Beyond the stars, there were galaxies, vast shoals of them in every direction. Each and every galaxy had to stand up to the same scrutiny as the stars. Novae and supernovae had to flare and die… whether they were noticed or not.
It was awesome and astonishing. It was also doomed to failure, for no such tapestry could ever have withstood arbitrarily close study using the kind of astronomical tools available in Auger’s era. Even a simple interplanetary probe would have eventually sniffed out something odd about those stellar positions… just before it dashed itself to atoms by colliding with the inner surface of the shell. No: it wasn’t perfectly foolproof, nor must that ever have been the intention of its builders. It was good enough to withstand examination using the crude science of Floyd’s time, but it was never the intention that the shell should form an utterly convincing illusion. Sooner or later, it must have been assumed, the inhabitants of E2 were bound to discover the truth. The function of the ALS was to protect them from outside interference until precisely that moment. After that—at which point they would probably direct their energies into breaking through the shell—they were on their own.
But there was already something amiss with the view of the heavens around the inside edge of the open wound. For thousands of kilometres in all directions, the stars were distorted, elongated and spermlike, their stretched, tapering tails pointing like accusing fingers towards the hole Niagara had made.
“The zone of distortion is spreading,” Tunguska said. “Frankly, they’re going to have a hard time not noticing that on the Earth, even if they somehow missed the initial flash.”
“What will they make of it?” Auger wondered.
“I don’t know. But if an inexplicable astronomical puzzle is all they have to worry about by the end of the day, they’ll be doing rather well.”
“Can we shoot that shuttle down yet?” she asked.
“No,” he replied. “But I’m ready to squeeze a little more out of the bleed-drive. If my estimates are good, we still have a chance of intercepting her before she hits the atmosphere.”
“Don’t hesitate, Tunguska.”
“I won’t. There is something I feel I should mention, though. It’s just an observation, and it may be misleading.”
Auger didn’t like the sound of that at all. “Tell us anyway.”
“The wound appears to be healing itself. The aperture was more than a hundred kilometres across immediately after the detonation of the Molotov device.”
“And now?”
“A shade under a hundred. It may not mean anything—it’s rather difficult to define the precise boundary—but I thought I should draw it to your attention.”
“Keep an eye on it,” she said. “I don’t want that damned thing closing on us while we’re still inside.”
“I’ll have a better idea of the closure rate in a little while,” Tunguska said.
“Squeeze as much speed out of this thing as you can. Then we can all go home.”
For the next hour, they pushed deeper into the ALS, following the lone echo of Niagara’s shuttle. All attempts at communication were ignored, although that did not stop Tunguska from making repeated offers of negotiation. He was, he said, prepared to consider any proposal that would stop the deployment of Silver Rain. But no acknowledgement of his messages ever returned.
Despite the urgent need to intercept the shuttle before it reached Earth’s atmosphere, Auger could not help marvelling at the experience of being inside the ALS sphere and seeing her world as it should have been. This was an Earth that had never known nuclear war, or runaway climatic catastrophe, or smart weather, or a Nanocaust. The sight of it made her want to weep. No image had ever come close to the heartbreaking beauty of this small blue world, a beauty all the more acute now that she knew how exquisitely fragile it was. It was the beauty of a butterfly’s wing.
E2 hung at the exact geometric centre of the ALS. Orbiting it, or at least moving in a convincing simulacrum of Newtonian motion, was what appeared to be an identical copy of the Moon. Auger presumed it had been captured in the same quantum snapshot as E2, but it would take close-up investigation to verify this. The Moon could just as easily be a mocked-up representation, imbued with enough detail to fool surface observers and enough gravity to lift tides on the Earth. The remaining contribution to the tides—the solar component—must have been achieved through some deft trickery of gravitational manipulation—invisible small orbiting masses, perhaps—for there was no sun. Instead, there was a golden-yellow disc of exactly the right temperature and apparent brightness shining out from the inner surface of the sphere. But it was only designed to look convincing from the vantage point of the Earth’s surface, and close to they saw how its shape was distorted by the sphere’s concavity.
“There’s your source of solar-spectrum radiation,” Auger said. “From outside the sphere we were seeing its light, leaking through the hole. How long do you think it would have taken Floyd’s people to figure that out?”
“Even without spaceflight, they’d have begun to notice some puzzling things about it within a few decades,” Tunguska said. “In our timeline, a great deal of attention was focused on measuring the circularity of the solar disk, since it turned out to be a way of discriminating between competing cosmological models. With that kind of attention, the illusion probably couldn’t have been sustained for long.”
“Or maybe they’d just pick another theory,” Auger said.
“Perhaps.”
“Anyway, Floyd’s world hasn’t achieved the science ours did even by nineteen fifty-nine.”
“They could quickly make up lost ground,” Tunguska said. “And then they might put up too much of a fight if someone attempted to do what Niagara is attempting now.”
“Which means that whoever was working behind the scenes had serious co-ordination,” Auger said. “Enough to change the outcome of the Second World War before it became truly global. And whoever did that is still down there.”
“You think they deserve retribution, don’t you?” Tunguska asked.
“Of course. Don’t you?”
“They stopped a war in which millions died in our timeline, Auger. No Final Solution, no Russian Front, no Hiroshima, Nagasaki.”
“They didn’t stop that war out of the goodness of their hearts, Tunguska. They stopped it because it interfered with their plans for global genocide. And now I think they should pay for it.”
“Well, we’re almost within attack range, if that’s any consolation. That little shuttle is having to decelerate in preparation for atmospheric flight. If it released Silver Rain at this speed, even the ablative jackets wouldn’t protect the nanomachinery at the heart of the weapon. There’s some uncertainty, but I can begin attempting the strike within three minutes.”
“What about the missiles you promised us?” she asked.
“Nearly ready. Patience, please.” She heard a note of diffidence in his voice. “Concerning the other matter…”
“What other matter?”
“The healing of the wound. I’ve been keeping a close eye on it and I can now state with some authority that—”
“Is there still time for us to get out?”
“Yes, allowing for—”
“I don’t need anything else to worry about, Tunguska.”
“Good. In which case I won’t mention the bleed-drive.”
Tunguska was as good as his word. Barely two minutes later, Auger felt the slight change in the ship’s attack posture that indicated it was bringing its beam weapons to bear. When they powered up and fired, discharging in timed salvos, she felt the surging and ebbing of massive accumulators somewhere in the ship’s gut.