The Shattered Sphere

Twenty-six It Goes In Here…

Dianne Steiger sat at the command chair on the bridge and tried to force the exhaustion from her mind. The news from NuPurHuh. Incredible. Absolutely incredible. Into the wormhole. Nine thousand plus people, dropping through into the unknown. God help them all. By the time the Terra Nova arrived at NaPurHab’s position, NaPurHab wouldn’t be there anymore.

Dianne was frightened for the people in the Naked Purple Habitat, but she had something more than a humanitarian interest in the fate of NaPurHab. She had her own ideas, her own theories—and her own nightmares.

At least the COREs were giving them less trouble. Only a handful of close encounters, and no more actual attacks. But even that was worrisome. Dianne could not get rid of the irrational feeling they were being herded.

Soon, very soon, she would have to make a decision. Bail out, abort the mission, and head meekly off into the depths of space—or else press on, head for the rendezvous point, and then…

She had spent too many long nights staring a hole in the overhead bulkhead, brooding over what the Charonians were, and where they came from—and who or what it was they feared.

Fear. Charonian fear. That was the key that turned the lock, the question that would lead to the answers. Dianne had watched the SCOREs appear, watched the Ghoul Modules come in and commandeer the corpse of the Moonpoint Ring, watched the way things had turned hard-edged recently. Up until a few months ago, the system had reminded Dianne of a huge, lumbering beast that could go where it wanted and do what it would. Now it was moving in panicky fear. Something, somewhere had told the Sphere that some threat was suddenly near. Things were nearing their climax.

And she was damned if the Terra Nova was going to miss the party.

Sianna Colette opened the door to her quarters and stuck her head out into the corridor. After the incident with the cleanup robot the night before, she was not going to venture into the hab’s public ways without careful consideration. NaPurHab was a madhouse. But that, Sianna thought, was the normal part. What was remarkable was the degree to which it was managing to organize itself and prepare for what everyone was calling the Big Dive, a term that seemed to come out of nowhere.

But then everything around here seemed to come from nowhere. Nothing made sense. The Boredway Gang started a petition that protested not the Dive, but the existence of the wormhole itself. She had learned the fine old Purple tradition of signing someone else’s name—preferably an outsider’s name—to a petition when someone shoved a page full of scrawls, scribbles and x’s, all purporting to be Sianna’s own signature, under her nose. She had signed Wolf Bernhardt’s name.

But the hab did, after all, work. It kept its citizens alive, and managed to hold itself together. The Purp had to be doing something right. Certainly the manic enthusiasm with which the entire populace was preparing for the Dive was impressive. Even if the cleaning robots did chase people around now and again.

The coast seemed to be clear, more or less, except for the man editing the graffiti on the opposite wall. Sianna stepped out into the corridor, determined that, this time, she would find her way to the Eyeball Central—the navigation room—without getting lost. She made her way through the tangle of passageways turned into living spaces, and living spaces turned into found art, and lost art turned back into passageways.

At last she came upon the hatchway marked I-BALLS OWNLEE. She had made it this time, without needing to ask directions of a local who might improvise a fictional route, or send her in exactly the wrong direction, just to demonstrate the foolishness of linear thinking, or something. Or else tell her she was going to be given false directions, and then give exact, precise, and accurate instructions on how to get there.

She stepped inside and closed the hatch behind her with a distinct sense of relief. In here, things were relatively sane. More or less. After all, Wally was there.

Sianna had been working herself to exhaustion every night, dragging herself back to her cabin only when her eyes just would not open any longer. But Wally had always been there when she left, and there when she arrived the next day. Sianna didn’t think Wally had left Eyeball Central in the last two days. He was right where she had left him last night, hunched over a video display, staring intently at something or other, not even aware she had come in. Sianna didn’t even try to offer him a greeting. Just like old times.

Eyeball came in a minute or two after Sianna, and offered Sianna a smile, of sorts. A tricky woman, Eyeball was, and not too much interested in the Purple way of doing a thing if that way did not suit her. Her lab space was immaculate. No rubbish heaved in corners, no drawings scribbled on the walls. Wolf Bernhardt himself kept no tidier an office.

“Good morning,” Sianna said.

“Morn,” Eyeball said. “Least morn or less. Losing track.”

“I know the feeling,” Sianna said. “But we’re getting there.”

