky fell, the cloud of nothing swelling out, sweeping down. The hole in the sky swallowed Gerald, swallowed the land he was on, and left behind still another skyworld. From horizon to horizon, it turned to fire, a h.e.l.l-red glow, brightest in the north. The lush and lovely greensward of Vancouver looked as if it had been dipped in blood.

In that moment Gerald knew that this was Judgment Day. G.o.d, in His Infinite Wisdom, had decreed the long-awaited End of Days foretold for thousands of years. Here was the Rapture, the Shout, the Trump of Doom. He closed his eyes again and prayed, prayed hard. For who could be sure of Salvation? He thought of his wife, Marcia, far away on that station orbiting Venus, and a small part of him smiled. In Heaven, families long divided would be reunited. He prayed for her, too, and found some comfort there. An unbeliever, but a good woman, a kind and loving woman who followed her heart and used her G.o.d-given talents. How could a just Lord deny her Paradise?

If any of them survived this Judgment. Fear rattled his faith.By a sheer act of will, he forced his eyelids open.

Still praying, still praising the Lord with all his heart, he watched. He was determined to witness the End of all things. Few indeed would be privileged to see such a sight. He was to be a Witness of Doom. He did not wish to annoy the Lord by refusing to see the sight set before him.

But, all things being equal, to witness such events was an honor he would gladly forgo.

Wolf Bernhardt, astronomer, sat inside on the floor in the dark, with no thought for the sky. He picked himself up off the floor, moving carefully in the sudden darkness. The lights had gone out right in the middle of the first quake. He knew, already, that the quake and the gravity wave could not be a coincidence. He had no proof, no evidence whatsoever-but he knew. Somehow, the gravity beam had disturbed the San Andreas Fault-and the San Andreas practically ran through the parking lot of JPL. No wonder the temblor had been so violent.

But how could the microscopic power of a gravity wave jolt something as ma.s.sive as a planetary fault system? It didn't make sense. But the seismologists hadn't predicted a quake, either. The Californians at JPL were forever boasting to visiting scientists that the seismo-predictions hadn't been wrong once in the last fifty years.

Until today.

But how could a gravity beam do this? There had to be more to it. The gravities people out on Pluto had discovered something far greater than they had imagined.The lights came back on, and Wolf got back into his chair. The autocamera came back to life and swiveled back to focus in on him. "h.e.l.lo again to you on Pluto," he said. "You may have set something off down here. There was a quake here in California, though we can't know what caused it."

More of the reserve power system was coming back on-line. He looked up at the communications status board and noticed that the comm line from Pluto had dropped out. d.a.m.n it! All the comm lines had dropped, and all the backups. "Pluto, it looks as though we have lost incoming contact with you. I will keep transmitting in the hope that you can receive me." He glanced at another set of meters, displaying the readouts from the gravity-wave sensors.

And then he stared at the readouts. Impossible.

Flat-out impossible. The Ring of Charon was supposed to be sending a steady pulsing signal from a single direction. The meters were showing a chaos of gravity signals of all strengths coming from all directions. Then, even as he watched, all of the readouts went dead at once. A warning bar appeared across the screen: SYSTEM OVERLOADED, SAFETY CIRCUIT.

BREAKERS INTERRUPTING SYSTEM.

A strange little thud quivered past his feet, shaking the whole building. An aftershock? It didn't quite feel like one. Too sharp, too abrupt and focused. It seemed to come from the direction of the gravity sensor lab, in a building a few hundred meters away. A new warning bar appeared: SYSTEM FAILURE. CATASTROPHIC FAILURE.

OF ALL GRAV SENSORSG.o.d in His Heaven, what else could go wrong?

"Pluto, we are getting some definitely weird results down here. I think that quake might have damaged the gear. Stand by. I will keep this message beam active while I check the situation."

Wolf stood up and shook his head. So much for dreams of glory. Duty required that he check the system. But the experiment had failed, somehow.

No one was going to get famous off this one.

He headed for the gravity lab, while the message system valiantly tried to send a blank carrier beam to a planet that wasn't there anymore.

Wolf found a fair-sized crater where the gravity lab should have been, and fires still burning in the rubble.

Lucian breathed a sigh of relief as the airlock swung open. He had wondered if it had been a bad idea to head down into the depths during a quake-but now the move was vindicated. He didn't mention it to any of the tourists, but the blinking yellow panel on the lock indicator meant that there was an air leak somewhere in the observation-dome complex. Had they stayed behind, sooner or later they would have been out of air. If the quake had likewise jammed the airlock door mechanism, they'd all be dead. The door stopped its travel and locked into the open position.

