The Shattered Sphere

Twenty-one Acceptable Losses

The Autocrat moved his pawn forward to the third rank and leaned back in his chair. Sondra Berghoff did not react, did not lean forward, or rub her hand on her chin. Instead she stared, motionless, at the board. She had always regarded herself as a pretty fair player, but the Autocrat was head and shoulders above her. And yet there were flaws, weaknesses in his game. She had never met his equal for being able to think three—or five, or eight—moves ahead, and he was remarkably skilled in seeing the board as a whole.

But for all of that—perhaps because of all that—the Autocrat often failed to see the small details, the little things, sometimes even the obvious things. If it did not lead to infinite opportunities in five moves, he paid it little mind. The only times she had managed to beat him had been the times she had found the little moves that did not seem to lead to many possibilities—for sometimes one possibility was all that mattered.

She moved her sole surviving rook down the length of the board and set it down in the eighth rank. “Checkmate,” she announced. The Autocrat looked up in surprise. “So it is,” he said. “So it is indeed. I must say it is a pleasure to get a real game out of someone. Almost worth the trip to Plutopoint all by itself.”

“Why can’t you get a good game of chess back on Ceres?” Sondra asked.

“People are afraid I’ll execute them if I lose,” the Autocrat said, in a calm, matter-of-fact way as he set the board up for a new game.

Sondra was not sure whether to laugh or to be shocked. Was he joking, or had he or some predecessor established a reputation as a terrible loser? She never quite knew what to make of the Autocrat. Well, she had to say something in reply, and somehow, professing shock did not quite seem polite. “Well, then,” she said, in as light a tone of voice as she could manage, “I suppose it’s lucky for me I’m outside your jurisdiction.”

“Ah, but you are well inside it,” he replied. “The Autocrat’s jurisdiction has no set bounds or borders. I am required to see after the good of the Asteroid Belt and its people in all times and all places. I assure you that, if I ordered you executed, being outside the Asteroid Belt would be no defense for you at all.”

“For the crime of beating you at chess?”

“For any reason, if I judged you to be a danger to justice or peace. On at least one occasion one of my predecessors executed a man for precisely the crime of winning at chess, under rather peculiar circumstances involving a dishonorable wager with a third party. Not a pleasant story, and not one with which to mar the present evening.” It was not the first time that the Autocrat had tossed a story of mysterious death and execution into the conversation, and Sondra could not help but notice that the Autocrat had never offered any assurance that he would not order someone executed.

Quite the contrary, she had been left with the clear impression that the crew of the Autarch was trained and ready to shoot holes in anyone at a moment’s notice, should the Autocrat give the order. No doubt it was all meant to be very unsettling, and it certainly was.

But for all of that, she liked the Autocrat. There was something a bit sinister about him, but so too was there something warm and approachable. He reminded her of a strict but fair father, relentlessly firm with his children, quite ready to give them a dispassionate spanking if they needed it. “Another game, Autocrat?” she asked.

“No, I think not,” he said, standing up. “You are improving a trifle too quickly for me,” he said. “You are learning how to beat me, and I think perhaps I should give you a day or so to forget what you have learned.” He crossed the wardroom and looked out the porthole to the huge and gleaming oval of the Ring of Charon, now almost edge-on as seen from the Command Station.

“Do you think I plan to take over this station?” he asked in a rather casual tone of voice.

“Sir?”

He turned and looked back at her. “You heard the question. Surely the possibility crossed your mind when a heavily armed and uninvited guest overstayed his welcome. I was supposed to leave here quite some time ago. Do you think I plan a takeover?”

“The possibility has occurred to me, yes,” Sondra said, choosing her words very carefully. “Some of the staff are more than a little concerned. But I think you wish us to fear you, wish our backers on the Moon and Mars to fear what you might do. You want to show that you could take this station, control the Ring of Charon. But you do not—and did not—intend to carry out the threat.”

“I see,” the Autocrat said. “And why would I pursue this course of action?”

“To strengthen your hand at the bargaining table. To make everyone else a bit more eager to please you. To force everyone to come up with a solution to the problem of a monopoly source of gravity beams.”

“Will your friends in the Inner System now come to the table before there is a crisis?”

“I think so. You certainly have their attention.”

“And have I come up with a solution? Have I found a way to parcel out this resource?”

Sondra was scared, very scared indeed. Some games she did not wish to play with the Autocrat. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think so.”

