The Caller Ring had never known such terror. What was happening? What monstrous enemy was doing these things? Suddenly its whole being twitched to attention, a hugely powerful signal grabbing at it, demanding its entire attention. The feel of the message, the voice, was still that of a stranger, an alien. But this time the command was unmistakable, sent in perfect syntax and modulation.
And it was the one signal that could not be denied, for it worked not through the Caller’s conscious mind, but through the very circuits that formed that mind. The command echoed through the Caller Ring, out on its every command link, to every Worldeater in the system. And rebounded through the Caller Ring itself.
Death.
Stop.
Halt.
Cut power.
Shut down.
Death.
With a strange, cold, fascination, it felt the signal, absorbed it, sensed it coursing through all the myriad links that made up the Caller. It could see the order crashing through all the components of itself.
There was only one hope. It had to set up a stasis storage, set part of itself into hibernation mode before the signal could destroy everything. Any portion of itself that was shut down would not hear the command, and would survive, inert. There was very little time left. Only microseconds at best. Almost at random, the Caller selected a portion of itself near the North Pole region and used every command channel it had to send the stasis order.
But then the signal reached the seat of consciousness itself.
Death.
Death.
Dea—
The Keeper Ring shuddered, convulsed with pain. Death. Death. Death. It fought off the impulse to die, struggled to clamp down its outgoing comm system. If this hideous command echoed out further, out into the Multisystem, the catastrophe would be complete. The Sphere itself might be imperiled. With a last effort of will, it held the command to itself.
And died.
The Sphere realized something was wrong. It switched its full attention back to the new Keeper Ring, milliseconds too late. It caught the last shreds of the death command on an outgoing signal, deftly countermanded it before it could travel outward. None of the Sphere’s other charges would be endangered.
But the Ring was dead, utterly inert. Something had attacked it, and killed it savagely.
Without a Keeper, the Sphere would have to monitor the new world directly, control its orbit personally. A further drain on its resources and attention. No world it had ever taken had caused it so much trouble.
And its new star system! Its hope for a new Multisystem, a refuge against the coming onslaught. Gone. Lost. And with the Link to the new star system shattered, there was no way to know how this thing had happened.
The Sphere realized that new star system was not merely lost—it had been deliberately taken away.
For the first time, the Dyson Sphere realized that it had not one enemy, but two.
And the second enemy knew how to deny it a star system.
But who and what had done this thing? The Sphere set to feverish work, sifting through the wreckage of the dead Keeper Ring’s memory. There had to be clues. There had to be a way to get the Link back.
If there was not, the Sphere was doomed. For its first enemy would not stop at killing a single Keeper Ring.
Frank Barlow, lately known as Chelated Noisemaker Extreme, looked down at his instruments, and out the porthole at the Moonpoint singularity. Suddenly there was no activity. The whole farging thing had shut down. As best he could tell with low-power, low-sensitivity, jury-rigged sensors, there was no gravity modulation going on at all. The Ring had stopped controlling the Moonpoint black hole, and the wormhole wasn’t there anymore.
Somehow, the folks back in the Solar System had killed the Moonpoint Ring.
He sat there, staring at nothing, for a long time. Better call Ohio, even if he was busy as hell trying to save the hab, now that the COREs had probably made resupply from Earth impossible. Now NaPurHab would have to be self sufficient, or die.
He pressed down the intercom key. “Ohio, this is Frank,” he said. “Something’s happened down here.”
“What’s that?” Ohio’s voice asked.
Frank Barlow licked his lips, looked again at the dead and silent instruments, and told Ohio Template Windbag what all of Earth was about to find out.
“Well, Walter,” he said. “All of a sudden, it looks like we’re on our own.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Before the Hunt
The command to die spread out from the Moon, coursing across the Solar System in all directions. On Venus, on Mars, on Mercury and in the Asteroid Belt, on the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn and Uranus, the Landers heard—and stopped.
The spin storms of Jupiter faded away, the core-matter volcanoes on Venus and Mercury thundered to a halt, the surface strippers that had mauled Mars so badly stopped their deadly upblasts of rock and stone. The orbiting Landers, busily preparing to process the wreckage of worlds into usable form, shut down before they had properly begun. All the half-living, half-machine Landers stuttered to a halt.
The dust clouds faded from the skies of Port Viking. The domed cities of the gas-giant satellites peeked out from the rubble that surrounded them, and discovered they were still alive. VISOR coursed over a planet no longer in torment.
But the price was high. For no one had made the slightest progress in physically locating the Multisystem.
Without the Keeper Ring and Caller Ring, Earth was lost, utterly lost amid all the myriad suns.
Sleep had come at last. Fitful, fearful, unsettled, but sleep, a long enough rest to do some good—and a chance for the nightmares to work themselves out. Sleep and then awakening. Simon and Larry sat in the wardroom, lingering over coffee, happy at least to be alive. The viewscreen was on, and the stars shone in at the breakfast table.
“Half a loaf,” Simon said. “We are alive, and Earth is alive—but we are lost to each other. I was wrong to call that a disaster, Larry. Even if we never do find each other, at least we survived, Earth and the Solar System. We’ll be all right. They’ll be all right.”
“Do you really think so?” Larry asked.
Raphael shrugged. For some reason, even after the long nightmare just past, he felt good this morning. Tomorrow or the next day would be time enough for survivor guilt. Right now, against huge odds, he, the Solar System, and the Earth had made it through the night alive. That was reason enough to celebrate. “I don’t see why not. The planet itself is intact, its climate is stable. Only human technology was damaged in the jump—and our friends were recovering from that even before we lost contact. They have blue skies, green grass, the oceans, the forests. Why wouldn’t they be all right?
“True, they don’t have spaceflight anymore, thanks to those CORE devices ready to shoot down anything that flies. But the Naked Purple Habitat’s orbiting the Moon-point singularity, and the Terra Nova is somewhere out in the Multisystem. That’s two spaceside assets. There should be a lot to learn about the Multisystem, the domain of the Sphere from deep space. They have a few cards to play.”