Maybe it would have been better to trust the duplicate functions and run her through, Tarrischall thought feverishly, but it was too late to bother about it now. They were committed.
"Velocity now third level... second..."
On the main display the double ring of scintillating propulsor vents flickered and went dark.
Varess" voice rose into a strangled scream.
"Alternative energy flow failure! Total failure! Crisis alternative functions do not reply! I have lost raft guidance! She floats free!"
"Marrun, get your pushers in there now!"
The Voice-of-Pusher-Guidance could only look slowly away in the refusal posture. "No good, Tarrischall. No good. She"s entering the grid and I don"t have the clearance. If one of my units b.u.mps her in a crisis bonding, I could knock her off vectorand into the grid structure. She"s going in and I can"t stop her."
He was right. May the Life-Fire-of-All-Things burn all! He was right! Even as Tarrischall looked on in growing horror, the bow of the cargo raft was ghosting into the grid mouth.
Tarrischall twisted to look at Narisara, his last hope of regaining control of the disintegrating situation. "Flow down, Voice-of-Physics! Close the channel!
The black-furred one could only look away as well.
"No time," she replied quietly. "We can"t fade the flow fast enough. The closing channel mouth would catch the raft. She"s going through wild, Tarrischall, and we can"t stop her."
Tarrischall could only stare up at the far viewer display. "Beware Marta-My-Friend," he whispered.
"Beware."
The silver-gray curve of the raft"s bow touched the infinite spherical blackness of the channel event horizon.
The tension inside the control center had grown into something physically perceptible. Tight-lipped, Marta Lane stared as the acquisition time bar crept deeper into the red zone.
"We are now at T plus two minutes and thirty-nine seconds post projected acquisition, Director," the gate systems manager said almost apologetically.
"I can see it, Mr. Desvergers," she snapped"Quantum monitoring. Status on the hole?"
"No entry registering yet, ma"am."
Lane glanced down at her a.s.sistant director.
"Something"s wrong Wolf side, Estiban. Tarrischall wouldn"t waste our energy this way with a sloppy transfer. He"s got problems. Take us to Flash Yellow.
Set alert protocols until we get this thing sorted out."
"Doing it, Marta."
"Contact," The quantum monitor leaned in over his workstation display. "Director, we have ma.s.s in the hole... but we have a slow entry... way slow! Less than one-fifth standard transit velocity registering."
"What the h.e.l.l?" Lane"s brows knit together.
"How"s the hole standing?"
"Dimensional structure is stable in all aspects. No variants! We have a good dilation here. This has got to be a barge problem. I confirm we have ma.s.s in trans-state and transit. Gravitational displacement is correct for projected payload, but it"s just crawling through."
"Power boards, reserve status!"
"Down to sixty-five of standard. Load draw steady... Recomputing power consumption rates...
We"ll make it, but it"ll be close. Forget today"s outbound shift, though. This is going to drain us dry."
"Forget the outbound! Stand by your reserve acc.u.mulators and alert Ces-Lunar for an emergency power draw! Tug Control!""Yo!
"I want your reception tugs holding right outside of the worm cage. The second you can get a good approach, move in and get a latch on her. I think we might have a rogue barge coming through. Barge Control!"
"Yes, ma"am."
"You heard what I just said to Tugs. The instant that brute is out of trans-state, get me a full diagnostic. If she seems to be clearing the perimeter grid on her own, let her drift out. Do not attempt active control until she"s in open s.p.a.ce."
"Understood."
"Director! There she is. She"s coming through!"
On the main display, the ultradark of the wormhole event horizon bulged. Cherenkov radiation played in spectral lavender waves around the extrusion, hydrogen atoms and solar wind particles from another star system reintegrating into conventional s.p.a.ce. Rippling shadow slowly peeled back from the blunt bow of the cargo carrier revealing steel that shimmered with residual inconsistency.
"Come on, old girl," Marta found herself murmuring. "Not far now, just a little more."
"Barge exit velocity one point five meters per second... No! One point four... point three! She"s decelerating!"
Marta"s world was turning on edge. "That"simpossible! Barge control, could we have a retro burn or an out-ga.s.sing event underway?"
"Negative! Negative! Her systems haven"t reintegrated from trans-state and I"m not detecting anything venting! This has to be an outside influence!"
"It"s the magnetic field of the perimeter grid!"
Rocardo yelled from his station. "It"s reacting with the ferrous metals in the cargo and hull structure.
She"s coming through so far below velocity she may not have the momentum to carry her clear."
"d.a.m.nit, Estiban don"t give me "may"! Yes or no!"
"Computing now!"
The answer came from another source. "Velocity point five meters per second... point three... Relative velocity zero! I say again, we have zero velocity...
Velocity now negative point one!"
Half the length of the cargo barge protruded from the unstable, quivering sphere of the gate mouth but only half. Then, slowly the expanse of metal hull began to shorten.
"My G.o.d," someone spoke in an appalled whisper, "she"s falling back into the hole."
"Tugs!" Marta called desperately. "Can you get a lock on her!"
The Tug Controller was already shaking his head.
"No room. No time! She"s going! She"s going! She"s gone!"
Lane"s thumb flipped aside the guard on herconsole and smashed down on the alarm key.
Throughout the Worm Gate complex the Rash Red disaster klaxons began their harsh bray.
"She"s still in there!" Narisara cried. "The raft is still inside the channel! She did not exit!"
"That"s impossible," Tarrischall snapped back.
"She had to clear!"
"She hasn"t," the Voice-of-Physics replied impatiently. "I am still registering ma.s.s inside the channel. Movement rate null. The raft must be caught between the magnetic lobes of the channel mouths."
On the far viewer, the black sphere of the channel event horizon continued to hover blandly at the center of the web-work tube of the perimeter grid.