“You are quite correct,” the Autocrat said. “I as yet have no solution. But it will come. It will come.”

“So you don’t intend to seize this station?” Sondra asked.

The Autocrat looked her straight in the eye and gave her one of his finest non-answers. “That is not my current plan,” he said. “But that is of no consequence. I believe I have the answer to a more interesting problem. I think now I know why I came here,” he announced, staring out the port.

“What? I’m sorry? What do you mean, Autocrat?” Sondra asked. She got up and went closer to him—but not too close. “I thought you were here because of the gravity-beam issue. I thought you came out here with some very specific political ideas in mind.”

“Oh, yes, indeed. Quite so. And I have thought of some very promising avenues, even if I have not come up with an ultimate solution. But that is as may be. There are reasons and reasons for doing a thing, you know. Making sure that the Ring does not fall under unilateral control is important, that gravity-beam technology does not set off an interplanetary war is likewise vital. I think that my coming here has alarmed our friends on the Moon and Mars enough that we can now resolve those issues and keep you independent. Useful stuff—but it is not why I came. Not really.”

“Then why are you here?” Sondra asked. But she barely heard her own words, her heart was beating so fast.

“To see this,” he said, gesturing toward the Ring. “To be reminded what real power is, and how small I really am. I have the power of life and death over any number of people, but out there is the most powerful machine ever built by humanity—and it is as nothing compared to the might of the Charonians. They have the power of life and death over whole worlds—and yet they lay hidden here in the Solar System. They feared some other, greater power, and did all they could to hide from it. I knew all that, I suppose, and I’ve seen my share of Charonian power, but this—” he gestured toward the Ring “—this is ours. And it was powerful enough to destroy two worlds.”

“But you knew all that before you came here,” Sondra said. What was all this? He came out here, not to do a little saber-rattling, but as a tourist?

“I knew Earth was a place with fresh breezes and open skies and wild animals,” the Autocrat said. “But I did not understand it, deep in my heart, deep in my soul, down at the level of instinct, until I had been there. Now I am as far as I can get from where Earth was and still be in the Solar System. I had to come here, too, before I could really understand.”

“You’re doing better than I am, Autocrat,” Sondra said. “At least I know I’m never going to understand you.”

The Autocrat smiled at Sondra, a warm and open expression that nonetheless scared the hell out of her. “Good,” he said.

Larry Chao opened his eyes to a room full of faces. Tyrone Vespasian, Selby Bogsworth-something, Marcia MacDougal, a nurse, Lucian Dreyfuss, all of them staring at him.

Wait a second—Lucian? That was impossible. Larry shut his eyes, shook his head, and opened them again. He was relieved to see the imaginary Lucian was gone—but also more than a little disappointed. Lucian. Lucian was going to be with him for a long, long time.

“Hey,” Vespasian said. “He’s awake. Hey, Larry. You okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, I guess.” Larry shifted position just a bit to sit up in bed, and instantly regretted it. His body was a solid mass of sore muscles. “Well, I will be all right, anyway. Pretty stiff just now.”

“I’ll bet you are,” Vespasian said, his enthusiasm and sympathy sounding more than a bit forced. Clearly he was not here because he cared about Larry Chao’s health.

Larry decided he was not much in the mood for small talk himself. “So,” he asked, swinging his feet around and putting them on the floor. A real, solid, floor, and not a computerized pressure simulator. “Did you get it all?”

“We got it,” Vespasian said. “But we’re not sure what it was. We were hoping you could tell us more about it.”

“I have the feeling you saw less than I did,” Larry said. “Things got rather… strange… after Lucian and I started flying around. I don’t think you could have gotten the feel of it off a simple video link. So what did you see?”

“A video sequence,” Marcia said. “It showed something attacking a Sphere, and then what happens when the Sphere is shattered. It had the Shattered Sphere images we got five years ago in the middle of it. The Sphere dies, its gravity systems fail, all the Captive Suns go flying off into space. The old Shattered Sphere images must have been some sort of shorthand version of the sequence we saw today.”

Larry nodded and stood up. A robe was hanging by the bed, and he pulled it on, wincing a bit. Lots of stiff muscles. Damn it, why couldn’t they give him a few minutes by himself? A chance to go to the toilet, wash, get dressed? Well, it was important. He knew that better than they did. But he still needed a little bit of time alone. “Shorthand is about right,” he said, trying to keep his temper. “If you showed the shorter sequence of a Sphere getting smashed to any high-level Charonian, it would know what it means.”

