The Shattered Sphere

Eighteen In the Can

The Guardian was one of many. Hundreds of its kind orbited this world, and thousands more patrolled the skies over the other planets of the Multisystem. The Guardian was far down in the Charonian hierarchy, and its freedom of action was severely limited. It had no significant capacity for free will. All it could really do was whatever it was told to do, and it had been told to detect and destroy any large body that threatened the world it guarded—a protection this world was much in need of.

For reasons unknown, this world seemed to suffer from far more than its share of space debris—much of which, erupted from the planet itself. How that could be, the Guardian neither knew nor cared. Perhaps the objects rising off the planet were the spawn of some sort of aberrant rogue Breeders, though they did not match any of the profile points for rogues. But such complexities were beyond its comprehension and well outside its area of concern. All it knew was that it must destroy whatever threatened the world that it guarded.

But the Guardian was not pure machine. The organic part of its being was a tiny, but vital, fraction that gave the Guardian some small shred of what might be termed imagination, some minute capacity for abstract thought.

These abilities allowed the Guardian to conceive of its own capacity for error, let it look forward to the consequences of those mistakes. Normally these were of no great consequence. But just at present the Multisystem was on edge. Through all the myriad communications links and nets ran the murmur of danger, the rumor of fear. The emotional underlay built on itself, reinforced itself. The Guardian was growing more wary, more fearful, and therefore more zealous. It watched for error, and struggled to prevent it, or foresee it.

It might have misread the orbit of this object, failed to account for the variable that would cause that body to shift its orbits, failed to realize those seemingly inert objects were actually rogue Breeders that might awaken at any time and savage a fallow world.

Far better to attack a hundred truly harmless lumps of skyrock, reduce them to unthreatening rubble, than to let a single truly threatening target get through.

And yet, there were always limits to capacity, varying degrees of threat, the need to conserve today’s resources so as to be prepared for tomorrow’s dangers. There was even, as a secondary consideration, the safety of the Guardian itself. Guardians had no particular need or desire for self-preservation—but were acutely aware that the Multisystem as a whole needed to conserve resources. The Guardian would be happy to sacrifice itself—if the gain to the Multisystem outweighed the loss of an asset.

The Guardian could not meet all potential threats to the world it shielded. Especially not now. Not when there was so much activity, and when soon, very soon, things would get even busier. And yet… and yet… its superiors were forcing the Guardian, all the Guardians, into higher and higher states of alert. The Guardian, of course, obeyed its orders, but it also responded to the tone, the mood, the emotion behind an order. Fear, real, deep fear, lay behind the commands from on high, and that fear was seeping into the Guardian, even as it was instructed to conserve its energy, choose its targets carefully, stand ready for the greater battles to come.

Go forward/hold back; be vigilant now/prepare for future battle; kill all possible enemies/make no wasteful mistakes. The dissonance was most disturbing.

The Guardian longed for better, clearer guidance—but preparation for battle was going on at every level of the hierarchy, and every being was swamped as the entire Multisystem girded itself for the coming crisis.

It had a job to do. It could focus on that, find solidity and sureness there.

A target headed out from the planet on a long, looping trajectory that would lead it out toward the singularity and back toward the planet, coming dangerously near it. It might well be perturbed into a planetary impact course. The target was a significant potential threat that the Guardian could deal with easily. The Guardian swung itself about and calculated an intercept course. It came about broadside to the target, and moved toward it at maximum acceleration.

Within seconds, the Guardian was moving at sufficiently high velocity to pulverize the object. It ceased acceleration, made a tiny course correction, and prepared for impact.

The Guardian smashed into the target, sending debris spinning off into space in all directions, leaving a new crater in the Guardian’s exterior, bits of twisted metal and plastic fused into its surface. The impact left the Guardian a trifle shaken for a moment or two, but that was to be expected.

The Guardian slowed itself and settled into a new patrol orbit.

Watching.

Waiting.

Afraid.

