The Shattered Sphere

Eight Wheels Within Wheels

The Adversary ventured, somewhat reluctantly, fully out into fast-time space. There were certainly benefits to be had, gains to be made, here in the cold, flat Universe outside the wormhole web. But it was, nonetheless, a most unpleasant place to be.

But no matter. It would not have to stay here long. There was no need to lose precious time and energy searching for its prey.

It had a good, solid lock on the wormhole link that had betrayed itself with those bursts of sympathetic vibration. Something, somewhere, had gone through a wormhole in such a way as to set off remarkably powerful vibrations.

An easy transit back toward the dead system it had left behind, the dead system where last it had fed. The trivial challenge of forcing the wormhole open, the brushing back of whatever pathetic defenses its prey could muster—and then the Adversary would kill and feed on the energy so obligingly stored up by its prey. Stored up by the Sphere.

The Sphere hung perfect in the night, glowing brick red in the darkness, strong and solid. The fine cross-hatching etched in its surface like tidy lines of latitude and longitude added to the sense of serenity and order. All was as it should be, all was under control.

Sianna walked a bit closer, brushing past the lightfleck of a Captive Sun, walking straight through holographic projections of several planets, all but microscopic at this scale, until the Sphere was right in front of her, a meter from her face. She had to admit it was impressive. Wally did indeed do good work.

“We have the whole Multisystem mapped into the simulation now,” Wally said with obvious pride. “All the Captive Suns and the known planets, of course. But also every known Charonian installation and object, all the way down to the COREs.”

Sianna had seen other sims of the Multisystem, of course, but she had never seen a full run of a full three-dee animated sim—and this was one of the best.

“What sort of detail can you get?” she asked.

“Well, it varies, of course,” Wally replied. “Some things we know to twelve decimal places, and others we’re just guessing at. The Terra Nova has done good long-range mapping surveys of the closer planets and good spectroscopic and mass studies of pretty much all the Captive Suns. The most distant Captive Worlds and a few of the Captive Suns that are behind dust clouds we don’t know so well. And of course we don’t have completely reliable masses for a lot of the objects in the Multisystem—just apparent masses. Our only way to measure the mass of a body is by measuring the movement of bodies near it. From that we get a measure of gravity, and from there to mass. Back in the Solar System, it was a straight conversion, cut and dried. Here, we have to guess what is a straight, ordinary gravity field and what is an artificial field imposed by the Charonians.”

Sianna nodded. “But what about the Sphere and its behavior? How good is your detail on that?”

“Not so good,” Wally admitted. “We, ah, have to fudge a lot on that.”

No surprise there, either. The Sphere was a completely artificial object. How the hell could you determine which motions were the result of natural forces and which were deliberate action? You could not derive information about either mass or density from, say, the orbits of the Captive Suns, for the Suns’ orbits made no sense whatever. The Sunstar, about which the Earth revolved, orbited the Sphere at the same radial rate, and thus with the same orbital period, as Captive Sun Fifteen—even though CS-15 was a billion kilometers closer to the Sphere, and exactly 180 degrees ahead of the Sunstar.

Sianna found the Sunstar, and then CS-15, in the simulation. CS-15 was always invisible from Earth, of course, hidden behind the bulk of the Sphere. The Terra Nova had spotted it and reported back.

She found her way around other parts of the simulation. Captive Suns Seven to Eleven were at varying distances from the Sphere, but they were spaced exactly ninety degrees apart from each other, and shared an orbital plane forty-five degrees away from the Sunstar’s.

And there, CS-4, -5, and -6. The three stars shared their orbit, spaced a perfect 120 degrees apart from each other. Other sets of suns were likewise lined up like beads on a string, orbiting in impossibly perfect alignment.

Some of the arrangements of stars seemed sensible enough, in that they kept the Captive Suns out of each other’s way. Others were completely inexplicable. Maybe the stellar orbital arrangements simply appealed to the Charonian sense of aesthetics.

The worlds that orbited the Captive Suns were arranged by equally mysterious criteria, but they were not Sianna’s concern right now. She had asked Wally to show her the Sphere. And he wanted to show off his latest handiwork.

Wally knew everything—more than everything—there was to know about simulation modeling, and absolutely nothing about anything else. He almost never left the campus, and didn’t even go aboveground that much. He supposedly had an apartment topside somewhere, in Morningside Heights, but his cubicle was his real home; that and a series of cots scattered around the labs.

All he cared about, or paid any attention to, was his work, the problem he was called upon to solve, the simulation someone asked him to create. To Wally, nothing but his simulations were real.

Wally had showed off some of his previous triumphs to her now and again. She had stood where she was right now, and watched real-time, highly detailed recreations of dinosaur mating dances, seen the Moon born in the impact of a Mars-sized object on the proto-Earth, seen imaginary “fast-life” creatures in invented environments evolve at the rate of a generation a minute. Sianna could almost understand why the real world wasn’t of much interest to Wally. If his simulations were that intense, if life in this tank had the hallucinatory, fever-dream, hard-edged sense of being more real than reality, how could anyone expect him to deal with—or be much interested in—the ordinary world?