He noticed more than a few of his charges were hanging back, unwilling to enter the confined s.p.a.ce of the airlock chamber. In a quake, claustrophobia was entirely rational. "Come on, folks," he said, trying to a.s.sume the air of a bored tour guideagain, weary of squiring his flock. If he treated them like sheep, maybe they would act like sheep.

"Inside. The sooner we get into the lock, the sooner we can get out the other side. Let's get into the lock."

Still they hung back, until Deborah, the sensible young woman, squared her shoulders and strode purposefully into the lock. That was enough to get most of the others moving.

Lucian crowded them all into the lock chamber.

He had twenty-eight people on the tour. Normally he would cycle the tour through in two runs-but one more good jolt and the lock might jam. Get them all through while he still could. Lucian herded the last tourist in, wedged himself in, and shoved his way over to the lock controls. He broke the seal over the emergency switch and punched the crash-cycle b.u.t.ton. A siren hooted, and the normal white lighting cut out, replaced by blood red emergency lights. The domeside hatch swung shut at double time and bolted itself shut. The tourists crowded back from it.

The pump mechanism clunked and clanked, making noises that were unnervingly unfamiliar to Lucian's practiced ear. Could the quake have screwed up the innards of the lock? What if it jammed? How long could the air last in here? It was a bit warm already, with all these people crowded into this small s.p.a.ce. Then came the welcome hissing sound of the pumps equalizing pressure with the city side.

The city side doors opened. With a collective sigh of relief, the whole herd tumbled out into the entryway.

Central City was built underground, a series of lens-shaped hollows, kilometers across, known as Sub-Bubbles. The tourist dome sat on the surface, fifty meters directly above one edge of a lens, connected to the interior's ground level by a long ramp running between the surface level and theairlock. The city side of the airlock complex had been designed with tourists in mind. One whole wall was made up of huge view windows that canted in from the ceiling toward the floor, overlooking Amundsen SubBubble, affording a splendid vista of the bustling city below.

Except now the view windows were shattered heaps of gla.s.s on the ground and jagged knife-edges sprouting up from window frames. A sooty wind swept into the overlook chamber.

The city below looked like a war zone. Smoke billowed up from at least three separate fires, only to be caught in a violent wind that flattened it into the sky blue ceiling of the bubble. Wind.

Nothing scared a Conner more than a leak.

Lucian forced the worry from his mind. Either the repair crews were handling it or they weren't.

Lucian's gaze left the ceiling and he looked down at the city again. The lush greenery that the city took such pride in was still more or less there, but whole garden sections had slumped over. Landslides had carried off hillside trees.

Mobs swirled about here and there-whether in panic or in some attempt to deal with the fires and other crises, Lucian could not tell. The lighting in the city was dimmer than it should have been. The emergency lights were on in places. Swirling smoke darkened everything. Many of the tall, graceful towers for which the city was famous had been felled or badly damaged. From what Lucian could see, the high-rent districts of the dome slopes had taken a lot of punishment.

Perfect, Lucian thought, glancing back at his charges. Just what these people need to see. "Come on, folks. Turn left and out the down ramp to the main city level. Let's get down and back to the hotel." Don't give them time to think, his father's voice whispered. Not when thinking will lead to panic. Get them home. He counted noses. There were still twenty-eight. Good. At least he didn't haveto go back through the lock after stragglers.

Lucian led the group down the access ramp, a long spiral walkway leading down from the overlook chamber. As with the chamber itself, the wall facing the dome interior was made entirely of gla.s.s. That was both for the benefit of tourists and because there was nothing cheaper than gla.s.s on the silica-rich Moon. Whatever the reason, it left Lucian leading twenty-eight people, most of whom barely knew how to walk in low gee, down an incline littered with razor-sharp fragments of gla.s.s, trying to stay out of a howling wind that blew through where the gla.s.s wall should have been. Somehow he got them down without anyone slicing open an artery.

The route back to the Aldrin Inn was at least short and direct. There was no sign of the bus that was supposed to be waiting to take them back. It wasn't hard to figure out why. The periphery of the main level was littered with boulders and parts of buildings shaken loose from upslope, clogging the roads with debris. He urged his charges into a brisk walk back toward their hotel.

Even in that short walk Lucian saw enough to scare him badly. Amundsen SubBubble, at least, was in pretty bad shape. Every house, every building, seemed to have soaked up some damage.

There was an obstruction in the road every few hundred meters. Abandoned cars, debris fallen from buildings, felled trees and broken tree limbs were scattered everywhere.

Finally they reached the Aldrin Inn. The big building seemed utterly intact. A small knot of people standing outside the entrance was the only sign here of anything out of the ordinary. By the looks of things, the place had been evacuated, and the guests were just now being allowed back in.