Whiskey Romeo

by James Welsh

  He was now in the lethal zone of the black hole. Nash had not yet breached the event horizon, but he knew that there was no hope for escape. Through the glass, he watched as a vortex of dust was draining down the black hole. He had never seen darkness as vicious as that hole. Not even light could escape the hungry jaws. Nash thought back to what Khunrath said, about how the marlin battery could run at speeds faster than light. For the last time, Nash fought down the temptation to run. He stood brave, even as the hull around him groaned horribly, its metal struggling against the gravity.

  At this point, Nash suddenly remembered what Khunrath said the night before, as the crews fitted together the launches and the battery. According to Khunrath’s quantum computer, they only had one chance to break the black hole, and that was as the ship was slipping through the event horizon.

  “But how would we know when we crossed the event horizon?” Nash had asked then.

  Khunrath laughed humorlessly. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? According to the computer, the event horizon isn’t fixed like a bubble. Rather, it’s gradual, like the Earth’s atmosphere. You’ll feel the gravity becoming stronger the deeper you dive. When the gravity becomes unbearable, that’s your event horizon. Just make sure that the battery is still keeping you company by then.”

  Remembering Khunrath’s advice, Nash checked the exterior camera, and he was relieved to see that the battery was still very much intact and connected. But his relief was short-lived: he began to feel the pull of gravity on the strings of his limbs. At first, he thought that it was the battery, but then he realized that he was feeling the prelude to the black hole. The fire of the gravity was only going to get worse – the only question he had was when the torture would break him.

  His end was coming soon. Nash stood up on his trembling legs and walked back into the cargo hold. He grabbed a spare spacesuit and wriggled into it. He clicked the helmet into place and let the rush of oxygen calm his orchestra of nerves. When he did this, it was not a moment too soon. Out of the corner of his eye, Nash thought he saw something moving in the cabin. He turned and peered through the open doorway, and what he saw was enough to shake anyone else. There was a lightning bolt of cracks arching across the glass window. It would not be long before it broke entirely. Nash fought the urge to close the door – although the door was built to safeguard the cabin’s occupants against an accidental opening of the rear hatch, it wouldn’t save him against the black hole’s fury.

  Instead, Nash knelt down on the floor and pressed the radio transmitter against the tiles. He had to position the transmitter as close to the battery as possible, given Hellmouth’s radio interference. He had only a few moments before the end. Nash held down the failsafe button as he prepared to twist the dial. But then he grimaced, as another wave of pain from the earlier fight swirled over him. His joints screamed and he suddenly felt older than he was. And with that pain came the sadness, as Nash remembered Stratos’ cries, as his friend drifted off into space.

  Nash couldn’t die – not like this. He couldn’t end his life on such a funeral note. Desperate, he ransacked his mind for the one photograph that he would take with him to his afterlife. And he found it, and he whispered their name in prayer.

  “Ava,” Nash breathed. Saying this surprised him – he thought that he was going to say Zara’s name instead. But he accepted the surprise for what it was, giving him the moment of serenity that he needed.

  He twisted the dial on the transmitter until he couldn’t turn it anymore.

  ***

  At first, nothing happened.

  But then, a few seconds after Nash had turned the dial, something did happen, something never seen before in all of the history of the universe. First, the marlin battery imploded upon itself, overwhelmed by the meltdown in its veins. Its destruction took no more than a fraction of a second. In that heartbeat of time, the battery was capable of astounding numbers: it could burn at trillions of degrees Fahrenheit and weighed more than a constellation of stars.

  As the battery collapsed, its vacuum of gravity instantly crushed the fused launches and Nash down to a dot, no larger than a period. But as Nash shrank, the milk of his dreams fed the battery. As the battery collapsed, a wind suddenly shot from it like a snake out of a den of thieves. The force, darker than midnight, uncoiled into space like a tornado shot from a bow.

  It had become a black hole – just as the computer had planned. And since the launch was halfway down the Hellmouth’s throat when this happened, the new black hole began to tug on the event horizon behind it – just as the computer had planned. The new black hole – one that the colonists would later call Orpheus, after the Greek hero who entered the underworld to rescue his love – was just strong enough for what was needed. As Hellmouth inhaled the tail of Orpheus, the new black hole was destroying the old – just as the computer had planned.

  In the second that followed, the two black holes had become intertwined with one another like a circle of snakes. One viper chewed on the other, driven mad by hunger, not realizing that it was vanishing from behind. As the feeding frenzy continued, the circle tightened, and the fused black holes approached a density so unfathomable, the number had not yet been named. The gravity was contagious enough, that even the colonists on Janus could feel the momentary lurch in their veins.