Math department legend had it that Wally did not find out that the Earth had been abducted by the Charonians until six months after the fact, and only then because he was asked to design a simulation of the Multisystem’s gravity-control system. He went from a steadfast belief that the rest of the faculty were pulling yet another elaborate practical joke on him directly to a steadfast acceptance and an utter lack of interest in the new situation. It did not affect him personally, therefore it did not exist.

Until now, of course. He had to simulate it now, and therefore reality affected him. A rather inside-out way of looking at the world.

Sianna stood there a moment longer, allowing herself a grudging admiration of the Multisystem’s might and grandeur. The glowering Sphere, the Captive Suns gleaming bright and perfect against the inky blackness of the dust clouds, wheeling about the sky in their forced, artificial orbits, shining yellow jewels imprisoned in a setting of terrible beauty and ponderous strength. The Captive Worlds, gleaming dots of blue-green life and light in the darkness, the ruination of their surfaces invisible at this scale. It was beautiful, in its own horrible way. She felt a deep pang of guilt in her gut for admitting even that much.

A sadness, a feeling of loss and tragedy, hung over the sullen domain of the Sphere. She glanced behind herself and saw the Earth hanging there, a tiny dot over her left shoulder. She felt a tear in her eye, and blinked to clear her vision.

“All right, Wally,” she said, her voice not quite steady. She looked back toward the center of the tank, where the Sphere glowed its angry red. “Show me Sakalov’s latest.” She felt relieved to see the Multisystem imagery vanish, and the simulated Sphere swell up into a ball three meters across.

Sianna watched it grow, some part of her still thinking, still hoping, that maybe Sakalov might have found the key, the answer.

If he had, it was a neat trick. There was damn all little to go on. The Sphere was perfectly round, rotated slowly about its axis, was 2.15 astronomical units, or just under three hundred million kilometers, in diameter. It was 232 astronomical units from Earth, and its color shifted from one shade of red to another, perhaps in relation to energy input or output. A pattern of lines resembling lines of longitude and latitude were visible on its surface. Its mass was impossible to estimate. It radiated little more than perfectly ordinary visible light, a bit of ultraviolet, a lot of radio frequency energy, and a fair amount of short and long infrared.

That was all that was truly known. Any ideas about the rest—what it was made of, how or why the Charonians had built it, how old it was, what it was for—were merest guesswork. For the last five years, Professor Yuri Sakalov had been working over that pathetic supply of information, struggling to divine the true nature of the Sphere, to pinpoint the location and nature of Charon Central, the control center for the entire Multisystem. Sianna had lost count of the theories Sakalov had presented.

Against all sense and logic, Sianna found herself standing there in the darkness, watching Wally’s light show, hoping against hope that Sakalov had finally found Charon Central.

For even with all her railing against it and objections to it, Sianna had to admit that the whole idea of the Charon Central was a wonderfully seductive, dazzling notion.

One thing was clear from everything transmitted back from the disaster in the Solar System: the Charonians worked to a very clear hierarchical pattern. There had to be a top to the pyramid.

Many of each lower-function type served a single, higher-function type, which in turn served a still higher function master. Study of video from the attack on Mars as transmitted back by the Saint Anthony made that clear: a gang of mindless carrier bugs worked under a somewhat more sophisticated scorpion-form, and all the hundreds of scorps were controlled by a single Lander. All the thousands of Landers were controlled by the Lunar Wheel, buried deep under the Moon’s surface.

Mind, that was a greatly simplified example, leaving out a number of intermediate forms. And there were many other subsidiary forms in other sub-hierarchies, and any number of ideas of how exactly all the hierarchies nested into one another. The whole Sphere system was a rigid hierarchal command structure—but where and what was the ultimate commander?

Maybe, just maybe, Wally was about to show her. “All right, that’s the Sphere exterior as we know it,” Wally said from behind her.

Sianna stepped closer and examined the image. “Hold it a second, Wait. Something real small is orbiting the Sphere around its equator. That some part of your theory?”

“No, that’s real, not hypothetical,” Wally answered, clearly pleased that Sianna had asked. The answer gave him a chance to show off his thoroughness. “Dr. Sakalov detected that body a few weeks ago. Very dark, very faint, real small, not more than a few thousand kilometers across. Just some piece of skyjunk, but it shows how detailed our model of the Multisystem is.”

“I guess so,” Sianna said, a bit doubtfully.

“Anyway, that’s what we know about the Sphere,” Wally said. “Now let me show you what Sakalov thinks is inside.”

Sianna watched the image of the Sphere shift and change, and found herself thinking back on all the old theories she had heard before.

