Whiskey Romeo

by James Welsh

  Slowly, he turned and stepped back into the apartment. He idly noticed how cold his home felt. In the basement deep beneath the complex, the furnace had broken down. The pipes in the walls were no longer breathing warm air, and it felt like the heart of his home had stopped beating, its blood frozen. He couldn’t tell where his broken apartment ended and his heart began. Nash wondered if this was how other people felt, the people who broke things because a beautiful world was too painful for them. In just that thin second, the architect’s courage returned to him.

  Just then, Nash heard a knock at the door. At first, he thought that it was Zara giving him a second chance. But this knock was different from hers: this one felt heavier and angrier. It was the sound of another beginning, disguised as an ending.

  CHAPTER 6

  2201 AD

  “Sonya?”

  “What is it, Brutus?”

  “There’s something wrong with my instruments,” Coil said, pointing to the instrument panel at his desk.

  Canto sighed and walked over. “You better not be wasting my time.”

  “I’m not – look.”

  Canto looked over Coil’s shoulder at the control panel. She stared at it for the longest second, her eyes squeezed, her brow furrowed. She had a confused look on her face, as if she was deciphering a foreign language, and Canto didn’t like being confused. “Hold on a minute.”

  She strode to the desk next to Coil’s, where Edmund Liber was sitting, laughing at a joke in his head. Canto rolled her eyes and pushed Liber’s head to the side with her hand. She ignored Liber’s protests, too focused on what she was witnessing. Among the instruments on the panel was an indicator measuring the star’s ambient temperature, necessary to ensure that the drills didn’t get too close and melt. Usually, the temperature hovered somewhere around 6,500 degrees Fahrenheit. Now, though, the temperature was showing 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit and dropping faster by the second.

  “Impossible,” Canto whispered to herself. She then called out to all of the miners in the room, “I need to run a calibration check! Who else is showing a malfunctioning temperature sensor?”

  There was a pause, as all of the miners looked at their computers. A chorus of surprise sang out as the others realized too that their instruments were acting strangely. Ayotunde Ekwe, a black man with a thick beard and a scar running across his forehead like a comet, called out, “The neutrino output is going down too!” He shook his head. “I don’t understand it, I just don’t.”

  “What’s going on?” Canto asked herself, finally feeling the tremble of fear for the first time in her life. It happened before where a drill’s sensors had malfunctioned – but it had never happened with all of the drills at once. She watched as the star’s temperature slid down the scale, diving below 1,000 degrees, then 100. The whole room was as quiet as a painting until the star reached zero.

  Canto’s gasp woke up the room, and as one the miners leapt out of their chairs and ran for the hallway. The space station’s narrow ring wasn’t meant for a crowd to push through, and there were jams and scrapped elbows as they ran down the hall. They were running towards the other side of Harbor, where the glass ceiling provided a panoramic shot of the star Carina. As they ran, each of the miners fumbled through their pockets for their visors – even in their confusion, they knew better than to stare into their sun.

  But as they reached the far end of the station and looked up, they realized that they didn’t need their visors after all. Just minutes before, they could look up and see the blood orange of their star dripping with warm juice. Before, they could feel Carina’s warmth, even though they were tens of millions of miles away and behind the cold curtain of space. Before, they could walk in the sunshine and believe that they were back on Earth.

  But, they could no longer believe this. Through the thick canopy of yells and gasps, Nash watched in horror as the star was now a dried husk, like crops ruined by a cold snap. Nash could have sworn he even saw cracks streaking across the star’s surface, as if it was a window ready to shatter. And then, just like life, the star’s flame suddenly went out. It was now little more than a massive lump of coal floating in the waters of space.

  The miners didn’t understand what it was they were witnessing. Every star is a balancing act between the furnace deep at its core and the overwhelming weight surrounding it. And every ember a star exhales is spent trying to stop its own gravity from choking it. But there comes a time when the furnace runs dry, and the star finally has to surrender to itself. And so its own gravity rains down like fire, squeezing down the star until it’s no larger than a fist, the most dangerous force in the universe. And it is at that moment when the star dies and transforms into something else entirely.

