Suddenly, with a flare of lights and a renewed hum of ventilation fans, the primary power system came back on. Lucian’s console flashed into life. He leaned into the keyboard and ran some quick checks. Yes, his programs were still intact. That much was a relief. But what about the missing satellites? Lucian ordered up a three-dee projection of the coordinates for the missing ships and stations, as of the moment before Earth disappeared.
The pattern in the three-dee tank was clear, obvious, and clean. It was not merely the Earth that was gone, but everything that had been within a certain volume of space surrounding Earth. Somehow, that made it seem real. It was easier to conceive of a space station ceasing to exist than a whole planet. It was suddenly real enough to be frightening.
The intercom bleeped and Lucian punched the answer button. It was Janie in Radar, paging him on the intercom. “Lucian, you got a second?”
Lucian looked over and spotted Janie on the far side of the big room, saw her looking not at him, but at her display system. It was disconcerting to speak to disembodied voices all day, when you could see the bodies they belonged to, out of earshot. Lucian adjusted his earpiece and spoke into his throat mike. “I’ve got just about that long, Janie. What’s up?”
“I’ll relay it to your screen. It’s kind of hard to explain. You had me do a radar track on Mendar-4, right?”
“Right,” Lucian said.
“Okay,” Janie’s voice said. “Here’s what’s what. This is what Mendar’s orbit was.” A standard orbital schematic appeared on Lucian’s flatscreen. Earth stood in the center of the screen, and Mendar-4’s track showed as a perfect white circle tracing around it. “Now this is an orbit based on the radar tracks we’ve gotten since the first quake.” The symbol for Earth vanished from the screen, and Mendar moved straight out on a tangent from its previous orbit. “I’m running it forward in blue to give us a projected orbit.”
Lucian watched as the straight blue line stretched out into Solar space.“Okay, so what?” Lucian asked.
“So here’s what happened after the second quake, just a few minutes ago. This is Mendar’s actual course, based on radar tracking. I’ll run it in yellow.” A third course appeared on the screen, peeling away from the straight blue line of the projected course.
“Holy Jesus Christ,” Lucian said.
He knew what it meant, even without analyzing the orbit. Mendar’s path was being bent back toward some large mass, a large mass right where Earth had been. A planet-sized mass.
“Has this happened to the other orbital tracks?” Lucian asked, his fingers busy running his own board. He could feel the relief washing over him. It had to be. Earth was back from whatever impossible place it had been. It had to be.
“Yes it has,” Janie said. “Similar orbit shifts, all starting just at the onset of the last quake.”
“It’s got to mean that Earth is back,” he said, excitedly. “That’s what caused the second quake series. Earth’s gravity field coming back and grabbing at the Moon.” He brought up the image from the surface camera, still trained on Earth’s coordinates.
But there was nothing there. Nothing at all. Just some debris.
“I checked that too, first thing, Lucian.” Janie’s voice was soft, apologetic. “There’s nothing there.”
“Give me a real-time radar image of where Earth should be,” Lucian said. Maybe it was simply cloaked somehow, some weird optical phenomenon. Janie redirected her radar and Lucian split his screen, watching the same swatch of sky in visual and radar frequencies.
“Nothing, Lucian,” Janie said. “Not one damn thing—”
Suddenly there was a blue-white flash of light in the center of the visual screen, and a smaller, dimmer flicker on the radar. And then, on radar, a target appeared. A big one, Lucian judged. Perhaps two kilometers across, and moving fast. About the size of the other debris chunks in the radar image. And all the debris was moving away from the new gravity source. Almost as if they had been launched themselves…
“You got a recording on this?” Lucian asked.
“Sure thing,” Janie said.
“Let me access that. Last fifteen minutes of it.” Lucian cut away from the live picture and ran the recording forward from the moment the quakes hit.
Another flash, and another target. And again, and again, and again. Some of them drove straight on. Others seemed to snap around in tight parabolas before speeding away. They had to be moving at a helluva clip for the motion to be visible at this range, even in fast forward. Larry ran a check, and discovered that the targets were popping out of the bluish flashes at regular intervals, once every 128 seconds.
The image reminded him of something, and it took a moment for it to register. Like lifeboats launching from a crippled ship, Lucian thought. For one wild moment he wondered if that was exactly what he was seeing—the populace of Earth somehow escaping from their wrecked planet.
But in ships two klicks across? No one built them that large. The whole idea was absurd.
But then, so was the idea of asteroid-sized bodies materializing out of the empty spot in space where Earth had so recently been.
Lucian stared at his screens, praying for understanding. It didn’t come.
The Caller saw the intruder diving toward its Anchor. This was by no means a surprising development. Of course the Anchor’s massive gravity well would attract debris. The Caller immediately sent a message through the Link, requesting a temporary halt to operations. Nothing material could ever damage the Anchor itself, of course, but a disintegrating asteroid could certainly damage the new arrivals as they streaked through the worm-hole. It did not matter. Now the Caller had the Anchor as a power source. Now it had all the time and power it could ever need—and this asteroid would be out of the way in a few minutes.
Lucian, still staring at the mysterious blue flashes, was startled to see them stop coming, and startled again to see an asteroid-sized fragment moving in toward Earth’s previous position. The new radar track had an ID tag on. This one, the computer could identify. Lucifer. Sweet Lord, Lucifer.
Lucian jumped up, unplugged his headset, and hurried over to Vespasian‘ console. “Vespy, are you watching the Lucifer track?” he asked.
“I’m on it, Luce.”
Tyrone Vespasian glanced away from his console and rubbed his jaw nervously. Lucian stood behind him, watching in silence as the radar tracked the wreckage of Lucifer tumbling through space, pitching and wheeling wildly. The huge worldlet was tumbling, out of control. What was happening? Earth wasn’t there. But Lucifer was falling toward something. And falling fast. Vespasian checked the real-time track.
Hell’s bells. It was moving toward that gravity source at ten klicks a second, and accelerating. He asked the computer for an impact projection. Twenty minutes. That was too fast a fall. Tyrone Vespasian had been running orbital traffic systems for a long time. He knew the space around Earth and the Moon intimately, almost by feel. He knew, instinctively, what sort of forces Earth and the Moon would impose on a body in a given position. And Lucifer’s acceleration was wrong, just a shade high.