The Ring of Charon the-1 Read online

  He noticed more than a few of his charges were hanging back, unwilling to enter the confined space of the airlock chamber. In a quake, claustrophobia was entirely rational. “Come on, folks,” he said, trying to assume the air of a bored tour guide again, weary of squiring his flock. If he treated them like sheep, maybe they would act like sheep. “Inside. The sooner we get into the lock, the sooner we can get out the other side. Let’s get into the lock.”

  Still they hung back, until Deborah, the sensible young woman, squared her shoulders and strode purposefully into the lock. That was enough to get most of the others moving.

  Lucian crowded them all into the lock chamber. He had twenty-eight people on the tour. Normally he would cycle the tour through in two runs—but one more good jolt and the lock might jam. Get them all through while he still could. Lucian herded the last tourist in, wedged himself in, and shoved his way over to the lock controls. He broke the seal over the emergency switch and punched the crash-cycle button. A siren hooted, and the normal white lighting cut out, replaced by blood red emergency lights. The domeside hatch swung shut at double time and bolted itself shut. The tourists crowded back from it.

  The pump mechanism clunked and clanked, making noises that were unnervingly unfamiliar to Lucian’s practiced ear. Could the quake have screwed up the innards of the lock? What if it jammed? How long could the air last in here? It was a bit warm already, with all these people crowded into this small space. Then came the welcome hissing sound of the pumps equalizing pressure with the city side.

  The city side doors opened. With a collective sigh of relief, the whole herd tumbled out into the entryway.

  Central City was built underground, a series of lens-shaped hollows, kilometers across, known as Sub-Bubbles. The tourist dome sat on the surface, fifty meters directly above one edge of a lens, connected to the interior’s ground level by a long ramp running between the surface level and the airlock. The city side of the airlock complex had been designed with tourists in mind. One whole wall was made up of huge view windows that canted in from the ceiling toward the floor, overlooking Amundsen SubBubble, affording a splendid vista of the bustling city below.

  Except now the view windows were shattered heaps of glass on the ground and jagged knife-edges sprouting up from window frames. A sooty wind swept into the overlook chamber.

  The city below looked like a war zone. Smoke billowed up from at least three separate fires, only to be caught in a violent wind that flattened it into the sky blue ceiling of the bubble. Wind.

  Nothing scared a Conner more than a leak. Lucian forced the worry from his mind. Either the repair crews were handling it or they weren’t. Lucian’s gaze left the ceiling and he looked down at the city again. The lush greenery that the city took such pride in was still more or less there, but whole garden sections had slumped over. Landslides had carried off hillside trees.

  Mobs swirled about here and there—whether in panic or in some attempt to deal with the fires and other crises, Lucian could not tell. The lighting in the city was dimmer than it should have been. The emergency lights were on in places. Swirling smoke darkened everything. Many of the tall, graceful towers for which the city was famous had been felled or badly damaged. From what Lucian could see, the high-rent districts of the dome slopes had taken a lot of punishment.

  Perfect, Lucian thought, glancing back at his charges. Just what these people need to see. “Come on, folks. Turn left and out the down ramp to the main city level. Let’s get down and back to the hotel.” Don’t give them time to think, his father’s voice whispered. Not when thinking will lead to panic. Get them home. He counted noses. There were still twenty-eight. Good. At least he didn’t have to go back through the lock after stragglers.

  Lucian led the group down the access ramp, a long spiral walkway leading down from the overlook chamber. As with the chamber itself, the wall facing the dome interior was made entirely of glass. That was both for the benefit of tourists and because there was nothing cheaper than glass on the silica-rich Moon. Whatever the reason, it left Lucian leading twenty-eight people, most of whom barely knew how to walk in low gee, down an incline littered with razor-sharp fragments of glass, trying to stay out of a howling wind that blew through where the glass wall should have been. Somehow he got them down without anyone slicing open an artery.

