Arrangements were not yet complete. The Sphere had not done all that needed doing to see after its new charge. The captured world was still exposed to some slight dangers, some unlikely hazards.
One of those dangers seemed to have been realized. An object, of fair size, had appeared through the wormhole link to the planet’s old system. It was not unheard of for debris to fall through a wormhole, but this was an unusually large fragment, and falling straight toward the newly acquired world at some speed. Though there was no real danger, the Sphere never took unneeded chances.
Another world was near enough to divert one of its Shepherds to meet the danger. The Sphere contacted the nearby world’s Keeper Ring and ordered the diversion. Almost immediately, a Shepherd swung out of its orbit and toward the intruder.
The Sphere noted another, larger object departing the vicinity of the new world, indeed headed for a close pass of the nearby planet that was providing the Shepherd.
But the large debris fragment was not on a collision course. If, somehow, the situation changed, then the planet’s Shepherds could handle the problem. The Sphere directed its attention elsewhere, checking again on the far-off danger that threatened the Sphere.
Far off, yes. But slowly getting closer. Disaster was yet decades off. But every moment of that time would be needed in order to avert disaster.
Every moment. The Sphere sent yet another message-image to the new system’s Caller, urging it on to greater speed.
The Anthony’s arrival was reported to the Terra Nova just as Dianne Steiger headed to her cabin for the evening. There was little the Nova could actually do, other than download the probe’s data and distribute it to the science staff.
Captains were supposed to delegate authority. Dianne decided to let her subordinates handle that job for her.
Dianne Steiger slept best in zero gee, and now was a time when she needed that sleep. It had been a busy time, getting the Nova launched, and she was exhausted. She was asleep the moment she slid between the sheets.
Five seconds or five hours after she lay down, a buzzer sounded by her bedside and she snapped to sudden wakefulness. She fumbled for the unfamiliar controls, got the lights on, and found the intercom switch. “Steiger here.”
“Ma’am, LeClerc here.” A tiny viewscreen popped on, and showed LeClerc’s earnest young face. “Sorry to disturb you, but this seemed important. We’ve got something on the radar plot board. One of the COREs just boosted for Earth.”
Dianne blinked and sat bold upright. “Say again. Our fusion core did what!”
“Sorry ma’am. I meant one of the radio sources orbiting the Target One planet. One of the COREs. One just broke orbit and started heading toward Earth. Boosted at an incredible rate, thirty gees at least, and then shut down. Ah, stand by, computer’s giving me a refined trajectory. Make that headed close to Earth. I read it now as intercepting that probe, the Saint Anthony. Here’s the plot.” LeClerc’s face vanished, to be replaced by an orbital schematic.
Dianne peered at it and swore. “Oh, hell. The party’s over. How long until intercept?”
“Forty-eight hours, four minutes. Though we still need to refine that a bit.”
“How close a pass will we get with the CORE?”
“Won’t come within ten thousand kilometers of us, according to the current track.”
A stray thought popped into Dianne’s head. “Wait a second. I ordered passive-only detection. How are you tracking the CORE at this range?”
“Hard not to track it, ma’am. These damn CORE things absolutely glow in radio frequencies. Bright enough that they seem to jam out all the natural radio sources.”
“Very well. Make sure Earth knows what’s happening, so they can use those forty-eight hours. Any theories on why the things didn’t come after us?”
“No, ma’am. Unless maybe they’re just waiting until we get closer.”
“‘That’s not very comforting. Thank you, LeClerc. You did right to wake me. Stay on top of it.”
As if any human being could stay on top of what was going on in a place like the Multisystem.
Part Five
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Thought Chain
Tyrone Vespasian caressed the Nenya’s controls. It had been too long since Vespasian had done anything but watch others go into space. He was more than pleased that he had convinced Daltry his piloting skills were sharp, and that the Gravities Research Station would have use for his knowledge of the Earthpoint wormhole’s behavior.
His face darkened. There was another, truer reason for his flying off to Pluto. With Lucian gone, he had to get off the Moon, run away from his pointless guilt, his sense of loss.
He couldn’t have done anything to prevent Lucian’s dying. But there should have been something. And by piloting this craft, by tending to the still-weakened Larry Chao, perhaps he was performing penance.
Larry. He was back there, in his cabin. There was a boy who had seen more than his share.
And done more. One 25-year-old kid pushes one button, and the history of humanity is changed for all time.
He checked his gauges carefully, and made sure the Nenya was holding together. If these gravity geniuses didn’t get back to Pluto, history might end altogether.
“So what’s happened while I’ve been out?” Larry asked, his voice weak and thin.
“Quite a bit,” Simon Raphael said, trying to hide his worry. The lad had been under sedation almost constantly for three days—but coming out of it this time, he seemed far more calm and rational than he had before. But even if he was recovered enough to sit up for a time, he was clearly not yet well. Though there was nothing physically wrong with Larry, his mind had suffered a cruel enough shock to weaken his body as well. His subconscious was responding, trying to recover from injuries he had never actually suffered.
Raphael spoke, pretending for Larry’s sake that he did not notice anything wrong. “We’re not really getting anything new. Just updates. One word we’re getting from everywhere: the structures are going up. Eyewitness and video reports from Mars, the radar teams at Venus, Sun-side overflight missions on Mercury. Observations of all Jupiter and Saturn’s major satellites. They’re all reporting the same thing—huge structures are rising on the equators of all the worlds.
“And more and more of both types—the gee-point asteroids and the faster gee points coming through the wormhole—are just placing themselves in parking orbits and waiting once they arrive at their target planet. What they’re waiting for, I don’t know. There also seems to be some sort of disturbances in the equatorial weather bands of Jupiter and Saturn, and there have been several sightings of asteroids entering Jupiter’s atmosphere. God only knows how the Charonians are managing that, or what it means. Except that they can survive inside a gas giant. No one can figure out how the Charonians are staying alive on Mercury and Venus and Ganymede, either. The biologists say it’s patently impossible—except the Charonians are doing it.