Local-traffic control systems didn’t need to be all that powerful. The hab’s hackstaff had done their best to hot-wire their traffic radars into a debris detector, but NaPurHab did not boast the most gifted technicians in the known Universe, and they had moreover done the job in a hurry with rather limited resources.
Sianna had no idea what the energy burst had been, or whether it had come from ten thousand kilometers away or ten thousand light years. Sianna was not really expecting to get any useful data at all out of the cobbled-together system.
She certainly wasn’t expecting to be astonished one more time.
Let alone terrified.
Twenty-nine
Incoming
“What is our struggle with the Charonians about? That I can tell you in one word. There is something they stole from us, something we want back again. Something that has been at the bottom of every quarrel, every battle, every war in human history.
“In that one word, we fight to get one thing back from the Charonians.
“Power.”
Dusk was falling, night settling over the city. Herr Doktar Wolf Bernhardt, Director-General of the Directorate for Spatial Investigations, Chairman of the Governing Board of the Multisystem Research Institute, stared down at his folded hands, at his empty desk, and faced the fact that, for the first time in years, there was nothing for him to do. At the end of the day, nothing demanded the attention and the authority of Wolf Bernhardt. And worse, much that he had done had proved to be of no use whatsoever.
“All of it for nothing, eh, Ursula?” he asked.
Ursula Gruber let off pacing back and forth along the length of the room and turned to look at her superior. “I beg your pardon?” she said.
“I said it’s all for nothing. All of the effort to rescue NaPurHab and Terra Nova. All the struggle to resupply them before the SCOREs could come and cut them off from us. All the panicked effort to get three scientists to the Terra Nova. Now Sakalov is dead, and if they are lucky, Sturgis and Colette are merely stranded with a habitat full of buffoons on the other side of a wormhole. Unless they are dead, too. And all of it based on guesses that were dead wrong, too. The SCOREs weren’t the least bit interested in Earth, just the Moonpoint Ring. All our preparations have been utterly wasted.”
“It’s not over yet, Wolf,” Ursula replied. “And there’s no question that you did save NaPurHab—or at least gave it a fighting chance. Perhaps that won’t do us much good here in the Multisystem, but the people on the habitat are still alive. If nothing else at all, your spacelift got enough propellant to them so they could adjust their flight path and make it through the wormhole. They’d have been smashed by the SCOREs or have crashed into the singularity if it weren’t for you.”
“Perhaps. Perhaps. If they even survived the passage. But now we are to lose the Terra Nova as well. What good can come of Steiger going down the wormhole?”
“A great deal,” Ursula replied. “What more could they accomplish here in the Multisystem, at lower risk than the wormhole transit?”
“I know, I know,” Wolf said. “And they may be able to learn a great deal, do a great deal, on the other side.”
“Except?” Ursula asked.
“Except,” Wolf said, “except we have utterly lost control of events. We, here, on Earth, we in this institute—you and I here in this room, have lost the initiative. Now we must merely watch from the sidelines, wait, hope that word will come.”
Ursula smiled. “There may be hope for you yet, Wolf. Not many autocratic, authoritarian leaders would be willing to admit that.”
Wolf looked to Ursula, but did not return her smile. “Indeed? So, very well, I admit it. But I find it remarkably small comfort.”
He stood up from behind his desk and turned around. He looked out, up into the sky, to where the great ship was preparing for its passage. “Now,” he said, “it is up to them.”
“There, there, there, and there,” Sianna said, stabbing her finger down on the display screen with each word. “Debris clouds, all lined up nice and neat, one right after another. You can run a single track through all of them. And there, there, and there, bright radar images, what have to be SCOREs running with their own internal radars turned off. One flight of twelve SCOREs still fairly close in, and others further enough out that we can’t get a precise count. Each flight of SCOREs on a precise intercept course with the projected sky track you get by running a line through the debris clouds. We figure the debris is what’s left of the SCOREs that tried and failed to smash whatever is moving in on that track.”
“We can’t see it?” the Maximum Windbag asked.
“Either it’s too small, or too nonreflective, or it’s using some sort of stealth technique,” Sianna said. “And I don’t think it’s stealth.”
“What for why not?” Eyeball asked.
“That thing’s moving in a straight line right for the SCOREs that are moving to intercept it,” Sianna said. “It’s not trying anything evasive or tricky, just barreling right through. Besides, it’s obvious the SCOREs can see it, even if we can’t. It’s not hiding. It just doesn’t care.”
“How they see it?” Windbag asked.
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Sianna said. “Obviously some sort of sensor we don’t have.”
“What’s more important is where the object is heading,” Wally said.
“Wherzat?” Windbag asked.
Sianna pointed at the display again. “Right there. Straight for the wormhole we came through. In other words, straight for Earth—and Earth’s Sphere—on the other side. It’s coming for us, Charonians and humans.”
“Say what?”
“We’ve got to assume this—this object is what’s been scaring the hell out of our Sphere,” Wally said. “We’ve got to assume this thing, whatever the hell it is, killed the Sphere here. It’s going to try and kill the Sphere in the Multisystem. And that will kill Earth.”
Windbag stared at the screen and nodded thoughtfully. “You know,” he said, “this isn’t good.”
Dianne Steiger sat down in the pilot’s control station and started working through her checklist. Normally, the bridge team sat at their consoles, fed commands to the computers, and watched the computer fly the ship. Not this time. Too many uncontrolled variables. Too many unpredictables and imponderables. Computers could react faster than humans could, of course, but the ship’s computers could not think, and quick thinking might be necessary to get them through this. If something went wrong, she would have to be ready to take over fast.