  The route back to the Aldrin Inn was at least short and direct. There was no sign of the bus that was supposed to be waiting to take them back. It wasn’t hard to figure out why. The periphery of the main level was littered with boulders and parts of buildings shaken loose from upslope, clogging the roads with debris. He urged his charges into a brisk walk back toward their hotel.

  Even in that short walk Lucian saw enough to scare him badly. Amundsen SubBubble, at least, was in pretty bad shape. Every house, every building, seemed to have soaked up some damage. There was an obstruction in the road every few hundred meters. Abandoned cars, debris fallen from buildings, felled trees and broken tree limbs were scattered everywhere.

  Finally they reached the Aldrin Inn. The big building seemed utterly intact. A small knot of people standing outside the entrance was the only sign here of anything out of the ordinary. By the looks of things, the place had been evacuated, and the guests were just now being allowed back in.

  Lucian, standing in the middle of the rubble-strewn road, looking at the hubbub around the hotel, felt something being shoved into his fingers. He looked into his hand. A British twenty-pound note. He realized Mrs. Chester was standing next to him.

  “Thank you so much, young man,” she said. “I’m so glad we’re all down safely.”

  Lucian looked at her blankly. A tip. The woman had tipped him for saving her life. Without him, they’d still be a panicky mob up in a leaking dome.

  At least it served to tell him he had discharged this responsibility. They don’t tip you until the job is over. He dropped the twenty-pound note, let it flutter to the ground, and walked away without saying a word.

  And he had actually been thinking of tourists as people.

  To hell with being a guide, he thought, glad that he had the day job to fall back on. He upped his pace to a dogtrot. He had to get to Traffic Control.

  * * *

  From the Aldrin Inn, Orbital Traffic Control should have been an easy five-minute walk. But the quake had turned everything upside down: even at a brisk jog, it took Lucian nearly half an hour to thread his way through the jammed intersections, powered-down slideways, and accessways cut by sealed airlocks.

  Jesus Christ, Earth. Lucian stopped in his tracks and stared at nothing. Earth. He had managed to forget about the planet for a moment in the panic of the quake. Down here, they won’t know. Even if they did happen to see it through a monitor, they won’t believe it. Nobody knows. No one at Traffic Control will understand what’s happening.

  Orbital Traffic Control was a madhouse. He could see that much through the smoked-glass windows that divided the control center proper from the administrative area. Too many people were standing, waving their arms, arguing silently into their headsets behind the soundproof glass. Too many consoles were on, too many lights glowed flame red instead of green.

  Lucian flashed his ID at the control center entrance. By the time the sentry system cleared him through to the interior, Vespasian had spotted him and was on the way over, waving for Lucian’s attention. Lucian ignored him, grabbed a headset out of the rack and looked for an empty console. There, in the corner. There were things he had to check.

  But Vespasian cornered him before he got halfway across the room. “Goddammit to hell, Lucian,” he began without preamble. “We’re in a helluva spot. All our navigation systems crashed all at once, right after the quake. Primary, backup, tertiary. All of them. Every damn ship is off course out there—the ones that haven’t vanished off the radar altogether. None of our course corrections work. We can’t figure out what—”

  “The system’s working, Vespy,” Lucian cut in. “It’s just
trying to compute for a gravity well that isn’t there anymore. Earth’s gone.”

  Tyrone Vespasian was a short, heavy man of uncertain Mitteleuropean origins and very certain opinions. “What the hell are you talking about?” he snapped. “That’s ridiculous!”

  “I mean the damned planet’s not there anymore!” Lucian walked over to the console with Vespasian right behind him. He ignored the older man, sat down at the console and powered it up. He found himself staring straight ahead, concentrating hard on the job at hand, excluding everything from his thoughts except the need to get this console on line.

  “Earth can’t just vanish,” Vespasian objected. “I mean, jeez, sometimes I wish the damn groundhogs would go away, but—”

  Lucian jumped back up out of his chair, grabbed his boss around the shoulders, and stared straight into his face through eyes half-mad with fear. “Earth is gone, dammit. I saw it happen with my own two eyes. I was on the surface, in the ob-dome, looking at it when it vanished. That’s what set off the quake. The tidal stresses vanished and the whole surface spasmed. There’ll probably be major aftershocks.”

