“But… well… I don’t know,” Wally said. Wally didn’t like arguing, or any sort of confrontation, and he wasn’t very good at it.
“Look,” Sianna said, “someday, yes, maybe if we’re lucky, we’ll find Charon Central—if it even exists—and maybe that will be vital information. But for the time being, the Charonians have us penned up pretty damned tight. What use is proving Charon Central is in the Sphere when we can’t get to the Sphere? No one can even get off-planet!”
“Sure they can,” Wally objected, clearly unconscious that he was using “they” to refer to the human race. “They send supplies to NaPurHab and the Terra Nova.”
“Come on, Wally, where have you been? Yes, we can send supplies, but we can’t send people. The COREs in Earth orbit smash one outbound cargo ship out of two during boost phase. And nothing can come inbound to Earth from NaPurHab or the Terra Nova. The COREs smash up anything that even gets close to an intercept course with Earth.”
“Well, okay, it isn’t easy,” Wally said. “Maybe we can’t get to Charon Central yet, but what’s wrong with trying to figure out where it is?”
“Nothing, except that all the time and effort they put into chasing the Center is lost to doing research that might get us out of this mess. Like getting past the COREs so we can land ships, maybe.”
“I like doing the Charon Central sims!” Wally said, a bit petulantly. “I’ve done COREs a million times. They’re boring.”
Only Wally would see relative degrees of fun as a reason to do one simulation over another.
“It isn’t a question of what you like, Wally,” Sianna said. “It’s a question of which is going to help the most. The COREs are—”
“COREs, COREs, COREs,” Wally said, losing his temper. “That’s all you ever talk about. It seems to me that you’re as obsessed with them as Sakalov is with Charon Central. You don’t ever seem to get anywhere, either.”
Sianna opened her mouth to protest, and then shut it again. There was too much justice in what he said for her to say anything. Maybe the COREs represented a more immediate problem, but if so, the problem didn’t show any more sign of being solved than the Charon Central mystery. He had a point. Dammit, now she was the one who had to apologize.
But Wally was already out of the visitor’s chair, stomping off down the hall to his own cubicle. Hell. Sianna wanted to get up and go after him, but she knew Wally wouldn’t listen to an apology—or anything else—until he calmed down. On the plus side, at least he had left her cubicle.
The trouble was, Wally had a point, one that she had not quite faced for herself—and when Wally Sturgis could see something you could not, then you were pretty damned self-absorbed.
Here she was, completely distracted from her own area of research, off on an ill-defined wild goose chase, listening to whispered hints from her subconscious, looking for messages in dreams, working on hunches and instinct. What the devil kind of science would that sort of nonsense produce?
Maybe it all was hopeless. Maybe nothing was left to any of them but the need to keep busy, keep the mind and body occupied. Maybe all of MRI was nothing but a huge distraction from a cruel and unchangeable reality. Maybe humankind was utterly, totally helpless in the face of the Charonians, and humanity would be wiped out in the exact moment that best suited the Charonian whim.
But Sianna was not quite ready to descend into gloom. Maybe they were all doomed. Well, even if that was the case, it could do no harm to solve the puzzle. The hell with it. She turned back to the question at hand.
Seven
Rules and Exceptions
The Mind of the Sphere was afraid. It was obvious by now that the tremors, the vibrations, in the wormhole net were no flaw, no illusion, no mistake. The Adversary was awake and on the move. But there was still time, if not much of it. The Sphere had been preparing its battle forces, its plan of attack for some time now. Already, great forces were on the move, not only to fight, but to serve as diversions, to shore up weak points in defenses, to serve as scouts and sensors. But now. Now there could be no doubt. What had been a possibility was now a certainty. The Adversary would attack.
It had been the trouble with that new world that had done it. There was no doubt of that. The capture of that world had been a more awkward bit of business than nearly anything the Sphere could find in the whole of its Heritage Memory. It was a wonder that the awkward, unshielded—and, in some cases, unexplained—bursts of gravitic radiation hadn’t attracted the Adversary sooner.
But perhaps the scales were soon to be balanced. Since it was the new world’s wormhole link that had attracted the Adversary, it would be the new world’s link that the Adversary would most likely attack.
And if there was one thing clear from all the data in the Sphere’s Heritage Memory, it was that the world closest to the Adversary’s arrival point was always the first casualty of the attack.
Three hours of staring at the wall had Sianna no further ahead than before. What the hell did that thirty-seven minutes mean? What was the source on that number, anyway? She had never seen the actual raw data for herself.
Maybe some systematic error no one had ever noticed, some glitch in the datastream, accounted for some or all of the discrepancy.
Clearly, it was time to examine the primary source material. Sianna reached for her notepack and started a search of MRI’s databanks. There were a lot of references, of course. It would take a while to go through all of them.
There was certainly enough material to examine. She had seen clips and snippets of the Anthony data before, of course, but she had never looked at it in any organized way. A strange thought, that. This entire Institute had been founded to study information from just two sources: observations made here in the Multisystem, and the data transmitted from the Solar System after the Abduction. The Saint Anthony, named for the patron saint of lost objects, was the sole and only source of post-Abduction Solar System information.
Sianna checked the reference-use codes on the main index to the Anthony data. The data did get used—but not much. According to the use log, whole weeks often passed without a single researcher accessing the primary data.
Even though Sianna knew the hard-edged facts of what had happened back in the Solar System, the words and numbers and pictures from the Anthony were shocking, devastating. The Charonians had left the Solar System half-wrecked.
Once it had been awakened by that infamous gravity-beam test, the Lunar Wheel sent out a wake-up call to the thousands of Charonians that had lain dormant in the Solar System for millions of years. The Landers, massive Charonians that had been hidden in the Asteroid Belt and the Oort Cloud, set to work tearing the worlds of the Solar System apart. The planets were to serve as the raw material out of which the Charonians would build a new Dyson Sphere, the center of a new Multisystem.
The Landers used a sort of reactionless gravitic propulsion that allowed them to travel fast, and they had made a good start of their work before the people of the Solar System sent the Saint Anthony through the wormhole. The Anthony, using a tight comm beam aimed straight through the wormhole, had transmitted a tremendous amount of information back and forth between Earth and the Solar System before a CORE smashed into the Anthony, cutting the link with the home system.