Allen, Roger Macbride - Hunted Earth 2 - The Shattered Sphere

504 Pages·2016·0.95 MB·English

by  Allen Roger Macbride

The Shattered
Sphere
Second Book of The Hunted
Earth
Roger MacBride Allen
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and
events portrayed in this book ate fictitious, and any
resemblance to real people or events is purely
coinci dental.
Copyright 1994 by Roger MacBride Allen
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.
ISBN 0-312-85734-9 I. Title.
To Eleanore Maury Fox— Home is where she is.
Author’s Note
“Have you finished The Shattered Sphere yet?”
That is the question I have been asked more than
any other since The Ring of Charon came out.
Readers, friends, editors, agents, and all sorts of
other people have wanted to know. I am more
pleased than you can know that the answer is now
“yes.” Here it is.
To everyone who has been patient—and
impatient— for this book, let me say thank you. I
hope that the results have been worth the wait.
Special thanks are due to my editor, Debbie
Notkin, and to Beth Meacham, Patrick Nielsen
Hayden, Tom Doherty, and the entire staff at Tor
Books. Now, at long last, I can stop hiding from
them. Thanks also, once again, to Linda Silk, whose
artwork graced the advance reading copies. Thanks
to my parents, Tarn and Scottie, for their
comments on the manuscript.
And finally, thanks also to Eleanore Maury Fox,
to whom this book is dedicated. She read the
original manuscript and provided a great deal of
firm and much-needed advice. There are, needless
to say, a lot of other reasons for me to say thanks to
Eleanore, but that’s another story—one that isn’t
anywhere near done yet.
—Roger MacBride Allen London, August 1993
Dramatis Personae
The Autocrat of Ceres. The absolute ruler of
Ceres, and de facto hegemonic leader of the entire
Asteroid Belt. By tradition, the holder of the office
renounces his or her name and all links to his or her
previous life upon entry into office.
Joanne Beadle. Operations technician at Kourou
Spaceport, South America. She acts, rather
reluctantly, as Wolf Bernhardt’s personal assistant
during his stay there.
Dr. Wolf Bernhardt. Head of the U.N. Directorate
of Spatial Investigation (DSI) and Director of the
Multisystem Re search Institute (MRI).
Dr. Sondra Berghoff. Director of the Ring of
Charon Gravit ies Research Station at Plutopoint.
Canpopper Notworthit. A rather inefficient cargo
handler on NaPurHab.
Dr. Selby Bogsworth-Stapleton. A “Leftover,” that
is, a citi zen of Earth stranded in the Solar System
by the Abduc tion. The only trained archaeologist
on the Moon, she heads the exploration of the
Lunar Wheel and the Wheelway Tunnel system.
Sianna Colette. A young woman, orphaned as a
teenager by the pulsequakes of the Abduction. As
the book opens, she is a graduate student working
at the Multisystem Re search Institute (MRI) in
New York.
Dr. Larry O’Shawnessy Chao. Formerly a youthful
and very junior researcher at the Gravities Research
Station, Pluto. Chao accidentally activated the huge
Charonian being, the Lunar Wheel, and thus
inadvertently set in motion the events leading to the
Abduction. As the book opens, he is working on the
Graviton project.
Lucian Dreyfuss. Once a technician at the Moon’s
Orbital Traffic Control Center, he was captured by
the Charonians in the Rabbit Hole. He is presumed
dead.
Eyeballer Maximus Lock-on. A rather moody and
forceful woman, she is head of navigation and
guidance on NaPurHab.
Dr. Ursula Gruber. Director of Observational
Studies at MRI and a key adviser to Wolf
Bernhardt.
Dr. Gerald MacDougal. Second-in-command of
the Terra Nova. He is married to Marcia
MacDougal. A born-again Christian, he is a trained
exobiologist.
Dr. Marcia MacDougal. Once a planetary
engineer on Venus Initial Station for Operational
Research (VISOR), now a researcher in Charonian
symbology. She escaped from the Naked Purple
Movement in Tycho Purple Penal as a teen ager.
She returned to the Moon when VISOR was
moth-balled. As the book opens, she is based at the
Lunar North Pole and involved in research into
Charonian language and behavior there.
Wally Sturgis. An expert in computer modeling.
As the book opens, he is employed at the
Multisystem Research Insti tute.
Ohio Template Windbag. The Maximum
Windbag, or leader, of the Naked Purple Habitat
(NaPurHab).
Tyrone Vespasian. Director of the Lucian
Dreyfuss Memo rial Research Station (a.k.a. “The
Rabbit Hole”) at the Moon’s North Pole.
