“We think its orbit should remain stable. But we don’t know. We have of course notified the Purple leadership, and they will be watching, I assure you. There is still some time left before there is any possibility of danger.” Bernhardt didn’t seem much interested in the problem, as if he were more interested in something else than the thousands of people aboard the habitat. “It’s just about here that the first of the SCOREs will be visible to the amateur telescopes,” he said. “No hope of keeping the lid on it past then. We have between now and then to prepare for their—ah—arrival.”
Suddenly it dawned on Sianna. Calling them SCOREs had misled her—as perhaps it was meant to mislead the public. She had envisioned them merely as little brothers to the big COREs, taking up positions around the Earth.
But no, these were not COREs. Bernhardt thought they were invaders, attackers. This was the beginning of a Breeding Binge.
Breeding Binges had just been theory up to now, though there was a lot of evidence supporting the theory, much of it plainly visible on some of the closer Captive Worlds. Binges were the whole reason for the Multisystem. The Charonians needed planetary surfaces for breeding during one part of their life cycle.
The night before, she had stared at the ceiling, wondering when the Breeders would come and make use of the Earth. Now she knew.
Her mind was racing, her body bathed in fear sweat. Time started up again in the simulation, and the SCOREs and the large objects moved in toward Earth and the Moonpoint Ring. The SCOREs—the invaders, the Binge Breeders—came in, did a close pass around the Moonpoint Ring, and then turned toward Earth. They came closer and closer, reached the planet—and disappeared. For one crazy moment, Sianna felt a wave of relief. She gasped, and realized she had been holding her breath. They would vanish. Everything would be all right. She had imagined the Binge Breeders landing, crashing, tearing into the landscape, but no, it was going to be all right.
“We can’t show the damage or the ground action in a space-based simulation, of course,” Bernhardt said. “But it will be severe. Wally, you’re still working on the ground sims?”
“Yes, sir,” Wally said. “Course, the infosets are pretty vague. I won’t be able to give you much detail, and some of it’s going to be speculative.”
“I am sure it will be up to your usual high standards,” the director said.
Sianna shut her eyes and cursed herself for an idiot. Of course. At this scale, with Earth the size of a basketball, what would there be to see? But of course the disaster would still come.
“So it’s finally going to happen,” Sakalov said. “I had been hoping I wouldn’t live to see it.”
“We’ll all live to see the start of it,” said Bernhardt. “You’ve seen the images from the Solar System, what just a handful of Charonians were able to do to Mars. These SCOREs are a different type of Charonian, of course, and they will probably behave quite differently.
“But I have no doubt they will do quite a bit of damage. The Charonians hunted our world down, and brought it back here, to the Multisphere, to their larder. Now they are ready to dine. They will land on Earth, and breed, and breed and breed and breed. They could wreck the planetary ecosphere completely. We can see other Captive Worlds where that has happened. Even if things don’t go that badly, they could still do some very serious damage.”
“So what do we do?” Sianna asked.
Wolf Bernhardt looked at her, then at Wally and at Dr. Sakalov. “First, we do all we can to resupply NaPurHab and the Terra Nova. We launch as many loads of spares and equipment at them as we can. If Earth is severely enough damaged, it is possible that they will be all there is left of us. We must do all we can to make sure they are in as good condition as possible. Then we use the interceptor missiles and the ground attack forces and all the other weapons we have built against this day,” he said. “We shoot down as many of them as we can, and kill as many of them as we can on the ground. Maybe we can drive back the first wave, and maybe the Charonians will conclude Earth is not a good place for a Breeding Binge. But I have no doubt that, if it chooses to do so, Charon Central can keep sending SCOREs—Breeders—long after our defenses are overwhelmed. And then the Breeders will land, and go about their business.
“And as to what we do then—I haven’t the faintest idea, except for one thing.” Wolf Bernhardt put his hands in his pockets, looked toward the simulation, and let out a deep sigh. “I expect,” he said, “that a lot of us will die.”
Nine
Death of the Past
“There are times when I don’t much mind being called a Leftover—but other times when I find it bloody infuriating. Why mark me out because I was one of the ones left behind? Haven’t we all lost someone? Is there anyone in the Solar System who didn’t lose someone, or some part of their past, when Earth vanished? And is there a single one of you lot who wasn’t lost by someone back on Earth?
“And if you weren’t lost to someone, if there is no one on the other side who cares a sausage for you, then dearie, I feel sorry for you.”
Gerald MacDougal, second-in-command of the Terra Nova, lay awake in his bunk, staring at the overhead bulkhead. He knew he should be trying to sleep, but this was one night when sleep would not come.
Gerald missed his wife.
Marcia. He could turn over on his side and look at her picture, taped on the bulkhead next to his bed, but there was no need. He had spent endless hours in the last five years staring at that photo. It was the only one of her that he had, and it was his most prized possession.
It was a quite ordinary flat photo, no three-dee, no animation. She smiled out at the camera, her two elbows resting on the picnic table, with her chin balanced on the palms of her hands, her long fingers hidden under her frizzy black hair, though the tip of her left index finger peeked through, just by her ear.
Her dark brown eyes were half-hidden by her bangs, but they shone with love and happiness. She was grinning, ear to ear, gleaming white teeth showing, with one tooth just a little crooked, and a tiny little scar on one cheek where she had caught a chip of flying rock in some childhood accident, before she had escaped Tycho Purple Penal.
No, he didn’t have to look at the picture.
She had been off-planet when the Abduction struck, working at the VISOR station orbiting Venus, while he worked on his own projects back on Earth. Even then, they had been forced to settle for video messages sent from so far away the speed-of-light delay made conversation impossible. Back then, that distance seemed impossibly wide. Now, it seemed trivial. What were a few tens or hundreds of millions of kilometers, compared to the unknown number of light-years between them now?
At last he did turn his gaze toward the picture, but he was seeing through it, rather than looking at it. How had five-plus years changed her? Had her hair gone grey? Were there a few more laugh lines around her eyes?
He didn’t even want to contemplate the other disasters that might have befallen her. One of the last messages relayed by the Saint Anthony had confirmed that Marcia had survived at least that long, and to know that much was a great blessing. Gerald offered a silent prayer of thanks for that. Many aboard ship, and back on Earth, had no way of knowing if their loved ones in the Solar System had survived the disaster. All they knew was that the much smaller population of the Solar System had suffered more casualties than all of Earth.