The Shattered Sphere

One Boarding Party

Others called it the Adversary, but it had no name for itself, or even a sufficient awareness of self for a name to be meaningful. The distinction between individual and group was as meaningless to it as it would be to a volume of water that happens to be divided and then recombined. The Adversary could divide itself, and merge itself, to whatever degree it chose. But the Adversary was, ultimately, one.

It lived in the warm, slow, soft recesses of heavy gravity, of gravity fields powerful enough to slow time down to a reasonable rate of speed. As seen from out in the cold and dark distortions of fast-time space, the Adversary was deep inside a truncated wormhole aperture, seemingly unheeding of the outside universe.

But it was not so, even if the slowed passage of time inside the ruined wormhole might make it so appear. It was aware of its surroundings, even if it was slow to react to them.

And it had detected a vibration in the fabric of the gravitic links. Some time past, as measured in the cold and dark of fast time, there had been a series of disturbances. As a series of lightning flashes might briefly illuminate all of a darkened landscape, and so serve to guide one across it, the gravitic vibrations made much that was hidden suddenly visible. The Adversary could see the path to new sources of power, of energy, illuminated across the expanses of wormhole links and fast-time space.

Slowly, oh so slowly as seen from fast-time space, it began to move.

“Hijacker now five kilometers from the Close-Orbiting Radar Emitter.” The tracking officer kept up her steady, monotone reports. A half million kilometers away, the long stern chase was drawing to its close. Terra Nova might have built and launched Hijacker, but the mother ship was nothing but an observer now. There was nothing she could do to help. Captain Dianne Steiger stared at the main bridge screen, at the huge lump of rock that was the CORE, straining her eyes for the dim, tiny dot that was Hijacker, the frail, tiny ship that had departed the Terra Nova nearly a month before.

Her hands gripped the arms of her command chair hard, her fingers dug deep into its fabric. She longed for a cigarette, but she had smoked the last one on board two years before. The CORE and Hijacker might be hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, but that didn’t make the little ship’s mission any less important. Hijacker’s crew had to succeed. They had to, or else it was time to change the Terra Nova’s name to the Flying Dutchman and be done with it.

The damnable COREs, the endless thousands of COREs, had prevented Dianne’s ship from approaching any planet for the last five years. The Terra Nova could not even return home to Earth, for Earth had been surrounded by its own swarm of COREs.

But this CORE was out in the depths of space, nowhere near a planet, all by itself, traveling between worlds on some unknowable task of its own. Maybe, just maybe, this one the men and women of the Terra Nova could take on.

“Hijacker now three kilometers from the CORE,” the tracking officer reported.

Dianne stared harder at the screen. Ah, there she was, just coming into view of the long-range infrared cameras. Even with all the enhancers cranked up all the way, Hijacker was nothing but a dim brown dot crawling into the picture frame. Staring at the image made Dianne’s eyes swim. She blinked to clear her vision, and found she had lost track of the hard-to-see blob of color. Then the Artificial Intelligence system, the Artlnt, running the display system threw a yellow target circle centered around Hijacker. Much better.

No need to throw any such circle around the CORE, of course. The alien ship was the size of an asteroid, and all too easy to see. In fact it was an asteroid. Perhaps even calling it an alien ship was a bit misleading. Dianne glanced to her left, where Gerald MacDougal was sitting, staring at the screen himself.

Gerald always argued, quite plausibly, that the CORE was as much crew and captain as it was ship, one semi-organic whole. Certainly the CORE was alive. More or less. Unless you chose to regard it wholly as a machine. Dianne sighed and gave it up. Nothing was ever clear when you were dealing with the Charonians. And even if they were the most deadly enemy that humanity had ever faced, and even if the Charonian’s utter failure to notice that humans existed was the one thing that kept humanity from being destroyed, there was something damn mortifying in the arrogant way the Charonians steadfastly ignored everything human. Cockroaches got more attention from humans than humans got from Charonians. Sometimes Dianne thought it would be a victory just to get the other side to acknowledge the existence of humans.

“Any change in radar emissions?” Gerald asked. Any shift in radar could be a warning that the CORE had spotted Hijacker. The Terra Nova was not putting out any radar herself, but the ship’s passive detectors were tuned and focused, watching the CORE’s emissions for any changes caused either by the CORE’s beams being deflected or by the CORE changing its active search pattern.

“No, sir. No change in radar emissions, no target-induced shift in outgoing beam. No new activity that we can detect.”

That was good news, or at least the absence of bad news. CORE stood for “Close-Orbiting Radar Emitter.” This one was not in close orbit of anything at the moment, but it sure as hell was emitting radar like crazy.

The radar was meant to detect any object large enough to threaten whatever planet the CORE happened to be protecting. If it detected a threatening meteor, the CORE would shift course and smash itself into the incoming rock, knocking the rock off course, if not smashing it to bits.

