Hunted Earth - The Ring Of Charon Part 12

Several satellites and habitats had already spiraled down to impacts on the Moon, including all of the satellites stationed at the Lagrangian balance points. Held in stationary orbit over the Lunar Nearside and Farside by the balance of terrestrial and Lunar gravity, some of the Lagrangian stations had drifted off into deep s.p.a.ce, and others had simply fallen down, once Earth's gravity was no longer there to hold them up.

Other facilities hadn't crashed yet-but they would, their impact points as inevitable and irrevocable as gravity itself. They were falling now, and nothing could stop them. The few stationary facilities with powerful station-keeping engines might be able to save themselves. But most of the stations had no stationkeeping engines, or only small ones. There was no way to correct their courses, even if Lucian had been able to calculate their present courses in time.

All of the objects Lucian tracked were still held in orbit about the Sun, of course, but the speed andvector each held at the moment Earth vanished threw a random element into the mix. Some were moving into higher-inclination orbits, others in a bit closer to or out a bit further from the Sun.

But what frightened Lucian most of all was that it should have been worse. Many of the predicted disasters never happened. Radar couldn't spot many of the threatened s.h.i.+ps in the first place.

According to the computer plots, there should have been far more impacts, more collisions, more s.p.a.cecraft radioing in to report themselves off course. Satellites, habitats and s.p.a.cecraft, lots of them, were simply missing.

Suddenly, with a flare of lights and a renewed hum of ventilation fans, the primary power system came back on. Lucian's console flashed into life. He leaned into the keyboard and ran some quick checks. Yes, his programs were still intact. That much was a relief. But what about the missing satellites? Lucian ordered up a three-dee projection of the coordinates for the missing s.h.i.+ps and stations, as of the moment before Earth disappeared.

The pattern in the three-dee tank was clear, obvious, and clean. It was not merely the Earth that was gone, but everything that had been within a certain volume of s.p.a.ce surrounding Earth.

Somehow, that made it seem real. It was easier to conceive of a s.p.a.ce station ceasing to exist than a whole planet. It was suddenly real enough to be frightening.

The intercom bleeped and Lucian punched the answer b.u.t.ton. It was Janie in Radar, paging him on the intercom. "Lucian, you got a second?"

Lucian looked over and spotted Janie on the far side of the big room, saw her looking not at him, but at her display system. It was disconcerting to speak to disembodied voices all day, when you could see the bodies they belonged to, out of earshot.

Lucian adjusted his earpiece and spoke into histhroat mike. "I've got just about that long, Janie.

What's up?"

"I'll relay it to your screen. It's kind of hard to explain. You had me do a radar track on Mendar-4, right?"

"Right," Lucian said.

"Okay," Janie's voice said. "Here's what's what.

This is what Mendar's...o...b..t was." A standard orbital schematic appeared on Lucian's flatscreen.

Earth stood in the center of the screen, and Mendar-4's track showed as a perfect white circle tracing around it. "Now this is an orbit based on the radar tracks we've gotten since the first quake."

The symbol for Earth vanished from the screen, and Mendar moved straight out on a tangent from its previous...o...b..t. "I'm running it forward in blue to give us a projected orbit."

Lucian watched as the straight blue line stretched out into Solar s.p.a.ce."Okay, so what?"

Lucian asked.

"So here's what happened after the second quake, just a few minutes ago. This is Mendar's actual course, based on radar tracking. I'll run it in yellow." A third course appeared on the screen, peeling away from the straight blue line of the projected course.

"Holy Jesus Christ," Lucian said.

He knew what it meant, even without a.n.a.lyzing the orbit. Mendar's path was being bent back toward some large ma.s.s, a large ma.s.s right where Earth had been. A planet-sized ma.s.s.

"Has this happened to the other orbital tracks?"

Lucian asked, his fingers busy running his own board. He could feel the relief was.h.i.+ng over him. It had to be. Earth was back from whatever impossible place it had been. It had to be.

"Yes it has," Janie said. "Similar orbit s.h.i.+fts, all starting just at the onset of the last quake.""It's got to mean that Earth is back," he said, excitedly. "That's what caused the second quake series. Earth's gravity field coming back and grabbing at the Moon." He brought up the image from the surface camera, still trained on Earth's coordinates.

But there was nothing there. Nothing at all. Just some debris.

"I checked that too, first thing, Lucian." Janie's voice was soft, apologetic. "There's nothing there."

"Give me a real-time radar image of where Earth should be," Lucian said. Maybe it was simply cloaked somehow, some weird optical phenomenon.

Janie redirected her radar and Lucian split his screen, watching the same swatch of sky in visual and radar frequencies.

"Nothing, Lucian," Janie said. "Not one d.a.m.n thing-"

Suddenly there was a blue-white flash of light in the center of the visual screen, and a smaller, dimmer flicker on the radar. And then, on radar, a target appeared. A big one, Lucian judged. Perhaps two kilometers across, and moving fast. About the size of the other debris chunks in the radar image.