Wolf Bernhardt paced the floor of the control center. He was exhausted, barely able to keep his eyes open, but too wound up even to imagine rest. Halfway there. Halfway. Half the cargo carriers on their way. Loss rates were high—not as high as feared, but not as low as hoped.

But so far, so good.

“Confirming CORE P322 impact with Cargo Craft 47,” Joanne Beadle announced. “CC47 destroyed.”

“Manifest?” Wolf asked, not even looking toward her. Was it something irreplaceable? Would they have to rush a new cargo craft to replace it, send a new craft up against higher odds than the one that had been destroyed?

“Just a moment. Ah, medical supplies, sir. But it’s a duplicate. Redundant to CC15, which NaPurHab has already taken aboard. No need for relaunch.”

“That’s something, anyway.” But what about the cargoes—and lives—he could not afford to lose?

“We have a green board,” the bland, artificial voice announced over the comm speaker. “Launch in one minute.” It was just as well that the restraint system had activated, and that Sianna was completely immobilized, with the airbags inflated down from above to hold her body in place. Otherwise she would have been severely tempted to reach up and claw the damned speaker right out of the console. That damned robot voice was getting on her nerves. Repeating the same bloody message every half minute, nothing changing but the time. The display screen had switched to a countdown clock, the numbers flicking downward in over-big, over-bright letters. She wanted to turn her head away, but the restraint pads had inflated around her head as well, holding it quite gently but quite firmly in place. You could snap your neck by having your head turn when a high-gee boost kicked in, and the permod designers had taken no chances.

“We have a green board,” the voice said again. “Launch in thirty seconds.”

Sianna could feel the sweat on her body, the airbags pinning her in place. She was hot. She concentrated on that, trying not to worry about other things. After all, being in a box, and being restrained, utterly immobilized into the bargain, could be enough to drive a claustrophobic person completely around the bend, if that claustrophobic person thought about it.

At least it was almost over. In another thirty seconds, she would be on her way. Wait a second. Over? Nowhere near. She would have three days in this thing.

If she had three days. No one wanted to tell her what the loss rate really was, what her odds of survival really were. How many cargo vehicles were making it through? Ninety-nine out of a hundred? One out of a hundred? Half? None? And even if the odds were good now, the very reason for making the lift now was the knowledge that the odds were about to get much, much worse. Suppose they were too late, and the SCOREs and COREs had shifted from passive defense to aggressive attack right now?

Still, the sooner they lit the candle on this thing and got moving, the sooner she would get out of this machine. Out. Dear God, out. It wasn’t just a word, it was a prayer for deliverance. She had only been in here two hours, and she was already half out of her mind. How the hell was she going to say sane for three days?

“We have a green board. Launch in twenty seconds.” There was a pause, and then—“We have a green board. Launch in ten seconds. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Zero.”

With a shuddering, towering roar, the booster leaped into the sky. Sianna was shoved down into the padding beneath her, and a brutal fist slammed down into her gut. The crushing load shocked her, amazed her. How could anything be so heavy? How could she be so heavy? The air was squeezing its way out of her lungs, she could feel her heart straining to move her blood. And then—and then—

And then she could feel unconsciousness coming near, offering her a release from all the terrors and fears. She reached for it, and took it, and knew no more.

Joanne Beadle stared at the ops screen and tried to remember what sleep, real sleep, felt like. She had grabbed a catnap here and there over the last few days, but not real sleep, head on a pillow, body on a bed and no one to bother you for eight solid hours.

She blinked, rubbed her eyes, and yawned. Watch the screens. Watch the screens. Ignore Wolf Bernhardt hovering behind her. He had been there ever since that Colette person had boosted away, long hours ago. But pretend he’s not there. Watch the screens and pray, and wonder when to do the very little she could do. For the most part the COREs moved far too fast, maneuvered far too violently, for there to be any hope of a human-built spacecraft avoiding them. But for this all-out effort, at least some countermeasures were available. Ground-based radars were ready to throw powerful jamming signals into the sky, and cargo carriers full of decoy targets were ready to send the enemy chasing after dozens or hundreds of targets—but no one was ready to use those just yet. Not when that might give the enemy time to react.

