And maybe the SCOREs would move faster than expected, do something unimagined, get the job over faster, exterminate the local fauna immediately so as to clear the way for the Breeders. Maybe everyone on Earth would be dead or dying in thirty hours’ time. No one could know. Wolf Bernhardt sighed and turned back from the sea. Time to get some sleep, before reawakening to the nightmares.
Ursula Gruber, Ph.D., stared, unseeing, at the datapack in front of her. No doubt there were all sorts of useful—perhaps even vital— datapoints in the cloud of numbers and charts and statistics in front of her eyes, but she couldn’t see them anymore. She rubbed her eyes and sighed. No point trying any more just now. Last night Yuri had died. Last night she had not slept a wink. She needed quiet and rest. Not that she was going to get it.
They had it wrong. She was becoming more and more certain of that. She did not know where, or how, but she knew they had it wrong.
The SCOREs were the key to it. But they didn’t have that key in the proper lock. The SCOREs were headed toward the vicinity of the Moonpoint Ring, and not toward Earth. The conventional wisdom was that the SCOREs were going to perform gravity-assist maneuvers, do slingshot turns around the Moonpoint Singularity and come in for landings on Earth to commence a Breeding Binge.
But that made no sense. The Charonians had never used gravity-assist maneuvering before. Why should they? Even the most energetic gravity assist could only add ten or twenty kilometers per second of velocity change, and any Charonian could manage ten times that much velocity without any strain at all. Gravity assists made sense when you were short of energy but had lots of time, whereas the Charonians had all the energy anyone could hope for— and seemed to be in a desperate hurry.
Which led her to the conclusion that SCOREs were going toward Moonpoint not for gravassist but because the Moonpoint was their ultimate destination.
Now all she had to figure out was why the devil would they want to go to the Moonpoint. And there were the damned Ghoul Modules, to use the Naked Purple name, a name which seemed likely to stick. Sixteen of them had landed at equally spaced intervals on the inner surface of the Moonpoint Ring. No one had offered the least explanation for them. They seemed to be sending power through the system, but why?
This one little planet was far from being the chief concern of the Charonians. Granted, that was difficult to keep in mind as the huge fleets of Charonians swarmed about Earth. Similar fleets of SCOREs were headed toward between fourteen and twenty other Captive Worlds—but not toward all of them. Just some. Why?
Furthermore, on three Captives, the SCOREs had already arrived—but no one could tell what happened next. The worlds where the SCOREs had arrived were just too dim and too far off to see what was going on in detail.
About half of the SCOREs apparently went missing after arrival at the target planet. That would seem to support the assumption that at least some SCOREs were landing on the planet—but then why were the other half still detectable? Why didn’t they land and commence breeding as well? Waiting for their turn?
It didn’t quite hang together. With every passing minute, Ursula felt more and more sure that they had the whole Breeding Binge idea wrong. Yes, there was no doubt that the Charonians used planetary surfaces to reproduce, but why assume they were going to do it today?
But despite feeling they had it all wrong, she still had no idea what was right. She had no alternative explanation. What other motivation could there be besides a Binge?
Well, no point in wondering. There was enough else on her plate to keep her busy. The latest from the cryptographic section, for example, with a new analysis of the transmissions from the Lone World—
A discreet little beep tone from her calendar roused Ursula from her thoughts. Damnation. Time to phone in her report to Wolf Bernhardt.
Why couldn’t he just accept a written report, instead of interrogating her twice a week? She hated his questioning. Of course, Bernhardt was not likely to be in top form today. Not after getting Sakalov killed the day before.
She reached out a tired hand and pushed screen panels marked place scheduled call and audio link button. She hesitated a moment, then punched up the video link as well. Normally, she didn’t like the additional intrusion of someone seeing her as well as hearing her, but she wanted to see what sort of shape the man was in.
Besides which, it might be no bad thing if he saw that she was nearly at the end of her tether. Wolf had a tendency to forget that people needed sleep.
“Yah. Bernhardt here,” said a voice from the console, speaking before the video display had gotten his image up on the screen.
Then the announcement screen faded and she could see Wolf Bernhardt, sitting at what looked like a console station in some sort of command center. She could see a vague, mousy-looking woman just at the edge of the frame. Where was he? Still at Kourou, according to the infostrip across the bottom of the screen. She had assumed he would be back here in New York long ago. Ah, well, good thing the phone system could keep track of where he was. Ursula certainly couldn’t.
Bernhardt looked drawn, tired, and pale, but not nearly so much as she expected. The man never wore out—or at least he was determined to make it seem that way.
“Wolf. Good morning.” Strange. She thought of him by his last name, but always addressed him by his first. Somehow, the two of them had always simulated intimacy, without actually having it.
“This morning is anything but good,” Bernhardt replied, a hard edge to his voice. “Last night was nothing but disaster. How could this morning be good?”
Damn the man, kicking her in the head for a commonplace courtesy. As if she were to blame for Yuri’s death. Ske had not sent him out in that death-trap permod. But still, she must say something. “I mourn his death as well, Wolf. I am sorry.”
“Yah, yah,” Bernhardt replied, ducking his head and running his fingers through his hair, avoiding eye contact. Ursula allowed the moment and the silence to linger.
But then it was over. Wolf cleared his throat, adjusted the papers in front of him, and moved resolutely to new business. “Now, your report and analysis. Have you got anything new? Any revised behavior analysis on the COREs or SCOREs?”
Ursula punched a panel or two on her menu screen. “Text and data on their way to you now. There is something new in it, too.”
“New in what way?”
“Something a little hard to put down in numbers and charts.” Ursula blinked, covered her mouth as she yawned. She felt the need to get up and stretch.
“Well, what is it then? A behavioral change in the SCOREs, perhaps?”
Ursula shook her head no. She was feeling restless, cooped up. She threw a switch that moved the image of Bernhardt over to the main wall display, and cut from the desk camera to the one over the wall screen.
She stood up, came around to the front of the desk, perched on its corner, and addressed the wall screen. “No change on the SCOREs, Wolf. We’re still tracking them heading toward the Moonpoint Singularity.” She hesitated, tempted to say something more about her thoughts on that. But no. Leave it for now. Talk about the rest of it instead. “But I’m starting to see something else in all the data. Nothing I can define absolutely, nothing I can hang a number on, but it’s there, all the same.”
Bernhardt gave her an odd look. “What is where, please?”
Ursula gestured vaguely. “The COREs, Wolf. They are becoming increasingly aggressive.”