The Shattered Sphere

Nineteen CORE Feelings

Sianna Colette opened her eyes from a restless, dreamless, sleepless fog of unconsciousness. Her hands still hurt. She looked at the open palms of her hands, and the deep red welts in her flesh where her fingernails had sliced into the base of her palm. Clotted over now.

Had she really done that to herself? She had bit her lip, too, somewhere in there. She ran her tongue over the bite, and it stung.

At least she was not bleeding anymore. Just as well. Tiny spots of blood were splashed all over the permod’s interior and her clothing as it was. Her face must look a sight.

She shook her head from side to side, trying to clear it, and rubbed her face with a grubby, bloody hand. How long had it been? It seemed as if she had been in here for weeks at least, but that was not possible. The life-support system could not have kept her alive that long— unless they had been lying to her. Maybe they had hooked up some sort of supply module alongside her permod, once she was inside. But why? Why the hell would they want her to stay in space for that long? Some secret plan to send her someplace even worse than NaPurHab? Maybe they had diverted her craft, sent her on a direct path to rendezvous with Terra Nova.

No, she told herself. It was bad enough being claustrophobic. No sense getting paranoid into the bargain. No. The clock display must be right, and it had only been two days. Was she running a fever? She put a hand to her forehead. She felt hot, and God knows her mouth was dry, but she couldn’t really tell.

She felt as if she were recovering from a fever, an illness, in that gentle moment of recuperation where you knew you were getting well, when the illness was getting weaker and you were getting stronger.

She had conquered the permod, more or less unharmed. Horrible as it was, she had discovered that she could survive being sealed up in this damned box. Maybe being sealed in a coffin for a few days was all anyone needed to cure claustrophobia. Granted, it would never be a popular cure, and she still was not exactly enjoying herself, but even so, the fear had been burned out of her. Oh, she still wanted to get out. But all but the last bat’s-squeak of irrational ravening fear was gone. After this trip, she wouldn’t have the slightest concern about stepping into that elevator car at MRI.

Not that she ever would have the chance, of course. She was never going back.

Sianna blinked, gulped hard, and forced herself to accept it. She was never going back to Earth. Not with the COREs and SCOREs and whatever other space-monsters the Charonians could dream up blocking the way.

Unless, by some miracle, humanity found a way to open the spaceways, it would be death to try and go home. She was dead already, so far as anyone back on Earth was concerned.

She would never see her friends, her city, her books, her clothes, her bed again. All she had was what was with her now. And she had been able to bring so little. Her personal luggage allotment here in the permod was only five kilos’ worth to fit into a space roughly the size of a large handbag. A few family photos, a pair of shoes, and a few changes of underwear. God only knew what sort of clothes the Purps would provide. Best to bring at least a few items that would allow her some chance at modesty and comfort.

We bring nothing into this world, and we take nothing out of it…

No. Enough of that. It was time to look forward. Toward NaPurHab, toward the Terra Nova, toward the Lone World—the Lone World that she had unveiled, revealed for what it was.

Back home, back on the Earth that was lost to her, they were monitoring the Lone World, every antenna and detector they could manage aimed at it, listening for its commands. Her friends back there were scurrying around the archives, digging through all the old data, searching for whatever transmissions from the Lone World the detection hardware had recorded by chance over the years. The experts in Charonian notation and language were working night and day, struggling to squeeze meaning and understanding from the Lone World’s transmissions. They were learning the enemy’s language of command, thus the enemy’s most powerful secrets. And she, Sianna Colette, had told them where the secrets were kept.

That was something to have pride in.

Now if she could get the hell out of this damned box…

Wolf Bernhardt sat at the water’s edge, in the darkness, in the hot, fetid night of the South American coast. He stared up at the blackness where the sky should have been. Thick cloud cover hid the stars from view, and made the night as dark and blank as his heart.

Soon he would have to head back to the ops center and watch over the next phase of this bloody nightmare. He would have to be strong, and firm, ready to make decisions. Before then, he needed sleep. He knew that. He should go back to his quarters and try and rest. But not yet. Not yet. He needed the darkness, and the roaring surf, and the chance to be alone.

Wolf shifted on the park bench, some tiny fragment of his mind wondering why on Earth no one ever made such benches comfortable. They always seemed to cut into some part of one’s anatomy. Thinking on trivial matters at such a time prevented one from thinking about so many other things.

The Atlantic lay before him, the water of the mighty ocean quite invisible in the darkness. But it was there, all right. The roar of the surf, and the salt air, and the glint of lights from the spaceport reflected off a whitecap all told him that. The unseen was still there. The hidden could be close, and powerful.