And all the debris was moving away from the new gravity source. Almost as if they had been launched themselves...

"You got a recording on this?" Lucian asked.

"Sure thing," Janie said.

"Let me access that. Last fifteen minutes of it."

Lucian cut away from the live picture and ran the recording forward from the moment the quakes. .h.i.t.

Another flash, and another target. And again, and again, and again. Some of them drove straight on. Others seemed to snap around in tight parabolas before speeding away. They had to be moving at a h.e.l.luva clip for the motion to be visible at this range, even in fast forward. Larry ran acheck, and discovered that the targets were popping out of the bluish flashes at regular intervals, once every 128 seconds.

The image reminded him of something, and it took a moment for it to register. Like lifeboats launching from a crippled s.h.i.+p, Lucian thought.

For one wild moment he wondered if that was exactly what he was seeing-the populace of Earth somehow escaping from their wrecked planet.

But in s.h.i.+ps two klicks across? No one built them that large. The whole idea was absurd.

But then, so was the idea of asteroid-sized bodies materializing out of the empty spot in s.p.a.ce where Earth had so recently been.

Lucian stared at his screens, praying for understanding. It didn't come.

The Caller saw the intruder diving toward its Anchor. This was by no means a surprising development. Of course the Anchor's ma.s.sive gravity well would attract debris. The Caller immediately sent a message through the Link, requesting a temporary halt to operations.

Nothing material could ever damage the Anchor itself, of course, but a disintegrating asteroid could certainly damage the new arrivals as they streaked through the worm-hole. It did not matter.

Now the Caller had the Anchor as a power source.

Now it had all the time and power it could ever need-and this asteroid would be out of the way in a few minutes.

? ? ?Lucian, still staring at the mysterious blue flashes, was startled to see them stop coming, and startled again to see an asteroid-sized fragment moving in toward Earth's previous position. The new radar track had an ID tag on. This one, the computer could identify. Lucifer. Sweet Lord, Lucifer.

Lucian jumped up, unplugged his headset, and hurried over to Vespasian' console. "Vespy, are you watching the Lucifer track?" he asked.

"I'm on it, Luce."

Tyrone Vespasian glanced away from his console and rubbed his jaw nervously. Lucian stood behind him, watching in silence as the radar tracked the wreckage of Lucifer tumbling through s.p.a.ce, pitching and wheeling wildly. The huge worldlet was tumbling, out of control. What was happening?

Earth wasn't there. But Lucifer was falling toward something. And falling fast. Vespasian checked the real-time track.

h.e.l.l's bells. It was moving toward that gravity source at ten klicks a second, and accelerating. He asked the computer for an impact projection.

Twenty minutes. That was too fast a fall. Tyrone Vespasian had been running orbital traffic systems for a long time. He knew the s.p.a.ce around Earth and the Moon intimately, almost by feel. He knew, instinctively, what sort of forces Earth and the Moon would impose on a body in a given position.

And Lucifer's acceleration was wrong, just a shade high.

With Lucifer's acceleration toward this gravity known, it was dead-simple to measure the ma.s.s of the gravity source-or, at least, the total ma.s.s of the gravity source plus Lucifer, and subtract Lucifer's listed ma.s.s. Probably it had lost some fragments after Dublin, but the result would be close enough.Result of calculation: 1.053 Earth ma.s.ses. It couldn't be Earth. Not unless the planet had gained a few gigatons in the last few hours. Besides, this gee source was invisible.

Holy Christ. Invisible gravity source. Vespasian suddenly realized what was out there. But he couldn't believe it. He wouldn't believe it.

He checked the impact projection clock. He wouldn't have to believe it for another eighteen minutes. He powered up the maximum-gain telescopic camera and trained it on the dot of light that was Lucifer. The camera zoomed in, the electronic amplifiers came on, and the typical rough potato-shape of an asteroid was tumbling in the center of the screen, tracking and velocity information appearing in a data window in the lower-right corner of the screen. Vespasian watched the fall of Lucifer, willing himself not to believe the evidence of his own eyes.

The ravaged asteroid started to die. The spin stresses were sheering off ma.s.sive boulders and environment huts from the main body of the asteroid. The main ma.s.s of the asteroid was soon surrounded by a thin, rapidly dispersing cloud of fragments large and small, falling, diving into the piece of s.p.a.ce where Earth should have been.

Down, down, closer and closer, moving not in a straight line toward Earth's old position, but in a tight parabola that spiraled in, moving faster every moment.

At about the point where Earth's surface should have been, tidal stresses began to make themselves felt, even over the relatively short distances involved. The gravity gradient started shredding larger chunks off the asteroid. Lucifer's tumble got faster, adding to the stresses tearing it apart.

