But still and all, Boredway was a pretty exciting locale just at the moment. All the conveyors and tow-ways were crammed with containers moving this way and that as the cargo jockeys struggled to get everything to where it belonged, and any number of cargo-container clusters were just floating free, tethered in most haphazard fashion and hanging in mid-air until someone thought of what to do with them.
Eyeball shook her head worriedly. She had been sweating this possibility. There was no way she could do any sort of course-correction burn until all the unsecured cargo was lashed down properly and stored in such a way as to retain the hab’s center of gravity somewhere within shouting distance of its centerline.
The hab’s cargo crews hadn’t ever had to handle this much in the way of incoming gear and supplies, even back in the unweird old daze before the Abduction. Cargo ops had been down to skeleton crews for years—and those skeleton crews hadn’t been worth much. There had been near no inbound traffic and total no outbound traf whasoev for years. Meantime, allthetime, bigtime great deal of work needed doing elsewhere in the hab if the place was to hang in there. Lotsa Purps had turned into big swinging engineers the last few years, improvising their way outta a zillion shortages and hardware drop-deads.
With so little demand here, and so much otherplace, twas understandable in the circs that cargo ops had become a haven for the real dreggers of Purple society—and Purple dregs were about as dreggy as they came, yabbos what barely came up to the min standards for being losers. Now the Maximum Windbag was staffing the cargo ops teams any way he could, yanking in teams from every other part of the station who didn’t know a thing about cargo. The Maxbag had been forced to find retired cargo oldfogies, put the oldfarts in charge to keep things running. But plain to scope, oldies weren’t whipping the losers into shape.
Eyeball swore to herself and moved along against the stream of cargo, toward the aft-end air lock complex. Time to bust some heads if she didn’t want the hab busting up when she lit the engines.
CORE destroyed, Ursula Gruber read. Probability of renewed attacks high, probability of surviving same low. Ursula shook her head. Captain Steiger was not much for excessive optimism. The woman won a great victory, and yet her report states she expects to be defeated next time.
Steiger was only partly right. A lot of COREs were still out there, but now people knew they were vulnerable, that they could he killed. The Terra Nova had taught Earth that its enemies were not utterly invincible. That knowledge would give people some backbone. Battles are not won by people who are certain they will lose.
Of course, a whole Multisystem full of high morale was not going to be much use against a CORE that managed to dodge the exploding decoys and kill the TN. The Terra Nova would have to win every time in order to survive. The odds against that were long, to put it mildly. For that matter, hope would not be much use against a Breeding Binge, should such occur. Ursula was more and more convinced that there would be no Binge—but try telling that to anyone. Word had gotten out, of course, and every imaginable official and private preparation was being made. Troops were being called up, attack forces prepared. People were getting instructions on shelters and evacuation. Of course, any number of end-of-the-world groups were springing up, and a few of the Sphere-worship cults had gotten into trouble. Suicides were up sharply—but so were marriages.
But all of it for nothing. There would be no Breeding Binge—at least not now. The SCOREs did not make sense as Breeders, and they were heading for the Moonpoint Ring, not Earth. But who the devil would believe that it was a false alarm, when Gruber could offer no plausible alternative?
Never mind. People would learn soon enough. But Terra Nova and NaPurHab were, as Captain Steiger knew, the ones up against the real long odds.
All right then. It was time to change the odds. But how? Ursula stood up and walked to the window, looked down at the absurd, underground, inward-looking bubble-in-the-stone headquarters of MRI. She slipped open the window and leaned out into the air-conditioned simulated fresh air. The ducks were on the pond, the drake flapping his wings, rearing up out of the water. She could hear his quacking from here, faint in the distance, announcing to all the world that he ruled this patch of water against all comers. As if he had built the cavern, and commanded the humans to come down to the water and bring stale buns to his flock.
Compared to how much say humans had in the running of the Multisystem, it didn’t seem quite so absurd. But if the drake failed in caring for his flock, only the ducks would die. If the humans failed, then all the Earth would suffer.
Steiger was right. The odds against her ship were high and getting higher. There was no hope—and no point—in the Terra Nova battling endlessly against COREs. That was playing the Charonian’s game, playing to their strengths.
So what game could mere human beings play, and beat the Charonians at?
Ursula had the feeling the answers were just out of reach, just beyond the questions she was asking. Something else had to happen before she would understand.
The SCOREs. That had to be it. They weren’t going to do what everyone expected them to do. She was sure of that now. She had not the slightest idea what they were going to do instead—but when she did, it would be time to change the game.
Joanne Beadle—and every other person in the ops center—watched as SCORE X001 made its closest approach to the Moonpoint Ring.
The Charonians had never bothered with closest-approach gravity-well maneuvers, but if the SCOREs were indeed headed for Earth, they would have to make their moves there. Whatever they were going to do, closest approach was the moment to do it.
X001 was the vanguard SCORE, the first to arrive. The betting was that whatever it did, the follow-on SCOREs would imitate. And whatever it was going to do, it was going to do now. It could do almost anything by maneuvering at peripoint—but which way would it jump?
“What’s it doing, Beadle?” Bernhardt demanded, leaning over his chair, as if Beadle had some special knowledge, could see something in the display screen that Bernhardt could not.
“I can’t quite say,” she replied, her mind far more on the display tank than on the director’s question. “There’s no way to guess. This one is no simulation.”
“Yah,” Bernhardt agreed. “We’re through with those for a while, thank the heavens. I was beginning to forget things could be real.”
Joanne didn’t see how it could be a good thing that the alien craft approaching Earth were real. It would have suited her just fine if the whole fleet of them were imaginary. Still, there was something to be said for getting on with it all.
She stared at the screen, tense, waiting.
It would, of course, have been sheerest folly to try and read a human craft’s intent from this range. The distances were too great. Even the fastest of human vehicles would be moving too slowly for a course change to be observable at this distance.
But not the Charonians. They could accelerate at hundreds of gees if it suited them.
She leaned closer to the screen, willing it to give up the secrets. “Peripoint in ten seconds,” she announced, quite needlessly. “In five. Four. Three. Two. One—”