Half-mechanically, Wolf checked the glowing numbers of the time display on his wristaid. Two hours since Yuri had died.

But that was not strictly accurate. Better, more accurate to say, that it was two hours since Wolf Bernhardt had killed Yuri Sakalov by sending him off on a suicide mission.

And Sianna and Wally still were out there, just waiting to be picked off, the defenses on their ships just as useless as the ones on Yuri’s.

And that was his doing, too. His. All of it. This whole mad, jury-rigged scheme to resupply NaPurHab before the SCOREs arrived. The hurried, improvised, idiotic, un-thought-out, comic-opera-heroics idea of sending Sakalov and the others to Captain Steiger and the Terra Nova. Others had thought of it, but he had agreed. He had liked the idea.

But no, damnation, no! It was not idiotic. It was right and proper to send those three to Steiger. MRI could beam all the information it wanted to the ship, but knowledge was not expertise, or wisdom, or insight. Sianna Colette had proved that much. She had not discovered anything new—she had simply put the pieces together, and made something new out of the parts everyone else had already seen.

Sooner or later, Terra Nova was going to have to confront the Lone World, and when she did, she would need not just the data concerning the Lone World, but the minds that had lived with that data, talked it out, seen it from a dozen different angles.

He needed to talk. Never had he felt more alone.

He pulled his phone from his pocket and stared at it for a moment before he realized that it was, of course, Yuri that he wanted to call.

Call and apologize for the very thing that made the conversation and the apology impossible.

But if not Yuri, then whom?

Time and events were rushing past, beyond all control. The crisis, the moment, was still unraveling. Early tomorrow, the first of the SCOREs would arrive at the vicinity of Earth, just about the same time Sturgis got to NaPurHab. That moment would give the first clue as to what the SCOREs—and perhaps the entire Multisystem— intended. Would they indeed attack Earth, land and use it for their breeding ground? And if so, could Earth survive?

Wolf had spent every waking moment of the last five years struggling to prepare for the time when the Charonians moved against Earth. He had gleaned every bit of data from every observation of the nearby Captive Worlds, attempting to analyze the nature of the attacks on them by the scars left behind. He had cajoled the United Nations and the rump national governments to prepare weapons to defend the planet, given a hundred speeches, written endless articles and reports urging this plan or that proposal, preparing these evacuation plans and those training programs.

Now the time had come and, across the world, armies and scientists and politicians were scrambling to be ready for the unknown, for whatever the SCOREs might do.

Perhaps the Battle of Earth would start tomorrow when the first SCORE made its closest approach to the Moonpoint Ring and then turned toward Earth. Perhaps tomorrow would mark a victory—or the beginning of the end.

But Wolf had already fought his battle. Either his efforts would be enough, or else they would not. There was nothing left for him to do. And perhaps it was too much for one man to imagine the fate of the world. Instead he found himself thinking about the fate of one child-woman, one frightened girl he had met but briefly and would never see again, a woman he had sent out into the void. Wolf glanced at his wristaid and figured the time. Thirty hours from now, Sianna Colette would either be dead, or just arriving at NaPurHab.

And maybe the SCOREs would move faster than expected, do something unimagined, get the job over faster, exterminate the local fauna immediately so as to clear the way for the Breeders. Maybe everyone on Earth would be dead or dying in thirty hours’ time. No one could know. Wolf Bernhardt sighed and turned back from the sea. Time to get some sleep, before reawakening to the nightmares.

Ursula Gruber, Ph.D., stared, unseeing, at the datapack in front of her. No doubt there were all sorts of useful—perhaps even vital— datapoints in the cloud of numbers and charts and statistics in front of her eyes, but she couldn’t see them anymore. She rubbed her eyes and sighed. No point trying any more just now. Last night Yuri had died. Last night she had not slept a wink. She needed quiet and rest. Not that she was going to get it.

They had it wrong. She was becoming more and more certain of that. She did not know where, or how, but she knew they had it wrong.

The SCOREs were the key to it. But they didn’t have that key in the proper lock. The SCOREs were headed toward the vicinity of the Moonpoint Ring, and not toward Earth. The conventional wisdom was that the SCOREs were going to perform gravity-assist maneuvers, do slingshot turns around the Moonpoint Singularity and come in for landings on Earth to commence a Breeding Binge.

But that made no sense. The Charonians had never used gravity-assist maneuvering before. Why should they? Even the most energetic gravity assist could only add ten or twenty kilometers per second of velocity change, and any Charonian could manage ten times that much velocity without any strain at all. Gravity assists made sense when you were short of energy but had lots of time, whereas the Charonians had all the energy anyone could hope for— and seemed to be in a desperate hurry.