“But what the hell does it mean?” Vespasian asked. “Why did Lucian show it to you? Was it history, or legend, or a warning?”

“All three,” Larry said, a bit sharply. “But wait a second. That’s all you saw? You didn’t see the rest of it—what I saw?”

“No one’s ever sure they saw what someone else saw,” Selby said dryly. “I know I never am. But what was it you saw? Something different from the Sphere getting smashed?

“Not something different,” Larry replied. “Something more. Something like the answer to all of it.”

“There were bursts of imagery and data,” Marcia said, “running too fast for us to make sense of them. We’ve been doing playbacks, over and over again, but we still haven’t been able to understand them.”

“Yeah, those bursts of data,” Larry said. “Though they sure weren’t bursts to me. They were long and detailed—with Lucian, or whatever Lucian is now—whispering in my ear the whole time, telling me things. For me it seemed as if it took hours for the whole sequence to run. It sounds as if it all took just a few minutes for you.”

“About five or ten,” Marcia said.

“Then you didn’t see what I saw,” Larry said. “It all changed when Lucian led me up into the sky. I think the whole time I was with him he was looking for a way to do whatever it was he did then. But everything changed then. Before, it was a plain old TeleOperator setup. Very realistic and convincing, but I could tell I was in a simulation. And then… then Lucian took me into the sky and it was all different.”

“Different how?” Marcia asked.

“It was like… like the difference between a live performance and a recording. When you’re there, really there, there’s layers, subtleties of… presence, of being there, of touching, of being inside looking around rather than outside looking in. I don’t know. It felt like all my senses were brought together. Sight and hearing and touch and taste and smell all one. Maybe there was some sort of feedback through all the connections and electrodes that put me in synch with it. What you got as data bursts, I got as someone opening up my head and pouring information in.”

“So what was the information?” Selby asked. “What the hell did you see?”

“The Adversary,” Larry said. “The Enemy. The Charonians’ enemy. The thing that killed the Shattered Sphere, and wants to try and kill the Sphere that’s holding Earth.”

Selby, Marcia and Vespasian exchanged glances with each other. “Look,” Vespasian said, his voice more than a little patronizing, “maybe you’d better start at the beginning.”

“Maybe I’d better,” Larry said, a bit irritably. “In ten minutes. After I’ve had a chance to wash my face and get into some clothes. And someplace besides here, with you three clustered around my bed.”

Marcia looked at her companions, a bit uncertainly. “All right,” she said. “There’s a conference room just down the hall. We’ll meet you there whenever you’re ready.”

Selby seemed about to protest, but Marcia gestured for her to be quiet. “We’ll be outside,” Marcia said.

Larry watched them go, more than a little surprised at himself. What had gotten into him? That was not the way he acted. But then it dawned on him. He remembered back to five years ago, to the way he and Lucian had bickered and argued. What had gotten into him, indeed.

That was the way Lucian acted.

Larry felt a little more settled—and quite literally more himself— when he came out and found the others in the conference room. It was rather satisfying to have the others being careful not to upset him again, treating him with a bit of fearful courtesy. It had clearly dawned on them that he had what they needed, and that bullying him might not be the best idea. They all got through an awkward series of pleasantries. Then Larry sat down at the head of the table, and started talking.

“I got a lot more from Lucian. Maybe even more than I think. It was like he was whispering to me as he showed me what we all saw. That’s not quite accurate, because he still had a great deal of trouble talking—but I know he gave me much more than you got.”

He hesitated for a moment, trying to decide how to start. “You have to go back a long time,” he said at last. “I don’t know how far back. I got a pretty good feel for shorter time spans, but time spans of any length get pretty tricky because—well, maybe you’ll see. It was millions of years ago, at any rate. Maybe five million, maybe a hundred and fifty million. The Charonians were already well established by then. They had spread across a large part of the galaxy, building their Spheres and collecting their worlds into Multisystems. Back then there was no fear and caution about them. They didn’t have anything to hide from.

“All the Sphere systems were connected to each other by wormhole links, and the Spheres stayed in close contact with each other, trading worlds and life-forms and new information back and forth across the links. Maybe at the peak of it all, there was a network of a few thousand Spheres.”

“So what happened then?” Marcia asked.

“What happened was they discovered they weren’t the only ones using gravity and wormholes.”

