Gerald smiled to himself. The Terra Nova and NaPurHab had just crossed into the unknown, and he was thinking about comparative maintenance schedules. But after a passage like that, it was time to get things back to as near normal as possible as fast as possible. To every thing, there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven, Gerald reminded himself.
But they were suddenly some unknown number of light-years from Earth, and some rather disturbing questions appeared, unbidden, in Gerald’s mind. This far from home, were they indeed still under heaven? And unto what purpose—unto whose purpose—was this time to be given?
“Okay, that’s a lock,” Windbag said to the commlink. “See your team in our maxmeet shop, twentyfour from now.” The Windbag cut the commlink to the Terra Nova and sighed.
He punched up the stern exterior camera shot and was rewarded with a view of the TN with the Charonian wormhole control ring behind it. Nice looking ship, but that was not exactly the key factor here. The Windbag found himself wishing bigtime he did not have to deal with a ship full of straights just now. He knew he shoulda been slap-happy glad to get ’em. Like to get heavily lonesome in these parts, and NaPurHab could use all the help it could git. The TN had all kinds of hardware and braintrust types who knew how to run things. Evenso, now wuz not-time for distractions. He had enough on his plate without the TN screaming for attention.
But still they had to have a maximum meet, all the honchos and honchettes. They had to slap together some way of surviving out here, and plain-fact-one was that they were gonna need each other.
But that didn’t make it fun.
Sianna looked around herself and realized that she had blundered onto the Boredway again. How many wrong turns could one person make? Quite a few, as it turned out. The whole hab was a madhouse.
Boredway was anything but boring at the moment, as tangled in frantic activity as an overturned ant heap. The air was filled with the smells of burnt insulation, sweating bodies, hot metal, and bonding chemicals, a tech crew just down the way trying to repair something while a cargo crew was struggling to make sense of the cargo canisters that had been strapped in any which way in the aft sections of Boredway. A few hundred meters forward, some sort of protest group was forming up. God only knew what they were protesting— or whom they were protesting to.
Sianna decided to risk a shortcut through Loopaway turf. If she could avoid any more wrong turns, it would cut twenty minutes off her trip.
She remembered the old joke about time being nothing more than nature’s way of keeping everything from happening all at once. For a while, it seemed as if it didn’t work this side of the wormhole. It had been a busy few days.
The captain of the Terra Nova and her executive officer had come aboard, looking more than a bit disoriented—understandable, considering they had both spent the past five years aboard one ship. Of course, NaPurHab would be disorienting no matter where you came from.
There had been another energy burst the day before—a multiple one this time—as the “object” slammed into a half-dozen SCOREs at once, with every scope on the hab and the Terra Nova watching it. The object was tracking closer and closer, heading right for the wormhole.
The object. It was coming this way, at high velocity. And when it got here, it was going to force open the wormhole and kill the Multisystem, and that would kill the Earth.
Oh God. How to stop it. How to stop it? Or were they just going to have to sit here and watch it happen?
At least life was chaotic enough to take her mind off things. Somewhere in the swirl of comings and goings, in between Purpgroups of this or that philosophy, while the frantic repair crews were rushing to patch up the systems that had been damaged in the passage of the wormhole and the tech teams were juggling like mad to keep the hab working with the solar collectors suddenly delivering a third less power than before, it had all turned from strange to familiar. Sianna had gotten used to it all, and that scared her.
Sianna stopped at the turning that always got her muddled and hesitated a long moment before taking the middle way. Yes, this was the right way. She recognized the stain on the wall. Straight along this way, then down two levels, and she’d almost be there.
Oh, it had been a time, with all the big events seeming to produce little ones in their wakes. A riot or two had broken out, a sit-in had been staged in the Maximum Windbag’s office. Meantime, certain residents of both ship and hab had decided on a change of scenery. Two dozen Purps had applied for crew positions on the Terra Nova, while twice that number of the TN‘s crew had applied for Naked Purple citizenship, which was a great nuisance, as the Purple Citizen’s Council had ruled there was no such thing as a Purple Citizen three years before and then disbanded.
Ah. Here it was. I BALLS ONLEE. Someone had changed the spelling again. She pulled open the hatch and went in. Wally was lost to the outside world, buried in some sort of elaborate simulation of the incoming object. It seemed to be running on every screen in the room, from a different viewing angle on each one. Eyeball was on the comm to someone, cursing them out with alarming skill and virulence as she compulsively neatened her immaculate work station. There were Solitude and the Shattered Sphere out the viewport, glaring down on them.
Sianna sighed happily and sat down at her own station. Scary to think that a scene like this could be the most comfortable and familiar thing in her life—but then, you always had to work with what you had.
Sondra Berghoff was scared, and trying not to show it. Plans and theories were all very well, but reality was a bit trickier. Hanging in space, the nose of the Autarch pointed straight at the Plutopoint black hole, she could no longer see the slightest logic to sending a ship through the wormhole. Yes, they had some important information. Couldn’t they have just scribbled a note, stuck it in a bottle, and tossed it through the hole?
She sat strapped into her chair on the main deck, right behind the ship’s pilot. She didn’t even know the man’s name, or the names of any of the Autarch’s five crew members. All of them were nameless, faceless, utterly taciturn, and sworn to unquestioning obedience to the Autocrat.
She had not seen any of them show any facial expression except something midway between a poker face and rigor mortis. Robots showed more in the way of reaction.
Suppose they couldn’t immediately dock with the Terra Nova or NaPurHab for some reason, and she was stuck with these guys for a month or two? Suppose the Charonians or the Adversary had destroyed the big ship and the hab, and she was marooned with these guys for life?
Well, at least the crew members weren’t the only ones on board. She turned and looked to her right, to the Autocrat. There were at least some signs of life and thought in his face. A strange man, to say the least, but at least he was capable of conversation.
She looked over to Marcia MacDougal, and Larry. A miracle they were here. No doubt if anyone survived long enough to write history books of the period, the books would record how those two had come along because they were experts in gravitation and Charonian language. That was even accurate, as far as it went.