The Sphere is hollow, with a standard G-type star inside. Charon Central is located on a planet orbiting that star within the Sphere. Except every calculation showed that the infrared waste heat plus the energy needed to keep the stars and planets in their courses required somewhat more energy than a G star could supply. Neither could a G star provide the instantaneous energy to transit the Earth into the system. Assuming that the Sphere had been built around a star in order to collect and store its energy, either that star was of a type more energetic than a G class—unlikely, as the Dyson Sphere seemed to want only G-cIass stars and standard habitable worlds—or else whatever was in there was no longer a star: the Sphere had rebuilt the original star into something different. A matter-antimatter system, a spatial interstitial generator, or something else, something quite beyond human understanding.

The image of the Sphere transformed itself into a cutaway, showing a featureless interior with an indeterminate bright light at its center.

The Sphere is a foamed-up solid mass of extremely low density, made up of processing nodes linked by synapse-like filaments, with an unknown power source or sources embedded within it. It is itself the control center, the brain of the Multisystem. Except the Sphere was larger around than Earth’s old orbit, and speed-of-light delays alone would make such a system hopelessly impractical. A thought would take over half an hour to travel from one side of the Sphere and back again. The human brain had a signal delay on the order of one-thirtieth of a second. If that was taken as a rough upper limit for processor delay in a practical thinking machine, and one assumed thoughts moving at the speed of light, that would dictate a “brain” not much larger than the Moon. Besides, even with a hopelessly inefficient architecture and very low capacity processing nodes and synapses, what could there possibly be to think about, what problem could be complex enough, to require a “brain” the size of the Sphere?

Now the interior of the image began to resolve itself. The brightness at the center resolved itself into a churning roil of energy. Sianna recognized a fairly standard representation of a “white hole,” the point where the mass and energy that vanished down a black hole re-emerged into the outside Universe.

The Sphere is actually a series of concentric Spheres, nested one inside the other, and the master race, the true Charonians, are ordinary beings, not so different from human beings. They live inside the Sphere and run the Multisystem for their own, unknown purposes. It was a reassuring idea, in that it made the Charonians a bit less god-like. But no evidence of such “ordinary” Charonians had ever been spotted anywhere in Multisystem. Besides, what point in creating and operating thing as huge and complex as the Multisystem if you never ventured out into it? And what need of the planets and the Captive Suns if you lived inside a Sphere that provided limitless living space, millions of times more surface area than Earth?

The image resolved itself still further. The latitude and longitude lines were visible on the inner surface of the Sphere, and Sianna saw filaments of some sort reaching down toward the power source at the center, drawing energy in, directing it along the longitudinal lines. The lines began to glow, shining brighter and brighter, the power coursing upward toward the north and south poles of the Sphere. Sianna recognized the pulse pattern as a standardized visual notation for gravity generation.

Suddenly the pattern made sense. Each line of longitude made a complete ring around the planet, going pole to pole. Sakalov was suggesting that each ring was a gravitic wave generator, like the Moonpoint Ring or the Lunar Wheel or the Ring of Charon writ large, with dozens of generators banded together, the better to focus and direct the power stream.

Now the Sphere tipped over, displaying the north polar region to Sianna. The image flickered and pulsed with power. Wally zoomed in closer and closer, until Sianna took an involuntary step backwards. Now she could see a tiny, detailed cluster of pyramidical structures at the pole, and recognized them as scaled-up versions of the so-called Amalgam Creatures, the devices—or animals—the Charonians had built on the terrestrial planets and the larger satellites of the Solar System. In the Solar System, the Amalgams had focused and directed the gravity beams used to tear up the planetary surfaces and launch them into free space.

Here, presumably, they were to transmit the gravity beams outward. That part did not ring true somehow. After the buildup Wally had given Sakalov’s new idea, it came down to some pyramids around the north pole? “Wally,” she asked, stepping back toward where Wally stood at the control panel, “have you guys gotten some new imagery that shows those structures at the poles?”

Wally cleared his throat in obvious embarrassment. “Ah, no, not exactly,” he admitted. “They are, ah, conjectural. Dr. Sakalov says the control structures are really big, but way below the limits of resolution we can get on images of the Sphere. But they make sense,” he said, with just a little too much emphasis to be convincing.

“Hold it, Wally. Never mind the pretty pictures. Give it to me in words.”

Belittling his simulations was not the best way to get on Wally’s good side. However, he did manage to hold his temper and stick to the subject. “Well, we did a lot of analysis of how much energy would be required to do the work the Sphere does, and a lot of horizon-position relationship analysis.”

“Huh?”

“Sorry. We worked through where the stars and planets and so forth were when their orbits and courses were adjusted, and what points on the Sphere they were visible from at that moment. Almost all of the course adjustments came when the star or planet was in direct line-of-sight with one of the poles.”

Sianna worked that through in her head for a moment. “Wally, that would be equally true for any two points on opposite sides of the Sphere!”

“Yes, but we detected a slight skew toward—”

“Oh, come on.”

“It’s the first theory that explains what the longitude lines are,” Wally said, beating a bit of a retreat.

“Okay, I’ll give you that,” Sianna conceded. “But what about the latitude lines, the ones parallel to the Sphere’s equator. What are they?”