“ ’Less there’s getting us,” Eyeball said, rather cryptically. She sat down at a workstation and got back to work.

Sianna nodded, to herself as much as anything. Talkative group. Of course, to be fair, Eyeball had to plan the precise trajectory through the wormhole, working off the numbers Sianna and Wally were developing on exactly where and when and what size the worm-hole would be.

Analyzing the wormhole events that had let the SCOREs pass through was Sianna’s job.

She had spent a good part of yesterday running playbacks of all the recorded passages of SCOREs through the hole, getting precise timings, positions and trajectories for all the events.

Well, back at it. Sianna told herself. She sat down at the console next to Wally’s and punched up the recorded images of the worm-hole events. She could have cued it up at the point she had left off the night before, but instead she ran it from the beginning, fast-forwarding through repeated blue-white flashes of the wormhole bursting open, the SCOREs heading through, the wormhole slamming shut behind them.

Sianna stared at the screen, watching the wormhole opening and shutting, at the stream of SCOREs heading into it. Opening, shutting, on, off, in, out, on, off.

Wait a second. Sianna had been a bit slouched down in her seat. Now she sat straight up. Wait a second. On-off, pos-neg, yes-no, zero-one, dot-dash. The most basic signaling system. Signaling… Yes!

“Wally,” she said, “Wally!”

Wally looked up from his datapack, and turned to look at Sianna. He was clearly surprised to see her, but that was no surprise.

“Huh? What? What… what is it?” he asked.

Eyeball looked up from her own work. Sianna hurried on with her question before Eyeball could shush her.

“What would happen to an inert wormhole aperture with the same default settings as this one when this one opens up and something goes through? Like, say, the Earthpoint Singularity back in the Solar System. What would happen?”

Wally frowned and looked off into space for a second. “Well, if current theory is anywhere near right, in some dimensional domains, Earthpoint and Moonpoint are contiguous. Well, more than contiguous. They aren’t just two adjacent planes in space, but two sides of the same plane, coplanar. Anything that affected one would have to affect the other. And of course the other side of the Moonpoint Wormhole is coplanar with whatever it’s linking up with.”

“Huh?” Eyeball asked. Straight or Purple, that seemed to be the standard response to one of Wally’s explanations.

Wally looked around and found two sheets of scratch paper. “C’m‘ere,” he said. “I’ll show you.” The two women got up and stood over him at the console. He put one sheet of paper down on the counter top, then put a second sheet on top of it. “The sheets of paper are the wormholes, and the space between them is the plane of normal space that divides them.” He lifted a corner of the top piece of paper and pointed to the one below. “Here’s the bottom sheet, the first wormhole. The bottom side of it exits out to wherever the SCOREs are going. Top side opens up here in the Multisystem, in the middle of the Moonpoint Ring.” He dropped the corner of the upper sheet back down on top of the first. “Top sheet. The bottom side of it also opens here in the Multisystem, but the top comes out from the Earthpoint Singularity back in the Solar System.”

“Yeah, I got it,” Sianna said. This much she knew.

“Almost,” Eyeball said. “Go on.”

“Well, you could think of it in generations. Call the point we’re heading for Point X. Point X is the grandfather singularity, and it produced the Moonpoint Singularity. Moonpoint is the father to the Earthpoint Singularity back in the Solar System. Earthpoint would have to have similar resonance characteristics to its father and grand father, Moonpoint and Point X. Sort of like genetics. Characteristics would be passed down, with some variance—though not much. There’s probably no more than a fourth-power variance between them at best, enough to differentiate the Moonpoint from Earth-point and Point X.”

“Great, good to know,” Sianna said. “But it doesn’t answer my question.”

“It doesn’t?” Wally asked. Clearly he felt that the next stage in the reasoning was utterly self-evident.

Sianna looked to Eyeball and shrugged. “Does it?”

“Not so I suss, nohow. Come on, Walls—what would be popping at Earthpoint ifwhen Charos drop SCOREs down Moonpoint tube?”

Wally had not ever shown the slightest trouble understanding Purpspeak. “Earthpoint ought to ring like a bell, resonate in all sorts of gravitic frequencies. Sympathetic vibration. We’ve always assumed that a lot of the hardware on a Ring-and-Hole pair was to damp out that sort of vibration.”