  Vespasian looked at him and swallowed hard. His face was sweating, and Lucian could see the light of fear in his eyes as well. “Planets just don’t vanish, Lucian,” he said in some sort of attempt at normal tones.

  “This one did!” Lucian shouted. He gripped the older man’s shoulders harder, and then relaxed his grip, slumped down into his seat. He shut his eyes and forced himself to calm down. A planet. Yes, a planet. And everything on it. Eight billion people. All the oceans, all the ice caps and forests and animals, all the volcanoes and weather and deserts and trees. The molten core, the bottom of the ocean, the prairies and mountains. All of it gone.

  No. No. He forced the thoughts, the fear, the panic from his thoughts. Don’t think about the Earth. Think about what we must do to save ourselves.

  He opened his eyes and punched up the exterior surface camera that was permanently aimed at Earth.

  “Look,” he said, not expecting to be believed. “That’s the camera locked down and targeted at Earth. Nothing there but stars.”

  “So the camera was jostled in the quake,” Vespasian said in calming tone. “Dreyfuss, listen, I can use everybody I can get hold of right now, and I know maybe you’ve just been through a quake on the surface, but I don’t have time for this kind of—”

  “Look at the background stars!” Lucian snapped. “That’s Gemini. Earth’s supposed to be in Gemini right now. Check with Celestial if you don’t remember.” Vespasian frowned and looked again at the camera. Lucian ignored him and punched up the playback on the camera. “Here we go. This is a replay off that camera for the last hour, in fast forward.”

  Earth, or at least the recorded image of Earth, popped back into existence on the monitor screen. Clouds chased themselves across the surface, the terminator advanced over the globe as the playback rushed forward at high speed—and then, in a flash of blue-white, the planet wasn’t there anymore.

  “Holy mother of God,” Vespasian said. “That can’t have happened. It’s got to be a camera malfunction.”

  “Dammit, Tyrone, I saw it with my own eyes, and so did twenty-eight other people with me.”

  “It’s nuts. It’s nuts. Optical illusion then.”

  “Prove it. I’d love to be wrong,” Lucian said.

  “I’ll do that,” Vespasian said. “Key this console to main ranging-radar output.” He punched a button on the intercom panel clipped to his belt loop. “Ranging radar, this is Vespasian,” he said into his headset. “Janie, scram your other operations for a moment and fire a high-power ranging pulse at Earth. Yes, now. I don’t care what the fuck else you got on your hands, you do it now.” Lucian switched in the radar operator’s audio and display screen.

  “—kay, for Christ sake, here’s your damn pulse, Vespasian,” the operator’s voice announced angrily. The screen, cluttered with displays of dozens of craft in orbit, cleared as the radar op wiped her screen. A message flashed on the screen: ranging pulse fired. The display grid itself was blank.

  And it stayed that way. After ten seconds, a new message flashed on the screen, no return, recycling. “Jesus Christ, what the hell kind of malfunction have we got here?” the radar operator asked. “We should have gotten a return in two-point-six seconds.” Now the radar operator’s voice was fearful.

  “We don’t know, Janie,” Vespasian said in a hoarse voice. “Lucian here says Earth ain’t there no more. Do me a favor, recheck your gear and prove he’s crazy.”

  He shut off the link and punched up another channel. “Comm, this is Vespasian. What’s your status on Earth comm channels?”

  “Dead, every single one of them,” another disembodied voice announced from the speaker. “Must have been the quake. We’re running diagnostics now.”

  Vespasian shoved Lucian out of the console chair and punched up an exterior optical circuit. The camera’s image of the surface popped up on one side of the screen while Vespasian did a celestial almanac lookup on the other side. He queried Earth’s current sky position as per the computer’s memory and fed it to the camera. The camera tracked smoothly, the current and ordered coordinates showing in a data line across the bottom of the screen. When the two matched, the field of view stopped moving—and displayed the same empty starfield Lucian had punched up three minutes before, as seen from another surface camera.