Which left Joanne with just two questions. When would they use their countermeasures? And, would any of them work?

The Mind of the Sphere—or at least that fraction of itself not presently dedicated to other tasks—looked out over its domain, and knew that all was not well. True, its Captive Suns still plied their steady orbits, and the Captive Worlds remained green and fertile, ready to serve as fit nurseries for the Great Breeding that was soon to come.

But what good were healthy Captive Worlds to a Sphere robbed of all its energy sources and cut off from its communications? What breeding could happen on a cold, dead world, sundered from its sun when the stabilizing beams of gravitic potential could no longer hold the system together?

The Sphere had received warning enough to know how grave was the danger, not only to itself, but to all the systems of its clan, all those to whom it was root or branch. If the Adversary succeeded in conquering this system, it would regain entry into all the myriad ways of the Consortium of Spheres. It knew that it must be prepared to die—must be willing to accept death from others—rather than let that happen. Its own root system, its own parent, had died in just that way, and all had thought that was an end to it. But now—now the Adversary was reawakened, back on the trail, hunting again, and all the death and sacrifice and subterfuge that had gone before were useless.

The Sphere knew it must prepare—but even in the midst of those preparations, it knew that all might well be for nothing. Nor could it oversee all the preparations directly. There was too much to do, and the Sphere could not form itself into too many units. There were limits beyond which it was dangerous to subdivide. It was forced to leave its underlings to fend for themselves, under minimal supervision.

The Adversary could strike from any or all of a dozen or more directions, and might well slip past even the most relentless defenses. The Adversary had no qualms about sacrificing many, or even most, of its forces, for even if one of its number won through, then the battle would be over.

Therefore the Sphere had to prepare everywhere for every possible Adversary tactic—but knew, too, that such was an impossibility. It simply did not have the power, the resources, the forces, to make secure all the possible battlegrounds.

But it had to try. All other issues had to give way before the question of survival.

The Sphere refocused itself on the question of defensive strategy. It might have years until the onslaught. It might have milliseconds. Whenever it came, the Multisystem would be as ready as the Sphere could make it.

Out. Out. OUT! Sianna realized that she was pounding on the lid of the permod, shouting at the top of her lungs. Hold it. Stop. How long had she been doing that? She couldn’t remember waking up, couldn’t remember the restraint system releasing her. When had she started screaming? How long had she been at it? How long had she been out?

A fresh wave of dizziness overcame her, and she shut her eyes, but that only made it worse, made it feel as if her head were spinning.

She opened her eyes and stared straight up at the blank, black video screen. Calmly now. Take a deep breath. Another. Easy. Easy. She unclenched her fists and lowered her hands, folded them on her stomach. Easy. Easy. Her face was sweaty, and she wiped it with the back of her hand. She ran her hand through her hair. She could tell it was a mass of sweaty tangles, but there was not much she could do about that just now.

Calmly. Calmly. Nothing could hurt her in here. That was the whole idea of the permod, after all. A box for keeping a person alive and well.

She was all right. Everything was fine.

A pill. A knockout pill. She could take it, and sleep, and not be afraid. She reached for the tiny padded door marked with a red cross—but then she stopped herself. No. Not yet. Maybe not at all. She was off on a journey into the unknown, after all. She was bound to face a lot of things more terrifying than brief and safe confinement in a box.

She would have to face those dangers, not sleep through them. No. No pills.

The Guardian watched over its patch of space, straining to extend us radar senses just a bit more, see just a little farther into the darkness of space. The task was made no easier by the fact that all its fellow Guardians were doing the same, or by the fact that space seemed filled with the strange debris being flung out by the planet it protected. There seemed to be more and more and more of it.

