The Adversary had arrived, had drawn close enough to be visible.
“All right,” Wally said. “Here we go.”
Every eye was on the right-hand display as it showed the Adversary moving in, closer and closer to the wormhole aperture, moving fast enough that its motion against the starfield was noticeable even at this range.
“Doesn’t look like much, does it?” asked Gerald MacDougal.
The Adversary was a dark, lumpen sphere, pocked here and there with small, low, dimpled craters—all the evidence there was of the SCOREs’ previous attacks.
“There go the SCOREs,” Sianna said, needlessly. The left-hand tactical display showed the movement quite plainly.
The SCOREs moved in to make one last, desperate attempt against their ancient enemy. Sianna hoped with everyone else that they would succeed, and knew they could not. But if, somehow, the SCOREs could kill this thing, then all the risks and dangers of their own plan could be avoided.
The Adversary came in, moving fast, diving straight for the worm-hole aperture. The eight surviving SCOREs moved in, rushing toward it, closing in from all directions. Then, in the space of a heartbeat, they appeared in the same frame as the Adversary. All eyes shifted to the right-hand screen just as the SCOREs reached their target. There was a brilliant, ravening flare of light, an explosion that seemed to go on and on, a ball of flame and fire that bloomed out into space, flared up, setting the sky alight—and the Adversary moved out through the burning cloud, its surface glowing just a trifle from heating effects, but for all intents and purposes, unchanged.
Sianna found she had been holding her breath, and she let it out in a sigh of disappointment and frustration. In a minute or less, the Adversary would reach the wormhole, force itself through, come out the other side—and then, it would happen.
Would the Sphere use the Earth as a kinetic impact weapon immediately, or would it first launch the cloud of SCOREs about the Moonpoint aperture in another futile attempt to stop this thing? Or would it send Earth and the SCOREs crashing in all at once? What difference could it make if Earth were destroyed two minutes from now, or two and a half minutes? All of it, gone. The oceans vaporized, the forests incinerated, the cities and towns smashed and shattered, a world of corpses and shattered, ruined bodies flung out into space—Don’t think about it, Sianna thought. Keep it from happening. Don’t think about it.
“Ready for shunt reception,” Larry said. “NaPurHab reports they retain control of the wormhole ring. They are ready to change the transit coordinates. So far so good.”
So far so good? This was the most dangerous moment of all. This was the moment when the Multisystem might act in some unexpected way, when the humans would begin to show their hand, when the Adversary might begin to realize something was wrong, when some bit of dead Charonian hardware might not respond in quite the way Wally expected.
“Sending link sequence command,” Sianna announced. Now the wormhole transit loop was waking up in earnest, drawing energy from the surviving power storage rings on the Shattered Sphere, keying into each other. They were ready. As ready as they were going to be, anyway.
Dianne Steiger sat in her captain’s chair and glanced over at where Gerald should have been. He was down there in the thick of it. And she was up here, orbiting this damn lump of rock, nothing more than a spectator. No, not a spectator. A warrior on a stretch of the battle line that had gone quiet for the moment. None of them would be down there, ready for the final battle, if not for her.
She had done her part, she and her ship, and her crew. Five years ago, before the Abduction, the ship had been in mothballs and Dianne’s career had been as close to over as made no difference. Then the Charonians had attacked, and everything had changed. Now here they were, Dianne Steiger and her ship, about to save the world, maybe.
Not bad, she thought. Not bad for a couple of mothballed has-beens.
They could see it, as it happened, with the naked eye. The Solitude Ring flickered awake, and the strange un-blue-white of a wormhole link came to life. The Adversary had activated the link, forced it to connect with the Moonpoint Ring in the Multisystem. It was heading in.
“Thirty seconds,” Eyeball said. “Show time. Fire up automatics.”
Sondra Berghoff reached over to set in the automatic sequencer, but then she swallowed hard, and thought of the button. Five long years ago, Larry Chao had set things so that he would send out the first pulse of collimated laser energy, not the computer. He had pushed the button that had made it happen, not some damn machine.
That beam of graser power had awakened the slumbering Lunar Wheel, and it had stolen the Earth. His finger on the button. No one else’s. That was what history would remember.
What if they failed today? What if the computer guessed wrong in the next twenty seconds, and Earth died as a consequence? No. It was not right. If Earth died, let there be someone to blame. Let it be a human decision, not that of a microcircuit.
And if they succeeded, let it be penance, of a sort, for her friend Larry’s finger on that button.
“I’m staying with manual,” Sondra said.
“What!” Eyeball shouted. “You nuts?”
The Autocrat stepped forward, about to speak, but then Sondra caught his eye. Their eyes locked for a heartbeat or two, and then he stepped back. He would not challenge her. Sondra looked back toward her partner on the controls.
“Shut up, Eyeball. No time to argue. Manual.” Now it was close. There was no time. The Mind of the Sphere could sense the Adversary coming close, unstoppable, uncontrollable. It made ready to do what it must, to sacrifice one world in order to save all the others. It gathered power unto itself, drawing down reserves from the storage rings, preparing to send the raw, massive burst of gravitic energy that would slam down on the luckless planet and accelerate it nearly to light speed, straight at the Adversary. Now was the time.
Sondra checked her switches, watched the display, the timers. Too late, and there would be no time to make a full link over to the wormhole transit loop coordinates. Too soon, and the Adversary might sense the changeover and do something about it.
The autosequencer’s countdown clock was still active, still counting down. Ten seconds. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four.
Yes, she had been right. Too far off. The Adversary was slowing for the transit. It was going to be too far off when the sequencer hit zero. Three. Two. One. Zero. Minus One. Almost there. Another second, let it draw in closer. But not too long. Not too long. Minus Two. Minus—
Sondra felt the right instant. She stabbed down at the button and sent the new coordinates on their way.
The un-blue-white of the wormhole link flickered and shifted, and then settled down again.
“Linkage!” Eyeball shouted. “We have solid link to the first wormhole aperture in the wormhole loop.”
Sondra slapped another button, and sent a lockout command, ordering the Solitude Ring to take no further changes until after transit. The Adversary would not be able to change the setting back. “Damnation!” the Autocrat said. “It’s spotted the change.”