  Lucian leaned over Vespasian and spoke in a steel-edged voice. “I don’t believe it either. I just know I saw it happen. Why, how, who or what did it, I don’t know. What I do know is that without Earth’s gravity as an anchor, every orbit and trajectory within a million kilometers of here is seriously screwed up. We’ve got to recalculate the orbit of every goddamn ship, satellite and habitat before they all start piling into each other. You get back to your own console and convince yourself. I’ve got to work on what we do next once you are convinced.”

  Vespasian swelled himself up, as if ready to explode— and then stopped. He knew he was a tyrant, and sometimes a bully with his people—but he prided himself on knowing the truth when he heard it, and on accepting a little bullying himself when it was necessary.

  Earth was gone. Getting people to believe that news was going to be a full-time job for Vespasian. He was having trouble enough convincing himself.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Tears for the Earth

  Second by second, millisecond by millisecond, in slow motion, Earth disappeared again. The cloud of blue-white appeared, swelled up and engulfed Earth. Hiram ran the key frames back and forth again. Wait a second. It was tough to tell at this resolution and this angle, but it didn’t look like that cloud was a globe forming around Earth, but rather a disk-shaped body forming behind the planet, between the Earth and Moon. Hiram watched the monitor as the cloud moved forward, toward the camera and away from the Moon, sweeping over Earth, and then winked out of existence, leaving no trace of Earth behind.

  What the devil was the cloud?

  Hiram sat alone in the main control room, hunched over his computer panels, glad for the peace and quiet. He didn’t quite know or care what had happened to the rest of the staff. For a gifted scientist, there were a lot of things Hiram McGillicutty didn’t notice or understand. Like other people, for starters.

  It was, in a way, a family trait. He had been born into one of the old pioneer families on Mars, and his greatgrandfather had been one of the earliest—and most obstreperous—of the Settlement World leaders way back when.

  Hiram had not inherited his ancestor’s political skills, or even his marginal ability to understand people, but Hiram had certainly gotten the old boy’s single-mindedness. He had also gotten a full dose of another unfortunate family trait—an almost complete inability to see the other person’s point of view.

  The rest of the station was in shock, struggling to come to terms with an incalculable loss. But Hiram was from Mars. He had never even visited Earth.

  If the rest of
humanity was stunned and terrified, Hiram McGillicutty was merely fascinated. No known mechanism could do this to a planet. Clearly there was a new principle at work here. And he would be the one to crack it. On that, he was determined.

  If the silence in the station meant anything at all to him, it was that he had a leg up on the competition. Here was the greatest scientific puzzle in history—and he was well ahead of the pack. After all, if his station mates weren’t working, who else would be?

  He sat alone in the main control room, pleased that every instrument and data record was, for the moment, his and his alone. He ran the visual record on the right screen again, throwing a new set of data overlays on the left-side screen.

  He watched the infrared image track up against the visible-light image of Earth. In visible light, that blue-white cloud bloomed up out of nowhere, but in infrared, there was nothing. It wasn’t there at all. No IR activity at all—except of course the Earth’s infrared image, vanishing when Earth did.

  Or maybe he just didn’t have good enough data to see the IR from here. He racked up the near-ultraviolet image and ran it against visible light again. Too bright. The event, whatever it was, positively glowed in UV. But then, VISOR had very sensitive UV detectors, far better than its IR stuff. Maybe the signal strengths he was seeing were artifacts of his own instruments’ relative sensitivity. He would have to compensate for that. But later. Later. Now he just had to look at the raw data. All of it.

  He stared hard at the visible-light image. VISOR was not intended as an astronomical observatory, of course, and the long-range optics used to get the last images of Earth did not provide very high resolution. Unfortunate, but no matter. Some sort of camera would have been running on the Moon. Sooner or later, he could see that imagery.