Which led her to the conclusion that SCOREs were going toward Moonpoint not for gravassist but because the Moonpoint was their ultimate destination.

Now all she had to figure out was why the devil would they want to go to the Moonpoint. And there were the damned Ghoul Modules, to use the Naked Purple name, a name which seemed likely to stick. Sixteen of them had landed at equally spaced intervals on the inner surface of the Moonpoint Ring. No one had offered the least explanation for them. They seemed to be sending power through the system, but why?

This one little planet was far from being the chief concern of the Charonians. Granted, that was difficult to keep in mind as the huge fleets of Charonians swarmed about Earth. Similar fleets of SCOREs were headed toward between fourteen and twenty other Captive Worlds—but not toward all of them. Just some. Why?

Furthermore, on three Captives, the SCOREs had already arrived—but no one could tell what happened next. The worlds where the SCOREs had arrived were just too dim and too far off to see what was going on in detail.

About half of the SCOREs apparently went missing after arrival at the target planet. That would seem to support the assumption that at least some SCOREs were landing on the planet—but then why were the other half still detectable? Why didn’t they land and commence breeding as well? Waiting for their turn?

It didn’t quite hang together. With every passing minute, Ursula felt more and more sure that they had the whole Breeding Binge idea wrong. Yes, there was no doubt that the Charonians used planetary surfaces to reproduce, but why assume they were going to do it today?

But despite feeling they had it all wrong, she still had no idea what was right. She had no alternative explanation. What other motivation could there be besides a Binge?

Well, no point in wondering. There was enough else on her plate to keep her busy. The latest from the cryptographic section, for example, with a new analysis of the transmissions from the Lone World—

A discreet little beep tone from her calendar roused Ursula from her thoughts. Damnation. Time to phone in her report to Wolf Bernhardt.

Why couldn’t he just accept a written report, instead of interrogating her twice a week? She hated his questioning. Of course, Bernhardt was not likely to be in top form today. Not after getting Sakalov killed the day before.

She reached out a tired hand and pushed screen panels marked place scheduled call and audio link button. She hesitated a moment, then punched up the video link as well. Normally, she didn’t like the additional intrusion of someone seeing her as well as hearing her, but she wanted to see what sort of shape the man was in.

Besides which, it might be no bad thing if he saw that she was nearly at the end of her tether. Wolf had a tendency to forget that people needed sleep.

“Yah. Bernhardt here,” said a voice from the console, speaking before the video display had gotten his image up on the screen.

Then the announcement screen faded and she could see Wolf Bernhardt, sitting at what looked like a console station in some sort of command center. She could see a vague, mousy-looking woman just at the edge of the frame. Where was he? Still at Kourou, according to the infostrip across the bottom of the screen. She had assumed he would be back here in New York long ago. Ah, well, good thing the phone system could keep track of where he was. Ursula certainly couldn’t.

Bernhardt looked drawn, tired, and pale, but not nearly so much as she expected. The man never wore out—or at least he was determined to make it seem that way.

“Wolf. Good morning.” Strange. She thought of him by his last name, but always addressed him by his first. Somehow, the two of them had always simulated intimacy, without actually having it.

“This morning is anything but good,” Bernhardt replied, a hard edge to his voice. “Last night was nothing but disaster. How could this morning be good?”

Damn the man, kicking her in the head for a commonplace courtesy. As if she were to blame for Yuri’s death. Ske had not sent him out in that death-trap permod. But still, she must say something. “I mourn his death as well, Wolf. I am sorry.”

“Yah, yah,” Bernhardt replied, ducking his head and running his fingers through his hair, avoiding eye contact. Ursula allowed the moment and the silence to linger.

But then it was over. Wolf cleared his throat, adjusted the papers in front of him, and moved resolutely to new business. “Now, your report and analysis. Have you got anything new? Any revised behavior analysis on the COREs or SCOREs?”

Ursula punched a panel or two on her menu screen. “Text and data on their way to you now. There is something new in it, too.”

“New in what way?”

“Something a little hard to put down in numbers and charts.” Ursula blinked, covered her mouth as she yawned. She felt the need to get up and stretch.

“Well, what is it then? A behavioral change in the SCOREs, perhaps?”

Ursula shook her head no. She was feeling restless, cooped up. She threw a switch that moved the image of Bernhardt over to the main wall display, and cut from the desk camera to the one over the wall screen.