“These Adversaries you mentioned,” Selby suggested. “There’s only one of them,” Larry said. “It can subdivide itself and then remerge the divisions as it sees fit. Group and individual don’t mean much to it. But it can and does split up into as many bits as it likes.”

“What do these bits look like?” Vespasian asked.

“They’re spherical. They have to be. Usually a dirty grey in color, but that’s just debris that accumulates on the surface. They can be any size—but the ones that take on a Sphere might be the size of a CORE or an average asteroid.”

“Why do they have to be spherical?” Marcia asked.

“They’re pulled into that shape by the force of gravity,” Larry said. “They’re small, but they are extremely massive. I can’t say for sure, because it wasn’t in the memory store Lucian showed me, but I think they’re made out of strange matter, with densities comparable to neutron stars. A blob of Adversary the size of a large dog would outweigh a good-sized asteroid.”

“Strange matter? What the bloody hell is strange matter?” Selby asked.

“An alternative form of matter—or at least, an alternative form of heavy particles like protons and neutrons.”

“Like antimatter?” Selby asked.

“No, no, not at all like antimatter,” Marcia said. “Antimatter blows up if it touches matter, so it doesn’t last very long. Strange matter could exist perfectly well in our Universe—if it existed. And it sounds like it does.”

“So why so dense?” Vespasian asked.

“There are upper limits on the size of the atomic nucleus in normal matter,” Marcia said. “Anything much above uranium is unstable— it decays. In theory, there are no limits on the size of an atomic nucleus made up of strange quarks. You could have a strange atom with an atomic weight billions or trillions of times higher than in normal matter.”

“But no one has ever seen strange matter, right?” Vespasian said.

Marcia looked to Larry. “Not until now.”

Larry sighed in frustration. “Look, I know it all sounds mad, but there it is. It’s true.”

“This is what Lucian told you, or showed you,” Marcia said. “That doesn’t mean it’s true. He could be wrong, or insane, or you could have misunderstood.”

“Or he could be exactly right,” Larry said, feeling a bit annoyed. “I know it seems impossible for something that small to attack the Charonians, but hear me out, all right?”

Vespasian shrugged. “Five years ago, who would have believed that a monster inside the Moon was going to steal the Earth? You go on, Larry. Tell us.”

“All right. Thank you. I don’t pretend to understand everything about it, but the Adversary is the key to it. It is capable of action, organized action, but I’m not even sure we’d consider it to be alive.”

“What sort of action are you talking about?” Vespasian asked.

Larry gave him a funny look. “Killing Spheres, of course.”

“Wait a second,” Marcia protested. “How could a thing that small kill a Sphere?”

“Look, let me tell this from the beginning and it might make more sense. We think the Charonians, the Spheres, evolved from some intelligent species, more or less like us, that sent out an automatic seedship programmed to modify the genetics of the life-forms it was carrying, adapting them to the planet it encountered—except the seedship took over, and the life-forms served it, and not the other way around. The Charonians merged biology and technology and guided their own development, their own evolution, until they got to the system of Spheres. As best I can understand it, the Adversary did the same thing, guided its own development. It’s as if… I don’t know… an amoeba, a very simple animal, evolved intelligence, and figured out how to make a new and better type of amoeba out of itself.”

“But an amoeba is nowhere near complex enough to have anything remotely like intelligence,” Marcia protested. “All sorts of research demonstrates you need to reach a complexity threshold much higher than you can get in a single cell before you have the capacity for intelligence. You can’t do it in one cell.”

“Not if you build that cell out of carbon and hydrogen and nitrogen and oxygen. But the atoms building up this creature might each have more particles, more neutrons and protons, than there are atoms in an amoeba. The complexity is there, but it’s at the nuclear level.”

“Wait a second,” Vespasian protested. “I thought Marcia said no one had ever detected strange matter. Where is this thing supposed to live?”

“On a neutron star,” Larry said. “It evolved on the surface of it. Of course, on a neutron star, the gravity flattened it out of its spherical shape to a pancake shape.”

“Oh, come off it!” Selby protested. “This is ridiculous. A giant one-celled pancake living on a neutron star? How the hell could such a thing come to be?”

“By evolving—or developing, or whatever—inside a massive gravitational field, and knowing how to feed off it,” Larry said. “The Adversary uses gravitational fields the way we use electrochemical energy in our bodies. It gets its energy by manipulating gravity fields. Somehow—I don’t know how—I think it uses gravity to convert normal matter into strange matter. It builds new pieces of Adversary out of some of it, and the rest it uses as an energy source, somehow.”

