She felt as if she were recovering from a fever, an illness, in that gentle moment of recuperation where you knew you were getting well, when the illness was getting weaker and you were getting stronger.
She had conquered the permod, more or less unharmed. Horrible as it was, she had discovered that she could survive being sealed up in this damned box. Maybe being sealed in a coffin for a few days was all anyone needed to cure claustrophobia. Granted, it would never be a popular cure, and she still was not exactly enjoying herself, but even so, the fear had been burned out of her. Oh, she still wanted to get out. But all but the last bat’s-squeak of irrational ravening fear was gone. After this trip, she wouldn’t have the slightest concern about stepping into that elevator car at MRI.
Not that she ever would have the chance, of course. She was never going back.
Sianna blinked, gulped hard, and forced herself to accept it. She was never going back to Earth. Not with the COREs and SCOREs and whatever other space-monsters the Charonians could dream up blocking the way.
Unless, by some miracle, humanity found a way to open the spaceways, it would be death to try and go home. She was dead already, so far as anyone back on Earth was concerned.
She would never see her friends, her city, her books, her clothes, her bed again. All she had was what was with her now. And she had been able to bring so little. Her personal luggage allotment here in the permod was only five kilos’ worth to fit into a space roughly the size of a large handbag. A few family photos, a pair of shoes, and a few changes of underwear. God only knew what sort of clothes the Purps would provide. Best to bring at least a few items that would allow her some chance at modesty and comfort.
We bring nothing into this world, and we take nothing out of it…
No. Enough of that. It was time to look forward. Toward NaPurHab, toward the Terra Nova, toward the Lone World—the Lone World that she had unveiled, revealed for what it was.
Back home, back on the Earth that was lost to her, they were monitoring the Lone World, every antenna and detector they could manage aimed at it, listening for its commands. Her friends back there were scurrying around the archives, digging through all the old data, searching for whatever transmissions from the Lone World the detection hardware had recorded by chance over the years. The experts in Charonian notation and language were working night and day, struggling to squeeze meaning and understanding from the Lone World’s transmissions. They were learning the enemy’s language of command, thus the enemy’s most powerful secrets. And she, Sianna Colette, had told them where the secrets were kept.
That was something to have pride in.
Now if she could get the hell out of this damned box…
Wolf Bernhardt sat at the water’s edge, in the darkness, in the hot, fetid night of the South American coast. He stared up at the blackness where the sky should have been. Thick cloud cover hid the stars from view, and made the night as dark and blank as his heart.
Soon he would have to head back to the ops center and watch over the next phase of this bloody nightmare. He would have to be strong, and firm, ready to make decisions. Before then, he needed sleep. He knew that. He should go back to his quarters and try and rest. But not yet. Not yet. He needed the darkness, and the roaring surf, and the chance to be alone.
Wolf shifted on the park bench, some tiny fragment of his mind wondering why on Earth no one ever made such benches comfortable. They always seemed to cut into some part of one’s anatomy. Thinking on trivial matters at such a time prevented one from thinking about so many other things.
The Atlantic lay before him, the water of the mighty ocean quite invisible in the darkness. But it was there, all right. The roar of the surf, and the salt air, and the glint of lights from the spaceport reflected off a whitecap all told him that. The unseen was still there. The hidden could be close, and powerful.
Half-mechanically, Wolf checked the glowing numbers of the time display on his wristaid. Two hours since Yuri had died.
But that was not strictly accurate. Better, more accurate to say, that it was two hours since Wolf Bernhardt had killed Yuri Sakalov by sending him off on a suicide mission.
And Sianna and Wally still were out there, just waiting to be picked off, the defenses on their ships just as useless as the ones on Yuri’s.
And that was his doing, too. His. All of it. This whole mad, jury-rigged scheme to resupply NaPurHab before the SCOREs arrived. The hurried, improvised, idiotic, un-thought-out, comic-opera-heroics idea of sending Sakalov and the others to Captain Steiger and the Terra Nova. Others had thought of it, but he had agreed. He had liked the idea.
But no, damnation, no! It was not idiotic. It was right and proper to send those three to Steiger. MRI could beam all the information it wanted to the ship, but knowledge was not expertise, or wisdom, or insight. Sianna Colette had proved that much. She had not discovered anything new—she had simply put the pieces together, and made something new out of the parts everyone else had already seen.
Sooner or later, Terra Nova was going to have to confront the Lone World, and when she did, she would need not just the data concerning the Lone World, but the minds that had lived with that data, talked it out, seen it from a dozen different angles.
He needed to talk. Never had he felt more alone.
He pulled his phone from his pocket and stared at it for a moment before he realized that it was, of course, Yuri that he wanted to call.
Call and apologize for the very thing that made the conversation and the apology impossible.
But if not Yuri, then whom?
Time and events were rushing past, beyond all control. The crisis, the moment, was still unraveling. Early tomorrow, the first of the SCOREs would arrive at the vicinity of Earth, just about the same time Sturgis got to NaPurHab. That moment would give the first clue as to what the SCOREs—and perhaps the entire Multisystem— intended. Would they indeed attack Earth, land and use it for their breeding ground? And if so, could Earth survive?
Wolf had spent every waking moment of the last five years struggling to prepare for the time when the Charonians moved against Earth. He had gleaned every bit of data from every observation of the nearby Captive Worlds, attempting to analyze the nature of the attacks on them by the scars left behind. He had cajoled the United Nations and the rump national governments to prepare weapons to defend the planet, given a hundred speeches, written endless articles and reports urging this plan or that proposal, preparing these evacuation plans and those training programs.
Now the time had come and, across the world, armies and scientists and politicians were scrambling to be ready for the unknown, for whatever the SCOREs might do.
Perhaps the Battle of Earth would start tomorrow when the first SCORE made its closest approach to the Moonpoint Ring and then turned toward Earth. Perhaps tomorrow would mark a victory—or the beginning of the end.
But Wolf had already fought his battle. Either his efforts would be enough, or else they would not. There was nothing left for him to do. And perhaps it was too much for one man to imagine the fate of the world. Instead he found himself thinking about the fate of one child-woman, one frightened girl he had met but briefly and would never see again, a woman he had sent out into the void. Wolf glanced at his wristaid and figured the time. Thirty hours from now, Sianna Colette would either be dead, or just arriving at NaPurHab.