She stood up, came around to the front of the desk, perched on its corner, and addressed the wall screen. “No change on the SCOREs, Wolf. We’re still tracking them heading toward the Moonpoint Singularity.” She hesitated, tempted to say something more about her thoughts on that. But no. Leave it for now. Talk about the rest of it instead. “But I’m starting to see something else in all the data. Nothing I can define absolutely, nothing I can hang a number on, but it’s there, all the same.”

Bernhardt gave her an odd look. “What is where, please?”

Ursula gestured vaguely. “The COREs, Wolf. They are becoming increasingly aggressive.”

Wolf shut his eyes and nodded. He was more tired than he looked. “Yah. More intercepts.”

“I am afraid it goes deeper than that. They are not just more aggressive. They are more erratic.”

“What do you mean?” Wolf demanded, looking up at the camera, his expression hard and sharp.

Ursula Gruber paced the floor. She knew that she was going in and out of the pan limits of the cameras, and knew how irritating it could be for Wolf when she wandered out of the shot, but she couldn’t help it. She was too keyed up, too edgy.

“There are more attacks, but there is less logic behind any given attack. Launch-window constraints meant we had to send some cargo via high-risk trajectories—but the COREs aren’t taking the bait. Cargoes we almost expected to be smashed are getting through—and the ones sent via the safest routes and launch windows are getting hit far more frequently than they should be.”

“We have enough ships and routes and attacks to know it isn’t just some slight skew in the numbers, a hiccup in the statistics. It’s a real change. Based on the numbers we had a week ago, Dr. Sakalov’s ship should not have been attacked.”

“And the other two, Sturgis and Colette, are still en route, in the mdidle of it, on those ‘safe’ trajectories,” Bernhardt said in a bitter voice, a note of anger and blame there as well. But one look at his expression made it clear he was blaming himself, not her. Well, if she felt guilty enough to think he was pointing the finger at her, no wonder. “I gave you the trajectory data, Wolf,” she said. “His death is on my hands as well.”

“Ursula, we are fighting a war here. Yes, one man has died, and two others might, but the fate of the planet is on the line. We made the mistake together, Ursula, if you like. But his blood is not on our hands. The enemy killed him. Not us.”

“But the other two are on the same sort of safe trajectories. Now all my calculations turn out to be useless and we don’t dare change their courses for fear of attracting the COREs’ attention. I could get them all killed, to no purpose.”

“Then they will be killed!” Wolf said. “We got them killed. I assure you, the nightmares came every time I lay my head down even before Yuri’s death. Now they will come even worse. I know that. But we must move on. If the other two are on dangerous trajectories, it’s too late now. There’s no way to recall them, no way to save them. If at least one of them survives, then that will be enough. The knowledge, the experience we have here at MRI will get to where it needs to be.”

“And if they both die? If the COREs get them both?” Ursula asked.

“If the COREs get them both—” Bernhardt began to answer, but stopped abruptly, as if to calm himself and collect his thoughts. “If the COREs get them both, I will review the situation and decide what to do. We may attempt to send someone else out. By that time it may no longer be within our power to do anything at all. It is not, thank God, a decision I must make now.”

“Have you—informed—either of them?” Ursula asked. “Do they know what happened to Yuri?”

“No. They are not to be informed until they arrive at NaPurHab. No good purpose could be served by telling them now. Cooped up in those damned tin cans, what good would knowing do them? Besides, the panic could kill them.”

“You’re right, I suppose,” Ursula conceded, “but that doesn’t make it feel any righter.”

“No, it does not.” Bernhardt was silent again for a moment. He just sat there, staring down at his hands. Ursula found it in her heart to pity the man, even if he did seem more than half robot most of the time. This was hard on him, harder than he ever let show. “But let us move on,” he said at last, in a brisk, efficient tone of voice. “How goes work on the Lone World transmissions?”

“We’re learning fast,” Ursula said, trying to sound equally brisk and efficient. “We’re seeing a lot of new syntax and vocabulary, but the underlying structure is very similar to the message traffic we’ve been reading for years.”

“Excellent,” Bernhardt replied. “That is going to be the key, Ursula. If we can read the Charonian’s basic commands, perhaps we can still survive.”

“We’re working around the clock, I promise you. But there’s something else that might be of more immediate concern. We have tracked what seem to be two incidents of—well, I am not quite sure how to describe it.”

“Two incidents of what, Ursula?”

“Of what look very much like COREs attacking each other. And another of a CORE attacking a SCORE.”

“Charonians attacking each other?” Wolf asked.

Ursula nodded. “Suicide attacks, in fact, but that much at least makes sense. An impact powerful enough to kill one would pretty much have to kill the other.”

