The Ring of Charon the-1 Read online

  “Good,” McGillicutty said, completely missing the sarcasm. “Chenlaw, what’s with the microwave receiver? I need it now, not next week!”

  “For God’s sake, Hiram, give me more than thirty seconds.”

  “Why?” McGillicutty asked. “It shouldn’t take anywhere near that long to swing it around twenty degrees.”

  “I have to swing it around the other way, through three hundred forty degrees, or point it straight at the power generators as it slews around,” Chenlaw replied through clenched teeth. “Do you want it blown out when it gets into position?”

  But McGillicutty wasn’t even listening anymore. He was on the intercom to one of the other labs, chattering on about neutrino backscatter. Chenlaw turned and shook her head at Marcia. Marcia shrugged back. What could you do? The man was utterly impossible.

  “Okay, boys and girls,” McGillicutty said in a loud, cheerful voice, patently unaware how many of his co-workers wanted to strangle him. He checked his chronometers. “Earth should be under the beam already, and has been for seven minutes. The event radius is moving toward us. Stand by to receive results data in three minutes—mark! All instruments and recorders should be operating now to establish pre-event background levels.”

  McGillicutty managed to shut up long enough to check his own control board. “Two minutes,” he announced at last.

  Under the beam for seven minutes. Marcia suddenly found herself thinking of her husband, Gerald MacDougal, back on Earth, back home in the lab in Vancouver. Even at the speed of light, he was ten long minutes away. But it wasn’t numbers and seconds. It was that Gerald was in the past, his reality cut off from hers by the wall of time. No matter what he did, no matter what happened to him, she could not possibly know about it until the sluggish lightwaves crossed the void between the worlds.

  He could die in the midst of sending her a live message and she would not know it for ten minutes.

  If, for Marcia, Gerald was trapped in her past, then she was trapped in his past. Each in the other’s past. There was something deeply disturbing about that, as if both of them were frozen in place, like some insect trapped in Precambrian tree sap, imprisoned as the sap fossilized into crystal perfection, leaving its victim perfectly preserved, trapped in the amber of time.

  “Twenty seconds,” McGillicutty announced. This weird pulsation and manipulation of gravity was not something she understood. She was more than a little afraid of it, to tell the truth. Somehow, it smacked of magic, of voodoo and mystery. How could there be a beam made of gravity waves? It even sounded like a nonsense phrase, a cheese made of xylophones, a cloud made of steel.

  She blinked and forced herself to concentrate on the display screen. “Ten seconds.” Nine minutes and fifty seconds ago, the beam had struck her husband’s world, but that stroke of time would not pass through her frame of experience for another ten seconds, nine seconds, eight seconds—she fiddled with her tuning controls, sharpening the image—four, three, two, one, zero—

  Her screen display went wild, and her terminal speaker was suddenly overwhelmed by a powerful screeching roar of noise. She cut off the audio and stared in astonishment at the oscilloscope trace on the screen. Something was producing a powerful and complex signal out there. There almost seemed to be a pattern to it, as if it were repeating over and over again.

  It took her a moment to look up and realize that the rest of the people in the lab were more surprised than she was. Even McGillicutty seemed to be in shock. It took her significantly longer to realize that the squeal on the twenty-one-centimeter band was all that was left of Earth.

  * * *

  With a bump and a clunk, the Pack Rat undocked herself from the Moonside cargo port of the Naked Purple Habitat. Dianne Steiger glanced at the chronometer: 1001 GMT, just after ten in the morning, departure right on schedule, though it didn’t come soon enough for her. If there were weirder places than NaPurHab in the Solar System, she didn’t want to know about them. The Rat backed off with a cough from her control jets, engaged her gyros and came about to a new heading. The big bright ball of Earth swung into view through the starboard port.

  With folded hands, Dianne Steiger sat at the control panel and watched the proceedings.

