The Shattered Sphere

Twenty-two Recalled to Life

“Good afternoon,” Larry said, looking out over the auditorium—a rather grand name for the rather scruffy-looking hall, but it was the only room at the station that could hold everyone, and everyone wanted to hear this. “We’ve come a long way very quickly, and I thought it would be smart to bring the whole team together to talk it through. The leads Lucian Dreyfuss provided have given us some guidance and some clues into what we should be looking for.

“Dr. Selby Bogsworth-Stapleton has made a tremendous contribution. Her expertise in reconstructing and interpreting old computer records has been invaluable. Thanks to Marcia MacDougal’s work over the last five years, we had a lot of Charonian visual-symbol units translated already, giving us the basic vocabulary to move forward fast.

“The teams working on chronology and duration have found all sorts of measures and scales in the data bursts, and that right there is a breakthrough. We know more about when things happened than we ever have before. Dates back to about five thousand years we know with great precision. Everything before that gets more and more uncertain. Some of the older data could come from a million years ago or a hundred million. We don’t know.

“Much of what I am about to tell you has been at least guessed at before. The difference is that now we have evidence and, in many cases, absolute proof that turns speculation into fact. We have filled in many—but not nearly all—of the holes in the story.

“Let me start from the beginning. Something like eighty million to sixty-five million years ago, a seedship Charonian, a large Charonian carrying the lifecodes and schematics for all the forms of Charonians, landed on the Earth and bred the various forms of Charonian, producing everything from smaller scavenger robots to things the size of asteroids, and producing them at a ferocious rate. The Charonian Breeders fed off terrestrial life—and picked up whatever odd bits of DNA they found of interest.

“At least one large Charonian lifted off for the Moon and started digging and burrowing and building itself into what we now call the Lunar Wheel. Other Charonians hid themselves in the depths of space, mostly by disguising themselves as asteroids and comets. Then the Lunar Wheel sent a signal to its parent Sphere that all was in readiness, and all the Charonians in the Solar System went dormant. They waited for a call that never came—until five years ago.

“Now, that original Charonian seedship that landed on Earth and started the Breeding Binge was one of thousands sent out by its parent Sphere system—the system in which the Earth now finds itself. Perhaps only one out of a thousand seedships would find a suitable star system. Each of those few would do as the Charonians did here—set things up, send a ready message, and then wait for a call. The parent Sphere might elect merely to order any usable stars or planets shipped into its system, or it might decide that it had enough surplus power and material to assist its offspring Charonians in tearing apart the star system they were in and helping them build a new Sphere system.

“Many are sent out, but few are called. For whatever reason, the Lunar Wheel was never called—until it was quite accidentally activated five years ago. Until I accidentally activated it.” Larry paused to take a sip of water, and worked very hard at not making eye contact with the audience. Being forthright was all very well, but there was no sense in pushing his luck.

“In any event,” he went on, a trifle too briskly, “the Sphere never called on the Solar System. Even for the Charonians, eighty million years is a long time. Our best guess is that the Sphere simply forgot about us, or found some other star system to be more useful. Or else the crisis I am about to describe made it impossible for the Sphere to deal with Earth and the Solar System.

“Sometime after the Charonian seedship arrived in the Solar System, bred, and went dormant, the Charonian network encountered the Adversary. The Charonians quite suddenly found themselves cast down—the lords of creation reduced to a mere food source for the Adversary.

“You have all seen the famous image sequence of a bright spot of light smashing through a Sphere and then smashing its way back out, taking a second bright spot of light with it. This is more or less the classic tactic of the Adversary. A single large Adversary unit gets into the system via a wormhole link, then splits up into as many smaller subunits as possible. Floods the Sphere system with large numbers of highly expendable Adversary units, all of them driving for the Sphere. Sheer numbers ensure that at least one or two get through for the kill. Whatever Adversary unit gets through seizes control of the central power source and smashes out of the Sphere with it.

“How, exactly, the Adversary uses the power source, or what, exactly, the form of the power source is, we haven’t a clue. We assume that it was made out of the original star the Sphere was built around, but God knows what the Charonians might turn those core stars into. Maybe they convert the core stars into black holes, and use those to generate gravitational power. We don’t know.

“Think for a moment how the Adversary experiences the Universe, what sort of place it is for it. Certainly it does not perceive the Universe as we do. Our senses would, of course, be completely useless to it, and yet it must be able to sense its environment. To it, what we regard as normal space must seem cold, dark, and disturbing. Should some sub-part of it move out of their high-gravity, slow-time world to the universe outside, little or no time will have passed there though they might have been gone years, perhaps centuries, as seen from out here. Neutron stars and wormholes are the safe, comfortable places. We think of wormholes as transits between two points in ‘normal’ space. They regard the web of wormholes as normal space, surrounded by cold, dark, and danger.

“In any case, once an invading Adversary had used a Sphere’s power source to reproduce, it would send its—I suppose ‘spawn’ would be the best word—it would send its spawn down the network of wormhole links, on the hunt for other Spheres to consume.