“But they are attacking each other?”

“We’ve seen it before, occasionally, in the vicinity of some of the other Captive Worlds. Never more than one at a time.”

“Are you sure they were attacks? Might the incidents not be something else you are misinterpreting?”

“One CORE moves in on another, crashes into it, and both of them go dead in the water. No further movement or radar emissions, and a cloud of fragments and debris. What else could it be?”

“But that doesn’t make sense,” Wolf protested. “Why would they attack each other?”

“I don’t know,” Ursula said. “Why the hell do they do anything? Any explanation I can give comes down to projecting human emotions and motives onto a bunch of flying rocks and mountains. But something is different about the way they are acting. That much I can say for sure. A few incidents of one crashing into another could just be malfunctions or accidents, or a result of more traffic causing congestion. It’s more general than that. Their movements are more sudden compared to even a few weeks ago. There’s something rather abrupt in the way they move, something that wasn’t there before. I’ve seen a few COREs start in toward a target and then abort, brake to a halt almost before they start. They’re jumpy.”

“But why?” Wolf asked. “What sort of orders could they be getting that would make them act that way?”

Ursula shrugged. “We’re just at the beginning stages of being able to read Lone World command sets, but I don’t think they are being ordered to do anything. Besides, the shift in their behavior is too subtle a difference to be caused by orders. It’s a question of tone.”

“Tone? Ursula, what the devil are you talking about?” Wolf said.

Ursula sighed. “All right. I think they’re sensing panic from higher up, and the panic is spreading. That’s the short form. They’re trigger-happy because the Lone World is nervous.”

“That’s a lot to read into one asteroid crashing into another.”

“Wolf, I know these particular, individual COREs. They’ve been in near-Earth space for years. I’ve been tracking them since they arrived, watched them the way a behaviorist watches herds of animals. And they do have individual behaviors. Certain COREs are more aggressive, other more cautious. If two COREs got within a certain distance of each other, one would give way to the other—and I could predict which one. I have files and data on every move they’ve ever made.

“These COREs are acting scared. Something has them spooked. The best I can describe it is that they are like hunting dogs who start acting nervous when their master is edgy.”

Ursula walked back behind her desk, dropped into her chair, and stared up at Wolfs face on the wall screen. “Which, of course, brings us back to the old, old question. What is frightening enough to spook the Charonians?”

The top of the permod swung open and Wally Sturgis sat up, feeling more than a little pleased with himself. He knew for damned sure that you weren’t supposed to be able to open the things from the inside. He counted the fact that he had managed it as a major victory.

His head felt a little funny, unaccustomed to any sort of movement after three days in the mod. He felt his stomach lurch just a bit as well, as he found out the hard way that sudden movement in a micro-gravity environment could be most disorienting. About a hundredth of a gee this close to the axis. Enough to tell him which way was down, more or less, but not much else. Welcome to NaPurHab, he told himself.

He took a deep breath to steady himself, and thus got a lungful of air that did not smell like Walter J. Sturgis, another novel experience after the last three days.

That led him to realize precisely what flavor Walter J. Sturgis had become in the last seventy-two hours. Perhaps a shower might be in order. Wally set to work detaching himself from the permod’s plumbing attachments, and got out of the permod, moving very carefully.

“Hey! You there guy! Get outta that mod now-right!”

Wally looked around to see who was calling to him.

A small, peppery-looking woman bounced up to an overhead guideway about twenty meters away. She was dressed in rather grubby-looking purple-and-orange pants and a torn pullover with a tiger-stripe pattern. Her hair was shaved in a tonsure, and her skin was dyed, not purple, but a rather striking shade of yellow. “Get outta that thing!” she said again, pulling herself along on the overhead stanchions.

“I’m getting, I’m getting,” Wally said, scrambling out of the mod, feeling more than a bit woozy.

“Those supplies are everybody’s, buddy,” the woman shouted, hurrying over, swinging along, arm over arm. “Cargo headhoncho don’t want no lib’rating without his okay…” Her voice trailed off as she got close enough to get a whiff of permod. She looked down into the permod, took another look at Wally, and said, “Oh.” She let go of her stanchion and drifted slowly down to floor level, landing after a leisurely five-second fall.

“You been in that thing?” she asked.

“Uh-huh,” Wally said.

“Not sposed to be outgetting alone,” she pointed out in a rather accusing tone, but with something less than crystalline clarity as to what she was accusing him of. Was she saying it wasn’t allowed? Or unsafe? Or commenting on the fact that it was supposed to be impossible?

“Sorry,” Wally said. “Should I get back in until you’re ready?”