Wolf shut his eyes and nodded. He was more tired than he looked. “Yah. More intercepts.”
“I am afraid it goes deeper than that. They are not just more aggressive. They are more erratic.”
“What do you mean?” Wolf demanded, looking up at the camera, his expression hard and sharp.
Ursula Gruber paced the floor. She knew that she was going in and out of the pan limits of the cameras, and knew how irritating it could be for Wolf when she wandered out of the shot, but she couldn’t help it. She was too keyed up, too edgy.
“There are more attacks, but there is less logic behind any given attack. Launch-window constraints meant we had to send some cargo via high-risk trajectories—but the COREs aren’t taking the bait. Cargoes we almost expected to be smashed are getting through—and the ones sent via the safest routes and launch windows are getting hit far more frequently than they should be.”
“We have enough ships and routes and attacks to know it isn’t just some slight skew in the numbers, a hiccup in the statistics. It’s a real change. Based on the numbers we had a week ago, Dr. Sakalov’s ship should not have been attacked.”
“And the other two, Sturgis and Colette, are still en route, in the mdidle of it, on those ‘safe’ trajectories,” Bernhardt said in a bitter voice, a note of anger and blame there as well. But one look at his expression made it clear he was blaming himself, not her. Well, if she felt guilty enough to think he was pointing the finger at her, no wonder. “I gave you the trajectory data, Wolf,” she said. “His death is on my hands as well.”
“Ursula, we are fighting a war here. Yes, one man has died, and two others might, but the fate of the planet is on the line. We made the mistake together, Ursula, if you like. But his blood is not on our hands. The enemy killed him. Not us.”
“But the other two are on the same sort of safe trajectories. Now all my calculations turn out to be useless and we don’t dare change their courses for fear of attracting the COREs’ attention. I could get them all killed, to no purpose.”
“Then they will be killed!” Wolf said. “We got them killed. I assure you, the nightmares came every time I lay my head down even before Yuri’s death. Now they will come even worse. I know that. But we must move on. If the other two are on dangerous trajectories, it’s too late now. There’s no way to recall them, no way to save them. If at least one of them survives, then that will be enough. The knowledge, the experience we have here at MRI will get to where it needs to be.”
“And if they both die? If the COREs get them both?” Ursula asked.
“If the COREs get them both—” Bernhardt began to answer, but stopped abruptly, as if to calm himself and collect his thoughts. “If the COREs get them both, I will review the situation and decide what to do. We may attempt to send someone else out. By that time it may no longer be within our power to do anything at all. It is not, thank God, a decision I must make now.”
“Have you—informed—either of them?” Ursula asked. “Do they know what happened to Yuri?”
“No. They are not to be informed until they arrive at NaPurHab. No good purpose could be served by telling them now. Cooped up in those damned tin cans, what good would knowing do them? Besides, the panic could kill them.”
“You’re right, I suppose,” Ursula conceded, “but that doesn’t make it feel any righter.”
“No, it does not.” Bernhardt was silent again for a moment. He just sat there, staring down at his hands. Ursula found it in her heart to pity the man, even if he did seem more than half robot most of the time. This was hard on him, harder than he ever let show. “But let us move on,” he said at last, in a brisk, efficient tone of voice. “How goes work on the Lone World transmissions?”
“We’re learning fast,” Ursula said, trying to sound equally brisk and efficient. “We’re seeing a lot of new syntax and vocabulary, but the underlying structure is very similar to the message traffic we’ve been reading for years.”
“Excellent,” Bernhardt replied. “That is going to be the key, Ursula. If we can read the Charonian’s basic commands, perhaps we can still survive.”
“We’re working around the clock, I promise you. But there’s something else that might be of more immediate concern. We have tracked what seem to be two incidents of—well, I am not quite sure how to describe it.”
“Two incidents of what, Ursula?”
“Of what look very much like COREs attacking each other. And another of a CORE attacking a SCORE.”
“Charonians attacking each other?” Wolf asked.
Ursula nodded. “Suicide attacks, in fact, but that much at least makes sense. An impact powerful enough to kill one would pretty much have to kill the other.”
“But they are attacking each other?”
“We’ve seen it before, occasionally, in the vicinity of some of the other Captive Worlds. Never more than one at a time.”
“Are you sure they were attacks? Might the incidents not be something else you are misinterpreting?”
“One CORE moves in on another, crashes into it, and both of them go dead in the water. No further movement or radar emissions, and a cloud of fragments and debris. What else could it be?”
“But that doesn’t make sense,” Wolf protested. “Why would they attack each other?”
“I don’t know,” Ursula said. “Why the hell do they do anything? Any explanation I can give comes down to projecting human emotions and motives onto a bunch of flying rocks and mountains. But something is different about the way they are acting. That much I can say for sure. A few incidents of one crashing into another could just be malfunctions or accidents, or a result of more traffic causing congestion. It’s more general than that. Their movements are more sudden compared to even a few weeks ago. There’s something rather abrupt in the way they move, something that wasn’t there before. I’ve seen a few COREs start in toward a target and then abort, brake to a halt almost before they start. They’re jumpy.”
“But why?” Wolf asked. “What sort of orders could they be getting that would make them act that way?”
Ursula shrugged. “We’re just at the beginning stages of being able to read Lone World command sets, but I don’t think they are being ordered to do anything. Besides, the shift in their behavior is too subtle a difference to be caused by orders. It’s a question of tone.”
“Tone? Ursula, what the devil are you talking about?” Wolf said.
Ursula sighed. “All right. I think they’re sensing panic from higher up, and the panic is spreading. That’s the short form. They’re trigger-happy because the Lone World is nervous.”
“That’s a lot to read into one asteroid crashing into another.”
“Wolf, I know these particular, individual COREs. They’ve been in near-Earth space for years. I’ve been tracking them since they arrived, watched them the way a behaviorist watches herds of animals. And they do have individual behaviors. Certain COREs are more aggressive, other more cautious. If two COREs got within a certain distance of each other, one would give way to the other—and I could predict which one. I have files and data on every move they’ve ever made.
“These COREs are acting scared. Something has them spooked. The best I can describe it is that they are like hunting dogs who start acting nervous when their master is edgy.”
Ursula walked back behind her desk, dropped into her chair, and stared up at Wolfs face on the wall screen. “Which, of course, brings us back to the old, old question. What is frightening enough to spook the Charonians?”