But the big white box stopped moving as sudden as it had started, less than a hundred meters from the Ring’s inner surface. Its legs unfolded and it moved gently in, settling itself neatly into place before the legs wrapped themselves around the ring.
It sat there, quiet and peaceful, and that was that.
“Now what the hell was that ’bout?” Mudflap demanded.
“Won’t know for sure till rest of them arrive,” Eyeball said. “But my guess is the Charonian docs is paying a housecall.”
The briefing room was a dreary, windowless grey box. It was aseptic rather than antiseptic, too grey and too drenched with disinfectants for anything to grow, but a grimy, cold little spot for all that. Even without the disinfectants, it was too dispirited a place for any but the most determined of germs, and nothing around here seemed all that determined.
The air conditioning was winning out over the ferocious heat of the launch base. Maybe winning by a little too much. The spaceport was only a few hundred kilometers north of the equator, and every time Sianna stepped outside, she felt as if she were walking into a sodden wall of heat.
Sianna, Wally, and Sakalov sat on one side of a rickety, stained old table, the debris of some previous meeting still in evidence here and there—crumbled bits of paper, a dried-up spot of spilled tea. A far cry from the luxurious appointments in Bernhardt’s office only two weeks before.
Bailey, the briefing officer, sat on the other side of the table. His coveralls were rumpled, and he hadn’t shaved in quite a while. He was a slouchy, sallow-faced, rubbery-skinned little man, with what appeared to be the stub of a cigarette hanging out of the edge of his mouth. He looked as if he had not been to bed in ten years, and did not care.
“Aw right,” Bailey said, taking a noisy slurp from his coffee mug, “let’s get this thing started. You folks mind if I don’t throw ninety-four different sims up on the screen? I’d rather just use plain English.”
Wally seemed as if he were about to say something, but then he thought better of it. Bailey nodded, scratched himself, and went on.
“Good. Then here’s the short form: We’ve started the massive cargo lift to NaPurHab. We’re lifting at least fifteen major cargo craft a day, every day for the next three weeks, plus all the smaller stuff we can manage. We want to send everything we can, with lots of spares, because a lot of it won’t get there.”
“The loss rate is still close to thirty percent, isn’t it?” Sakalov asked, as if he were asking about the price of onions, rather than his own odds of survival.
“Worse than that,” Bailey said, a bit reluctantly. “The COREs have been getting more and more aggressive. We expect the loss rate to get a hell of a lot worse real soon. We have to assume that once the main body of SCOREs hits town, we will lose whatever remaining access to space we still have. The odds on a given cargo getting through will go way down. Say, to one in a hundred. We might be able to launch in radar-transparent stealthships, but that is very tough engineering.
“The good news is that we have gotten better and better at analyzing what the COREs do. Over the years, we have thrown a lot of cargoes at NaPurHab—and seen which ones get taken out. We know what sort of craft, moving in what sort of trajectories, the COREs are most likely to attack. We can send our cargoes in the lower-risk trajectories—and send you people in the lowest-risk ones of all. But there is a better-than-zero chance that the COREs will attack any given object more than two meters long within about three hundred thousand kilometers of Earth. If the COREs decide that you might impact on Earth, they will attack you.”
“Wonderful,” Sianna said. “How about if we bend over and you send us in one-meter-long ships?”
“Don’t think we haven’t thought about it,” Bailey said, “but we’d have to launch you rolled in a ball. You wouldn’t survive the boost phase. We’ve also learned that the odds don’t change much for smaller-size craft. Once you’re over that two-meter threshold, it doesn’t much matter if you’re two and a half meters or two hundred fifty.”
“Great,” Sianna said.
“I know,” Bailey said. “But the best we can do is get you up and out of here at the lowest-risk trajectories during the launch windows we’ve calculated to be lowest risk. And we want to get you up there sooner rather than later. The SCOREs are headed this way. We don’t know what they will do when they get here, but we have to assume they will join the COREs in attacking our ships.”
“So when do the SCOREs arrive?” Wally asked.
“We don’t know that, either,” Bailey admitted sourly. “One cluster of them will boost and then coast, and then another, and another, while the first drifts off course until there’s a course correction.”
“Sounds like limits on the ability of the Sphere to transmit gravity power,” Sakalov said. “It must be directing a single gravity-power beam from one cluster of SCOREs to the next, nudging each group when it can spare the power from some other need. The Sphere is spreading itself pretty thin.”
Bailey looked annoyed. “You know so much, you want to give out the info?”
“Ah, no, no. Please, forgive me.”
“Okay, we think their arrival has something to do with the Ghoul Modules—”
“The what?” Sianna interrupted.
“Oh, right, you weren’t around for that one,” Bailey said. “That’s what the Purps are calling the large Charonian devices that are docking themselves to the Moonpoint Ring. The last of them docked to the ring this morning, and they seem to be pumping power into the ring. It looks very much to us as if they are there to bring the dead ring back to life, reactivate it. Ghouls.”
“But why?” Sianna asked.
“To proceed with the Sphere’s original purpose in setting up the Moonpoint Ring,” Sakalov said. “To get through to the Solar System and start building a new Multisystem there.”
“Hey, real smart,” Bailey said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “But our team has been thinking on this for more than five seconds, and if you can prepare yourself for a shock, they see another possibility. We think it’s meant to be used as a bolt-hole. We’ve known for years the Sphere was afraid of something. Maybe that something is getting close and the Sphere wants a back door. Some hole it can open up, go through, and pull the hole in after itself.”
“The Dyson Sphere is way too big to get through the Moonpoint wormhole,” Wally objected.
“But the Lone World is the real Sphere,” Sianna reminded him. “It’s the brains of the outfit. The Lone World could go through the hole with a whole slew of smaller Charonians and set up shop someplace new, build a new Sphere.”
“What would it use for power once it was cut off from the gravity generators in the Dyson Sphere?” Wally asked.
“Who knows?” Sianna replied. “Maybe it can store power. Maybe it could absorb solar power in a pinch. If the Lone World drops itself through a wormhole, it’ll have done its homework so it can survive on the other side.
“The bigger question is—why is it setting up our Moonpoint Ring for its bolt-hole? It must have links to a zillion wormholes. Why does it want to go through ours?”
Bailey nodded, as if he were actually conceding that someone else besides himself might be capable of having an idea. “Good question. The answer is it isn’t going to go through the Moonpoint Hole. Best we can tell, the Sphere is getting dozens of old wormholes ready. At least we see a lot of things that look like Ghoul Modules headed toward a lot of other inactive rings in the Multisystem.”