“Well, I—”

“Okay, never mind that. Just walk me through the whole idea. You’ve got a white hole in the center. Why is that?”

“The Charonians use black holes all the time. Stands to reason they’d use the same technology to create power.”

“But you have no evidence? No new particle detection or anything that might support the idea?”

“Well, no,” Wally admitted. “But the simulated energy profiles match up pretty well. Anyway, the white hole dumps power into the Sphere. The power shunt beams you see there transfer that energy to the Longitudinal Generators. The LGs focus that energy at the north and south poles of the Sphere, and the gravity-control systems direct it outward to control the Multisystem. You said yourself that it makes sense for the lines of longitude to be gravity generators. If they are, the poles are natural focus points. It only makes sense that Charon Central would be there on the scene to control the gravity power transmission.”

“But you have no imagery, no evidence, to support that theory, do you?” said Sianna. It was a statement, not a question.

“We have logic,” Wally responded, now openly defensive. “We have the behavioral evidence. The Sphere puts out gravitic energy— it has to be produced somewhere, and be transmitted from somewhere. Dr. Sakalov is extrapolating from known Charonian structures. We know they tend to stay close to the same designs a lot. COREs are a lot like the Landers they saw in the Solar System. He’s taken the Amalgams and scaled them up to match what we know of the Sphere.”

“First off,” Sianna said, “the Solar System Amalgams received gravity power transmitted by the Lunar Wheel. You have super-Amalgams transmitting power. Second, the Solar System Amalgams were a few tens of kilometers high at most. You’ve got these things at least, what, a thousand klicks high? But even past that, I don’t like your logic. Amalgam Creatures exist elsewhere, therefore giant Amalgams exist here? We feel they must exist, therefore they do? Come on, Wally. Do you really think that any of this makes sense? It’s right up there with epicycles.”

“What are epicycles?”

“A good lesson in why facts can’t follow from theory. The philosophers and astronomers before Copernicus had this whole crazy system worked out with the planets and the Sun and the stars orbiting Earth in perfectly circular orbits, because the circle is the perfect form.”

“But the planets don’t—”

“Of course they don’t. They move in ellipses. But when the theory first got trotted out, no one really knew that. As the instruments got better, people started to notice the orbits weren’t perfect circles. So they decided that the planets orbited in small circles that were centered on the big circle of their main orbit, like the Moon going around and around the Earth without the Earth being there.”

Sianna stopped herself for a moment. Something about the Moon going around an Earth that wasn’t there, something she could not quite put her finger on. It resonated with something. She blinked, came back to the moment, and went on with what she had been saying.

“Even that didn’t match the observed movement perfectly,” she continued, “so they decided the planets moved around the circle that was moving around their orbital path in another set of perfect circles, like a satellite going around the Moon while the Moon goes around the Earth—except with Earth and Moon not being there. I think they got up to four or five sets of epicycles.”

“So what’s your point?” Wally asked.

“My point is Sakalov’s doing the same thing. The facts and his theories don’t fit, so he changes the facts to fit the theories, adjusting reality to match his preconceived notions of how reality should be. Then when that doesn’t fit, he changes the facts a little bit more, and a bit more. Everything here is one conjecture built on other.”

Wally pointed at the image of the Sphere as it hung in mid-air. “Nothing in there contradicts anything we know,” he said.

“That’s not good enough,” Sianna snapped back. “You can’t present a theory on the basis of there being no evidence against it. Where’s the evidence for it?”

“My dear, you are quite right,” a new voice said. The voice was gentle and low, with just a hint of a cultured Russian accent. “We have not one bit of evidence.”

Sianna gasped and spun around. Wally, standing by the control panel, brought the house lights up a bit to reveal that two visitors had arrived. Two men. One of them Sianna did not recognize, but the other was none other than Dr. Yuri Sakalov. Oh. great, Sianna thought. There goes my career. How long has he been standing there?

Dr. Sakalov and his companion stepped further into the room. “I must confess that I had thought of the parallels with epicycle theory myself,” Sakalov said. “However, I am not lost and confused on account of theology, or a need to be proven right. We desperately need an answer—any answer we can find. It almost doesn’t matter what question it answers. Anything would be a starting place. One right idea might be the key in the lock that sets us all free.”

Sakalov looked thoughtfully at Sianna for a moment, and then turned his gaze toward the model of the Sphere. He was an elderly man, dressed in a rumpled worksuit, his hair silver-grey and pulled back in a rather old-fashioned-looking pony tail. His face was deeply lined, with sad, quiet eyes, a slightly bulbous nose, and an expressive mouth. He wore a small, neatly trimmed beard. There was a rather distracted air about him.

“I chose to focus on Charon Central,” he went on, “because I believe that when we know where and what it is, and how it works, we will have that key in the lock. We will understand our enemies, and have some hope of defeating them. I believe that my new model has some real merit. It sounds as if you hold my previous ideas in low regard. Tell me, with the new idea—do you think I am grasping at straws?”