Invisible within that sphere, however, the cargo raft was still present, coexistent dimensionally not only within River-"Tween-Worlds but at the Earth Worm Gate as well.
"Voice-of-Physics, what happens if we can"t clear the channel? What happens when we have to reduce the power flow?"
"I don"t know," Narisara replied. "We have never attempted such a simulation."
"Guess!"
"Tarrischall, I can"t! The matter inside the channel is dimensionally unstable. I cannot project how it will react to a channel contraction. Possibly as a quantum material. Possibly as tridimensional. Ican"t tell!"
"Differentiation!
"As quantum material it may disperse out along the residual thread of the channel, leaking back into tri-s.p.a.ce as a few extra ultimotes per lype of interstellar gas."
"As trimaterial?"
"You will be compressing a hundred and eighty thousand kyhar of ma.s.s down to a point you could balance on a pup"s claw tip."
Tarrischall felt his whiskers bristle. "To say more simply, POOYGH!"
Narisara gave an affirmative toss of her shapely head. "A ma.s.s explosion such as no one has ever imagined. We would burn brighter than the Life-Fire-of-All-Things."
"Where"s my power!" Marta called in a half-scream to her Energy Boss.
"They"re trying to get authorization from the Ces-Lunar Grid Authority now, ma"am," the thoroughly unhappy techno yelled back over his shoulder.
"d.a.m.n it, I"m the authority! Tell those idiots to check their disaster protocols. A Worm Gate emergency has absolute priority over everything except basic life support, and we are declaring a gate emergency! Tell them we could lose the wormhole and the whole b.l.o.o.d.y L-2 complex if we don"t get that power shift immediately!""Doing it, ma"am!"
"L-2 traffic control on red command channel, ma"am," Communications cut in. "They acknowledge your crisis declaration and are standing by for instructions."
"Tell them to initiate immediate dispersal of the complex by Plan Red Roger. Clear all nonessential manned vessels and platforms out of this traffic block with all speed and keep them out until we can get a handle on this thing."
"Aye, ma"am."
On the big display, the city in the sky was already disintegrating, its component stations leaving their formation within the Lagrange point. With att.i.tude control thrusters and docked tug engines blazing to haul them clear, the awkward voyagers were drifting outward in a slow motion bomb burst that left the Worm Gate and gate control wheel alone in a growing volume of empty s.p.a.ce.
"We"re starting to get some power supplementation from Ces-Lunar already, Marta,"
Rocardo reported, "but we are still trending negative on our acc.u.mulator reserves. Can we fade back a little? Let the hole contract a bit to conserve power."
Lane shook her head, eyeing the sphere of blackness hovering within the perimeter grid. "We have sixty thousand metric tons of ma.s.s out there locked in trans-state, Estiban. If we try altering thevariables on that much malleable matter, I don"t know what will happen. n.o.body else does either."
"Headquarters has triggered a net crisis conference," the a.s.sistant Director replied, sounding hopeful. "They"re bringing in every physicist in the field to work the problem."
"And maybe they"ll come up with some answers in six months or so. We don"t have that much time.
Power levels?"
"Down to twelve per on all reserves."
"Dr. Lane, I have an idea," the tug controller spoke up.
"Go, Fred."
"Why don"t we try and shove the barge out of there? I could send one of our big Miki T-5s into the hole. I know all of its systems would go down as it crossed the event horizon, but we could back it off and run it in at full thrust with a load of momentum built up. It"d wreck the tug, but it might be enough to knock the barge out the other side."
Marta turned the suggestion over in her mind examining it from all angles, then shook her head.
"No, that might work under simple Newtonian physics but we"re operating quantum here. While we know individual atoms can maintain momentum in trans-state, n.o.body can say if momentum can be kinetically transmitted.
"If we ram a tug into the hole, it might just pa.s.s right through the barge"s dimensionally irrationalform and go right out the other side. On the other hand, there might be enough nuclear forces interaction for the barge"s ma.s.s to not only absorb the tug"s momentum but its physical structure as well. The two vehicles could merge with an overlap on the subatomic levels. Two objects can"t occupy the same s.p.a.ce, in the nonquantum universe at any rate.
When they came out of trans-state at Life-Waters, there could be a ma.s.s explosion that could vaporize the whole gate."
"Lord and Lady!" The tug controller murmured.
He liked the People, too.
"We"ve got no choice, Estiban," Lane stated to her a.s.sistant Director, making her final decision in the matter. "If we get down to four percent reserve without stabilization, we"re going to cut the negative energy fields and dump the hole."
For a Gate Controller, those words were blasphemy. "You can"t be serious!" Rocardo exclaimed, "It took ten years to isolate and fix a properly oriented wormhole for the 359 system. If we dump the hole..."
"I know. If we dump the hole, it"s gone. We"ll never get it back. We may never acquire another one for Wolf system either. But if we can keep the physical gate structure intact, we"ll at least have chance to try again. If we destroy the gates, that chance will be gone, too. Power?"
Rocardo replied by looking down at his stationdisplays. "Now down to nine per on the reserves."
The string-of-gem city lights on the night side of Life-Waters were blinking out, fading as the orbital light-power-gatherers that fed the People"s civilization shifted their flow rays on River-"Tween-Worlds, a half cone of raw energy flooding across s.p.a.ce and through the overloading absorption structures.
Tarrischall rode the power tasking pallet himself, nursing the straining systems like a caregiver with a sick pup, rolling each control rod with an extended claw tip. "Smoothly, smoothly," he murmured to himself, staring into the data bubble, "I-lick-your-fur, sweet one. Steady down and quit twitching on me."
All others in the Gathering-of-Voices were silent save for Narisara. Bouncing back and forth between her display and that of the Voice-of-Decision, she maintained Tarrischall"s situational awareness.