One
Boarding Party
Others called it the Adversary, but it had no
name for itself, or even a sufficient awareness of
self for a name to be meaningful. The distinction
between individual and group was as meaningless
to it as it would be to a volume of water that
happens to be divided and then recombined. The
Adversary could divide itself, and merge itself, to
whatever degree it chose. But the Adversary was,
ultimately, one.
It lived in the warm, slow, soft recesses of heavy
gravity, of gravity fields powerful enough to slow
time down to a reasonable rate of speed. As seen
from out in the cold and dark distortions of
fast-time space, the Adversary was deep inside a
truncated wormhole aperture, seemingly
unheeding of the outside universe.
But it was not so, even if the slowed passage of
time inside the ruined wormhole might make it so
appear. It was aware of its surroundings, even if it
was slow to react to them.
And it had detected a vibration in the fabric of
the gravitic links. Some time past, as measured in
the cold and dark of fast time, there had been a
series of disturbances. As a series of lightning
flashes might briefly illuminate all of a darkened
landscape, and so serve to guide one across it, the
gravitic vibrations made much that was hidden
suddenly visible. The Adversary could see the path
to new sources of power, of energy, illuminated
across the expanses of wormhole links and
fast-time space.
Slowly, oh so slowly as seen from fast-time
space, it began to move.
“The Terra Nova was, of course, built to
be the first starship. In the parlance of
the time, she was a sleep-ship. Her
passengers were meant to be frozen
before departure, and to sleep away the
long years and decades between the
stars, then thawed and decanted on
arrival at the target star system.
However, budget restraints forced the
mothballing of the great ship a few
months short of completion. She was
never launched toward Alpha Centauri,
as intended. In stead, she sat in a
parking orbit of Earth.
”As chance would have it, the Terra
Nova was swept up along with Earth
when the planet was ab ducted into its
new surroundings in the Multisystem.
The Terra Nova was immediately set to
work studying Earth’s startling new
environs.
“The ship’s designers named her for a
famous Brit ish exploration ship of the
early twentieth century. No doubt they
would have chosen a name of better
omen had they examined the history,
rather than the myth and romance,
surrounding that namesake ves sel.
That Terra Nova, Commander Scott’s
ill-fated command vessel on his fatal trip
to the South Pole, was a rather ordinary
ship, a whaling vessel pressed into
Antarctic service, quite ill-suited to
exploration or Antarctic conditions. As a
result, she found herself in the greatest
of difficulties on many occasions,
put ting her crew in great and needless
peril. Her unsuitability was a
contributing factor in the expedition’s
disastrous failure.
”Our Terra Nova, on the other hand,
was built for the sole purpose of
exploration—but found herself forced
into virtually every other role instead. By
turns a mothballed hulk, a military
craft, a rescue ship, a lifeboat, and many
other things besides, she earned fame
for doing all the things she was never
meant to do.
“In one of the great ironies of the history
of explo ration, the ship built to search
for and colonize new worlds trillions of
kilometers from Earth instead found
herself among any number of new and
fertile worlds a mere stone’s throw away
from Earth—and yet she dared not
approach any of them, let alone take up
orbit or send down landers.”
—Earth, in the Multisystem: A
Chronicle of Exile, Jose Ortega, Central
City Press, 2436
Aboard the Terra Nova
Deep Space
THE MULTISYSTEM
June 4, 2431
“Hijacker now five kilometers from the
Close-Orbiting Radar Emit ter.” The tracking
officer kept up her steady, monotone reports. A half
million kilometers away, the long stern chase was
drawing to its close. Terra Nova might have built
and launched Hijacker, but the mother ship was
nothing but an observer now. There was nothing
she could do to help. Captain Dianne Steiger stared
at the main bridge screen, at the huge lump of rock
that was the CORE, straining her eyes for the dim,
tiny dot that was Hijacker, the frail, tiny ship that
had departed the Terra Nova nearly a month
before.
Her hands gripped the arms of her command
chair hard, her fingers dug deep into its fabric. She
longed for a cigarette, but she had smoked the last
one on board two years before. The CORE and
Hijacker might be hundreds of thousands of
kilometers away, but that didn’t make the little
ship’s mission any less important. Hijacker’s crew
had to succeed. They had to, or else it was time to
change the Terra Nova’s name to the Flying
Dutchman and be done with it.
The damnable COREs, the endless thousands of
COREs, had prevented Dianne’s ship from
approaching any planet for the last five years. The
Terra Nova could not even return home to Earth,
for Earth had been surrounded by its own swarm of
COREs.
