“I beg your pardon?” Gerald asked, turning away from the image.
“What next?” Dianne asked again, leaning in close, her eyes intent.
“We were supposed to rendezvous with NaPurHab. Now what?” If Gerald saw the same answer, then there was at least some rational basis for it.
Gerald’s eyes lit up. “I think,” he said, “that we should give serious consideration to proceeding with the rendezvous—at an alternative location.”
“You thought it was too dangerous for the Purps to try the passage. You said so yourself. Why would it be safer for us?”
“The circumstances are different. Because they went through, we know there’s another side. And we know there is something over there that can kill Spheres. That’s knowledge we need.”
“But we don’t even know if the Purps survived. They could have been destroyed the moment after we lost contact.”
“The Terra Nova can take more punishment than they could. And, we can’t survive here that long ourselves. Beating one CORE was a triumph. We can’t make a career out of it. Sooner or later, one of them is going to get us.”
“We could shift our trajectory away from Moonpoint, and regroup,” Dianne suggested. “Get well away from all the planets and all the COREs and SCOREs, take a month or a year to think it through.”
“No,” Gerald said. “What would wasting time change, except that the Ghoul Modules could shut the Moonpoint Ring down again? We go in after them. That Last World alone ought to tell us more about the Charonians than anything else we’ve ever seen. A month or two ago we were hoping to learn more by boarding a CORE. Now, maybe we have the chance to explore the mind of a Charonian Sphere. Compared to exploring an unguarded Command Center and a Sphere, what is there for us here?”
Dianne took a deep breath and then let it out. Now the idea, the mad idea, was out in the open. “Good,” she said. “I needed to hear you say it. I wanted to be sure I wasn’t crazy.”
“What about the SCOREs on the other side?” Gerald asked. “Won’t they try and stop us?”
“I don’t think so,” Dianne said. “Not if we’ve got the rest of this figured out. They’re trying to keep something from coming through the hole going the other way. The SCOREs on this side are blocking anything coming out of the hole. That only makes sense if the SCOREs on the other side are there to block anything going in. We ought to be safe enough heading outward.”
Gerald nodded his head abstractedly. “Ordinarily, I’d say that was mad optimism. The risks are far too high. But with all the other chances we’d be taking, that one seems almost trivial.”
Dianne smiled sadly. “When the chance of getting smashed to atoms by SCOREs on the other side of a wormhole seems trivial, then I say things are in a pretty bad way.”
Gerald laughed. “Let’s you and me get to work, and maybe we can find some way to make them better.”
Twenty-eight
… And It Comes Out There
“One of the tricky things about researching NaPurHab’s arrival in the Shattered Sphere system, and what happened afterward, is that neither the people in the Solar System nor the people in the Multisystem knew the whole story. It’s hard, now, after the fact, to remember the appalling ignorance we all suffered under. Everyone had holes in their knowledge. Big enough holes that, for all intents and purposes, no one knew what the hell was going on.
“Come to think of it, the Adversary and the Charonians knew even less than we did.”
Another attacker came at the Adversary, and it dealt with the assault as effortlessly as always. The Adversary smashed through, its multi-megaton assailant, emerging unscathed, its course unchanged, and leaving another cloud of debris in its wake.
The immediate threat dealt with, the Adversary extended its senses outward and noted a different disturbance in the vicinity of its main target. It focused its attention there. Some odd sort of mass, quite different from the others it had seen, had come out of the link from the living system. Had the Adversary entertained any lingering doubts at all that this was the real target and that all the others were decoys, then the arrival of this strange object would have put those doubts to rest. The Adversary’s kind had long experience of the Charonians, and how they behaved. The unique link locus, the one with something, anything, different about it, was the real one. The Adversary was well pleased to have its previous conclusions confirmed. It moved smoothly on, toward the link and the rich feeding grounds beyond.
Sianna held on as the habitat bucked and kicked like a live thing. And she promptly put any thought that she was cured of claustrophobia right out of her head.
You bloody idiot, what the hell are you doing going down a wormhole down a wormhole down a wormhole?—They were trying to send the hab through a tunnel of infinite length, and that tunnel was inside a hole that took up absolutely no space whatsoever. Sianna’s fear of being closed in rose to new heights, took on new meanings, as NaPurHab headed deeper into the hole, the ride getting progressively rougher as Eyeball fought to keep them moving down the centerline—and as the gravitation fluxes and tidal pulses struggled to tear them apart.
After an especially sharp bang and a thud, the overhead lights cut out and came back up and then went out and stayed out. A dozen new alarms started up, hooting and beeping and ringing, and Sianna could smell something burning.
At least the exterior monitors stayed on, even with the cabin lights out. The sideview cameras showed an un-blue-white tunnel wall of flailing storm, seething with power, rushing past the habitat, and that was bad enough. But the forward cam showed the view looking straight down the wormhole, down, down, down the seething, glowing tube, toward the tiny black pinprick that was the way out, the only way out, impossibly far off and getting no closer. Sianna clutched at the arms of her scruffy old crash chair and tried to tear her eyes away from that seething tunnel.
The passage seemed to go on forever in time and space, taking them further and further away from the Universe, deeper and deeper into the tunnel and the depths.
And then, abruptly, it was over—gone, all at once. The wormhole swept past the forward view, and the Universe beyond came into view, and they were up, and out, and through.
But through into what, and where? The forward camera showed a huge, sullen-red globe, a tiny, dried-up grey lump of a world, the black of space—
Suddenly the habitat was pitching over, starting to tumble, end over end.
“Damnation!” Eyeball called out. “Aft boom caught wormhole side. Sheared right off. Morons failed to retract or what?”
“Can you correct?” The Maximum Windbag had to shout the question to be heard over the alarms.
“Dunno!” Eyeball shouted back. “Shut up and stand by!”
Something broke loose behind Sianna’s head and went windmilling across the compartment to smash into the far wall. The lights on a whole bank of terminals flared and went out, and the hot smell of burnt insulation was suddenly stronger and more pungent. Wisps and tendrils of smoke filled the compartment. Air. They were going to run out of air and suffocate and die in the darkness.