  But the moment that the fused black holes lived in was a thin one. Just a few millionths of a second later, the two black holes had consumed enough of one another that they had been squeezed down to the size of a skin cell. And that was when even the black holes – the mathematical insanity of the universe – had no choice but to surrender. An invisible crack ran around the entire equator of the beast, and it broke open with a carnival of light. The eruption was bright enough that when its light reached Earth a few years later, it lit up the sky like a second Sun.

  And as the ribbons of light tumbled into space, they left behind nothing. When Hellmouth had cracked open, its physics were broken. It had no choice but to flush itself, rinsing the dark skies with a wave of light that would ripple outwards for millions of years. When our descendants look up into the sky years from now and see the crest of shine, they will remember just what wonders humanity is capable of.

  In death, Nash was finally able to achieve what he couldn’t in life.

  EPILOGUE

  But when Nash pulled the colony out of the black hole’s fangs, the people did not realize that their salvation would be so expensive. True, they were spared a horrific death of being stretched out and torn apart. But as much as the colony feared the gravity like a god, they still worshipped it like a god. And while they no longer had a black hole in their horizon, they no longer had a star either.

  And so, without an anchor, their boat was left to drift in the sea of spacetime. To the human eye, the planet was far from drifting – it had been slung out of its orbit at a speed of 65,000 miles per hour, or approximately 570 million miles a year. But to the universe’s eye, the planet was crawling – Janus was heading in the direction of Altair, the cornerstone of the Aquila constellation some 18 light years away. At the speed the planet was flying, it would reach that new home in almost 200,000 years.

  At first, the colonists despaired that their entire planet had become a refugee. And while Nash had saved them from death, they knew that the charter was not going to save them from the long life that would follow. Given how the charter had seen the colonists as property rather than people, and that the quantum drills were now gone, the colonists were damned to be written off as a tax deduction. In time, the colonists would lose things that they couldn’t replace: the printers that made food, the pipes that pumped fresh air, their families and friends. They were going to wither away like a tree in the desert, a tree that just realized that it had been living for years without water.

  But soon, the people would tire themselves out by grieving for their future, and a strange hope would rise in their chests. They were going to learn that for every mile they put between themselves
and the charter, the more their shackles rusted. And there would come a day when the chains would finally break and the colony would walk on its own two feet, proud. The colony would learn how to manage their geothermal energy to ensure a steady supply for generations to come. They would learn how to ration the food supplies that the Moser twins had been stockpiling. They would learn how to use their remaining ships to tow in meteoroids from space, to harvest them for their precious metals. Their new lives would be hard, but if they had to choose between pain and slavery, they had already made their choice.

  In time, Dmitry Puzzle would shut down the massive radio transmitters pointed towards Earth. He did this reluctantly, of course, his eyes stinging. His whole life had been dedicated to radios, but he knew that a radio needed a speaker and a listener. And the colony could only be free the second it stopped talking to the charter. And while Puzzle thought of radio static to sing himself to sleep at night, the others thought that silence had never sounded so golden.

  In the end, the distance between the two planets – Janus and Earth – would grow, as the planets would learn to forget one another. The Earth would forget Janus’ bravery, and Janus would forget Earth’s routine. Earth would look backwards while Janus would look forwards, being pulled by the gravity of the unknown. The charter was a modern god and thought that it could live forever through the marlin battery, a dirty fuel that drove their sin. For this crime, the charter was punished by being forgotten by the colonists. The charter would be forgotten, as Nash would be remembered.

  ***

  “Jules?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you have a minute?” Latch asked, uneasily.

  Khunrath looked at her curiously. “Of course I have a minute for you. What’s wrong?”

  Khunrath had been working on moving his workshop. With his secret aired out, he saw no point in hiding any longer deep beneath the colony. And when someone had mentioned that a room in one of the longhouses had not been used for quite some time, he jumped at the chance. He had just dissembled his computer when he heard the sound of someone climbing down into the laboratory. He had turned and saw Latch standing at the base of the access shaft, ankle deep in water that still had not drained from earlier.

  Latch sighed. “There’s no easy way for me to say it: Bends is dead.”

  As Latch said this, she looked into Khunrath’s eyes, to see if there was any sign of guilt, but she saw nothing. As a matter of fact, there was no change in Khunrath’s expression at all. At first, Latch thought that he didn’t hear her correctly.

  But then Khunrath asked, “How did he die?”

  “We don’t know – not yet. They’re going to run an autopsy on him. We’ll have our answers in a few days.”

  Khunrath returned to breaking down his computer. He said casually, “And you’re wondering if I had something to do with it. Am I right?”

  “I don’t know what to think. All I know is that, when Anzhela died, you had become someone else entirely. There were the threats you sent him, the breaking into his cliffhanger – you can’t blame me for thinking what I think.”

  “No, I guess I can’t. But, if you want my opinion, you might as well stop the investigation, because the killer already found justice.”