“That’s what I thought,” Sianna said. “Okay. Would the people back in the Solar System be able to detect that? If they were running any sort of gravitic detection gear hooked to the Lunar Wheel or the Ring of Charon?”

“They’d be lucky if it didn’t blow every circuit breaker on the detector grid. Absolutely. In fact, I doubt they’d need detectors. The Lunar Wheel itself would react. No way they could miss it.”

“Charon Ring?” Eyeball asked.

Wally thought for a second. “Maybe. If they were running in the right sort of detection mode, they might pick it up. If the folks on the Moon warned them, they could certainly recalibrate and listen for the next one. Of course, we don’t know for sure anyone is still running the Ring, or if anyone is observing the Lunar Wheel.”

“Okay,” Sianna said. “Good. Great. There have been lots of openings and closings, lots of SCOREs headed through. Something like a hundred so far, and maybe another dozen to go.”

“And they’d have been watching them,” Wally said, getting I he idea. “And they know reverb theory as well as we do. They’ll know it means something is up with us.”

“Holdit holdit holdit,” Eyeball said. “We’re going through, right? We’re gonna send a command set to pop the hatch on that thing and dive in. That command set. Has to go through to your Point X so’s the other end of the hole knows to open. Right?”

“Sure, right. We’ll send the signal the same way the Charonians do. Earth will send a radio beam to the Ghoul Modules. The Ghouls will respond by sending out command modulations on a gravitic carrier beam,” Wally said.

Eyeball leaned back, stared at the ceiling, and thought for a moment. “Now how ’bout folks back home in Solar, at Charon? They be able to detect commands, maybe read ’em and reap?”

Wally shrugged. “Read them, sure, but I don’t know what they’ll get out of them. All the signals are virtually identical. Without some sort of code key, like we got off the Lone World, it’ll just be the same burst of noise over and over.”

“No,” Sianna said. “They have a code key, sort of. They knew enough Charonian visual symbol language to close the wormhole five years ago. They’ll know it’s a wormhole transit signal, and they’ll have enough of the syntax to be able to get something out of it. Besides, the signals aren’t precisely identical. There are timing variables and mass variables.”

“Okay, they’ll be able to parse the signal, work out the grammar. Maybe even mimic the signal. But there won’t be anything in the signal they’ll be able to read and understand.”

Sianna stood up straight rather suddenly and put her hand over her mouth. “Wait a second. Wally, stick around. I get my best ideas around you. There will be nothing they can read in the signal—unless we put it there.”

“Say what?”

“There’s a null sequence in the command set,” Sianna said. “Like a comment line. It’s preceded by a symbol telling the Ghoul Modules’ processors to disregard the following sequences. Probably it’s a place to put in the Charonian equivalent of a manifest name, or an explanatory note. We could use it.”

“Could we put something in there?” Wally asked, in a tone of voice that made it clear that he was not concerned with the technical challenge, but whether they would be allowed to do so, as if the grown-ups wouldn’t let them fool around with the equipment that way.

Sianna nodded enthusiastically. “I don’t see why not. Wally, pull up that diagram of the signal syntax. I want to see how much room we have.”

Wally got out his notepack and worked the controls. He shook his head. “Not much. About thirty characters, tops. Can’t say much in that.”

“But enough to tell them it’s us,” Sianna said. “Enough to say it’s Earth, it’s people going through.”

“What good would that do?” Wally asked.

“At least it would tell them we’re still alive,” Sianna said. “We’ve been out of contact for five years. They have no idea whether or not we’re still here.”

“Could do more than that,” Eyeball said. “Would let them know they could use same command set on Earthpoint Singu—no, no, that fish ain’t tunable no more. The Ring of Charon, though. Maybe they could tweak it up enough to scoot a ship, send it thru true to Point X.”

“Wherever that is. Is that going to be doing them any favors?” Sianna asked. “Suppose we all get killed the second we go through, just after we’ve sent them an invitation to join us?”

“Risk worth it,” Eyeball said. “Think ’bout it. We can’t make passage to Solar Space nohow now. Suppose we find a real, perm way to get forth and back, use Point X place for long shortcut. Worth plenty, that.” Eyeball thought for a second. “Risk they might miss it, though. Mebbe we could send own shout, longer message? Just talk, without sending something through?”