“The Spheres fought back as best they could. One of their tactics was to perform a rather brutal kind of triage—killing a threatened Sphere and thus wrecking its whole system of stars, planets and wormhole links—so as to deny the power source and transit links to the Adversary. Sometimes a Sphere would commit suicide rather than be taken. You will all recall that the Charonians in the Solar System accepted the command to die that we sent to them. We wondered why they were programmed to take such a command in the first place, but now we know.

“It would appear that only a very few Charonian Spheres of that era survived. Those that did learned to hide themselves, conceal themselves from the Adversary.

“In theory, wormholes can be used not only to link two points in space, but as a means of time travel. We humans have never managed it, and there is no evidence that the Charonians ever used wormholes in this way.

“Be that as it may, we found indications that the Adversarys travel backwards and forwards in time.

“Maybe the Adversary was lying, or being poetic, or the Charonians misunderstood, or we misunderstood. However, there is one form of time travel we know the Adversary used. It is called waiting.

“As mentioned earlier, these portions of the Adversary—or constructs, or entities, or whatever you want to call them—live on the surfaces of neutron stars, where gravity is tremendously intense, and they can survive more powerful gravity fields than that. How they survive, we don’t know. Perhaps they can manipulate inertia. Dial your inertia down to zero, and you have reduced your apparent mass down to zero as well. Give a mountain the inertia of a pebble, and you will be able to propel that mountain as if it weighed no more than a pebble.

“But back to the question of time. As we all know, as the strength of a gravity field increases, time slows down. This is not a trick, or an illusion, or a theory. It is a fact, part and parcel of the phenomenon of gravity itself. A massive gravity field will retard time tremendously—and, of course, a black hole stops time altogether.

“The Adversary cannot go into a black hole and survive. But it can get deep, deep into a gravity well without suffering harm—and there it can wait. A year for us might seem a day—or a minute—for an Adversary unit in a wormhole. This explains why the danger is not passed, although the Charonian-Adversary War ended—or seemed to have ended—millions of years ago. The Adversary has a tremendous capacity to wait. The Adversary may have some way of piloting singularities through interstellar space, living in slow time near the event horizon as its singularity moves. It would be a clever solution to the problem of long star journeys.

“One hundred and forty-seven years ago the Adversary, having worked its way through all the dead wormholes, or perhaps traveling through normal space for an extended period, found Earth-Sphere’s parent.

“The Adversary attacked. That Sphere seems to have sent a warning, and either died or killed itself before the Adversary could make any wormhole link to other Sphere systems. The holes were slammed shut, and the tuning controls for the holes destroyed.

“When that Sphere died, its system was wrecked. Its Captive Suns, no longer held in their orbits by the Sphere’s gravitic control, flew out into space. A few of those stars retained at least some of their planets, but many more planets were flung off. The Shattered Sphere rules no suns, no worlds. It is alone in space, with nothing but the corpses of spacegoing Charonians for company. The wormhole links to other systems were slammed shut when the Sphere died.

“In the meantime, the Adversary apparently went back down a wormhole and remained there, living in slow time. It was, in effect, asleep for most of the last 147 years.

“However, five years ago, the Abduction woke it up. Earth’s transition through the wormhole between the Solar System and the Earth-Sphere system created a… disturbance… in the wormhole network. Without going into a great deal of mathematics on the subject of gravity-wave propagation, suffice it to say that the transition of a massive object through a wormhole would set up a resonance pattern—a gravitational vibration, if you will. When the Earth was stolen, its passage caused a disturbance that reverberated up and down the wormhole links, not unlike waves in a pond moving out from the point where a rock hits.

“This uncontrolled, unshieldable vibration was like a blast of light, illuminating not only the position of wormhole links between the dead Sphere’s system and the Earth-Sphere system, but the precise tuning and resonance setting for them. Then, we sent the kill command to the Charonians here. That kill command was loud and indiscriminate, and likewise may have served to illuminate the worm-hole links.

“Thus the Adversary learned exactly where to find a new Sphere system. It will take some time for the Adversary to respond. It is possible it has not responded yet. But it will. It will emerge from its gravity well—unless it has already. It will move toward the center of the gravity-wave disturbance. It will go through that link, and attempt an attack on the Earth-Sphere system. It will do all these things—unless it has done them already.

“The Earth-Sphere must know all this better than we do. Once the Sphere is certain that it is to be attacked, it will set to work preparing to defend itself by every means it can.

“The Earth is in terrible danger. If the Sphere dies, Earth will almost certainly be ejected out into the depths of interstellar space, or smash into some other body in the Earth-Sphere system.

“However, the odds are poor that Earth would survive even that long. The best defense against an Adversary unit that has penetrated into a given Sphere system is to smash a planet into it at the highest-possible velocity, before the Adversary has a chance to split-breed.

As the Adversary will be homing in on the wormhole exit that Earth came through, Earth is the most convenient rock. It is going to be smashed to rubble in the first few milliseconds after that Adversary gets through.”

Larry hesitated and looked around the auditorium.

“That is what will happen. Unless, of course, it already has happened. With every day that passes, the odds are higher that Earth has already been destroyed.”