Sianna looked at the old man, her heart pounding with fear. Sakalov. Why did it have to be Sakalov? And who was that with him in the dark? His silent companion was standing in shadow, and it was hard to see much of him in the dim light. He was a younger man, blond-headed, his expression guarded. There was something rather severe about his whole demeanor. Suddenly she placed him, and she broke out into a cold sweat. Unless she was very much mistaken, he was Wolf Bernhardt himself, head of the DSI, the man who wrote most of the checks that kept the Multisystem Research Institute going. One wrong word in front of him and—

“Miss Colette?” Dr. Sakalov asked.

“Um, ah… ah. I don’t know what to say, doctor,” she said, stalling for time.

“Surely you have some opinion. You were speaking most forcefully a moment ago.”

Sianna swallowed hard and looked the old man in the eye. She battled back her fear, made herself look at the man and not the caricature of the doddering old eccentric she carried in her head. Maybe his ideas were wrong, even mad, maybe he was building castles in the air, but at least he was trying to make sense of it all. How many people his age—mercy, he must be at least a hundred—even tried that much, instead of sticking their heads in the sand and pretending everything was all right?

Sianna was used to the world as it was. For all the short years of her adolescence and young adulthood, humanity had been a hunted, threatened species, knowing itself to be hopelessly outmatched by an invincible opponent. But Dr. Sakalov had lived his whole life, up until his twilight years, in a Universe where humankind was unchallenged and alone. What must it have been like to see all that destroyed and brought low at the end of his days? What would it be like for an astronomer to have the night sky stolen from him?

Dr. Sakalov was asking for the truth, for her honest opinion. She had to give it to him. “Well, all right, yes sir,” she said, struggling to keep her voice steady. “With all due respect, as best I can see, your only concrete reason for thinking Charon Central is at one of the poles seems to be that the longitudinal features meet up there.” She hesitated a moment more, marshaling her thoughts, trying to find the proper words. “You, ah, ah, offer the theory that longitudinal lines are actually huge gravity generators. That’s a reasonable assumption, and makes a lot of sense—but you have no proof. Building on that assumption, you make a series of completely unwarranted further assumptions about what it would mean if the longitudinal lines were gravitic generators, and based on those, you conclude Charon Central is at one of the poles. Your conclusion is based on pure conjecture, not proof.”

Sakalov looked at Sianna, his expression dour and unreadable. “Go on,” he said quietly.

Sianna wanted to shut up, but some part of her insisted on going on—and unfortunately, that part seemed to be controlling her mouth at the moment. “Well, ah, sir, you are working from extremely thin and highly circumstantial evidence,” she said, “and I’m afraid you are stretching it well past its limits. I don’t even see how this theory aids you in your goal. Even if Charon Central were where you say it was, how could we ever reach it? What could we do about it? How does this help us?”

Sakalov brought himself up to his full height and cleared his throat, a bit self-importantly. “The truth is not always convenient, young lady. I cannot decide where it would be convenient to place Charon Central, and then work backwards to the proof of the theory.”

“But—” Sianna began, and then bit her tongue. Enough was enough.

“But what?” Bernhardt asked from the shadows, speaking for the first time.

Great. All she needed was to draw him into the argument. “Nothing,” Sianna said, looking down at the floor.

“I am thinking you are having something more than nothing on your mind, dear miss, and I am thinking you had best tell me what it is,” Bernhardt said, in a tone of voice that made it clear he expected an answer, not an evasion.

MRI folklore had it that Dr. Bernhardt’s English took on a slightly German syntax when he was agitated, but Sianna would have been just as happy if she had never had the chance to confirm the story.

Sianna tried to say something. Anything. “Ah… ah, well,” she began, not quite sure where she was going.

“What more do you have to say, please?” Bernhardt asked, the courtesy of his words completely missing from his tone of voice.

Sianna realized her arms were wrapped around her chest, as if ready to shield her body from a blow. She put her arms at her sides, and then behind her back. She clamped her hands together so she wouldn’t knot herself up in a pretzel again. She shut her eyes for a second, took a deep breath, and spoke, being careful to direct her words not at Bernhardt, but at the slightly less intimidating Dr. Sakalov. “Well, sir, before this, all your theories have been based on the idea that Charon Central was the absolute apex of the Charonian command hierarchy.

“You have worked from the assumption that you could derive a unique physical location that was ideally and uniquely suited to be Charon Central. Your theory was that the Charonians were utterly rational, and therefore the location of Charon Central could be established by entirely rational means. Each site would offer advantages and disadvantages, and the Charonians would balance all the pluses and minuses until they derived the optimal site.”

Sakalov cocked his head to one side and nodded. “I am impressed that you have studied my work so well, but what of it? How does that invalidate my new approach?”

“Because—because—by the criterion of unique qualification, your new location for Charon Central cannot be right. A polar control center does not offer a single ideal location, but two equally valid ones. Where would it be? North pole, south pole, or both? And if one and not the other, what is your criterion for choosing?”