“Not now,” Sianna said. “Maybe not ever. The only command set we know is the one the Lone World’s been sending. We don’t know any other way to do it, any other code set. And I don’t want to mess with a wormhole if I don’t know what I’m doing. Don’t forget this whole mess started when that Chao guy accidentally switched on the Earthpoint-Moonpoint wormhole. We might send a text message that also told the wormhole to convert its mass into energy, or something.”

“Could we do like that with this nullset thing, the comment line?” Eyeball asked.

Sianna frowned. “My God, I hadn’t thought of that. Wally? Could we do any damage using the nullset area?”

Wally shook his head, serenely—and disconcertingly—confident. “No way. Impossible. That null sequence area is safe. That’s the whole point of it.” But then he cocked his head to one side, and thought about it a little more. “At least I don’t think it could do any damage. Don’t see how it could. But, ah, I’m not quite sure I can make any promises.”

“Beautiful, Walls,” Eyeball said. “Glad you cleared that one up.”

“So? Well?” Sianna asked, looking toward Eyeball. “It’s your hab, your home,” she said. “You’re the pilot. Your call.”

“Yeah. Yeah. Wish weren’t.” Eyeball turned her back on the other two, and stepped over to the porthole. She looked out onto the depths of space, at the Moonpoint Ring, at the Multisystem beyond. “I got family Earthward,” she said. “Sis and pop live, mom longdead. Never gonna seem ’em again, likeward. But let ’em know I’m alive, that we made it? Gotta do that. Be sweet to let ’em know we all reet. Risk so high on diving the Hole anyhoo, it ain’t no nevermind to bet one more leetle chip.”

Sianna thought she had followed that, but she wasn’t sure. She looked at Wally. “She’s going to do it?” she asked.

Wally gave Sianna a strange look. “Of course,” he said. “Isn’t that what she just said?”

“This is madness,” said Wolf Bernhardt, watching the displays in his office. “I cannot believe that you agreed to this.”

“I didn’t agree to it, Wolf,” Ursula Gruber replied. “I suggested it, as you know perfectly well. And, I might add, you approved it.”

“For which I should have my head examined most carefully,” Wolf said. “Was there no other way? No way for them to escape at lower risk?”

“No,” Ursula said. “Nothing. This is their last, best, desperate hope.”

“We are ready to send the command set?” Wolf asked. “You have the latest update?”

“Yes, Wolf, yes. Everything has been made as ready as possible. We send the wormhole command in approximately sixty-five minutes. And they are already very much committed. They did the first burn an hour ago, changing their course. They are spiraling in on the wormhole, and they don’t have the power to pull out.”

“And the sensors and the cameras?”

“Up and running. We don’t think we’ll get more than about sixty seconds of transmission radioed back before the wormhole closes down. Maybe much less. With some luck, that will be enough to know what sort of place they are in.”

“And then the hole slams shut, and we know nothing much?”

“Precisely.”

“They could all die the moment after the wormhole closes, and we would not know. Any hope of reopening the wormhole afterwards?”

“Oh, yes,” Gruber said. “So long as we have a mass, a large one—to send through it.”

“Why should the wormhole care if we send something or nothing through?” Bernhardt asked.

“Because we don’t think the Ghoul Modules are smart enough to do the compensations a full Ring can do,” Gruber explained. “The amount of mass to be transferred is a major variable in a wormhole transfer. Get it wrong by any substantial amount, and the Ghoul Modules won’t have the capacity to absorb the excess power. They’ll burn out.”

“So tell the Ghouls we are sending nothing—or something very small—through.”

“The minimal mass is too high. We don’t know any way of doing a zero-load setting on the Ghoul Modules. After all, the reason they are there is to manage mass transfers. Maybe we can find ways around that, but we don’t know how yet.”

“ ‘We don’t know.’ The motto for our era.” Wolf stood up, turned around, and looked out his glass-wall window at the great city outside, the sun just setting over the gleaming towers. “ ‘We don’t know,’ ” he said again. “Ah, well. We’re about to start learning very quickly.”

Somewhere in the aft areas of the habitat, the main maneuvering thrusters cut off. “Second main trim burn complete,” Eyeball announced. “We are in the groove. I think.”

Sometimes talking—or thinking—in Purpspeak was not such a good idea, and more or less standard English was a wiser choixe. Eyeballer Maximus Lock-On figured that piloting a habitat through a wormhole with groundhogs for assistants was just such a time.