  The massive, somehow scruffy bulk of NaPurHab loomed large in her forward port. NaPurHab flew a looping figure-eight orbit that shuttled back and forth around Earth and Moon. Right now the hab was headed down into the Earthside portion of its orbit. That was where the Rat got off, fired engines to circularize her orbit and get on course for her next port of call. Dianne keyed the comm panel and called NaPurHab comm and traffic. “NaPurHab, this is Foxtrot Tango thirty-four, call signal Pack Rat, departing for deadhead run to High New York Habitat. On auto departure, now sending departure vector data on side channel. Please acknowledge.”

  “We copy you, Pack Rat. Departure plan received, recorded and approved. Slide on in to HNY easy. Milk the fatcats until they moo or meow. See you next time.” Chelated Noisemaker Extreme, also know as Frank Barlow, was a decent sort, even if he drifted into the stilted Naked Purple lingo now and again.

  “Thanks, Frank,” Dianne replied. “I’m looking forward to it.” Not exactly true, of course, but what the hell. On her job description, Dianne Steiger was called a pilot-astronaut. But she knew better. Dianne was a backup system. The robots, the automatics, the artificial intelligence routines—they were the astronauts. They did all the work. She was here because this freight run flew close to inhabited areas in the crowded regions of Earth orbit, and because the astronaut union was still fairly strong, if in decline.

  Union rules and safety regs required a pilot aboard in case the incredibly unlikely occurred and the automatics packed up while leaving the manual controls functional. Nice theory, except that virtually every mishap that could incapacitate the autos would wreck the Rat past all possibility of controlling her ever again, by any means. But regulations were regulations.

  Even the few tasks left to Dianne could just as easily have been done by machines. But it was deemed wise to give the pilots at least something to do, even if the computer could have controlled that circuit, and a servo could have sealed that hatch. A pilot left completely inactive, her reflexes completely dulled by boredom, was not likely to be of much use in an emergency. Or so went the theory. Dianne felt pretty dulled down, even so.

  Flying spaceships was supposed to be romantic, exciting, dangerous and challenging. Dianne had gone through eight years of training and ended up running a glorified delivery service.

  She was thirty-three years old, but looked older. Her hair was long and brown, half-gone to gray. At the moment she had it bound up in a tight braid coiled on top of her head. When she let it down, it was as wiry as a bottle brush. Her face was lined and lean, and her eyes were wide and bright. People who didn’t know her assumed at first sight that she hadn’t eaten in a week, Her face took expressions to their extremes. Her slightest smile lit up a room, her least frown was frightening.

  She sorely missed her cigarettes aboard ship. Someday they’d build a ship with an air system rated to handle tobacco smoke. She made up for it on the ground, though. She was a chain-smoker between flights, her fingers stained yellow with nicotine. She was small and slight of build, but surprisingly strong, with a bone-crushing handshake and a hard, muscular body built over her slender frame. Her appearance, her body, had helped her get a job. The shipping companies like their pilots small and quick.

  She had, quite literally, set her sights a lot higher than flying an orbital shuttle. She had been a candidate for the starship project, before they scrapped it. She’d been one test away from acceptance as a cold-sleep reserve pilot aboard the Terra Nova. She was to have been the third-wave pilot, thawed out when the first-wave pilot retired and the second-wave pilot took command. When the second-wave pilot died or retired—then she would have been the commander of a starship.

  Then the whole starship project had been canceled, victim of the Knowledge Crash recessi
on that had hit Earth and the rest of the Solar System. It was an era of retreat, surrender, drawing back from the frontiers to safety. So now the nearly completed Terra Nova rode in low Earth orbit, mothballed.

  The recession hadn’t offered much to ex-starship pilots. There weren’t any openings on the passenger lines, or even on the cargo ships moving between the major planets. And so Dianne was reduced to humping freight back and forth between NaPurHab, the low-Earth-orbit stations, and the dirtside spaceports. And she was lucky to get even this job. All the other Terra Nova pilots had out-emigrated long ago, looking for work in the Settlement worlds. But pilot jobs were lean out there, too.

  She almost didn’t care about that. She was thinking of quitting astronautics altogether, picking one of the Settlement worlds or a habitat and getting the hell out. It wouldn’t be exploring new star systems, true, but at least it would be a frontier, of sorts.