That brought a low chuckle, but not from Sakalov. Dr. Bernhardt stepped forward and patted the older man on the shoulder. “I think she has you there, Yuri,” his voice far gentler than it had been. Bernhardt turned toward Sianna, and smiled, but the expression did not look as if it really belonged on his face. “I made exactly the same objection in my office not half an hour ago.”

“And I make exactly the same answer to you both,” Sakalov said. “There is a deciding variable that renders one more optimal. Charon Central is located on the south pole of the Sphere. More of the planets and Captive Suns are visible from that point than from any other on the Sphere.”

“And that just happens to be the pole we won’t see until the Earth and Sunstar complete another half-orbit around the Sphere, a small matter of a hundred years or so from now,” Bernhardt said, still with that most artificial smile in place. It wasn’t insincerity, Sianna decided. Bernhardt was just unused to smiling. Not that it mattered, but maybe if she focused on what sort of smile the man had, then she wouldn’t be thinking about how this nice chat was destroying her career.

“That is inconsequential!” Sakalov protested. “All that is needed to prove my theory is to send the Terra Nova on a course that will bring the south pole into view and—”

“Yuri, Yuri. Do you know how many requests I get a week asking—or demanding—that I send the Terra Nova to this location or that?”

“But this is—”

“Most urgent and important,” Bernhardt said, finishing Sakalov’s sentence. “They all say that. Sometimes I think that if someone sent in a request and described it as minor and trivial, that would have a better chance of getting my attention.”

“But you must listen—”

“Yes, yes, I know I must,” Bernhardt said. “That is, after all, why I am here. For you to convince me. Convince me, and I will try and convince Captain Steiger to set such a course, though after today’s news I warn you she will not be in much of a mood to listen.”

“Today’s news?” Sianna blurted out, instantly wishing she had kept her mouth shut. Shut up, shut up, shut UP! she told herself.

Bernhardt looked surprised, as if he had forgotten she and Wally were there—and perhaps he had. He looked from Sianna to Wally and back again, and shrugged. “Well, you both have the standard clearances, no doubt, and the news will be all over MRI soon enough. The Terra Nova sent a small stealthy ship out in an attempt to board a CORE. All hands aboard the stealthship were lost and the ship destroyed. Captain Steiger broke radio silence to ask if we had any ideas that might aid their next attempt.”

Sianna’s blood ran cold. Never mind for the moment that she had no clearances at all—technically, she was not even supposed to be in the sim center. That was of no consequence. Those words “next attempt.” Here they were, safely deep in the bowels of the Earth, fiddling around with meaningless questions of the whichness of what, asking each other where the enemy’s imaginary fortresses might be—and people, real people, were dying out there, in battle against the real enemy.

MRI was nothing but a bunch of dreamy time-markers far below Manhattan, but the crew of the Terra Nova was asking their advice before sacrificing themselves anew.

If that didn’t chastise a person, bring on a feeling of humility and unworthiness, then nothing would. “Do—do we have any advice to give them?” she asked.

“No,” Bernhardt said, his voice quiet and sad. He let his answer hang there for a moment, and the brief silence spoke volumes to Sianna. People are dying out there and we’re letting them down. She herself had gone in early, not to grub away at her proper work on CORE research, but to go glory-chasing after some completely meaningless thirty-seven-minute hiccup in a long-destroyed space probe’s chronometer. And to compound the crime, she had been distracted from that nonsense by the even more foolish nonsense of Sakalov’s pursuit of Charon Central.

At last Bernhardt spoke again. “But perhaps there is no need to say more about the Terra Nova. In any event, it’s quite possible that they are safer in that ship than we are here. I think, Yuri, that perhaps it’s time I showed you what I brought you here to see. I think you will see that the arrival of the SCOREs makes any discussion of what goes on at the Sphere a bit academic. We are going to have other worries.”

“SCOREs?” Sianna asked. She had heard the term go past once or twice, in the lab, but no one seemed ready or willing to explain what the acronym meant.

“Small Close-Orbiting Radar Emitters,” Bernhardt said, a bit absently. “Hmmph. Wally, I was going to operate the equipment myself, but as long as you’re here, if you could run that simulation of the SCOREs you did last week—”

“Yes, sir,” Wally said. He bent over his control panel for a moment. Good God, Wally had been working with Dr. Bernhardt himself? Why hadn’t he ever said anything about it? But Sianna knew the answer even before she was done asking herself the question. What Bernhardt said next confirmed it, even if it didn’t make her feel any better.

“Needless to say, this is all top secret data,” Bernhardt said. “If it gets out prematurely—”

“Ah, sir, excuse me,” Sianna said. Better fess up now before she got in even deeper. “Sir, I don’t have top secret clearance. I don’t have any clearances.”

Dr. Wolf Bernhardt swiveled his head about and regarded her for a full five seconds. “You don’t,” he said at last. “Most unfortunate, considering what you have heard already. What is your name, young lady?”