Impacts between fragments came faster and faster, each smas.h.i.+ng more fragments free. Lucifer disintegrated altogether, with no one piece of rock any longer distinguishable as the parent body.The cloud of debris that had once been Lucifer spiraled down into the gravity well, falling deeper and deeper, whirling in a tighter and tighter spiral, faster and faster, approaching significant fractions of lightspeed. Bright flashes erupted in the depths of the gravity well as ma.s.sive fragments smashed into each other at utterly incredible speeds.

The flashes and sparks rose to a crescendo, leapt up to a whole new level of violence. Bursts of radiation flared out across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Gamma rays, X rays, ultraviolet, visible, infrared and radio blazed out from the gravity source. Then, just as suddenly as it had peaked, the violence ebbed away. A flash, a flicker, and then one last ember red flare that snuffed itself out with the suddenness of a candle flame caught by the wind.

And then there was nothing. Nothing at all.

"Radar, give me a scan of Earth-s.p.a.ce,"

Vespasian said.

"Running now," Janie's voice replied. "No return.

I say again, no return signal of any kind."

Lucian leaned in closer to the screen. "Jesus, Vespy, how could that be? What the h.e.l.l happened to the asteroid? Shouldn't there at least be debris?"

"It's gone," Vespasian said. "Think about it.

Think about your college astronomy courses. What sort of gravity source can suck up an entire asteroid and leave nothing behind? No debris, no signal, no radiation, nothing. Lucifer just got sucked down into a black hole." And now Vespasian knew how Earth could have gained five percent more ma.s.s. He had just seen a demonstration. Wherever Earth had gone for those few hours, it had been crushed down to nothing just as Lucifer had been crushed. Maybe Earth had got caught by a black hole with five percent of Earth's ma.s.s. Either way, it didn't matter. There was no more doubt, at least in his mind. He knew what had happened to Earth. Nothow, or where, or why, but what. "A black hole with the ma.s.s of planet Earth," he whispered. "A black hole that used to be Earth."

Part Three

CHAPTER TEN.

Naked Purple Logic

The meeting was not going well, Sondra decided.

Larry was stubbornly refusing to believe that Earth was destroyed, Webling seemed incapable of anything but shooting down theories-having none of her own to offer-and Sondra found herself helplessly spouting out one d.a.m.n-fool idea after another. If we three are the big gravity experts who are going to save humanity, we are in big trouble, Sondra thought.

Larry was still in a sulk, and Webling was just on the point of spinning out another objection when suddenly the door burst open. Dr. Raphael rushed into the room, carrying a datablock and a thick sheaf of printout. "The communications duty officer woke me," he said without preamble. "This just arrived from the VISOR station at Venus," he said, his voice breathless and weak. "The comm officer woke me to give it to me, and she was right to do so."

Sondra was surprised. Raphael didn't like anything disturbing his sleep. She looked at Raphael's death-white face. Something had scared him, scared him bad. But what the h.e.l.l could scare anyone more than Earth disappearing?

"Some man McGillicutty, down there at VISOR,has come up with some figures on... on Earth. Do you know him? Is he reliable?" Raphael asked, in a tone that suggested he wanted to be told no.

"I know him by reputation," Webling replied carefully. "One of the sort that hasn't been out of the lab in years. No understanding of people, and a tendency to get lost in the details. He often misses the point of what he finds-but his observations and measurements are always first-rate."

"Well, he seems to have missed the point here all right," Raphael said grimly. All the anger seemed to have drained out of the man, as if fear and distraction had left no room for anything else.

Raphael dropped the papers on the visitor's side of his desk. "Have a look at these while I call up the computer file. Can't think as well looking at paper,"

he said under his breath, muttering to himself.

Sondra looked at Larry, and Larry looked at her.

Muttering? For Raphael, this was utter loss of control. The man was frightened.

"I want to see what this report tells you," Raphael went on. "I don't want it to be what it told me."

Larry and Sondra put their heads together over the hard copy of McGillicutty's report, while Webling read the computer screen over Raphael's shoulder.

Larry got it first. "The gravity waves are continuing, but with Earth gone there's nothing there to produce them. And that twenty-one-centimeter radio source is radiating in a complex, regular and repeating pattern.

McGillicutty doesn't say anything about the pattern. He just talks about the signal strength and the distortions caused by the gravity waves. He missed the fact that the signal is complex and repet.i.tive. But that can't be. Natural signals can't-"

He stared into s.p.a.ce for a moment, until the truth dawned. "But that means these signals aren't natural," Larry said in a whisper. "That's what thedata say to me."

Raphael nodded woodenly. "That was the conclusion I reached," he said. "The one I hoped was wrong. The signals are not natural in origin.

Could one of the radical groups on the Moon have-"

Sondra felt her skin go cold. "Not natural. Now wait a second here-"

But Larry wasn't listening. He knew the technology required to generate gravity waves. The Ring of Charon was, if anything, a minimal hookup for gravity generation. It was inconceivable that any other group could have built anything remotely capable of such a job and kept it hidden.

At least no human could have done it.