Showdown at Centerpoint (14 page)

Sonsen pushed another button and the car started to move, not up or down, but sideways. Lights on the exterior of the car came on, showing the way forward. The tunnel they were in was circular in cross-section, and dark pink in color. The tunnel ahead trailed off into what seemed an infinity of darkness. Luke felt as if they had been swallowed by some huge creature and were rushing down its gullet, toward an appointment with the digestive system.

“We might as well start out with Hollowtown,” Sonsen said. “It’s what everyone always wants to see first.”

“Hollowtown?” Lando asked.

There was a second’s awkward pause before Sonsen spoke. “You’re not all that well briefed, are you?” she asked.

“Things have happened kind of fast,” Luke said. “There hasn’t been a lot of time.”

“I guess not. Well, let me start from scratch. Hollowtown is the open space in the exact center of the central sphere. It’s a spherical hollow about sixty kilometers across. Where you docked was just about at the join between the North Pole—that’s what the locals call the cylinders, the North and South Poles—and the central sphere. We’re now moving parallel to the axis of rotation, sideways, in toward Hollowtown. We have to pass through about twenty kilometers of decks and shells first. A shell is what we call real high-ceilinged deck, anything over about twenty meters or so. There are about two thousand levels all told. We’re accelerating pretty fast right now, faster than you think. We’ll come up in Hollowtown in about five minutes, and then start moving downslope, toward the heavy-gravity areas. Farther out from the axis you go, the more of a spin, and the higher effective gravity, of course.”

“The spin must get to be an awful nuisance,”
Kalenda said. “Why haven’t you shifted over to standard artificial gravity?”

“We’ve thought about it. Cap Con Ops—sorry—the capital construction operations office—has done about a dozen studies on de-spinning the station and using standard artigrav.”

Luke managed to translate that last as “artificial gravity” and tried to nod encouragingly. “So what do the studies come up with?”

“Too expensive, too complicated, too disruptive, and too many unknowns. The station’s structure might or might not respond well to the shifted stresses. But it’s your problem now. You can de-spin it all you want as far as I’m concerned.”

“I take it you want out,” Luke said.

“Do I ever. I was into real short-time when the first flare went whump. I was almost down to counting the days on one hand—and then, well, you know the rest.”

“Lousy briefing, remember?” Lando said.

“Wait a second. You people don’t know about the
flares
?”

“First we’ve heard of them,” Luke said. “We just broke through the interdiction field into the system a few days ago.”

Sonsen let out a low whistle. “Broke through the interdiction field?
That
’s something, all right. I’ll bet whoever is creating that field isn’t real happy with you just now.”

Kalenda frowned. “Hold it.
You’re
generating the field.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“The field. The interdiction field is centered on this station. Centerpoint Station is generating the interdiction field. And the communications jamming, for that matter.”

“Burning stars. It
is
?”

“You didn’t know that,” Lando said. It was not a question.

“Nope. None of us here did. Looks like my briefing wasn’t so good either.”

Luke was getting more confused by the minute. How could the people running the station not know the station was creating the field? And what were these flares Sonsen was talking about?

It was becoming plainer and plainer that things were not as they appeared. But it was also becoming progressively less clear
how
they appeared in the first place.

“I think we have a few things to talk about,” said Luke.

The turbovator moved smoothly toward Hollowtown.

W
hat you’ve got to understand about this place is that no one understands it,” Sonsen said. “We just live here. It’s here, so are we, and that’s about it. No one thought much about why things were the way they were. We didn’t know
why
Centerpoint did most of the things it did, but we knew what most of them were. At least we thought we knew, up until a while ago. Up until the terrorists started showing us a few tricks.”

“We just got here,” Lando said. “What terrorists?”

Sonsen shook her head. “I’d love to know the answer to that one. There have been attacks—nasty ones. But no one has claimed responsibility or made demands. Not so much as an anonymous tip. We have suspects—the TraTaLibbers, the Two Worlders, and so on, but they all denied having anything to do with it. Besides, if they could pull off the stuff that’s happened here, they wouldn’t waste time making threats. They’d just move in and take over. Of course, the station’s been cut
off
from everybody since the jamming started up. The investigators on the ground could have wrapped up the case, solved it completely, and we wouldn’t know about it.”

Luke made a guess that TraTaLibbers meant the Tralis and Talus Liberation Party, or some such. Two Worlders probably meant some crowd that wanted separate governments for each planet. Guesses were good enough. He had an idea what Sonsen meant, and he had a hunch the groups in question were not worth worrying about. “Tell us about the attacks themselves.”

Sonsen went to the turbovator car’s viewport. “You’ll be able to see for yourself in a minute or two. Hollowtown used to be quite a place. It grew enough food for the whole station, with a surplus. It had parks, and nice homes, and lakes and streams. Green and blue, cool and lovely. Then someone started messing with the Glowpoint.”

“The Glowpoint being a sort of artificial sun?” Luke asked.

“That’s right,” said Sonsen. “And someone made it go crazy.”

“Who normally controls the Glowpoint?” Lando asked.

“No one, of course,” Sonsen replied, as if Lando had just asked where she kept the on-off switch for the galaxy’s spin. “As I said, it’s just there, the way the whole station is. We didn’t build it. I guess it was here when we got here—whenever that was.”

“The Glowpoint is just
there
” Lando repeated. “Anyone know how it works? How it gives off light?”

“There are theories of one sort or another. One idea is that the Glowpoint draws its power directly from the gravitational interflux between Talus and Tralus. But no one has been able to come up with an instrument to test the idea. There’s nothing conclusive.”

“You don’t know how the power source for half your food production works?” Gaeriel asked.