“Ah… Sianna Colette,” she said, her heart pounding with fear. Oh God, what was he going to do with her?

“Wally—Mr. Sturgis. Can you vouch for this person?”

“Ah, yessir. I know her. She’s okay,” Wally said as he made his adjustments. From his tone of voice, Sianna knew that he wasn’t paying all that much attention. He could have been talking about the weather—and Wally hadn’t been outside for weeks.

“Very well, Miss Colette. You have top secret clearance now. I would suggest you read and obey the regulations, or else you might find yourself in some difficulty.” That done, he cocked his head back towards Wally and the control panel. “Are you ready?”

“Yes, Dr. Bernhardt.”

“Then you may begin.”

—And the Universe of the Multisphere shifted, changed.

The Sphere itself vanished, and suddenly it was the Earth hanging in the blackness. The background stars and planets shifted their positions, and the perspective veered about until they were looking at Earth in half-phase, with the Sunstar out of view to the left. They were looking at the planet from a point a few thousand kilometers back along the planet’s orbital path. Sianna could see tiny dots hanging in space all around the Earth, the COREs, guarding the planet against the deluge of skyjunk that filled the Multisphere.

The view pulled back, getting further and further from the planet. The Moonpoint Ring came into view to the right.

There was something odd about the background of the scene. Then Sianna realized what it was—there were stars visible. Not the Captive Suns and planets, though they were there too, but points of light hanging in the firmament. “What are—”

“Those are the SCORES. Wally’s enhanced them to make them visible, of course,” Bernhardt said, his attention on the sim and not on Sianna. “In reality, they are about as dark as lumps of coal, under one hundred meters across. Fairly bright in radar frequencies, once you know where to look. We had a hell of a time detecting them with our ground-based gear. Terra Nova hasn’t been doing sky survey work, and she’s missed them so far. NaPurHab just started watching for them. But once they get this data, you can bet they’ll be looking for them. Wally, can you lose the Captives and the other objects we’re not interested in?”

Suddenly the suns and planets vanished, and only the dots of light were left. Sianna noticed they seemed to be concentrated in one quadrant of the sky.

“How long ago is this image?” Bernhardt asked.

“Ah, this is a real-time image,” Wally said. “Or close enough, really. Latest data from the automatic tracking systems. Enhanced and enlarged, of course, or we wouldn’t be able to see anything at this scale.”

“Hmmph. Backtrack thirty days, speed up the time display by factor ten thousand, and move forward to the present time,” Bernhardt said.

After a moment’s pause, the image jumped and skewed as Wally set in the new commands. Then the three-dimensional ghosts of reality settled down. The Earth’s rotation was obvious now, one day taking just over eight and half seconds. Sianna looked past the planet to the sky beyond.

Now the dots of light were smaller, dimmer, and spread out in a rough toroid of space that spanned half the sky.

But the images were moving, coming closer, converging, moving toward one point in the sky in front of Earth. The inner edges of the toroidal area converged on each other until the dots of light were moving in a loose, flattened spherical volume of space, following behind the ring. The tiny dots grew closer, brighter, and the ring moved in, still somewhat ahead of the smaller points of light.

Sianna stepped around to the Sunstar side of the simulation and watched it from there. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of the things were moving in toward Earth. It took just under five minutes for the imagery to run up to the present moment and then stop dead at the real-time position. One thing was clear from watching the displays: the objects were moving, not toward Earth, but toward the Moon-point Ring. What the devil did they want with the Ring?

“What are they?” Sianna asked. “Where do they come from?”

“As to the first, we don’t know, though we have some unpleasant guesses,” Bernhardt said. “The detection teams that spotted them called them Small COREs, because that’s what they look like and act like. That got shortened to SCOREs very quickly. As for why they come from where they do, I have an idea, but no proof. The SCOREs are too small to track easily much past the distance we have displayed here, but if you backtrack their course, they seem to come from a rough halo of space around the Sphere. Roughly speaking, Earth is looking down at the north pole of the Sphere, and the rough halo suggests—”

“These were launched from facilities around the Sphere’s equator,” Sakalov said.

“Precisely. What that means, I don’t know. Maybe they were launched from some sort of portals around the equator of the Sphere. Maybe they were launched from your south pole Charon Central site and moved Sphere-north from every point along the Sphere’s circumference. We don’t know. I might add that we have several indications that there are similar streams of SCOREs moving toward most of the Captive Worlds. We can’t tell for sure, precisely because these objects are so hard to track and detect. But we have spotted some small objects that resemble these SCOREs moving toward some of the other Captives. In any event, there is tremendous new activity in the Multisystem. We have no idea why it should happen at this moment, but I doubt it is good news for Earth.”

Sianna noticed something. There was a different class of objects coming in ahead of the others. Wally had them color-coded red. She counted sixteen of them. “What are those?” she asked, pointing at them.

“They are different,” Bernhardt said. “Faster, larger, moving in a more direct path than the other ones. And they are rather complex in shape. We can’t tell much more than that yet, but they are certainly not the simple oblong typical of most spacegoing Charonians.”