Such protection was necessary. Earth’s new home, the Multisystem, was full of spaceborne debris and clouds of dust, thick enough in places that comm lasers would not work. Terra Nova‘s lasers had not been able to punch through to Earth for weeks. The ship had been in radio silence for all that time as well, for fear of attracting the CORE’s attention.

The best estimate was that there was between fifty and five hundred times as much skyjunk as in the Solar System. Dianne shifted nervously. As if she needed something else to worry about, something else she could do nothing about. There was no real way to know that the Solar System had survived, and plenty of reason to fear that it had not.

But best to focus on the problem at hand. Counting the Earth, there were at least 157 planets in the Multisystem, and every last one of them was surrounded by a cloud of COREs. The COREs were a first-rate defense against asteroids, but the damned things went after ships and landing craft just as relentlessly, swarming out to smash into any craft whose projected course intercepted a planet. The Terra Nova dared not get within three hundred thousand kilometers of any of those 157 planets. There was no danger of starvation, of the ship dying, of course: Terra Nova was designed to cross the dark between the stars, and Earth could still send the occasional outbound resupply ship. The COREs did not seem to care about objects moving out from a planet—most of the time. Something like half the outbound supply cargoes made it through.

No, survival was not the issue—the question was one of the ship’s usefulness, of its meaning. What was the point of a starship that could not get near a planet? Terra Nova had long since learned all she could about the Charonians from 300,000 kilometers away.

But Hijacker might be the key. If the small, stealthy ship could land on this CORE undetected, if her crew could make use of the tiny scraps of information that were all humanity knew about the COREs specifically and the Charonians generally, it was just possible they could take over the CORE, learn how to control it. Then maybe, just maybe, they could find a way to make all the COREs back off, find a way that would allow the Terra Nova to send landing craft to explore some of those worlds. Earth could launch new spacecraft, and humanity would have a chance to rebuild the orbital facilities that had been destroyed.

Maybe, just maybe, getting a prize crew aboard a CORE would be the first step toward humanity’s reclaiming control of its destiny. The second stealthship, the Highwayman, was nearing completion, down in the Terra Nova’s massive holds. If this first attempt worked, they would be ready to capture another CORE almost immediately. If the first stealthship worked.

Hijacker was supposed to be invisible to radar, built with every possible trick of stealth technology that the crew of Terra Nova could manage. But no object could be made completely invisible at all detection frequencies, and the closer Hijacker got to the CORE, the more likely it was that the CORE would spot her. In fact, never mind radar. If the CORE used visual or infrared, it would be all over. There was no evidence that COREs had any sort of infrared or visual sense—but there was no proof they didn’t, either.

Hijacker was painted matte black to make her hard to spot visually, but there was damned little they could do to hide the fact that Hijacker was warmer than empty space. After all, if the Terra Nova could track her on infrared from a range of a half million klicks, there had to be some chance that the CORE could spot her three klicks away.

Dianne wished to hell she knew how things were going on the little ship. But Hijacker had to maintain radio silence, and she was not large enough to carry the sort of pointing and tracking gear required to keep a comm laser pointed accurately over long range. There was no way to know more than what the screen and the tracking officer could tell her.

Now came the worst part, the most dangerous part. Hijacker was moving slowly in relation to the massive CORE, but she still needed to match velocities with the behemoth. That meant firing some sort of reaction thruster. Standard fusion rockets were out of the question, of course—they would light up a radar screen like a Christmas tree. But there were other choices besides fusion rockets.

“She should start braking any time,” said Gerald MacDougal. “I pray to God this works.”

Hijacker used cold gas rockets—nothing more or less than compressed-air jets. The jets were hideously inefficient and awkward. The engineers had had a devil of a time preventing the tanks of supercompressed air from throwing their own substantial radar shadows. It was a terrible solution. There had to be a better way. No one had found it, though. The best that could be said of the compressed-air rockets was that no one could think of anything less bad.

But, still, it ought to work. Radar of any sort was going to have trouble detecting rocket thrust that was literally nothing more than cold thin air.

The tracking officer spoke again, relentlessly calm. “We are showing change-of-rate on Hijacker. She has commenced her braking maneuver.”

And now came the moment of truth. There had been no way to know until now. No way to be sure the CORE could not detect a compressed-air jet until they tried it.

“Any change in radar emissions?” Gerald asked again.

“Nothing, sir. Hijacker still braking.”

“Come on, Hijacker,” Dianne whispered, staring at the screen. Seconds turned to minutes, and the tiny brownish dot crept toward its target, a flea on its way to attack an elephant, moving more and more slowly as its braking maneuver continued. Time itself seemed to stretch out, expand.

Until it moved all too quickly.

“Change in backscatter pattern!” the tracking officer cried out. “Beam transmission seems unchanged, but we are reading a new interference pattern. I say again, a new backscatter pattern.”

“What the hell sort of pattern?” Dianne demanded. Backscatter meant that whatever was causing the change was directly between the CORE and the Terra Nova, illuminated from behind as it was detected by the TN’s sensors.