“No,” said Sonsen. “Do you know how the hyperdrive motors that got you here work?”

Luke had to smile to himself. Jenica Sonsen had a point. There was scarcely a human being alive who completely understood every bit of technology he or
she used. The Centerpointers, it seemed, were just a bit more obvious about it.

“Anyway, we’re coming up on Hollowtown, if you want to get a look at it.” The other humans joined her at the viewport, leaving the two droids off by themselves in the back of the car. A spot of light began to gleam through the end of the tunnel up ahead. “That’s the Glowpoint,” Sonsen said. “It’s back to normal, at least for the moment. That’s what it used to be like all the time.”

The turbovator car moved closer and closer to the tunnel, giving the illusion that it was moving faster and faster as it got closer to the light. The humans in the group shielded their eyes against the sudden brightness.

In a moment that seemed to take forever to arrive and then to happen all at once, the turbovator car burst out of the end of the tunnel and, with a stomach-dropping lurch, began to move straight downward. But no one in the car paid much notice to the violent change of direction. They were too busy looking at Hollowtown.

Or what was left of it.

The Glowpoint was just that, a glowing point of light suspended in midair, in the precise center of the huge spherical chamber. It looked like a miniature sun, warm, bright, comfortable, inviting. But there was nothing comfortable about the landscape below.

Hollowtown had been burnt to a crisp, charred down to a blackened land of ashes. Hazy clouds of dust floated everywhere. Luke could see the skeletal remains of burned-out buildings, what had once been neatly planted orchards that were now nothing but rows of incinerated tree stumps. A lake had boiled dry, and the lake bottom was exposed, the remains of ruined pleasure boats lying there like children’s toys left behind when the water was drained from the tub.

It was a terrible place, a nightmare place, made all the worse because it had so plainly been lovely, well
tended, not so very long before. “Normally I’d stop the car at one of the intermediate stops and let you get out and look around,” Sonsen said. “But there’s just about no free oxygen left in there. All of it got consumed in the fires. I don’t know how we’ll ever get breathable air in there again. For that matter, it took some doing to get breathable air in this turbovator car. It didn’t use to have its own air source, just a compressor that pulled air in from the outside. The air in the tunnel and near the spin axis was always too thin to breathe. After the first flare, the techs installed a full air system so I could still use the car. It’s the fastest, easiest way from the equator to the docking zone and the techsec, where I met you. The engineers yanked the compressor and hooked up some air tanks and a carbon dioxide scrubber.”

“What happened, exactly?” Lando asked.

“The first flare was about thirty or forty standard days ago,” Sonsen said, her voice suddenly sad and tired. “Up until then, everything you see here now was parkland, or farmland, or luxury estates. It was beautiful to see. The Glowpoint would shine down constantly. The farmers would use shadow-shields to block the light and simulate seasons. From the inside of the shields, it could be as light or as dark as you liked, just by twisting a dial. From the outside, the shield could look like shadows, or like silver bubbles, or squares of gold—however you wanted to set them. People decorated their shields all sorts of ways. There was a special feeling, knowing it was always day here—but that under every spot of gold was a secret little patch of night. All of it gone now. Gone. Gone when the flare hit.”

“That was before the jamming started. I came into the system about that time,” Kalenda objected. “I never heard anything about this. It should have been big news. The biggest.”

“We tried to keep it as quiet as we could,” Sonsen said. “The Fed-Dub government was weak enough as it was, and what terrorists want most is publicity. The
Feds were afraid that if this got out, it could spark a panic or even a rebellion here. And I guess they were right. We could keep news of this”—she gestured toward the devastation out the window—“from getting to the other worlds, but the refugees all had to go to Talus and Tralus. The word spread, and we got our rebellions, all right. One on Talus, two on Tralus. One group or the other—I don’t even know which—landed a bunch of fighters somewhere on the South Pole a while back, claimed the station for themselves.” Sonsen shrugged. “What was I going to do? Fight them off by myself? I left them alone, and they did the same to me—until you chased them off.”

“What do you mean, by yourself?” Gaeriel asked. “Are you the only one still on the station?”

Sonsen shook her head. “Probably not. It’s a big place. We tried to evac everyone, but my guess is someone got left behind. I haven’t seen anybody, but that doesn’t mean anything.”

“You keep talking about the first flare,” Lando asked. “How many more were there?”

“Just one more. Two in all. The second happened just about a day or so before the interdiction field and the communications jamming came on. And don’t ask me what the point of a terrorist attack is when there’s no one left to terrorize, and there’s nothing left to burn.”

“Uh-huh,” Lando said, a bit distractedly. This station is exactly at the centerpoint, the barycenter between Talus and Tralus, right?”

“Right,” Sonsen said, giving Lando another strange look. “Were you people briefed at
all
?”

“I knew that much,” Lando said. “I just wanted to confirm it. The Glowpoint. It’s at the exact center of Hollowtown? And Hollowtown is at the exact center of the station?”

“It might be off by a centimeter or two. Feel free to get a measuring stick and check if you want.”

Lando ignored Sonsen’s sarcasm. He pointed out across the huge spherical space, toward the far side of the rotation axis, and then tilted his head back to look through the overhead viewport. “Those conical structures coming up out of the North and South Poles, right on the rotation axis. What can you tell me about them?”

Luke looked through the overhead viewport, and then through the forward view. Up until just a moment ago, they had been too close to one cluster of cones to see it clearly, and the other had been lost in the glare of the Glowpoint. But Lando seemed to have spotted them in the moment they became visible. Almost as if he had expected to see them. The two clusters seemed to be identical: a larger central cone surrounded by what looked to be six smaller cones, all with similar proportions of height to width.