The director stepped around to the other side of the sim from Sianna and pointed at the larger objects. “Note that these larger units seem to be leading the SCOREs in, moving a trifle faster,” Bernhardt said. “It would seem they must be in place first before, ah, other events.”

“Maybe they are a repair kit for the Moonpoint Ring,” Sianna suggested.

The director frowned. “An interesting thought. Better than anything else we’ve come up with. In any event, the SCOREs are likewise making for the Moonpoint Ring. We assume they are heading there for some sort of preparation or processing before they… well, before other events. Wally, run the images forward in time at the same rate, showing our best-guess projection.”

The ring and the SCOREs moved closer and closer to Earth. The larger objects arrived and merged, rather vaguely, with the image of the Moonpoint Ring. From that, Sianna gathered that the research teams were sure the big objects were headed for the Ring, but had no idea what they were going to do upon arrival.

“Ah, sir, NaPurHab orbits the black hole at the center of the Moonpoint Ring,” Sianna said. “What happens to it in all this?”

“We think its orbit should remain stable. But we don’t know. We have of course notified the Purple leadership, and they will be watching, I assure you. There is still some time left before there is any possibility of danger.” Bernhardt didn’t seem much interested in the problem, as if he were more interested in something else than the thousands of people aboard the habitat. “It’s just about here that the first of the SCOREs will be visible to the amateur telescopes,” he said. “No hope of keeping the lid on it past then. We have between now and then to prepare for their—ah—arrival.”

Suddenly it dawned on Sianna. Calling them SCOREs had misled her—as perhaps it was meant to mislead the public. She had envisioned them merely as little brothers to the big COREs, taking up positions around the Earth.

But no, these were not COREs. Bernhardt thought they were invaders, attackers. This was the beginning of a Breeding Binge.

Breeding Binges had just been theory up to now, though there was a lot of evidence supporting the theory, much of it plainly visible on some of the closer Captive Worlds. Binges were the whole reason for the Multisystem. The Charonians needed planetary surfaces for breeding during one part of their life cycle.

The night before, she had stared at the ceiling, wondering when the Breeders would come and make use of the Earth. Now she knew.

Her mind was racing, her body bathed in fear sweat. Time started up again in the simulation, and the SCOREs and the large objects moved in toward Earth and the Moonpoint Ring. The SCOREs—the invaders, the Binge Breeders—came in, did a close pass around the Moonpoint Ring, and then turned toward Earth. They came closer and closer, reached the planet—and disappeared. For one crazy moment, Sianna felt a wave of relief. She gasped, and realized she had been holding her breath. They would vanish. Everything would be all right. She had imagined the Binge Breeders landing, crashing, tearing into the landscape, but no, it was going to be all right.

“We can’t show the damage or the ground action in a space-based simulation, of course,” Bernhardt said. “But it will be severe. Wally, you’re still working on the ground sims?”

“Yes, sir,” Wally said. “Course, the infosets are pretty vague. I won’t be able to give you much detail, and some of it’s going to be speculative.”

“I am sure it will be up to your usual high standards,” the director said.

Sianna shut her eyes and cursed herself for an idiot. Of course. At this scale, with Earth the size of a basketball, what would there be to see? But of course the disaster would still come.

“So it’s finally going to happen,” Sakalov said. “I had been hoping I wouldn’t live to see it.”

“We’ll all live to see the start of it,” said Bernhardt. “You’ve seen the images from the Solar System, what just a handful of Charonians were able to do to Mars. These SCOREs are a different type of Charonian, of course, and they will probably behave quite differently.

“But I have no doubt they will do quite a bit of damage. The Charonians hunted our world down, and brought it back here, to the Multisphere, to their larder. Now they are ready to dine. They will land on Earth, and breed, and breed and breed and breed. They could wreck the planetary ecosphere completely. We can see other Captive Worlds where that has happened. Even if things don’t go that badly, they could still do some very serious damage.”

“So what do we do?” Sianna asked.

Wolf Bernhardt looked at her, then at Wally and at Dr. Sakalov. “First, we do all we can to resupply NaPurHab and the Terra Nova. We launch as many loads of spares and equipment at them as we can. If Earth is severely enough damaged, it is possible that they will be all there is left of us. We must do all we can to make sure they are in as good condition as possible. Then we use the interceptor missiles and the ground attack forces and all the other weapons we have built against this day,” he said. “We shoot down as many of them as we can, and kill as many of them as we can on the ground. Maybe we can drive back the first wave, and maybe the Charonians will conclude Earth is not a good place for a Breeding Binge. But I have no doubt that, if it chooses to do so, Charon Central can keep sending SCOREs—Breeders—long after our defenses are overwhelmed. And then the Breeders will land, and go about their business.

“And as to what we do then—I haven’t the faintest idea, except for one thing.” Wolf Bernhardt put his hands in his pockets, looked toward the simulation, and let out a deep sigh. “I expect,” he said, “that a lot of us will die.”