Where was it all coming from? What did it all mean? Was it perhaps some strange new danger? Perhaps some scheme of the Adversary’s? The spawn of some malfunctioning rogue Breeder that had landed on the planet and begun breeding on its own, without the Sphere’s wishing it? The Guardian struggled against its own rising fear, knowing full well that its judgment could be impaired by such panicky emotion.

But no counterweight, no calm and soothing word of command came from on high to reassure the Guardian. No one told it what to do. How could it serve properly without instruction?

Surely action, any action, was better than inaction at such a time. There! There was a target. It was not a threat at present, but space was full of targets that maneuvered, shifted their orbits, re-aimed themselves. This one could do that! It might be a covert infiltration ship, filled with the agents of the Adversary.

Attack. The Guardian realized it must attack. It reoriented its radars, focusing its main beam down on the target. It shifted its course, made ready for the kill.

Joanne Beadle got up from her console and stretched. At some unnoticed moment of the night, the ops center had turned quiet, shifting from a mood of taut urgency to something more akin to quiet expectancy. Joanne looked about the large, semi-darkened room. There were empty consoles now, people slipping off for naps, operators getting friends to cover while they made a stop at the head or grabbed a hurried bite to eat.

Joanne Beadle had wide-set grey eyes and dark brown hair that set off her pale skin. She was a careful, owlish sort of person, slow and thoughtful, but ready to move fast once she was sure she was ready. She prided herself on being able to learn fast and remember it all— and she had needed to be able to do both things for this job. The spaceport director had chosen her as Bernhardt’s on-site technical adviser during his visit, and stuck her with that job the moment Bernhardt arrived at the spaceport. She was supposed to be able to answer all his questions about the operation, the Charonians, the Moonpoint Ring, and the SCOREs. It was a lot of studying on short notice. She had been holding her own so far, but it was nice to get a moment’s peace.

Joanne looked behind her. Dr. Wolf Bernhardt slept on a dumpy couch in the corner, his body twisted into a posture that could not be comfortable, his face looking drawn and exhausted, even in sleep. There was some ancient quote from somewhere about this sort of moment—something about the last moment of night, just before morning, where everything seemed to have stopped for good and all. It all felt changeless, as if this was going to be forever. A little dark, a little quiet, a never-ending stream of cargo ships lifting off Earth— some getting to NaPurHab, some being destroyed.

The business of getting the cargo convoys to NaPurHab had settled down from panicky improvisation to a steady, grinding battle of endurance. The Charonians had nearly all the advantages, of course, and once the cargo ships were launched, there was not a great deal the control operators could do.

But here and there were holes in the patrol patterns, craft that could be shifted to other courses and so moved out of danger. There were chances to fool the Charonian radar. More often of course, they could only mark down another ship as destroyed and determine if it was necessary—or possible—to launch a replacement cargo.

Joanne stretched again, took a few steps back and forth to get the kinks out, and sat back down. Nothing changing, everything the same…

—The alarm went off and Joanne jerked to attention. She reached out and shut off the audio alert out of sheer reflex with one hand while she called up display details with the other.

She stared at the display for fully a half a minute before she understood it—and then wished she didn’t. Something cold gripped at her insides. Sakalov. The old man, the nice old man who had never hurt anyone. He was in that carrier.

Bernhardt. She had to wake Bernhardt. For a tiny, fleeting moment, she toyed with the idea of leaving him alone. There was no logical reason to wake him. There was nothing he could do, and the knowledge would bring him no benefit. Would he really want to witness the death of his old friend, the man he had sent out—the man he had killed? Yes, he would be angry at her for not alerting him— but he would not live the rest of his life with the memory of watching his friend die.

Then it dawned on her that Wolf Bernhardt had remained here for the sole purpose of watching his friends die, if need be. He was here to face the consequences of his actions.

