“That would be the ship carrying Silver Rain,” Tunguska said.
“And Niagara,” Auger added.
Tunguska shut his eyes, blanking out the extraneous distraction of the real world. “I see the shuttle, and the mother ship,” he said. “The shuttle is on a high-gee burn trajectory away from the Molotov section.”
“Looks like it’s trying to put as much distance between itself and the blast point as possible,” Auger speculated.
Tunguska nodded, his eyes still closed.
“Well, you would, wouldn’t you?” Floyd commented.
“Any chance of a beam strike any time soon?” she asked.
“Not yet. Believe me, my trigger finger is itching.”
There was nothing to do but wait for the distance to be closed. Tunguska’s long-range view gradually sharpened, confirming that the two ships had indeed separated, and that the heavier of the two—the main craft, the one that they had been following from Earth—was racing on an accelerating trajectory towards the surface of the ALS, gunning its bleed-drive to the wall. The excess radiation from the tortured drive made it an easy object to track, even across such a distance. An hour earlier it had been moving parallel to the surface of the sphere, but now it was daggering down on a course that would intersect the surface at a right angle.
“We can’t stop this, can we?” Auger said, exasperated. “That damned thing is going to hit the ALS no matter what we do.”
“But admit it,” Tunguska said, with more playfulness than she cared for. “Aren’t you just a little bit curious to see what will happen?”
“I could stand not knowing,” she said.
Tunguska opened his eyes. “Report from the bleed-drive: we’re ready to increase our thrust to five gees. Can’t risk anything higher than that, for now at least. We won’t need the acceleration caskets, although the ship will still have to immobilise us.”
“Whatever it takes,” Auger said.
The room quivered and swallowed them.
In the soft grip of the ship’s protective systems, time surged and dragged in unpredictable, dreamlike waves. She wondered how it was for Floyd, whose head was free of twinkling machines. What was he thinking now that he was so close to home, and simultaneously so close to seeing everything he knew destroyed?
“By my estimation,” Tunguska said, “the Molotov impact will happen in fifty seconds. I’m deploying expendable sensors, but closing off all our usual channels. No one’s ever seen a big matter-antimatter explosion up close, and there’s no telling what kind of reaction the blast will provoke from the ALS itself.”
“How close is that shuttle to the impact point?” Auger asked.
“About half our present distance,” Tunguska replied. “His shielding had better be good if he wants to be alive at the end of this. Thirty seconds—”
“I can do without the countdown, Tunguska,” Auger said, bracing herself. “Just tell us if we’re still alive at the end of it.”
She felt, when it happened, some ghostly report of the blast, even though Tunguska assured her that no signals could possibly reach her through the barricades he had put in place. It was long and drawn out, like a distant peel of thunder.
“The Molotov device has detonated,” Tunguska said. “And we, self-evidently, are still alive.”
“I was being sarcastic.”
“I wasn’t. It’s always good to confirm these things.”
When the expendable sensors deemed it safe, Tunguska unshuttered the ship’s more delicate eyes and turned them on the scene of the crime. It took a little while for them to make sense of the data, for the view was obstructed by a slowly expanding debris plume, spreading away from the impact point like a cherry-red fountain. Auger grappled with the scale, but she still couldn’t adjust to the mind-numbing size of the ALS object. The plume was huge—hundreds of thousands of kilometres across and still growing—but it was just a tiny detail on the surface of the sphere.
“Debris is clearing near the epicentre,” Tunguska said. “The view is foreshortened, so it isn’t easy to see exactly what damage has been done.”
“Just show us what you’ve got,” Auger said.
They had to wait twenty minutes until the plume had dissipated sufficiently, and their angle of observation improved enough, to allow a clearer view. By then, Tunguska’s ship was following the same arcing trajectory as Niagara’s, curving around for a hard interception with the ALS. They were still sustaining five gees, cocooned against harm.
“They’ve broken through,” Tunguska said.
He pushed an image into Auger’s head. The Molotov device had punched a surprisingly neat little entry wound into the skin of the ALS. The hole was a hundred kilometres across and nearly circular. The kilometre-thick skin glowed painfully brightly around the edge of the hole, shading down through blue and yellow and charred red out to a distance of perhaps two or three hundred kilometres from the epicentre. There were hints of wild, lashing structures in the exposed cross section, flailing like severed nerve endings.
“Dear Christ,” Auger said. “They did it. The damned thing didn’t put up any kind of fight at all.”
“Did you expect it to?” Floyd asked.
“I expected something.”
“What about the other ship?”
“Still tracking it,” Tunguska said. “She’s under thrust and maintaining the course she was following before the blast. It will take her through the wound in under ten minutes.”
Maybe he shouldn’t have been so concerned about the state of Niagara’s shielding, she thought. “I take it we’re still not within beam range?”
“No.” Tunguska sounded genuinely embarrassed. “We’ll have to follow her in for that.”
“Through the wound?”
“Yes,” Tunguska said. “Into the ALS. I’m afraid it’s the only course available to us.”
FORTY
By the time they were about to pass through the hole that Niagara had punched into the ALS, the debris cloud had completely cleared. The wound remained raw and bright, spilling a faint shaft of re-radiated golden-white light back into space, twinkling off the few remaining shards of hot matter still hanging around the impact site.
“That light has the spectrum of solar radiation,” Tunguska said, when they were falling down the column of light. “It’s a perfect match for the Sun, at the limit of our instruments.”
The transition between outside and inside happened in an eyeblink. One kilometre of shell thickness was nothing compared to their speed. One moment the surface of the sphere was swelling larger, with the wound growing rapidly from a searing, white-rimmed eye to a swallowing mouth… and then they were through, falling towards the heart of the ALS.
Tunguska’s sensors took immediate stock of the interior. Behind his ship, the receding wound embraced a circle of the perfect blackness of interstellar space. It was rimmed with bright, agonised matter on this side as well. But instead of the quilted blue-grey material of the outer skin, the inner surface of the ALS was made of something far stranger; something far less susceptible to easy interrogation by Tunguska’s instruments.
They had always known that the inner surface of the shell had to function as a kind of near-perfect planetarium, projecting an image of the sky that would have been seen from the original Earth. There were false stars, their brightness and colours reproduced precisely, aligned into exactly the right constellations that the inhabitants of E2 had learned to expect. Some fraction of the stars must even have been programmed for variability—to dim and brighten according to intricate astrophysics-rich algorithms. They were all required to move with respect to each other, following the slow, stately currents of proper motion, or the wheeling gyre of binary orbits.