The Autocrat smiled. “Actually,” he said, “I’d say they are rather good. And they can only get better if your friend Dr. Chao manages to get here. Do you think he’ll make it?”
Sondra frowned. “I hope so, Autocrat. I sure as hell hope so. Because I know Larry. If he doesn’t make it, he’s sure to die trying.”
Larry Chao tried to look calmer than he was. “All right,” he said, “three minutes to beam reception.” If the Ring had actually sent the beam, long hours before. That was one slightly nerve-wracking thing about gravity-beam propulsion. The beam had to come from the Ring of Charon. From lunar space, your power had to come, at the speed of light, from a little matter of forty astronomical units, or just under six billion kilometers away. In theory, the Ring had fired the beam five and a half hours ago. In three minutes—no, two now— they would find out if they had done it right. They could abort now by slamming on the rocket engines and blasting out of the beam’s path—but once the beam hit the ship, the Graviton was committed. No one had ever tried shutting off a gravitic-beam system from the shipboard side of things, but theory indicated the attempt would destroy the ship. Once the beam touched them, there was no turning back.
The Graviton had lifted off the Moon eighteen hours before, and done pretty good time under old-fashioned rocket power getting to the safe-distance point. A nice, smooth, routine flight. But now. Now they had turned their crash couches around, and they sat in the ship’s backwards control room, with the floor where the ceiling should have been. Now came the interesting part.
Larry looked over to Marcia. “I’m scared to death,” he said, “but I’m maintaining a brave front. How about you?”
She smiled feebly, but did not take her eyes off the countdown clock. “Just about the same. Three days to get there,” she said. “I know it’s much shorter than the old transit times, but is it fast enough?”
“They won’t leave without us,” Larry said, with more conviction than he felt. “They’ve had just as many glitches reconfiguring the Ring as we had getting the Graviton ready. Probably they’ll still have half a dozen snags that will need me to sort out when we get there,” he said, trying to make a joke out of it.
“I still can’t believe it’s happening, finally happening after so long,” Marcia said. “Gerald. I’m going to see Gerald. Maybe it really isn’t happening. Maybe the Terra Nova went through the wormhole from place A to place B, and we’re just going to place A. Is it possible we have it backwards?”
“I doubt it very much,” Larry said, watching the last of the seconds fall away.
TERRA NOVA TERRA NOVA TERRA NOVA. Not much of a message, but it was all the Ring team had gotten during the last wormhole passage, a week ago. They knew the TN had gone through the wormhole. Marcia’s fears to the contrary, they knew which set of coordinates it was moving toward. But they did not know if the ship had survived.
“Here we go,” Larry said. The clock reached zero—
And nothing happened. Not at first. But then the meters twitched and starting crawling upwards. The Graviton creaked and groaned a time or two as the ship’s structure took up the new stress load. It was happening. The Graviton was taking the gravity beam and using it to create an imaginary mass just ahead of the ship’s nose, under their feet. One that was pulling her forward at forty gravities. Larry felt his weight returning as the acceleration-shielding system tapped some of the gravity field to produce a little resistance, just enough to give them an interior one-sixth gravity. It was working. It was working.
Thirty hours accelerating, nine hours in zero gee, and thirty more hours slowing down. They were making history. They were the first people ever to ride a human-built gravitic spacecraft. But that was a trivial point, almost beneath notice. What did such things matter, compared to the fact they were going to get there in time?
Thirty-one
The Autocrat Departs
The Mind of the Sphere felt a second strange pulse move through the wormhole web, a rough, crude movement through the net. Then, shortly thereafter, a third pulse this one coming from outside, somehow, from a wormhole aperture no Charonian had ever formed. But like the first two illicit wormhole transits, this one terminated in the default link station in the dead system—the same link point the Mind had sent its own forces through, the same link point the Adversary was driving for.
Were these passages some strange new scheme of the Adversary? The Mind’s fears were instantly aroused. It examined the records of the link in more detail. No, no. This was not the Adversary. It was all too coarse, too crude, too awkwardly done, too cautious.
But it was something. Something to do with the strange troubles that had surrounded the last world brought into the Multisystem, such a brief time before. For a moment, the Mind considered the idea of destroying that world now, as a precaution, and expending the massive energy needed to bring another planet forward to serve as a projectile weapon.
But no. That would drain its energy reserves to dangerously low levels. And these were such small and weak interlopers. Certainly there had to be more frugal means to defend against them, if need be. Surely it would make more sense to conserve its projectile planet, keep it for its intended use.
Besides, the Mind could always destroy the troublesome planet later, after all this was over.
There was a lot going on. Communications to establish with NaPurHab, navigation setting to work out, observational procedures to work out, once they figured out what they were looking at. But Gerald was happy to let the captain and the comm officer dicker and bicker with NaPurHab and sort out the rest of it. He had a ship to manage.
He quickly confirmed what he had been hoping for—the ship was safe, at least for the moment. No damage from the wormhole transit, none of the handful of SCOREs in the neighborhood showing any hostile intent, and no other danger on the immediate horizon.
He punched up the intercom and set it to general announcement. “This is the executive officer,” he said. “All sections, secure from special shifts and resume normal shift rotation. Resume normal watches. Everybody get some rest.”
They had made it. They had gone through the wormhole, and not so much as a scratch on the paint job. Gerald glanced toward the main screen as the tracking officer put up a live feed of NaPurHab. It was little more than a sharp-edged spot in the screen at this range. Dianne already had headphones on, no doubt talking to the Maximum Windbag himself.
The passage must have been much tougher on the hab. It had to take some real courage to take her through, Gerald told himself. We had it easy. The Terra Nova was much newer and smaller and more compact, built more robustly and maintained with much more care than the hab.