The Shattered Sphere the-2 Read online

  The Shattered Sphere

  ( The Hunted Earth - 2 )

  Roger Macbride Allen

  The sequel to The Ring of Charon.

  Humans face two enemies—the implacably powerful Charonians who kidnapped the Earth, and the mysterious Adversary, before whom the Charonians quake in fear. Can an unlikely combination of scientists, corpses, dictators, and professional troublemakers withstand both threats and return the Earth to its proper place in the Solar System?

  The Shattered Sphere

  by Roger MacBride Allen

  To Eleanore Maury Fox—

  Home is where she is.

  Author’s Note

  “Have you finished The Shattered Sphere yet?”

  That is the question I have been asked more than any other since The Ring of Charon came out. Readers, friends, editors, agents, and all sorts of other people have wanted to know. I am more pleased than you can know that the answer is now “yes.” Here it is.

  To everyone who has been patient—and impatient— for this book, let me say thank you. I hope that the results have been worth the wait.

  Special thanks are due to my editor, Debbie Notkin, and to Beth Meacham, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Tom Doherty, and the entire staff at Tor Books. Now, at long last, I can stop hiding from them. Thanks also, once again, to Linda Silk, whose artwork graced the advance reading copies. Thanks to my parents, Tarn and Scottie, for their comments on the manuscript.

  And finally, thanks also to Eleanore Maury Fox, to whom this book is dedicated. She read the original manuscript and provided a great deal of firm and much-needed advice. There are, needless to say, a lot of other reasons for me to say thanks to Eleanore, but that’s another story—one that isn’t anywhere near done yet.

  —Roger MacBride Allen, London, August 1993

  Dramatis Personae

  The Autocrat of Ceres. The absolute ruler of Ceres, and de facto hegemonic leader of the entire Asteroid Belt. By tradition, the holder of the office renounces his or her name and all links to his or her previous life upon entry into office.

  Joanne Beadle. Operations technician at Kourou Spaceport, South America. She acts, rather reluctantly, as Wolf Bernhardt’s personal assistant during his stay there.

  Dr. Wolf Bernhardt. Head of the U.N. Directorate of Spatial Investigation (DSI) and Director of the Multisystem Research Institute (MRI).

  Dr. Sondra Berghoff. Director of the Ring of Charon Gravities Research Station at Plutopoint.

  Canpopper Notworthit. A rather inefficient cargo handler on NaPurHab.

  Dr. Selby Bogsworth-Stapleton. A “Leftover,” that is, a citizen of Earth stranded in the Solar System by the Abduction. The only trained archaeologist on the Moon, she heads the exploration of the Lunar Wheel and the Wheelway Tunnel system.

  Sianna Colette. A young woman, orphaned as a teenager by the pulsequakes of the Abduction. As the book opens, she is a graduate student working at the Multisystem Research Institute (MRI) in New York.

  Dr. Larry O’Shawnessy Chao. Formerly a youthful and very junior researcher at the Gravities Research Station, Pluto. Chao accidentally activated the huge Charonian being, the Lunar Wheel, and thus inadvertently set in motion the events leading to the Abduction. As the book opens, he is working on the Graviton project.

  Lucian Dreyfuss. Once a technician at the Moon’s Orbital Traffic Control Center, he was captured by the Charonians in the Rabbit Hole. He is presumed dead.

  Eyeballer Maximus Lock-on. A rather moody and forceful woman, she is head of navigation and guidance on NaPurHab.

  Dr. Ursula Gruber. Director of Observational Studies at MRI and a key adviser to Wolf Bernhardt.

  Dr. Gerald MacDougal. Second-in-command of the Terra Nova. He is married to Marcia MacDougal. A born-again Christian, he is a trained exobiologist.

  Dr. Marcia MacDougal. Once a planetary engineer on Venus Initial Station for Operational Research (VISOR), now a researcher in Charonian symbology. She escaped from the Naked Purple Movement in Tycho Purple Penal as a teenager. She returned to the Moon when VISOR was moth-balled. As the book opens, she is based at the Lunar North Pole and involved in research into Charonian language and behavior there.

  Wally Sturgis. An expert in computer modeling. As the book opens, he is employed at the Multisystem Research Institute.

  Ohio Template Windbag. The Maximum Windbag, or leader, of the Naked Purple Habitat (NaPurHab).

  Tyrone Vespasian. Director of the Lucian Dreyfuss Memorial Research Station (a.k.a. “The Rabbit Hole”) at the Moon’s North Pole.

  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.

  “The Terra Nova was, of course, built to be the first starship. In the parlance of the time, she was a sleep-ship. Her passengers were meant to be frozen before departure, and to sleep away the long years and decades between the stars, then thawed and decanted on arrival at the target star system. However, budget restraints forced the mothballing of the great ship a few months short of completion. She was never launched toward Alpha Centauri, as intended. Instead, she sat in a parking orbit of Earth.

  “As chance would have it, the Terra Nova was swept up along with Earth when the planet was abducted into its new surroundings in the Multisystem. The Terra Nova was immediately set to work studying Earth’s startling new environs.

  “The ship’s designers named her for a famous British exploration ship of the early twentieth century. No doubt they would have chosen a name of better omen had they examined the history, rather than the myth and romance, surrounding that namesake vessel. That Terra Nova, Commander Scott’s ill-fated command vessel on his fatal trip to the South Pole, was a rather ordinary ship, a whaling vessel pressed into Antarctic service, quite ill-suited to exploration or Antarctic conditions. As a result, she found herself in the greatest of difficulties on many occasions, putting her crew in great and needless peril. Her unsuitability was a contributing factor in the expedition’s disastrous failure.

  “Our Terra Nova, on the other hand, was built for the sole purpose of exploration—but found herself forced into virtually every other role instead. By turns a mothballed hulk, a military craft, a rescue ship, a lifeboat, and many other things besides, she earned fame for doing all the things she was never meant to do.

  “In one of the great ironies of the history of explor
ation, the ship built to search for and colonize new worlds trillions of kilometers from Earth instead found herself among any number of new and fertile worlds a mere stone’s throw away from Earth—and yet she dared not approach any of them, let alone take up orbit or send down landers.”

  —Earth, in the Multisystem: A Chronicle of Exile, Jose Ortega, Central City Press, 2436

  Aboard the Terra Nova

  Deep Space

  THE MULTISYSTEM

  June 4, 2431

  “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 sil
ence, 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.”