But this CORE was out in the depths of space,
nowhere near a planet, all by itself, traveling
between worlds on some unknowable task of its
own. Maybe, just maybe, this one the men and
women of the Terra Nova could take on.
“Hijacker now three kilometers from the CORE,”
the tracking officer reported.
Dianne stared harder at the screen. Ah, there she
was, just coming into view of the long-range
infrared cameras. Even with all the en hancers
cranked up all the way, Hijacker was nothing but a
dim brown dot crawling into the picture frame.
Staring at the image made Dianne’s eyes swim. She
blinked to clear her vision, and found she had lost
track of the hard-to-see blob of color. Then the
Artificial Intelligence system, the Artlnt, running
the display system threw a yellow target circle
centered around Hijacker. Much better.
No need to throw any such circle around the
CORE, of course. The alien ship was the size of an
asteroid, and all too easy to see. In fact it was an
asteroid. Perhaps even calling it an alien ship was a
bit misleading. Dianne glanced to her left, where
Gerald MacDougal was sitting, staring at the screen
himself.
Gerald always argued, quite plausibly, that the
CORE was as much crew and captain as it was ship,
one semi-organic whole. Certainly the CORE was
alive. More or less. Unless you chose to regard it
wholly as a machine. Dianne sighed and gave it up.
Nothing was ever clear when you were dealing with
the Charonians. And even if they were the most
deadly enemy that humanity had ever faced, and
even if the Charonian’s utter failure to notice that
humans existed was the one thing that kept
humanity from being destroyed, there was
some thing damn mortifying in the arrogant way
the Charonians stead fastly ignored everything
human. Cockroaches got more attention from
humans than humans got from Charonians.
Sometimes Dianne thought it would be a victory
just to get the other side to acknowl edge the
existence of humans.
“Any change in radar emissions?” Gerald asked.
Any shift in radar could be a warning that the
CORE had spotted Hijacker. The Terra Nova was
not putting out any radar herself, but the ship’s
passive detectors were tuned and focused, watching
the CORE’s emissions for any changes caused either
by the CORE’s beams being deflected or by the
CORE changing its active search pattern.
“No, sir. No change in radar emissions, no
target-induced shift in outgoing beam. No new
activity that we can detect.”
That was good news, or at least the absence of
bad news. CORE stood for “Close-Orbiting Radar
Emitter.” This one was not in close orbit of
anything at the moment, but it sure as hell was
emitting radar like crazy.
The radar was meant to detect any object large
enough to threaten whatever planet the CORE
happened to be protecting. If it detected a
threatening meteor, the CORE would shift course
and smash itself into the incoming rock, knocking
the rock off course, if not smash ing it to bits.
Such protection was necessary. Earth’s new
home, the Multisys tem, was full of spaceborne
debris and clouds of dust, thick enough in places
that comm lasers would not work. Terra Nova‘s
lasers had not been able to punch through to Earth
for weeks. The ship had been in radio silence for all
that time as well, for fear of attracting the CORE’s
attention.
The best estimate was that there was between
fifty and five hun dred times as much skyjunk as in
the Solar System. Dianne shifted nervously. As if
she needed something else to worry about,
some thing else she could do nothing about. There
was no real way to know that the Solar System had
survived, and plenty of reason to fear that it had
not.
But best to focus on the problem at hand.
Counting the Earth, there were at least 157 planets
in the Multisystem, and every last one of them was
surrounded by a cloud of COREs. The COREs were a
first-rate defense against asteroids, but the damned
things went after ships and landing craft just as
relentlessly, swarming out to smash into any craft
whose projected course intercepted a planet. The
Terra Nova dared not get within three hundred
thousand kilometers of any of those 157 planets.
There was no danger of starvation, of the ship
dying, of course: Terra Nova was designed to cross
the dark between the stars, and Earth could still
send the occasional outbound resupply ship. The
COREs did not seem to care about objects moving
out from a planet—most of the time. Something like
half the outbound supply cargoes made it through.
No, survival was not the issue—the question was
one of the ship’s usefulness, of its meaning. What
was the point of a starship that could not get near a
planet? Terra Nova had long since learned all she
could about the Charonians from 300,000
kilometers away.
But Hijacker might be the key. If the small,
stealthy ship could land on this CORE undetected, if
her crew could make use of the tiny scraps of
information that were all humanity knew about the
COREs specifically and the Charonians generally, it
was just possible they could take over the CORE,
learn how to control it. Then maybe, just maybe,
they could find a way to make all the COREs back
off, find a way that would allow the Terra Nova to
send landing craft to explore some of those worlds.