  “It’s a black hole,” Wales breathed.

  The miners watched over the next few minutes as the star jumped into the pit of its own heart. But as the star collapsed, it didn’t shed its mass – instead, it greedily held onto its matter. It should have been impossible, but after a few minutes, the dead star was little more than a mile wide but held the mass of a star a million times larger. And as the star shrank to being no more than a foot wide, the mathematics finally began breaking down. The mass was a punch through the floor of spacetime, and what was once a star was now a drain, threatening to devour anything in its path, even beams of light. Its gravity was so vicious that it warped the starlight around it, casting a demonic halo across outer space.

  “Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?” Nash heard Liber say in awe.

  The miners gasped as the planet Persephone, the chunk of diamond that revolved in a tight orbit around what was once Carina, suddenly was the first to die. The burst of intense gravity from the black hole sheared the planet right down the center. The planet’s western hemisphere crumbled into pieces that hurtled towards an end in the black hole. Its eastern hemisphere broke down as well, with those pieces smashing into one another, until there was a curtain of rock orbiting the black hole. It was a belt of rock that would only grow as the black hole became hungrier – in just a few hours, a passing comet would become ensnared as well, in addition to nearby asteroids.

  And what happened then, after the matter was devoured, no one knew for sure. There were the theories, of course, about what happened after diving into a black hole. The most popular theory was that after reaching the point of no return, the object would be stretched infinitely and broken down in the stomach of the beast’s gravity, until the food was nothing more than bytes of information floating inside of the black hole. Nothing, not even hope, could escape from a black hole.

  “We’re going to be next,” Nash said softly.

  Canto shook her head. “No, we aren’t. If the black hole could destroy us, it already would have. The station’s orbit is too far out.”

  “Sonya,” Ekwe reminded her, “we don’t orbit in a perfect circle. The orbit’s elliptical – sooner or later the orbit’s going to close in.”

  Canto swore. “When will it close in?”

  Ekwe ran the calculations in his head. “I would say about a week. By that point, we’ll be close enough to get caught in the black hole’s drag. And Janus…”

  Ekwe’s words died away, as he realized what he was saying. The others realized too – the space station was in the same orbit as the colony, revolving just ahead of it. If Harbor was close enough to be destroyed by the black hole, so would Janus just a week or so after. Their house was going to fall.

  Nash panicked. “What are we going to do?”

  For once in her life, Canto wasn’t sure what to do. As she fumbled for her words, a voice behind them spoke up, “I know what we’re going to do.”

  The miners turned and saw Joyce standing in front of them, looking even sterner than usual. She had the gray face of a general about to send men into the battlefield to die. As she looked out over the sea of worried faces, she said in measured words, “First, we’re going to evacuate Harbor. It’s not safe here – not anymore. We’re going to p
ile everyone into the launches and get back to the colony. Dmitry, the transmitter here still isn’t working, correct?”

  Puzzle nodded silently.

  “Okay, so we’re going to have to try hailing the colony on the launch radios. We need to warn them about what had just happened. Hopefully, the launches can tune to that frequency – they won’t be expecting a distress signal from a launch, not when there’s none scheduled to fly. But we need every minute we can to evacuate the colony. Are the radios on the launches strong enough to reach Earth? We need to send a distress signal.”

  Puzzle found his words. “They are – barely. But I’ll need line-of-sight to reach the charter back on Earth, and that monster’s between us and them. There’s no way I can get a radio message through.”

  “Well, find a way to contact home – if anyone can do it, you can,” Joyce assured him, although Puzzle wasn’t as confident as she was. She turned to the others and saw that none of them had moved. She yelled, “What are you waiting for? Let’s get moving!”

