“Inside? We dunno even what the hell izzat the center of the Ring.”
“Hell, bossman, something at the center has mass, fershure. Even if we can’t see it. Uhh… we got those unwhiteblue flashes coming from it every hundred twenty-eight seconds. And they’s some kinda big herd o‘ unheard of thangs, big dude thangs, nearly the size of the habitat, in damnclose close orbit of the blueflasher at the center. They moving plentydamnscary quick. And after every blueflash, they’s one less big dude around the blueflasher.”
“Say what? Oh, the hell with it, Frank, switch to English. You’re giving me a headache.”
Chelated/Frank breathed a sigh of relief. “Thanks, Walter. I’ve got one already. What I was trying to say was that there is definitely something at the center.”
“Just how big a mass?”
“Well, I derived that from our own motion. The blueflasher weighs just about as much as the Moon. Pretty wild for something so small we can’t even see it through the big telescopes.”
“And the ‘big dude thangs’? What does that translate to?”
Frank shrugged. “Actually, that’s as good a name as any. Large objects, roughly the size of this habitat, several hundred of them, moving very fast in very close orbit around the blueflasher at the center. Beats the hell out of me what they are. But after every flash, the tracking computer says there’s one less of them. Like the large objects are going into the blueflasher. Or through it.”
Ohio/Walter sighed and wished for the old days, back when he was teaching high school in Columbus, and not trying to keep ten thousand yahoos alive inside a tin can in space. Things were bad when setting up a close orbit around a wormhole was the solution to a problem. Better to pretend it wasn’t true. Lying to himself beat going crazy. “Frank, I’m a reasonable man, so I know you’re not trying to tell me what you seem to be trying to tell me. I refuse to believe in wormholes. But circularize us around the centerpoint anyway. If you think that’s our best shot.”
“With the fuel we’ve got, it’s our only shot,” Frank said, a bit worriedly. “I don’t see any other way of getting into a safe orbit.”
“ ‘Safe.’ You suggest putting us in orbit around the wormhole or black hole or whatever it is that I refuse to believe in—that thing that’s where the Moon should be. You suggest putting us in orbit inside the circumference of the Big Ring. And you call it ‘safe.’ ” Ohio Template Windbag shook his head sadly. “I take back everything I’ve ever said about your command of Purpspeak. Obviously you can make a word do whatever you want it to do.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Shattered Sphere
Coyote Westlake had remembered a lesson of her childhood back in Nevada: live with what you could not change. Her bizarre predicament was now routine. She was trapped without a ship or a radio aboard an asteroid that was accelerating smoothly to absurdly high velocities by means she could not understand. She had even gotten used to it all, even used to the impossibility of it all.
Up until a few days ago, space had made sense. She had known the rules. She was a rock miner. She tracked down smaller asteroids, rocks too small to interest the big-time boys. She bored through the rocks, refined whatever metals and volatiles she could find on the spot, and hauled her refined goods back to make a sale. She had some fun on Ceres or one of the big habs, and then back out again. It was a stable, understandable life.
The world surrounding her was equally understandable. The asteroids moved in predictable patterns, and she knew how to keep her ship ticking, knew she would die if she got it wrong, knew how to play a dicker with the traders. It was simple.
Back on Earth, that had never been true of her world. Hell, she had never been sure who or even what she was. Never sure if she was completely human, natural born, a woman who just got born ugly; or if she was a bioengineered “upgrade” that didn’t quite work out. Big boned, too tall, her too-white face too hard edged.
Maybe her parents were a pair of drifters who dumped her on the creche steps—or maybe instead of parents mere was a lab somewhere that did the same after the technicians realized they had blended the genes wrong. She had held all the Nevada jobs—prostitute, card dealer, con grifter, divorce lawyer—and had never been happy. The freaks of Earth generally, and of Las Vegas specifically, disturbed her. L. V. Freestate drew them alclass="underline" Cyborgs, Purples, head-clears, twominders. They all started to get to her, because she was never quite sure if she was one of them.
Out here, she still didn’t know, but it didn’t matter. She was herself. Taking care of herself. Even if that was a mite tricky in the present circumstances.
She had worked as well as she could with the limited hardware aboard the tank—as she now thought of the hab shelter. She spent her days at the bottom of a cylinder five meters across and fifteen meters high, and was determined at least to make her situation as tolerable as she could. She had gotten her bunk off the ceiling and put it on the floor. She’d rigged lines and ropes so she could climb up to the control panel, and had reset all the restraints and handholds to allow her to move more easily.
The trickiest job was reprogramming the hab’s tiny position-reporter computer to provide her with tracking data. She felt a real need to keep at least a rough track of where the hell she was going. If she was doing her crude astrogation right, and assuming a constant acceleration and turnaround halfway there, RA45 was headed straight for Mars.
She still had not the faintest idea as to why this was happening. Who was doing this? Toward what goal? And how? She had rigged her exterior-view camera on the longest cable she could manage and spooled the cable out far enough for the camera to give her a view of the asteroid’s aft end, trying to get a look at the engines that were doing this.
But there were no engines, there was nothing at all back there. Just more rock. Damn it, something was accelerating this rock. If the something wasn’t outside the rock, it had to be inside the asteroid, somehow. But then how was the acceleration even happening? A rocket inside the rock couldn’t work. That meant a reactionless drive.
Enough of the anything-for-a-buck Las Vegas Free-state tradition had stuck with her that it occurred to her, even in her current predicament, that a reactionless drive ought to be worth something.
That, and the risk of madness by boredom, were enough to set her to work trying to solve the puzzle. She took her first crack at it by sitting and thinking. This drive seemed to have some attributes of a rocket, and some attributes of a gravity field. Like a rocket, it obviously could be started and presumably stopped at will. Like gravity, it worked without throwing mass in one direction to move in another.
But gravity couldn’t be pointed in one direction—it radiated out spherically from the center of a mass.
But if the whole rock were simply falling forward under the influence of some sort of external gravity field, her body would have been pulled along by the gee field precisely as much as the asteroid itself. The relative acceleration between herself and the asteroid would be exactly zero—in other words, she should have been in free-fall, effectively in zero gee.
But she was in a very definite five-percent field. Or was it five? That was still just a guess. There had to be a way to measure it.
What was accelerating her? A magic rocket that didn’t need propellant or fuel or nozzles, or magic gravity you could point in any direction?