She was playing a risky game—but to her, the Terra Nova was a known factor. She knew how far she could push the big ship, what it could take, and what it couldn’t. The unknown risks were the aliens and humans who might stand in the way. Better to get a jump on all of them, at a trivial risk to the ship, rather than giving them all time to stop the flight.
Officially they were boosting for the Sphere, but everyone knew perfectly well that was hogwash. They were going no further than the next planet inward. Dianne was prepared to press on from there if all was going well-but not in the direction of the Sphere. Not for a long time. She smiled with pleasure and watched her status boards, all of them glowing green.
On the next couch over, her second-in-command was not enjoying the ride nearly so much.
Gerald MacDougal, exobiologist, crossing space to a world presumably brimming with unknown life, wondered exactly why he had wanted so much to take this trip. At this precise moment, he could think of nothing but the groaning metal around him. He knew the ship could take this thrust, and ten times as much; knew that it was normal for load-bearing members to make a little noise now and then; but his fertile imagination could not be bothered with mere facts. In his mind’s eye, he could see collapsing bulkheads.
He felt a touch of claustrophobia. Monitors and view-screens and graphic flight-path displays were all very well, but there weren’t any real windows on the bridge. He felt himself to be in a cramped metal cave, a coffin in space, hurtling toward a needless doom. His thoughts turned to Marcia. He did not want to die, now or anytime, without seeing her first.
But even as that melodramatic idea flashed across his mind, another part of his mind knew that all was well, that the ship was performing as expected. And yet a third part of his mind was praying to God as hard as it ever had.
No sense in taking chances, he told himself.
The Terra Nova shut down her engines, and coursed through open space, toward a new world without a name.
The Nenya rushed away from the Moon, out away from the Sun, boosting toward the cold and dark of Pluto, toward the Ring of Charon, Tyrone Vespasian at the controls.
Dr. Simon Raphael sat in Larry Chao’s cabin, watching the Moon grow smaller in the monitor and wondering what it was like to live through decapitation.
Dr. Raphael had never worn a teleoperator control rig himself, but the experts said that the better the rig, the more realism it provided—and the more traumatic the psychic effects of an accident to the teleoperator.
The rig Larry had been wearing was one of the best.
The boy shifted in his sedated sleep, moaned, and rolled over. His left hand flopped out of the bed and Raphael took it, held it. Somewhere in the midst of all Larry’s terrors there might be some part of him that could sense a touch, and know it to be friendly, comforting.
Raphael looked over to the video monitor. He used the bedside control to cut away from the view of the Moon to a dynamic orbital schematic, an abstract collection of numbers and color graphics. But to Simon Raphael, there could be nothing more meaningful in the Universe. It was the Saint Anthony’s flight path, tracking its progress from the Moon to the Earthpoint black hole.
And Earthpoint was getting close.
The probe fell relentlessly, down toward the nightmare point where Earth had vanished, toward the strange throbbing blue flashes of light. Toward the place where huge and mysterious vehicles were materializing still, rushing out toward the surviving planets. Down toward the black hole, the wormhole that marked the spot where Earth had been.
All the latest data from Mars, from the Lunar Wheel induction taps, from all sources, had been radioed aboard the little armored craft. Whatever information the Solar System had gathered concerning its invaders would be aboard, ready for transmission to Earth.
If Earth was still there.
But the Saint Anthony was incapable of worrying about that. All it knew was that it needed to arrive in precisely the right spot, a point mere meters across, at a moment timed with utterly compulsive precision. Miss the point, fail to move through in the nanosecond between a pseudo-asteroid arriving and the wormhole slamming shut again, and the Saint Anthony would be just another submicro-scopic, infinitesimal part of the Earthpoint black hole.
The moment was coming closer. The Saint Anthony checked its alignment one last time.
The wormhole opened, precisely on time. The probe’s cameras saw the event from close range, broadcast it back to the Moon, taped it for a hoped-for transmission to Earth.
A gee-point craft burst out of nowhere, leapt through the hole at terrifying speed, missing an impact with the Saint Anthony by a scant few hundred meters before flying off into the darkness beyond.
The hole was open.
The probe fell in.
Vortices of space, time, light, gravity, twisted and swirled around each other in ways that should not have been possible, knotting themselves about each other. The wormhole went through the probe, instead of the other way around. Time stopped, space stopped, and then each turned into the other and ran backwards. Gravity became negative, and the black glow from outside the wormhole was the stars absorbing photons, using them to fission helium into hydrogen. Time fell in knotted loops around the craft, chasing itself backwards, forwards, sideways—
And then it was over, and the Saint Anthony was through.
Chelated Noisemaker Extreme/Frank Barlow was responsible for keeping the Naked Purple Habitat in contact with the outside Universe. But now, Earth was the only comm target, and it was dead easy to track from here. But on the other hand, without its comsat network, Earth’s own communications were sorely degraded.
Chelated’s boss, Overshoe Maximum Noisemaker, was much troubled by the situation. After all, the Noise-makers were charged with keeping comm from getting too good or too bad. And therein lay the problem. Did the ease with which they could signal Earth mean comm was good and needed screwing up? Or did the damage to the space communications net represent bad comm that needed tender loving care? And how many pinheads can dance on an angel? Chelated/Frank asked himself sarcastically. He was tired of all the almost theological worrying over minor points.
He was tired of it all. Tired of his Purple name, tired of thinking in circles, tired of not being allowed to do his job properly. It was his name that was bugging him most of all. Noisemaker just meant communications worker. Extreme was a bit less neutral, a derisive comment on how seriously he took his job. But Chelated. He had known that in Purpspeak it meant overdetermined and overeager. But it was not until last night that he found out the hard way from a cruelly informative young woman that it had a sneering sexual connotation. And they had been calling him that for months!
The hell with it. The hell with all the rules. While the powers-that-be dithered, Frank felt himself free to do his job properly, free to use his gear to observe the strange things NaPurHab now shared a universe with. He spent much of his time with all sensors locked on the wormhole, watching the massive vehicles drop into it, bound for who knew where. Frank was fascinated by it. He sat, for hours at a time, transfixed, staring at the hole in space.
So he sat when the Saint Anthony came through from the other side.