  She didn’t understand the people on the Earth or the Moon anymore. The crazies were taking over. The evidence was right in front of her. She looked intently at the huge habitat floating in the darkness. The Purps had come off Earth, taken over this place and the old Tycho Penal Colony—and the United Nations actually recognized the Purps as a legitimate government.

  Dianne had her mind made up. If she could not have the stars, she wanted to get out to somewhere, to a place, a world, that would at least be new to her. But could she live in a habitat, a tin can in the middle of space? To one of the Settlement worlds, then. Mars, or Titan, maybe. Perhaps the Asteroid Belt. If she could even get that far in the middle of a recession.

  Dianne Steiger checked the Pack Rat’s main panel again and sighed. All was well. Far too well. Nothing for her to do. Transorbital burn in ten minutes. The Rat knew that with far greater accuracy than she did.

  The ship lit engines and made the transorbital burn with perfect precision, shut down, and left Dianne to continue stewing in her juices. Not much longer, she told herself. Not much longer at all.

  * * *

  Chelated Noisemaker Extreme glanced up at his external monitor. Good-bye to the Pack Rat. There she was, a small dot of light ten degrees across the sky from the gleaming bulk of a nearly full Moon, a skyful of familiar old stars glowing warm and bright between them. He glanced down and checked his Moonside comm board. All green. All comm channels to the Moon operational. He’d have to do something about that, or catch hell from his boss.

  But not just yet. The view was too pretty. The Pack Rat’s acquisition strobes blinked on and off, giving Frank an easy visual sighting. Good for Dianne. A lot of the astros didn’t bother with ac-lights anymore, especially the ones who flew into Purple space. He sighed and shook his head. There was something wrong with a world where so many people worked so hard to do the absolute minimum. Not as if the Purps were much help.

  Chelated did a lot of the traffic control duty, but he was mainly a radio tech, responsible for keeping the Naked Purple Habitat more or less in contact with the outside universe. That “more or less” was a key part of his job description. If things got too bad, he had to struggle to bring them up to spec. If, on the other hand, communications got too good, it was his job to degrade them. And he was, of course, expected to randomize the situation at times. Keeping things off an even keel was an important part of the Purple philosophy.

  Even if the duties of the job were a bit strange, Chelated—known as Frank Barlow in his pre-Purple life—was skilled in his profession. That was what made him a Noisemaker Extreme—and earned him a bit of suspicion from the more purist Purples, who disapproved of any ability.

  But that didn’t matter. Chelated (or Frank, as he still secretly thought of himself) loved radio, electronics, and communications gear for themselves. In the post-K-Crash world, there were few positions for a man of his skill. He had come to the Naked Purple Habitat simply because there was no other place he could get a chance to practice his craft. He saw it as a bonus that he was allowed—even required—to try all the crazy things the other comm centers never permitted.

  Still, he found the place a bit disturbing. But then, he would have been worried about himself if he ever got used to these people.

  He felt the need to talk to someone and keyed the radio link open again. “Hey Dianne, you still on the feed?”

  “Still here, Frank,” her voice said from the overhead speaker. “What’s up?” Chelated was about to reply, but the view through the monitor caught his eye again.

  Some sort of flash of light overwhelmed the camera for a moment before it recovered. A chance reflection of the Sun off some polished surface, no doubt. The image came back at once. But there was something wrong. Chelated frowned and looked harder.

  No, it was okay. Dianne’s ship was still there, against the broad background of stars. Stars? That was nuts. The Moon should be behind the Pack Rat. An alarm began to bleat, and he checked the system. The Earthside links were okay, but all the Moonside commlinks were out. Every last one of them.

  Frank looked to the external view again. A numbing horror began to take hold of his gut.

  The sky was all wrong. The Moon wasn’t there anymore.

  And those weren’t the right stars, either.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Shock Waves

  Lucian Dreyfuss was one of the few permanent Lunar residents who actually witnessed Earth’s disappearance.

