“Good God. We caught a Lander!” Simon said. Suddenly, for the first time, the mad idea of building a worm-hole was real, was concrete to him. A Lander, an asteroid-sized half-living spaceship, had popped out of nowhere right in front of them.
“That poor dumb Lander had to have been targeted and programmed for one of the inner planets. Now what the hell is it going to do?” Larry asked gleefully. “Good start, and if we didn’t know before, we know now,” Larry said. “Our aperture is stronger than the Earthpoint aperture. The theory worked—the wormhole is drawn toward the most powerful gravity signal. Now we’re in the driver’s seat,” Larry said eagerly.
“But what will the Sphere do?” Raphael asked.
“Not the Sphere,” Larry said. “That’s our main hope. The Sphere would be smart enough to handle our attack. But from what I could get out of the reports from Earth, the Sphere delegates everything. My bet is the Moonpoint Ring is running autonomously by now.”
“So how will it react?”
“God only knows.” Larry was intent on his control panel. “There! There it is.” He threw an oscilloscope tracing on the main screen. “That’s the main command signal coming from the Moonpoint Ring through the wormhole. I’m going to shunt it toward us, try and pull as much of that signal in through our aperture as possible, so we can weaken the signal arriving at Earth-point.”
Malfunction! Terrible malfunction. Massive amounts of power were being drained away from the Link. The young and inexperienced Keeper Ring forced itself to think clearly. There had to be an answer, a solution stored in its heritage memory. But this circumstance was new, unique, utterly unknown in all the annals of the Sphere and its ancestors. It rushed to abort the next launch of a Worldeater through the aperture, knowing the terrible dangers of sending mass through an unstable wormhole.
But power. That was the real problem. Without sufficient power, the Caller Ring would be unable to complete its work. The Keeper Ring redoubled its efforts.
On the other end of the wormhole Link, the Caller Ring was equally mystified, equally frightened, and utterly helpless. Without power it was nothing.
“Here we go,” Larry said. “We’re sending a modulated pulsed gravity beam, at high power, in command mode, right down the wormhole. I’m ordering shutdown of all activity on Mars.” He pressed the button and wiped the sweat off his brow. “Hell! The Moonpoint Ring is increasing its command power feed to the Lunar Wheel through Earthpoint. I’ll have to shunt more power away and store it here to make sure ours is the stronger signal at the Lunar Wheel.”
“But we don’t have that much storage capacity,” Raphael said, leaning over the control console. “We’ll have to dump the power, or use it to amplify our own command signal.”
“Can’t,” Larry said tersely. “Everything’s at capacity already and there’s no way to dump it except through the Ring of Charon. Put any more power through the Ring and we’ll melt it. And we don’t have any storage capacity left in the gravity containment.”
There was something wrong with the incoming commands, and nothing could be more terrifying to a Caller Ring. It was getting two command signals at once, and neither made any sense. The weaker one advised that increased power was on the way—but if anything, the power transmission was dropping again. The second command signal was loud, blaringly loud and powerful. It took a supreme effort of will to resist blind obedience to it. But its command syntax was garbled slightly, and there was something odd, disturbingly unfamiliar about it—and the orders did not make sense. A stranger’s voice, commanding wrongful acts. The Caller Ring was badly frightened now. What could it be? What was happening? It sent a reply signal to both senders.
The Keeper Ring was stunned. The Caller was clearly receiving an alien signal. Why was the Caller being ordered to cease disassembly of one world? Who or what was ordering it? How was it that the increased power the Keeper sent was not received?
The Keeper Ring upped its output to the Caller Ring again.
“Damn all that’s holy. Son, we’re spiking high,” Raphael said. “The gravity containment is completely saturated. We can’t shunt any more power to it. We have to let the power through to the Lunar Wheel or melt out the Ring.”
“Not yet,” Larry said. “Just a little bit—hold it, signal coming back. Computers working to interpret. Stand by.” Larry stared at the display screen, and his face turned ashen gray. “Oh my God. We’ve failed. The Wheel is saying our command was garbled, and indicates receipt of two command signals. We didn’t jam the Moonpoint signal hard enough.”
“Well, send the Martian shutdown order again,” Raphael said.
Larry shook his head, and punched in a display code.
A highly complex visual image flashed on the main screen, the schematic of the Martian shutdown command. “Not if it contains an error. We can’t just send it again, the Wheel would just refuse it again.” He stared at the schematic, and muttered to himself, trying to read the symbols and codes.
“Can you fix it? Correct the error and send it again?” Simon asked.
Larry shook his head, the sweat popping out on his forehead. “Not in time, not this fast. The damn message is too complicated, and we don’t know the language well enough. And we can’t shunt any more power to our containment, unless you want to recreate the Big Bang right here and now. The Wheel is going to get everything Moonpoint sends—all the power, all the commands—and you can bet the Moonpoint Ring is going to increase its power relay.
“And now they know we’re in the power loop, that there’s an intruder in the system. When the Wheel gets a full power signal from Moonpoint, they’ll find a way to lock us out. Just change the damn frequency, probably. And it’ll all be for nothing.”
He hesitated for a long moment, and turned toward Simon, a desperate look in his eye. “Unless the Lunar Wheel isn’t there anymore.”
There was a pause, a deep beat of time while Simon Raphael looked at Larry, and understood what he was saying.
Simon Raphael felt a hard knot in the pit of his stomach. Fifteen minutes ago he had been rejecting the idea as a disaster, but now it was the only choice left. “Do it,” he said, Now he wished Larry had kept the whole plan to himself. Dr. Simon Raphael did not want this decision thrust upon him. “Do it. Send the order to die.”
Larry decided not to tempt fate by asking for confirmation. He shifted all the power he could draw, called up the signal he had so carefully constructed, and ordered the computer to send it down the wormhole with everything behind it. Not just to the Lunar Wheel—but through the Wheel to the Moonpoint Ring, and through open space, to every Charonian in the Solar System.