One hundred twenty-eight seconds later it flared again, and Larry let out a shout of triumph that nearly scared Simon Raphael to death. They were in.
“Now,” he said, “we start tapping into the Lunar Wheel’s power feed.”
The education of the new planet’s Keeper Ring was barely completed. The Keeper had been handling the Link on a solo basis for only the briefest period of time, but it had the procedure down to a comfortable routine. Maintain the Link, allow the aperture’s innate recycle time to complete, stimulate the wormhole aperture to open, direct a Worldeater through the aperture, pull down gravitic quanta from the Dyson Sphere and direct them through the aperture at the same time. Complete all the transactions before the aperture destabilized and collapsed. And then, maintain the Link while the aperture recycled.
It was simple, straightforward, and the thing the Keeper had been bred to do. The Keeper took the mechanical equivalent of pride and satisfaction in the work, and in the fact that the Sphere had removed its last direct monitors, trusting the Keeper with the responsibility.
But no matter how great the Keeper’s competence, no matter how vast its heritage memory, time was still the great teacher, and very little of that had passed.
The Keeper Ring—and the Sphere—paid the price for the Keeper’s inexperience when the anomaly occurred. It took the Keeper only microseconds to realize something was wrong. The Keeper sensed a strange sensation on its Link to the new star system. A dip in power, a double echo on the last few pulses, as if the Caller Ring on the other end were answering twice. The Keeper increased the draw-down from the Sphere’s power feed to match the increased demand while it ran diagnostics on the situation. No need to call the Sphere for help. The Keeper felt confident it could handle the problem on its own.
It had to be his imagination, but to Larry it seemed as if the Ring of Charon were visibly surging, pulsing with power. It had never been designed to store this kind of gravitic potential, but the Gravities Station staff had learned a great deal in his absence. They had devised a way to use part of the Plutopoint singularity’s potential to form a toroidal gravity bottle, a gravity-field containment that knotted a toroid of space between the Ring and the black hole, curving space back on itself into a doughnut shape centered on the singularity. The containment could store the gravitic potential until it was needed.
And it was going to be needed soon.
Larry drummed his fingers nervously on the console. “Simon, there are things that I’m not sure of. I think that I’ve got the Charonian command-image system down. The Gravities Station’s engineers agree, and the Simulations work, and the data we’re pulling in now from the Keeper tap seem to confirm it. But there’s no time for more research. We won’t know if we’ve got it right until we start sending commands—and by then it will be too late to find out if things are going wrong.”
“All right,” Simon said. “Walk through it with me one more time. Assuming everything works, what are you going to do?”
“Well, the best we can hope for is to send false commands to the Lunar Wheel at a higher signal power than the real commands. Because we’re putting all our gravitic potential into signaling, and none into power relay, we ought to be able to shout at the Lunar Wheel louder than the Dyson Sphere—or louder than whatever auxiliary the Sphere is using to control the Wheel. Probably the Moonpoint Ring, but we don’t know.
“Then we can order the Lunar Wheel to relay our commands to its underlings. Marcia MacDougal recorded a large number of start-work commands sent by the Lunar Wheel to the Landers, and a few that seem to be stop commands. We send shutdown command sequences that ought to work. They should cause all the Landers to stop what they are doing and stand down. That should buy us enough time to learn the command language, and do more refined control—while holding the link to Earth open. If we get good enough with the command system, maybe we could bring Earth back.”
“It all sounds very promising. Suppose your commands don’t work?”
Larry folded his hands in his lap and looked down. “I have a contingency plan. But not one I want to use. It has to be decided ahead of time.”
“What has to be decided?” Simon asked, as gently as he could.
Larry seemed unwilling to answer that directly. “Well, if nothing else works, Marcia found what seems to be an abort order. The Charonians were smart enough to put an off switch in every machine. It seems to be an order that can be used on any malfunctioning Charonian device or creature, in the event that it goes out of control, threatening others. She spotted it being sent to the Landers that went out of control and crashed. I can use that command—as a last-ditch effort—to tell the Lunar Wheel and the Moonpoint Ring and all the Landers to die. It’s a very simple command. There’s no question that we have it right. If we sent it in a general broadcast through the wormhole link, and direct from here it would give us permanent, complete, final shutdown. I have no doubt about that. But of course, there would be other consequences as well,” he said.
“Consequences?” Simon Raphael asked. “It would be a full-blown disaster! Without the Wheel, we’ll have lost our link to Earth! You yourself pointed out what a disaster that would be when Vespasian suggested killing the Wheel. Earth will still be in danger, exposed to a future breeding binge.”
“We’ve sent Earth our warnings,” Larry said. “Unless a miracle happens and we can bring the planet back here, I don’t really think there’s much more beyond that we can do, or will be able to do. Whether or not we are in contact, Earth will have to stop the breeding binge on its own.”
“But you yourself said the Dyson Sphere had to have a backup linkage system,” Simon said.
“If it does I bet the other end is maintained by the Moonpoint Ring in the Multisystem,” Larry said. “And the Moonpoint Ring will get the order to die at the same time the Lunar Wheel does. With both ends of the link destroyed, the wormhole will collapse. I don’t know if even the Dyson Sphere could find us again.”
“How can you even imagine doing such—” Simon Raphael was about to protest, when his eyes fell upon the clock. With every change of the numbers, the Solar System was suffering more and deeper wounds. Three more of the core-matter volcanoes on Venus, and six on Mercury. Port Viking’s dome coming apart at the seams, its air rushing out into the Martian night. Daltry’s law, he thought. There is always a worse catastrophe. “Forgive me. If it does come to that, perhaps we will find out how we can do such a thing. We’ve done all we can afford to do in order to prepare for this. There is no time. Begin it. And good luck.”
Larry took a deep breath, turned back to the controls and adjusted the release on the gravitic quanta containment. The Ring took on new power. Up until now the Plutopoint end of the wormhole had been at the lowest possible energy, a mere pinprick in the side of the main sky tunnel.
Now Larry amplified the power going into the Pluto aperture, in effect grabbing at space, grabbing at the pinprick and pulling it wider, until the pinprick was a gaping hole in space.
Simon Raphael watched the main display screen, with half an eye on the countdown clock. The Earthpoint-Moonpoint aperture was to reopen in another five seconds. Four, three, two, one—where there had been a tiny flicker of blue, suddenly there was a blazing flash of color—and a massive object was hurtling through space. Simon caught a glimpse of a gleaming, cigar-shaped object before it flashed out of camera angle.