  Mostly, it was the tourists who saw it happen. At any given moment, there were thousands of tourists up on the surface, in suits or in the view-domes, seeing the Lunar sights, such as they were. The locals never went topside.

  Lucian worked as a space traffic controller in his regular job, and shepherded tourists on the side when money was tight—as it usually was with Lucian. At least it was a view-dome tour today. Dealing with a gaggle of tourist in shirtsleeves, oohing and ahhing at the gray landscape from inside a bubble dome, was infinitely preferable to riding herd on a bunch of neophytes bounding about the surface, all of them merrily trying to kill themselves by finding the flaws in supposedly idiot-proofed pressure suits.

  Not even the Sun could hurt them here. Outside the dome, a large occulting disk on a specially built tracking arm followed the Sun around the sky, putting itself between the dome and the Sun at all times, thus keeping the Sun’s disk safely hidden from the dome’s interior. Outside the dome, the Moonscape was brilliantly lit: the dome itself was in permanent shadow. Lights glowed around the edge of the dome floor, providing just enough illumination to keep the turistas from tripping over each other.

  But dome or surface, morning tours were always a bit much for Lucian. He was a night owl, used to the night shift at Orbital Traffic Control—and the night life at the casinos. He glanced at his watch. Just before 1000, Universal Time. Of course, this crowd was fresh off the ship. Most of these grounders were probably still on their local times. God only knew what time of day it was for them.

  Lucian was on the short side with a wiry, athletic build. He put in a lot of time in the gym, determined to fight off the typical Conner’s tendency toward pudginess. His face was narrow and pale, with a reddish brown crew cut. His eyes were slate gray, penetrating, serious, passionate.

  He looked out over the landscape. At the moment, his eyes showed nothing more impassioned than boredom. Maybe the landscape was awesome, but the natives—the Conners, as they called themselves—had seen it all before. None of them bothered to go up to the surface without a good reason. After all, the Lunar surface didn’t change much. Or at all. The tourists never seemed to understand that attitude.

  Lucian spotted a somewhat overfed matron looking around the dome, giving every person a once-over, no doubt cataloguing each by accent and clothing. She frowned, spotted Lucian, and came over to him. A Mrs. Chester, he remembered. He knew what she was going to ask even before she opened her mouth.

  “Tell me, Mr. Dreyfuss,” she asked. “Why do so few natives came up to look at any of the sights? I’ve been on tour here for a week now, and the only locals I’ve se
en aboveground have been the tour guides. The vistas are so lovely. Why don’t you all come to look at them?”

  “ ‘You only have to see the rocks once,’ ” Lucian replied in a tired voice. He didn’t bother telling her that that bit of folk wisdom had the power of a proverb among the Conners. People said it to explain that something once new was getting stale, old, was something you didn’t need anymore.

  Lucian currently felt all of those things. He certainly didn’t need to see the rocks again. His mind was on other things. On how long until he could bring the tour group back, on how much of the spiel he still had to give, on how many more herds of groundlings he would have to drag around to clear his casino debt.

  He glanced at his watch. That was time enough to let them wander the dome, ogling on their own. Lucian clapped his hands together and stepped up onto a low dais built into the dome’s floor. “All right, folks, all right. Gather around, if you please. I’ll be pointing out several of the landmarks visible from here. First and foremost of these is of course the Earth, directly over my head.”

  As if they were all attached to the same swivel control, the sea of heads surrounding Lucian all pivoted upward at once. A forest of arms sprouted up as the groundlings pointed out home to each other. Lucian had given up wondering why they did that. Did any of them seriously think their friends were incapable of finding Earth in the sky?

  Lucian looked up himself to see what sort of real estate and weather were visible at the moment. Earth was in waning half-phase, the terminator just about to reach the coast of North America, with clear weather over most of the daylight quadrant. Good. That put Africa front and center. A nice, well-known, easy-to-recognize piece of geography plainly visible with no damn cloud cover hiding it. Much preferable to when the Pacific was socked in and he was reduced to showing where Hawaii would be if it were big enough to see and the clouds weren’t there. He tried to pump a little enthusiasm into his voice, just for the form’s sake.