  The miners jumped at the dagger in her words. As one, they rushed down the hallway once more, this time to the launches docked to Harbor. As they ran, Joyce called after them, “Brutus, wake up the pilots! They’re sleeping in the bunks!”

  In less than a minute, the miners found their selves crowded around the airlocks, impatiently waiting for the pilots to arrive and start up the launches. As they waited, Nash suddenly realized something. He turned to Puzzle. “What about the miners who had just left?”

  Puzzle paled – in their panic, none of the people onboard the station had thought about the miners who were en route to the malfunctioning drill. And there was no way to contact them, not with the station’s broken radio anyway. He yelled for Joyce, who was busy entering the code to pressurize the airlocks. “Mystery, what about Ysabel and the others?”

  “I know,” Mystery said, as the airlocks suddenly slid open. “Let me worry about them.”

  As the miners clambered through the airlocks and into the docked launches, the other two pilots, Blue and Thaden, appeared. Their eyes were red as if they had just been woken up, and they had bewildered looks on their faces. Their confusion was understandable: they had just woken up to the news that the world was ending.

  The first of the launches to leave was Ship Upsilon, flown by Pilot Blue and carrying Liber, Stratos, Wales, and Iago Crane, a miner who thought the entire universe was out to get him, and the black hole wasn’t helping him out of the pit of his conspiracy theories.

  The second of the launches was Ship Delta, flown by Pilot Thaden and carrying Coil, Nash, Pere, Puzzle, and Canto. Of all of the pilots, Thaden was the fastest but also the most reckless. But they needed to get word out to the colonists as quickly as possible so that they could evacuate the colony. And Thaden was the arrow out of the archer’s bow. Nash wasn’t aware of the danger of flying with Thaden, or else he would have volunteered to be on another launch. As the launch undocked from Harbor, Puzzle worked desperately at the radio, trying to contact the charter back home to request emergency assistance.

  The third of the launches was Ship Nu, flown by Captain Joyce and carrying just Ekwe as a passenger. They had tried hailing Ysabel Winter over the radio, but the launch that had left earlier to repair the quantum drill was not responding. That was when Joyce had pulled up the sonar map and saw that Winter’s launch, Ship Pi, was stranded in the whirlpool around the black hole. The ship was pushing against the current of debris, but it wouldn’t be long before the ship sank into the black hole. Joyce was not going to lose an entire launch crew, not after what had happened with the Descent Incident a few years before. Ekwe went with her, because of all of the miners, he was the most skilled with spacewalks, and Joyce was going to need him to hook up with the stranded launch.

  As each of the crowded launches undocked from Harbor, the miners inside looked out at the space station for one last time. For as long as they had mined the star, they had done so from their desks aboard Harbor. The work was anesthetic – the same duties every day, as they pulled strings of sunshine out of Carina with the quantum drills – but it was the only work they had ever known. In a week, as the space station dips into the black hole’s gravitational pull, the single-paned glass ceiling that wrapped out Harbor will crack then shatter. The outer ring of the station will get ripped apart like a piece of paper. The only thing that would remain will be Harbor’s super-dense central disc, responsible for maintaining the station’s gravity. And even the disc will break down, as it careened wildly into the fog of the black hole.

  But while Harbor will die, it is going to be spared the punishment of the life that follows. Because even if the miners were to survive the plague of the black hole, they would be living hollow lives in the footsteps of the apocalypse. The miners had spent so many years defining themselves by their work, they had never stopped to think that they had more dimensions than being profits in the charter’s ledger. They were each as rich and perfect as they imagined their selves to be. But now, with their light bulb burned out and walking lost in the night of their lives, the workers imagined only their worst fears. More than anything else, they wanted to return to the cold, flickering fluorescent light that they had worked under for so many years. At least they had control over their lives then – not understanding how much control their lives had over them.

