Sianna shivered at that thought. Wally could put it all in terms of hypothetical, theory. But this place was death, and it was real. Suppose whatever killed this place went through the wormhole and visited itself on the Multisystem. “How did it die, Wally?” she asked. “What did all this?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Wally said. “Right now, you know everything I know. No, wait, there is one other interesting thing. As best I can tell, the co-orbital wormhole ring loop is still more or less intact.”
“Hmmm? What?” Sianna blinked and looked back toward Wally.
“Just like back in the Multisystem. There’s the Lone World, and then a whole system of modified and oversized Ring-and-Hole sets spaced at equal intervals along the same orbit. It looks as if there used to be sixteen—and all but two are up and running. The only damn things in this system that still are.”
“How can you tell which ones are operational, or how many there are?” Sianna asked. “We can’t possibly see more than two or three of them from here. The Shattered Sphere gets in the way of line of sight.”
“Yeah, but I rigged a whole set of alternate-mode gravity-wave detectors, the ones based on Charonian technology. The ones we built have never worked real well, but believe me, even on a bad detector, an active Ring-and-Hole set shows up very nicely, no matter how many Spheres are around.”
“They’re active?” Sianna asked.
“Makes sense they’d be the last thing to go,” Wally said. “They served as communications relays and cargo conveyors. Even if everything else went, as long as the wormhole ring loop was intact, Solitude could still maintain radio communications with the system, import new stars and worlds from other systems and move raw materials around this system.”
“But once the wormhole ring loop goes, you’re dead.”
“Right. So you set things up so it keeps running, no matter what. That’s why there are so many rings in the loop. You only really need three or six, but this system had sixteen—and fourteen survived whatever killed the rest of the system.”
“But what the hell are they using for power?”
“That’s the other thing,” Wally said, suddenly grinning. “I finally cracked one of the mysteries about the Spheres that’s been bugging me from day one. Remember how we figured out the longitudinal lines were huge accelerator rings, super-big versions of the Moon-point Ring? But we could never figure out what the latitudinal lines were?”
“Yeah, so?”
“So with this Sphere dead, all the other power systems aren’t masking the readings. I nailed them. The latitude rings are power-storage rings, holding reserve energy. About thirty percent of the rings on this Sphere are still intact and carrying a charge.”
“And the wormhole ring loop is tapping into them?”
“At real, real, minimal levels. But I doubt they’ll last much longer. Everything’s decaying.”
Sianna looked out the viewport again, at the dead Sphere ami the dead Last World of Solitude. “Very impressive work, Wally. Find any other surprises out there?”
“Not really,” Wally said. “There’s the little stuff, of course. Asteroids, impact debris, dead COREs, other dead Charonians, and random skyjunk. This Sphere’s taken impacts from all kinds of stuff.”
“So this is what happens when a Sphere dies,” she said. “Sounds like that old poem, doesn’t it? ‘This is the way the world ends,’ ” she whispered. Though there was little as gentle as a whimper in the violence that had been wrought here. Smashed, broken worlds, stars flying off in all directions, planets being flung off into the frozen interstellar darkness. Sianna shook her head, staring out into the void with unseeing eyes.
“How did it happen, Wally?” she asked again. “What killed the Sphere?”
He shrugged. “I’d love to know. We have that three-dee clip from five years ago, of something smashing into a Sphere and pushing through, but that still doesn’t tell us anything.”
Sianna stared out at the dead world she had named. “This is a sad place,” she said at last. “Death, decay, collapse.”
They had all thought of the Multisystem Sphere, of the Charonians, as the enemy, and that was right as far as it went. But it did not go far enough.
There were enemies that human, Charonian, all life battled against: Death. Entropy. Collapse. Life of any sort reversed entropy, brought order to the Universe, and made a haven for more life. The lesson of the Shattered Sphere was slowly dawning on Sianna: this was Earth’s future if humanity somehow succeeded in defeating the Charonians. Like it or not, willing or no, the Multisystem was now Earth’s haven, and it had to be protected. But that was too much to say to Wally, too much to express.
Besides, he was already done with his sandwich, and back at his work. He had already forgotten she was there. Sianna sighed and turned her back on the viewport. She sat down and got back to her own work.
Actually, her own work was a trifle on the undefined side, as Wally was doing the whole job that had been assigned to both of them. Sianna knew damned well that it would be all but impossible to pry any part of it away from him, and, worse, that the two of them working together would probably do the job less well than Wally working by himself.
Wally saw the Universe as a species of wind-up toy to be taken apart, figured out, and put back together. Once the puzzle was solved, he lost interest and moved on.
Sianna liked to think she had the imagination to find the problems in the first place, the ability to step outside and see things no one else had. She could interpret the puzzle, take the pieces Wally put together and make them into more than the sum of their parts.
But to do that, she had to at least get a look at the pieces. The hab’s databanks were already full to bursting with images and readings of all sorts. Sianna had taken on the job of looking at all of it, feeding the raw data to her skull, knowing it all from the ground up.
She fired up her terminal, called up the scope log, and started scrolling through it. More small objects of debris located, more of the Sphere’s surface mapped, higher-resolution images of Solitude. All good, important data, but none of it new, unexpected, nothing that made her ask questions.
But then something caught her eye. Not an object, but an event, about two hours back. According to the log reports, no one had reported at the time, which was not surprising, given that things were more than a little busy about the habitat.
Sianna called up a full data playback and was rewarded with the image of a brilliant flash of light, along with a hell of a lot of radio-frequency, gamma, X-ray, and infrared radiation. Sianna frowned. What the hell could have produced that much radiation all over the spectrum? A nuclear explosion? Some black hole absorbing a huge amount of mass all at once?
How big had it been? How far away? The autoscope had logged the sky coordinates, but it had no way of reporting a range.
She brought up the radar ranging data, going back to the moment when NaPurHab had arrived in-system, and cross-linked it against the coordinates for the energy flash.
NaPurHab’s radar system had been meant for use in a traffic-control system, and it had certainly done good service with all the incoming cargo vehicles not so long ago. The Purps had pressed it into service as an early-warning system against spaceborne debris, as the Shattered Sphere system seemed to be even more full of skyjunk than the Multisystem.
Like all active radar systems, the hab’s gear sent out timed bursts of radio signals. Some portion of a given signal would reflect off a target and bounce back. By measuring how long the signal took to make the round trip, radar systems could compute the precise distance to a given target. Of course, the further off a target was, and the smaller its reflecting surface, the weaker the returning signal would be.