Sianna shut her eyes so as not to see the darkness. She prayed to someone, anyone, she didn’t care who, to get them out of this get them out of this, now, please God now—
A whole bank of circuit breakers slammed shut with a bang, and the overhead lights came on. The ventilators kicked back in, and Sianna was desperately glad she hadn’t noticed them cutting out. The air cleared, and the control thrusters cut. Eyeball worked the conn, slowing the tumble, bringing the hab around to a steady, stable attitude. Eyeball let out a sigh of relief and leaned back in her crash couch.
The ops boards were still more red and amber than green, and new alarms seemed to be going off every time an old one was silenced. But they had made it. They were here, wherever that was, and they were alive.
At last all the alarms were turned off, and the command center was still, and quiet, for a moment.
“Well,” Wally said, speaking into the silence, “let’s not do that again.”
Sianna held the carrybag with one hand and started climbing the ladder, making her awkward way up to the zero-gee levels. It was four days since the hab had come through the wormhole, but the reality of it all hadn’t set in yet, at least not for Sianna.
What do we do now? she wondered. No one knew. They were surprised enough just to find themselves alive. Most of the Purps weren’t yet thinking clearly enough to manage a state of shock.
Sianna found herself busying herself with small details. Make the tea—one the way Wally liked it, and the other for her. Make the sandwiches. Pack them in the carrybag. Go to where Wally was.
It might have been possible to think no further than lunch if she had been allowed to hole up in her cabin with her pillow over her head. Unfortunately, Eyeball had put Sianna and Wally in charge of charting the big picture, making it a trifle harder to escape.
Sianna reached the top of the vertical shaft and stepped into the horizontal corridor that led to the ob bubble. She swung her legs around and kicked off from the end wall, intending to send herself sailing smoothly down the corridor. Unfortunately, the weight of the carrybag in her left hand threw off her balance. She overcorrected and sent herself tumbling through the air, bouncing off the corridor wall. She caught at a handrail, bounced once or twice, and then steadied herself before making her way along the corridor in a more controlled fashion.
She shifted the carrybag full of lunch to her other hand, opened the hatch, and moved into the observation bubble. Wally, as usual, did not notice her arrival. The autoscan scopes had been working overtime since their arrival in-system, and he was busily pulling the data off them and logging it in to his simulator datapack.
Eyeball had just told them to get some sort of inventory of the system. Wally was way past that, already hard at work using his knowledge of the Earth’s Multisystem as a rough working guide to setting up a dynamic model of this system—and of what this system had once been.
“Wally,” Sianna said. “I brought back lunch.” She sat down, opened up the carrybag, and handed Wally a bulb of tea.
“Hey, great,” he said. “Keep forgetting to eat.”
“I know, I know. And I keep remembering to feed you,” she said, handing over a sandwich. She dug out a sandwich for herself and looked out the observation port.
There it was. Huge, brooding, smashed and dead, an overwhelming sight. The Shattered Sphere had named itself. Not even the Purps could dream of calling it anything else. Sianna could see a dozen craters of various sizes, and one or two impacts that had punched holes clean through. The Sphere was covered with a jagged, broken network of cracks.
The Last World hung close in the sky, still in half-phase, appearing somewhat larger now than it had when NaPurHab had first arrived. Sianna had named it Solitude, and it seemed as if the name might stick—a fact that gave her immense pleasure. Not many people got the chance to name a world.
She looked down on it, and was surprised at her own reaction. She felt sorry for the poor thing. A lone world, a last world, a lonely world. An airless, waterless, lifeless lump of rock, all that was left of the control center for a mighty stellar empire. “Sorrow” might have been another name for the place.
It had taken the slightest of burns on the maneuvering jets to put the hab into an elongated elliptical orbit about Solitude. Eyeball might well decide some other orbit would be better later on, but this one at least kept them from crashing into the planet, which was the main thing for now.
Well astern of the hab, and getting further away by the minute, was the wormhole portal, a Ring-and-Hole set very much like all the ones back in the Multisystem. That was no surprise. Most of the SCOREs that should have been in orbit around it seemed to have gone missing. Only nine or ten were on station, their radars aimed out from the wormhole, clearly watching for something on its way in.
But the hab’s radar center had detected signals from at least four or five other clusters of SCORE radars, and visual checks showed that each cluster surrounded its own dormant Ring-and-Hole set. It would seem that the SCOREs the Multisystem Sphere had been sending through other wormholes back on the other side had been reinforcements for a number of sites on this side. But the SCORE counts were low at the other Ring-and-Hole sets as well. That was a good-size mystery right there—where were the rest of the SCOREs that had been streaming through the wormholes?
No doubt plenty more mysteries would crop up before some answers presented themselves. “So,” Sianna asked. “What’s the state of play?”
Wally took a swallow of tea and a bite of the sandwich. “Well, this place looks like what the Multisystem would look like if our Sphere stopped using gravitics to hold the place together. First, there’s the Sphere itself, and presumably a black hole of about one solar mass inside it.”
“Why do you assume the black hole?”
“No gravitic controls means Solitude has to be in a natural orbit, and that means something with enough mass to produce that much natural gravity. If the Dyson Sphere was built out of disassembled planets, it can’t have that much mass on its own—not by a factor of a thousand. So there has to be something massive inside it.”
Sianna nodded. “Right. I should have seen that. And it has to be a compact dark mass like a black hole. If it were a star, we’d see its light shining from inside the Sphere through the holes, and be detecting lots of heat energy.”
“Exactly. Aside from the Sphere, we’ve got Solitude, of course, and one Captive Sun that’s still around. It might have been in a natural binary relationship with the star the Charonians built the Sphere around.”
“Any more tracks on the other stars and their planets?”
“Plenty of them,” Wally said enthusiastically. “It’s going to take months for me to build up a simulation of the momentum exchanges that ejected them from the system. So far I’ve tracked seven definite ejected Captive Suns moving away from this system. Working backwards from their current velocity tells us it happened something like one hundred fifty years ago.”
“What about the Captive Worlds?” Sianna asked. “Are they still with their stars?”
“Not most of them,” Wally said. “But then you wouldn’t expect them to be. I just ran a quick-and-dirty simulation of the Multisystem, to see what would happen if the gravity control system shut off there. One or two planets per star stay anchored in their orbits. The rest are thrown around by momentum exchanges caused by various close passes between the Captive Suns. The planets in those pseudo-stable orbits go sailing off into space, or impact with other planets, or spiraled into their suns. Some of them end up in extremely eccentric orbits of the Sphere. Two or three impact on the Sphere— including Earth.”