  But the miners were not ready to shake their future’s hand. Instead, a few of them closed their eyes in prayer for the first time in years, and a few even wept. Their god in the star was dead, and in its place was a demon, a monster, a beast, a leviathan. As the miners looked out at the black hole splatted across the universe like red paint thrown at a painting, one of the miners spontaneously said, “Hellmouth.” The name stuck because it made sense: it was a pair of jaws always open and hungry. And as the miners looked into the rows and rows of teeth, they wondered what sin they could have possibly committed to deserve punishment for this.

  CHAPTER 7

  As Ship Nu sailed through space, the launch shook a little more than usual. Joyce was an experienced enough pilot that her flying was smooth to the touch, oily almost. But now the ship was swaying , and Joyce was having trouble keeping the prow pointed straight towards Ship Pi’s beacon. Ekwe, who was seated nearby and reviewing the sonar map, noticed and asked, “Are you having trouble with flying?”

  “It’s the black hole,” Joyce lied. “We’re starting to feel the gravity.”

  But honestly, it wasn’t the black hole’s gravity at all. If anything, it was her nerves having finally caught up with her. She had put on a good act back at Harbor, when the miners needed to be lied to in order to be saved. Joyce was as terrified as they were, but someone had to lead them out of the sinkhole they had suddenly fallen into. But her orders would only get them so far: the space station will fall soon, and so will the colony. Their only hope for rescue was years away, and there was no guarantee that they would come at all. Of course the colonists had contingency plans, but no one had ever stopped to think that their star would suddenly collapse into a black hole.

  Ekwe – who was illiterate when it came to emotions – offered, “Since the black hole is to our right, try turning your right hand a few degrees clockwise. That should help with keeping the launch balanced against the gravity.”

  Joyce couldn’t help but laugh. “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome,” Ekwe said distantly as he returned to his map. If Joyce hadn’t felt alone before, she certainly did at that moment.

  She had to remind herself that she still had company: the launch around her, the only creature that understood her escapes to freedom. As she dipped her hands into the water panels, it was no different from flying a bird and digging your hands into the pillow of feathers. There was nothing but emptiness around her, waiting to be written with the launch’s exhaust. She was living out the story of her life every time she sat down at the controls, and the next page she was going to write was rescuing Ysabel Winter. She had to prove to Winter
once and for all that she never wanted her dead, that their rivalry was just a game. She thought this, not realizing how imprisoned it made her, and that she was flying deeper into the trap.

  As she piloted her ship through space, she made sure to keep her distance from the sharp rocks orbiting the black hole. The monster had been born less than an hour before, but it was growing every second. Already, there was a cloud of diamonds from the broken planet Persephone orbiting the black hole. Joyce was amazed that there could be so much debris – she never thought that Persephone was that large to begin with.

  Joyce was wearing her cartographer’s glasses, which pinpointed the tracker beacons belonging to every manmade object in the star system. In the distance, she could see the little green glow for the downed launch, with the call sign for Ship Pi hovering in her visor. They were getting closer.

  “Ayotunde,” Joyce asked abruptly, “approximately how much further until we reach Ship Pi?”

  There was a pause as Ekwe ran the numbers. “Exactly fifty minutes and twenty seconds.”

  Joyce rolled her eyes – she was going to break Ekwe out of his obsession with numbers yet. She was about to make a comment about that, when Ekwe continued, “I am also showing a cluster of particularly large debris on a collision path with Ship Pi.”

  This was what broke Joyce’s concentration. She quickly turned in her seat and stared at Ekwe. “Are you serious? When is it going to hit them?”

  “I’m showing that the debris will arrive five minutes after we do.”

  Suddenly, Joyce couldn’t bring herself to mock Ekwe’s absurd precision.

  ***

  Winter had accelerated the ship, flicking it like a dart into the darkness, knowing exactly where it was going to land. Running maintenance missions on the quantum drills was becoming a common occurrence, and the only way to break the monotony was by throttling the engine to its limit. On the instrument panel, the needle was trembling in the red, warning her that she was pushing her luck. But her fastest time for a repair mission was three hours, and she was looking to break her personal best, because there was nothing else to do at the colony.