The Shattered Sphere

Thirty Rubicons

Gerald MacDougal watched the wormhole getting closer, surprised at how calm he was. He should have been terrified, his pulse pounding, the sweat thick on his body.

And yet he was not. Was he serenely confident they would make it? Was he so certain they were doomed that he had given himself up to death with calm and dignified resignation? Or was he so terrified that he could find no other reaction than absolute, blanket denial?

As the blazing un-blue-white circle of the wormhole aperture swelled forward, rushing toward them, like a wall in space they were just about to slam into, Gerald braced for the impact, his instincts telling him the ship was about to crash into the barrier that was not really there.

Gerald glanced up at the status displays. Dianne was flying at a much higher velocity than NaPurHab had used. Maybe that was wise. No sense remaining inside any longer than necessary. Or maybe it was downright suicidal.

But then they were in. No turning back. They had crossed their Rubicon; they were committed. The ship hit the un-blue-white, and dove into the wormhole. Gerald felt a sudden thrill of excitement. At last, at long last, the Terra Nova was living up to her name. She was off in search of New Worlds indeed.

Dianne Steiger drove the ship in, her whole attention, her whole soul, focused on the job of getting her ship in and down and through and out. The ship bucked and jittered as the complex tidal and gravitational forces inside the wormhole grabbed at it. Dianne was flying by the seat of her pants, the joystick in a death grip. Easy now, she told herself. No heroics. Just get it done. But hell, getting done would require heroics.

A secret part of her knew that, and gloried in it. She had been here before, after all. She had been in space when the Abduction struck, just inside the zone that the Charonian wormhole had swallowed up, flying a little cargo shuttle. A hundred meters further out from Earth and she would have been left behind in the Solar System. And she had brought her ship home, back to Earth, in a spectacular crash landing at Los Angeles Spaceport she had no right to have survived. She had lost her left hand in the crash, and had long since forgotten that her new one was a sprint-grown bud-clone. It didn’t matter. Because she had lived. She had beaten them all.

The secret soul of a certain kind of pilot lives for the thrills it does not get. It wants to fly to and past the ragged edge of disaster, to bring its craft through the greatest of perils, and yet escape. Pilots who flew winged craft back from orbit wanted to come to a smooth rolling stop right on the centerline, knowing that, by all rights, they ought to be part of the gooey dead slime in a fiery crater a kilometer short of the runway.

Pilots of that sort live to cheat death. Dianne had tasted that forbidden thrill back then, and God forgive her but she wanted it again. And she was getting it now.

Back then, she had flown through a wormhole because she had no choice. The Charonians had had it all their way. But now, today, was her chance to use their own damn wormhole to save her ship, the ship the Charonians were trying to kill.

So here she was again, up against a wormhole, the sweat standing out on her forehead, a strange, fierce anger in her heart, battling the forces that wanted to destroy her ship.

They were going to have to try a lot harder if they were going to kill a ship with Dianne Steiger at the controls. She could feel it. They were going to make it!

There. There, dead ahead, was the exit from the wormhole. Closer, closer, closer—

A shuddering thump and bump, and they were through. The wormhole snapped out of existence behind them, and they were there.

Wherever they were.

“We picked up the signal twenty minutes ago,” Sondra told the Autocrat. “Same pattern as with NaPurHab. The words TERRA NOVA TERRA NOVA TERRA NOVA coded into the wormhole activation command.”

“Interesting. Most interesting,” the Autocrat said. “It seems reassuring to know our friends on Earth were willing to send a habitat and a ship through.”

“Somewhat. Not all that much. Autocrat, once again, I must ask you to reconsider. You are a head of state. Do you really feel it is wise for you to leave your people, your nation behind? The odds are very good that we will die on the other end, or be stranded there.”

“But you are going,” the Autocrat said.

“It’s my job,” Sondra said. “I couldn’t send anyone in my place if I were unwilling to go myself.”

“My feelings exactly,” the Autocrat said. “I do not think any more need be said.”

Sondra nodded. “All right,” she said. “I know when I’m beaten. Not that it matters, of course.”

“Why not?” the Autocrat said, a little startled.

Sondra grinned, delighted to finally find a break in the man’s armor. She couldn’t resist pressing home her advantage. “You forget,” she said, “we’ve never done this before. You can’t go through a door you can’t get open. The only way this ship is going anywhere is if our team can successfully establish a stable wormhole link to the proper coordinates and tuning frequency on the first try. What do you think our odds are?”

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?