Marcia was thinking. “It all sounds a bit outlandish, but something killed that Shattered Sphere,” she said.

“Even so, things would be a great deal easier for a species that was adapted to high gee. To us, a gravity field powerful enough to warp time and space is deadly, and nuclear physics takes place at a scale so small we can’t even see it. But to the Adversary, high gee is normal, and the atoms it deals with are so big they might even be visible to the naked human eye. It would be as if we could create a wormhole with, say, a five- or ten-gee field, or do genetic engineering with genes the size of children’s blocks. The threshold would be much lower.”

“But the Charonians,” Selby insisted. “What do they have to do with the Charonians?”

“The Charonians have a network of wormholes linking their various Spheres and systems,” Larry said. “The Adversary developed a similar network. It put together a wormhole link and locked onto another neutron star, and colonized it. And then another, and another. Both nets grew out from the center.”

“My God,” Marcia said. “I get it. Now I get it. One side accidentally tapped into the other’s wormhole net.”

“Right. Exactly,” Larry said. “But the thing to bear in mind is that the Charonians use high-gee fields and wormholes, but the Adversary lives in them, feeds off them. The Charonians use gravity very differently, but they make a living off gravity fields as well.

“High-gee situations and wormholes are still dangerous to Charonians. They still have to be careful around them. In that respect, we have a lot more in common with the Charonians than the Adversary. At least Charonians and humans inhabit the same experiential universe. The normal place for a part of the Adversary to be is on the surface of a neutron star. To the Adversary, a wormhole is just like home.”

“If you look at it that way, then the size difference doesn’t matter, either,” Marcia said, “any more than it does in a fight between a swarm of crop-eating locusts and a group of humans trying to chase them off.”

“What’s a locust?” Vespasian asked. Apparently, he hadn’t spent a great deal of time on Earth.

“A voracious insect,” Marcia said. “Be glad they never got to the Moon. Millions of them would descend on a field and eat it bare in a day. They were adapted to a certain sort of environment, and if they found that environment, they took it and used it. It didn’t matter to them that humans created the crop field, or would want to use it for themselves. Crop fields were the ideal environment for locusts. They were better designed to exploit them than the humans who planted the fields. The locusts would gobble up the whole field, and the farmers couldn’t stop them.”

“But that only works if you have millions of locusts that can overwhelm by sheer force of numbers,” Selby protested. “We only saw one bit of Adversary in that video sequence.”

“One is all it takes. You saw the one that got through. The Adversary would force open a wormhole and enter a Sphere system as a single large entity. As soon as it was in, it would split up into hundreds of smaller units. Some would run interference and be destroyed by the Charonians. But only one Adversary bit had to make it all the way. It didn’t matter if the rest get killed, because they’re all the same.”

“And one of them—just one—is able to kill a Sphere?”

“Just one,” Larry said. “The best way to stop them is to kill the parent just as it enters the Sphere’s system through the wormhole, before it can split-breed. The way to kill the parent is to throw a planet at it. Adversary units are tough, and the big parent ones are tougher. Only the kinetic energy of a whole planet moving at relativistic speed can kill a large Adversary. Smash into it at a good fraction of light speed and you’ll destroy the Adversary—and the planet. The Adversary will penetrate most of the way to the planet’s core before it’s destroyed. The Charonians kill one planet to save all the others. Acceptable losses. Half a loaf. Sound familiar?” Larry smiled at his own unfunny gallows humor.

“Larry, there’s something more,” Marcia said. “Something else you’re not telling us. Lucian wouldn’t have worked so hard to get you all this information unless it did more than clear up a mystery or two. It’s nice to know who the Charonians are afraid of, but we don’t need to know it.”

“No, no, we don’t need to know all that. But… but…” Larry turned his head away and looked at the wall. How to say it matter-of-factly? How to get them to believe? “What we do need to know is the geometry of the Sphere system the Earth is in.

“When the Adversary comes for you, it comes through a wormhole link. And there is an Adversary coming for the system the Earth is in. That’s what terrified the Charonians, set them into a panic. Somehow, it was the movement of Earth into that system that attracted the Adversary’s attention. It’s heading for the wormhole link with Earth. It might try for some other entry to the system, but the link it’s most likely to come through is the one nearest Earth.

“And when a Charonian Sphere needs to throw a planet at an Adversary, it generally uses the closest one to hand.”