She went over to him, reached out with a hesitant arm and shook his shoulder. “Sir. Sir. CORE 326 is targeting Cargo Craft 43— Sakalov’s permod is—”

Bernhardt’s eyes snapped open, and he was on his feet, at the display controls, punching at the touchpads to display full data on CORE 326. He stared at the screen, his face expressionless, so calm and thoughtful that he might as well be reading over the budget projections for the next quarter. He stabbed down a finger and switched the commlink over to another setting.

“Countermeasures,” a man’s voice answered from somewhere.

“Countermeasures, this is Bernhardt,” Bernhardt said, his voice betraying nothing. “Give me status on CC43. CORE 326 is targeting it, and CC43 is carrying a passenger. Where is our response?”

“We are responding now, sir. There is a full set of countermeasure modules on board CC43. We are deploying them now. But CC43 is now over two hundred thousand kilometers from Earth. The speed-of-light delay…”

“Well, dammit, see that there are no other kinds of delay!” Wolf snapped. It was the first crack in his armor, his first display of emotion.

“Ah, ah, yes sir. But it takes some time for the countermeasures to deploy. We should see deployment start in about fifteen seconds.”

“Stay on this line, Countermeasures.” Wolf hit a touchpad and cut his microphone. “Beadle. Tell me. What are the countermeasures for this ship? What will happen? What will we see?”

“Well, sir, we will commence by firing chaff bombs.”

“Chaff bombs? What are these, please?”

“Chaff is small strips of aluminized plastic, highly reflective to radar. A very old defense against radar systems. The ship launches the bombs, which move out ahead of the cargo carrier and explode, producing a cloud of chaff. That blinds the CORE’s radar. Then the ship fires a cluster of decoys, each designed to display a false radar image that mimics the ship’s. While the CORE is blinded, the decoys and the cargo craft all maneuver. The decoys try and draw the CORE off, get it to attack them instead of the ship.”

“And this will work? This will protect the ship?”

Joanne looked at Wolf Bernhardt, looked him in the eye, knowing the expression on her own face was the answer he did not want. Just for a heartbeat, the mask fell. All the fear, the strain, the guilt shone through. Then, just as fast, all trace of emotion vanished. “We don’t know, sir,” she said. “In theory, it ought to. In practice, it’s a rush job. We cobbled the system together in a hurry—and the COREs are fast and powerful. My guess would be that—”

“Yes? Yes? Your guess would be what?”

“That the CORE will be agile enough to smash the decoys and the ship long before the ship can get out of range. Even if the ship escapes for now, there’s nothing to keep the CORE from making a second pass.”

The mask flickered once more, but this time it did not fail. “Thank you, Beadle. I appreciate your candor. Now let us hope that you are wrong.”

Yuri Sakalov woke from fitful slumber. Some sort of noise, some vibration transmitted through the ship’s hull, had awakened him. There it was again, a muffled, far-off thud. Something being ejected off the ship, out into space? What the devil was—

Then an alarm sounded, and a mechanical voice blared out of the speaker at him. “WARNING. WARNING. ACCELERATION WARNING. RESTRAINT SYSTEM ACTIVATION. MAKE SURE ARMS AND LEGS ARE IN RESTRAINT POSITION.”

It took Sakalov a moment to remember that meant making sure his arms weren’t pinned to his body by the airbags. His arms had been half-floating over his body as he slept, and he pulled them back to his sides just as the bags inflated, grasping him tight. The neck restraints filled, forcing him to hold his head straight.

He felt a new vibration and a sharp, high hissing noise. The attitude control jets, he realized. His head was pressed down into the padding, and slightly lighter pressure held his feet. The aft port and forward starboard thrusters, he decided. Setting the ship into an end-over-end spin. Then the hissing noise cut off, and the pressure stopped. Was that what all the fuss was about? That one little tap on the jets. There had been no need to—

But then the main engines roared to life, slamming him down into the padding with incredible force. Sakalov gasped, the wind knocked out of him. It had to be at least eight gees. Why in the world would the ship need that hard a kick? It took him a moment to realize the attitude rockets hadn’t fired a second time to counteract the rotation caused by the first burn. That meant the ship was still under that end-over-end spin. But firing the engines without the ship being stable on all three axes meant it had to be corkscrewing all over the sky. What possible reason could there be for such an insane maneuver?