And they were heading through, and no mistake. Of course, a mistake, they would be heading in, not through. Either NaPurHab made it through, or the singularity at this end of the wormhole was just about to gain a little weight.

The hab was as battened down as it was ever going to be. They had spun it down to zero rotation, zero gee. The solar collectors were stowed, all the loose cargo was in theory strapped down, all personnel had been ordered to emergency stations until further notice— producing the usual number of protests from the kneejerker set—and all the docshops were standing by. Everything that could be done had been. But everything sure as hell wasn’t much.

Closer, closer, drifting closer.

Eyeballer swallowed hard and tweaked back the attitude controls by just half a hair. She was not piloting by the numbers anymore, but by feel, by guess. They were deep inside the probabilities now, so tangled up in the variables that there was no longer time to set up the problem, let alone work through logical, mathematical solutions.

Too slow, Eyeball told herself. They were too slow, by the tiniest bit. What would happen if the wormhole slammed shut while the stern of the hab was still moving through?

“Stand by,” Sturgis said. “Variable projection shows us coming up on another Ghoul pulse. Probability peak in ten seconds.”

Eyeball glanced toward the prob display, absorbed the data on the display without really seeing it. “Got it, Walleye. Hanging.” Had to hand to the groundhog—he was good.

Obviously, the Ghouls were adjusting for the mass imbalance caused by NaPurHab itself. At least that gave Wall some sort of way of guessing what they would do next. If the Ghouls followed the trim pattern he was predicting, then the hab would have to slow down its approach again—by almost exactly the amount she had just gotten through speeding them up. Damnation! This was getting out of control. The Ghoul Modules were doing their best to stabilize the worm-hole, and Eyeball was constantly adjusting NaPurHab’s trajectory, trying to move with sufficient precision to make it through the hole, even as the hab’s movement destabilized the gravity patterns the Ghouls were trying to maintain. Two feedback loops combining to set up a meta-unstable synergy. Or something. She could write learned papers about it later. If they survived.

“Coming up on wormhole transit link activation,” Wally said. “MRI will send the command sequence to the Ghoul Mods in five seconds. Four, three, two, one—MRI sending commands.”

Eyeball felt her stomach turn to ice as nothing, nothing happened.

The wormhole would not open. They would crash into the singularity. But no. Speed-of-light delay, command-activation delay. It would take a little time, just a few seconds before—

Eyeball took her eyes off her control panels and risked a look through the main viewport. The wormhole came suddenly alive, pulsing, swirling, a strange serpentine tunnel with walls of swirling not-blue. The begloomed black-grey sky of the Multisystem brooded in the background, set off here and there with the dull red glow of reflected Spherelight on a dust cloud.

The undead Moonpoint Ring was a ring no more, but a band across the sky, too close to see more than a small piece of it at once. But she had no eyes for the ring. She looked back at the growing power of the wormhole.

“Pray God to save us, pray God to save us, pray God to save us.” A small voice at the back of the compartment was chanting the words over and over again, and, Eyeball realized, had been for some time. She glanced overshoulder. Sianna. Poor kid. How n hell had she got dropped into this mess? How any of them? Notime to thinkitall now.

Back to the transit calculations. Yawing just a bit, losing alignment, don’t over compensate, just the lightest of micropulses on the thrusters. Easy now. Easy.

“Tracking, tracking—the hab is closing on the singularity. A great deal of interference is being produced by the Moonpoint Ring and its interaction with the singularity,” DePanna said, as if she were talking about a little static during a call from her Aunt Minnie.

Dianne wished, not for the first time, that her detection officer could be a trifle more excitable. That hunk of iron and glass out there, with thousands of people on it, was about to drop straight on through into the unknown. Yet DePanna seemed more concerned by the fact that her display screens were difficult to interpret.

Of course, if DePanna had gotten emotional, Dianne would have relieved her of her duty. But being upset with someone else’s reaction helped keep Dianne from getting too upset herself.

“They shouldn’t have done it,” Gerald said. “It’s suicide.”

“What choice did they have?” Dianne asked. “It was suicide to stay where they were.”

“I know,” Gerald said. “I know—but even so.”