“Searching archives for pattern match,” the tracking officer said. “Oh my God.” For the first time, the young officer betrayed emotion. Suddenly fear hung heavy in her words. “Dust, ma’am. We… we have a pattern match on a radar beam reflecting off rock dust. And the cloud is expanding.”

And Dianne’s insides were suddenly nothing more than ice. She knew what was happening, what happened next. There was no way around it. Hijacker’s gas jets had struck the surface of the CORE, dislodged dust that had no business existing on that surface, kicked it up into open space. The CORE’s radar beams were striking that dust—and if the Terra Nova could read the change in the beam, so could the CORE. Hijacker’s designers had considered the danger, and rejected it as minor. After all, this very CORE had been seen undergoing the most violent maneuvers. Surely the massive accelerations would have dislodged any dust layers long ago.

But no, they had been mistaken. And the Universe was about to extract its usual penalty for being wrong. The CORE would detect the dust cloud, refocus its radar beams to bear down on Hijacker, and that would be that. If the CORE focused its complete attention on the tiny volume of space that contained Hijacker, there could be no escape.

There was silence on the bridge. There was nothing to be said, nothing to be done. Perhaps the tracking officer should have kept up her reports, but silence said more than any words she could offer.

The CORE started to turn, coming about, bringing its nose to bear on Hijacker. The tiny brownish spot on the screen, the spot that was ten men and women, ten of their friends and lovers and colleagues, the spot that was months of planning and years of hope, hung helpless in the sky.

And then the CORE moved, crossed the distance between itself and Hijacker in the space of five heartbeats. The brown dot vanished, brushed aside as the CORE swept into the space it had occupied. Light flared in the display, and that was all. The display system’s Artlnt faded out the target circle that had highlighted the ship’s position, and the CORE resumed its previous heading.

Five hundred thousand kilometers away, there was a cloud of debris, of smashed bodies in torn pressure suits, of crumpled machines and ruined engines. Perhaps not all of them were dead yet, perhaps the gods of luck had been cruel enough to catch one or two of them in their pressure suits, leaving them to survive for a time, beyond all hope, but still breathing, hearts still beating, helpless to do anything but watch the wreckage and the bodies disperse into the black and empty space of the Multisystem. Could there be a lonelier death?

Captain Dianne Steiger still stared in the direction of the view-screen, but she saw nothing at all. “Nothing is changed,” she said at last, in a voice that was cold and hard. “That CORE is still our best chance. Our only chance. It could be years before another one goes on a trajectory we can follow. We either solve this problem, board that CORE, or give up and die.”

Gerald MacDougal looked over at her, and she looked back at him. After close to five years aboard ship together, she knew what he would say, how he would say it. She answered the words he did not need to speak.

“I know, Gerald. They are dead. We will mourn when there is time,” she said. “But if we do not break out of this trap, find a way to get this ship to a planet, we might as well be as dead as Hijacker.”

She slumped back in her command chair and stared at the terrifying emptiness in the screen, the emptiness where the Hijacker had been. “Find a way,” she said. “Find a solution. We were nearly, nearly, there. Find the solution and give it to the second stealthship, the Highwayman.”

Captain Dianne Steiger tried not to think about the next crew of ten she was sending out to likely death. But the Terra Nova’s survival, the mission, the people of Earth came first.

And so she spoke the words. “I want the Highwayman launched toward the CORE within a week.”

“Dianne—Captain—we can’t!” Gerald MacDougal protested. “We’d just be dooming another crew.”

“Then give me another choice, Gerald,” she snapped, turning to glare at him with desperate eyes.

Gerald stared right back at her. “At least let me break radio silence and contact Earth before we launch. It’s a million-to-one shot, but maybe they’ve come up with something. There’s no point in hiding out here anymore—that CORE is sure to have spotted us now. Hijacker was directly between us and the CORE. The CORE must have gotten a radar echo off us as well when it threw that beam onto Hijacker.”

“Tracking?” Dianne asked, not breaking eye contact with Gerald.

“Dr. MacDougal is right, Captain,” the tracking officer said. “There was a very strong direct pulse onto the hull. The CORE must have picked up the echo.”

Dianne knew that there was no realistic hope that Earth had come up with anything. After five years of utter failure, the researchers had all given up or gotten bogged down in blind alleys. She knew that even a brief, tight-beam radio transmission might be enough to spook the CORE, send it to the attack. There was no sense in delay, no rational reason to agree.

But—but even she was horrified at the idea of trying again. The second stealthship could only have a lower chance of success than the first.

For the CORE would know to watch for them now.

To hell with sense and rational reason. “Very well,” she said. “Go ahead and make your contact, Dr. MacDougal.”

She sighed and stared at the main screen and the brooding bulk of the CORE. After all, what harm could there be in waiting a day or two before sending a second crew to its certain death?