And then he knew. He knew. And in that moment, with the engines still roaring, the acceleration still crushing him into the padding, his body cocooned in the restraint airbags, Yuri Sakalov was suddenly at peace.

Calm. He felt a remarkable calmness that surprised him even as he felt it.

And then he understood. It was the certainty of the thing. For the first time since the Charonians had appeared and stolen the Earth for their own mysterious reasons, there was something certain, clear, definite, in his life. And that was a great comfort. Even if the certain thing was his own death.

Suddenly, a cloud of blinding-bright reflectance burst into being in the Guardian’s radar sense, dead ahead, just in front of its target. The target itself vanished in the glare, completely hidden from view by the shimmering mass as it swelled to many times the Guardian’s own size. For a brief instant, the Guardian knew fear, thinking the cloud was as solid as it seemed, that the Guardian would smash itself into it, be reduced to a mass of useless rubble, dying wastefully, accomplishing nothing. It decelerated violently, prepared for evasive action.

But the cloud continued to expand, and began to dissipate. The Guardian retuned its radar sense, in effect squinting at the cloud in order to see it better. It was nothing but a shimmering illusion, millions of low-mass bits of high’reflectance material. The cloud was harmless. But its target, its quarry, was hidden behind that cloud—and this deception made it clear that the target was controlled by the Adversary. It must be destroyed at all cost. The Guardian re-accelerated, diving straight for the center of the cloud and the target’s predicted path.

The Guardian braced itself for impact with the edge of the cloud, but the flurry of tiny impacts was so slight as to be almost undetectable. With a feeling of triumph, the Guardian sped through, clearing the rearward edge of the cloud—

—To find seven targets, each presenting a radar image identical to that of the original target, each maneuvering in a different direction. Had the enemy duplicated itself somehow? Reproduced? Or was this another illusion, another deception?

No matter. If there were suddenly seven enemy targets, then the Guardian would simply have to destroy all seven. All were maneuvering, but none at even a tenth of the Guardian’s normal acceleration.

The Guardian came about and aimed itself at the first of them. It rushed forward, gathering velocity, focusing its radar sense on the target, bracing itself for impact with an object large enough to produce such a bright radar reflection.

But then, at the last moment, just before impact, it refined its radar imagery once again, and discovered the astonishing truth—the target was a quite small object that somehow produced the radar image of the original large target. A decoy. Truly, the Adversary was full of cunning.

It smashed into the decoy, the impact nothing more than a slight jolt, a shudder.

But now. Now it had learned the subtleties of the Adversary’s gambit. There were tiny differences between the false image produced fry the decoy and the image produced by the true target. Now the Guardian knew enough to distinguish one from the other, even at a distance.

It examined the remaining targets, ignored all the decoys, and moved in on the true agent of the Adversary.

“The devil take it!” Bernhardt muttered under his breath, but Joanne barely heard him. She was staring at the same image he was, the same image the was being displayed on nearly every screen in the control room. The red dot that was CORE 326 was heading straight for Sakalov’s ship, ignoring all the decoys that lay in between. “The thing learns too quickly,” Bernhardt said, his voice weak and powerless. He pulled a chair out from the console and slumped down on it. He leaned his arms on the counter top and sat there, staring at the screen, shaking his head. “Too fast.”

The Guardian brought its radar sense to maximum acuity, tightened the beam down as far as it would go. Yes. This was the real target, the one being shielded and hidden by all the Adversary’s trickery. The target was maneuvering in a complex pattern, but the Guardian could shift course far more quickly and move much faster. It could catch the enemy in just a few seconds. Eager for the kill, it put on more speed.