All the Earth was watching NaPurHab’s battle, its struggle to ride the rapids of gravity, the shoals of warping space, fighting past doom and disaster—toward what?

A dozen screen displays were running at once, and Dianne was trying to watch all of them. But the direct feeds from NaPurHab’s external cameras meant the most. They would show what sort of place NaPurHab got to.

Assuming it got to anywhere at all.

Getting closer, closer, toodamn close. The gaping mouth of the hole was getting larger and larger—but was it large enough? Did those straights back on Earth really think they had a strong enough capiche on this thing to pry the hole open big enough for something the size of a hab to punch through?

Back off. Bail out. Abort this. This is crazy. But there was very little point in listening to the panicked gibberings of her hindbrain. They had passed the point of no return long, long ago. We’re going to slam into that damned hole anyhow, anyway, she told herself. Shush. Quiet, concentrate.

“Ghoul Modules commencing compensation,” Sturgis reported. “Attempting to use gravitics control to pilot us in. Right on predicted schedule.”

“Oh, good,” Eyeball said. Wally had predicted that the Charos might try and manipulate the hab’s course, setting it into the ideal transit path for a SCORE with the mass of the hab—which was not the right path for the hab. Eyeball would have to compensate for the attempted corrections as well.

“Confirming attempt at gravitic course compensation,” Wally said.

Eyeball suppressed the urge to swear. The man sounded pleased that the Charonians were going to take another crack at killing them all. After all, it proved that he had gotten the problem right. Wally was born to the Naked Purple. “I’m getting the distortion now,” Eyeball said.

Then the sounds started. The hab itself creaked, once, quietly, and then subsided. Too many shifting stresses were grabbing at the structure and the fabric of the poor old hab. Eyeball knew it was but a precursor of some truly serious noise. The tidal stresses were going to build up ferociously in the next few minutes.

The theory was that the hab could take it—but the damn thing was so old. NaPurHab had passed through a lot of hands before the Purps had taken possession. Eyeball was reasonably sure the original designers had not intended the thing to hold together for 150 years, let alone be dropped through a wormhole.

But none of that mattered now. NaPurHab had run out of choices long ago. A thousand things could go wrong, a thousand ways they could all be destroyed. Whether the hab crashed into the event horizon, was smashed by the SCOREs, was ripped apart by tidal stress, or was destroyed by a clumsy pilot at the helm, the result would be the same. She could get this exactly right, and they could still all get killed. Somehow, that made her feel better.

They were skewing to port just a tad. She tweaked the att jets a trifle and took a deep breath.

“Tidal forces becoming significant,” Wally announced, and, as if on cue, there was another low moan as a support shifted its load.

Eyeball tried to ignore her fears. Get it right. No excuses, no second chances, no apologies. An alarm bell sounded behind her, and then another, and another. But they hadn’t held an alarm drill since Eyeball had joined the nav team. Hull breach? Power short? The galley out of coffee? Never mind. She had to pilot this thing and there was nothing she could do. Let the others worry about everything else. Someone cut the alarms and silence returned, at least for a moment. Closer, closer. She could see the motion now, without any effort, see the wormhole coming closer, swelling wide. Or was the worm-hole aperture actually expanding? A sudden, hard jolt punched at the habitat, and the main lighting system cut out. A sort of rippling shudder moved over Eyeball, and she grabbed at the yaw controls, fighting to keep the hab on the right course and heading, even as the massive tidal forces strained to tear it apart.

Closer, closer, the inner depth of the hole now visible. Eyeball looked up to see how far off the Moonpoint Ring was from here— and saw nothing but the not-blue-white nothingness of the wormhole wall. They were inside it, swallowed whole by the hole, or maybe swallowed hole by the whole.

But they couldn’t be in or through, or over, or across—not yet. No. Eyeball could see nothing on the other side. The seconds felt like hours. A new, deeper, shuddering vibration grabbed at the hab. Something wrenched at them, pulled at them, flared across them.

Eyeball looked up again, ahead, toward their destination. An enormous blood-black shape, far too large to be seen as a whole, swallowed up half the horizon, its huge surface smashed and pitted and scored. And there, dead ahead, a wizened little ruin of a world seen in half phase hung over the huge black-red form beyond.

The Naked Purple Habitat moved forward, down into the wormhole, toward the strange worlds on the other side—

—And then they were gone.