“Needless to say, this is all top secret data,” Bernhardt said. “If it gets out prematurely—”
“Ah, sir, excuse me,” Sianna said. Better fess up now before she got in even deeper. “Sir, I don’t have top secret clearance. I don’t have any clearances.”
Dr. Wolf Bernhardt swiveled his head about and regarded her for a full five seconds. “You don’t,” he said at last. “Most unfortunate, considering what you have heard already. What is your name, young lady?”
“Ah… Sianna Colette,” she said, her heart pounding with fear. Oh God, what was he going to do with her?
“Wally—Mr. Sturgis. Can you vouch for this person?”
“Ah, yessir. I know her. She’s okay,” Wally said as he made his adjustments. From his tone of voice, Sianna knew that he wasn’t paying all that much attention. He could have been talking about the weather—and Wally hadn’t been outside for weeks.
“Very well, Miss Colette. You have top secret clearance now. I would suggest you read and obey the regulations, or else you might find yourself in some difficulty.” That done, he cocked his head back towards Wally and the control panel. “Are you ready?”
“Yes, Dr. Bernhardt.”
“Then you may begin.”
—And the Universe of the Multisphere shifted, changed.
The Sphere itself vanished, and suddenly it was the Earth hanging in the blackness. The background stars and planets shifted their positions, and the perspective veered about until they were looking at Earth in half-phase, with the Sunstar out of view to the left. They were looking at the planet from a point a few thousand kilometers back along the planet’s orbital path. Sianna could see tiny dots hanging in space all around the Earth, the COREs, guarding the planet against the deluge of skyjunk that filled the Multisphere.
The view pulled back, getting further and further from the planet. The Moonpoint Ring came into view to the right.
There was something odd about the background of the scene. Then Sianna realized what it was—there were stars visible. Not the Captive Suns and planets, though they were there too, but points of light hanging in the firmament. “What are—”
“Those are the SCORES. Wally’s enhanced them to make them visible, of course,” Bernhardt said, his attention on the sim and not on Sianna. “In reality, they are about as dark as lumps of coal, under one hundred meters across. Fairly bright in radar frequencies, once you know where to look. We had a hell of a time detecting them with our ground-based gear. Terra Nova hasn’t been doing sky survey work, and she’s missed them so far. NaPurHab just started watching for them. But once they get this data, you can bet they’ll be looking for them. Wally, can you lose the Captives and the other objects we’re not interested in?”
Suddenly the suns and planets vanished, and only the dots of light were left. Sianna noticed they seemed to be concentrated in one quadrant of the sky.
“How long ago is this image?” Bernhardt asked.
“Ah, this is a real-time image,” Wally said. “Or close enough, really. Latest data from the automatic tracking systems. Enhanced and enlarged, of course, or we wouldn’t be able to see anything at this scale.”
“Hmmph. Backtrack thirty days, speed up the time display by factor ten thousand, and move forward to the present time,” Bernhardt said.
After a moment’s pause, the image jumped and skewed as Wally set in the new commands. Then the three-dimensional ghosts of reality settled down. The Earth’s rotation was obvious now, one day taking just over eight and half seconds. Sianna looked past the planet to the sky beyond.
Now the dots of light were smaller, dimmer, and spread out in a rough toroid of space that spanned half the sky.
But the images were moving, coming closer, converging, moving toward one point in the sky in front of Earth. The inner edges of the toroidal area converged on each other until the dots of light were moving in a loose, flattened spherical volume of space, following behind the ring. The tiny dots grew closer, brighter, and the ring moved in, still somewhat ahead of the smaller points of light.
Sianna stepped around to the Sunstar side of the simulation and watched it from there. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of the things were moving in toward Earth. It took just under five minutes for the imagery to run up to the present moment and then stop dead at the real-time position. One thing was clear from watching the displays: the objects were moving, not toward Earth, but toward the Moon-point Ring. What the devil did they want with the Ring?
“What are they?” Sianna asked. “Where do they come from?”
“As to the first, we don’t know, though we have some unpleasant guesses,” Bernhardt said. “The detection teams that spotted them called them Small COREs, because that’s what they look like and act like. That got shortened to SCOREs very quickly. As for why they come from where they do, I have an idea, but no proof. The SCOREs are too small to track easily much past the distance we have displayed here, but if you backtrack their course, they seem to come from a rough halo of space around the Sphere. Roughly speaking, Earth is looking down at the north pole of the Sphere, and the rough halo suggests—”
“These were launched from facilities around the Sphere’s equator,” Sakalov said.
“Precisely. What that means, I don’t know. Maybe they were launched from some sort of portals around the equator of the Sphere. Maybe they were launched from your south pole Charon Central site and moved Sphere-north from every point along the Sphere’s circumference. We don’t know. I might add that we have several indications that there are similar streams of SCOREs moving toward most of the Captive Worlds. We can’t tell for sure, precisely because these objects are so hard to track and detect. But we have spotted some small objects that resemble these SCOREs moving toward some of the other Captives. In any event, there is tremendous new activity in the Multisystem. We have no idea why it should happen at this moment, but I doubt it is good news for Earth.”
Sianna noticed something. There was a different class of objects coming in ahead of the others. Wally had them color-coded red. She counted sixteen of them. “What are those?” she asked, pointing at them.
“They are different,” Bernhardt said. “Faster, larger, moving in a more direct path than the other ones. And they are rather complex in shape. We can’t tell much more than that yet, but they are certainly not the simple oblong typical of most spacegoing Charonians.”
The director stepped around to the other side of the sim from Sianna and pointed at the larger objects. “Note that these larger units seem to be leading the SCOREs in, moving a trifle faster,” Bernhardt said. “It would seem they must be in place first before, ah, other events.”
“Maybe they are a repair kit for the Moonpoint Ring,” Sianna suggested.
The director frowned. “An interesting thought. Better than anything else we’ve come up with. In any event, the SCOREs are likewise making for the Moonpoint Ring. We assume they are heading there for some sort of preparation or processing before they… well, before other events. Wally, run the images forward in time at the same rate, showing our best-guess projection.”
The ring and the SCOREs moved closer and closer to Earth. The larger objects arrived and merged, rather vaguely, with the image of the Moonpoint Ring. From that, Sianna gathered that the research teams were sure the big objects were headed for the Ring, but had no idea what they were going to do upon arrival.
“Ah, sir, NaPurHab orbits the black hole at the center of the Moonpoint Ring,” Sianna said. “What happens to it in all this?”