  Latch looked at Khunrath strangely, and the inventor continued, “Don’t you see? As much as everyone hated the doctor, I guarantee you that he hated himself even more. A man like that, someone who feels compelled to hurt everyone around him, is just trying to purge himself. A volcano with all of that loathing has to erupt sometime. When did the bastard die? Do you know that at least?”

  “It’s looking like it was around the time we were preparing that battery of yours.”

  “I’m thinking that he saw us standing up for ourselves instead of surrendering, and he couldn’t take the hope. His hatred was poison, and he choked on it. You didn’t have to read the tea leaves to see that coming. It’s just a shame that he had to die, before we had a chance to make our peace.”

  “You would have wanted that?” Latch asked, surprised.

  “Of course, but not because I am the bigger man – although I am,” Khunrath said with a little smile. “When Bends killed her, I was vengeful because I thought that I had to be. I had a twisted mind then, and my world had been spinning so much, I had no sense of direction. But then I entered the virtual reality, and I talked Anzhela – or rather, what I remembered of Anzhela. And do you know what she told me, Diamond?”

  “What did she tell you?”

  Khunrath was quiet for a moment. “She told me that, as special as I thought she was, she was still made of the same life as everyone else – including Bends. She said that killing him was no different from killing her again. That, more than anything else, leeched the bad blood out of me. Anzhela’s death was more than enough for everyone to bear, and I wasn’t going to bury the suffering with more pain. And so believe me when I say that I’m sorry to hear that Bends has passed away, and I can only hope that the next world will be as forgiving.”

  ***

  Something strange happened that evening, even more bizarre than the black hole becoming crushed: the Moser twins had opened the food store in the middle of the night. Ever since the twins had arrived at the colony years before, they had opened the food store at the exact same time every morning. And so, when the colonists saw Stormrunner opening the doors early, they wondered if they had actually died after all, not realizing that routine could be so fragile. But now, as the food store opened in celebration of those who stopped the black hole, the colonists were certainly ready to accept this change.

  In just a few minutes, the entire colony had organized itself into a line, waiting for their turn to have their feast. Volver and his men had secretly passed out books of whiskey, and the people drank the pages. As they stood in line, they chattered excitedly among themselves, whether it was about the future or food or family or friends. Things were changing, and they were going to keep themselves anchored with what they loved – instead of the charter.

  This shift in the winds was best personified in none other than Trenton Pascal himself. The people in line looked uncomfortable as they saw Pascal approach. They were expecting the preacher to be horrified by the events of the past few days, for Pascal to condemn them for turning their backs on the charter. They were expecting him to follow his routine of the usual sermons.

  The preacher scratched at his scruffy beard thoughtfully, considering what he was going to say. And then, to the colonists’ surprise, Pascal launched into a speech that they had never heard from him before.

  “My friends!” Pascal began. “You’ve been more than patient, listening to me all of these years. You’ve heard me talk as if I knew the answer and that answer was the charter. Well, I am here to tell you that I was wrong! And you all have taught me in the only way you know how: by rising to the occasion. You chose not to surrender to death, even when so many have before. You were able to destroy a black hole, a feat that no one had ever dreamed possible. And you have chosen to stand on the face of the bullet and be shot out into space, not knowing what challenges you will hit. What stubbornness! What genius! What courage! I’ve been praising the charter as mankind’s greatest invention, when I should be praising you! Earth invented this colony so that they could have something to finally live up to. And today, you’re standing taller than anyone ever has. Tonight, you celebrate you!”

  As Pascal spoke, a weak man standing at the window of the nearby clinic smiled. Even from a distance, the weak man could feel what was fueling the engine in Pascal’s heart. Pascal had finally learned what had set man apart from all of the other creatures in the universe: it wasn’t humanity’s ability to answer questions but to question answers. And Pascal had understood that bowing to the charter did not make someone stand taller. And with that, Tumbler hobbled back to bed.

  Meanwhile, the colonists cheered at what Pascal said, and the line rippled forward as another person took a meal from the food store. The next per
son in line, Alaois Dart, approached the counter. He had the usual cloudy look on his face, but Stormrunner was able to smile for the both of them. “And what will you be having tonight, Mr. Dart?” Stormrunner asked.

  “I’ll take my usual,” Dart mumbled, meaning the baker’s ration, which he had every single day for years.

  Instead, Stormrunner took a fisherman’s ration off the shelf and handed it to him. “Enjoy!”

  Dart looked down at the ration and up to Stormrunner with surprise. “This isn’t…”

  “I know,” Stormrunner nodded. “But if you don’t try something new, you’ll only get old.”

  Dart paused, not sure what he should say. Finally, he said, “Thank you.”

  “You’re most welcome!” Stormrunner exclaimed. She could see the light bulb of relief in Dart’s face. She knew that even a shy soul like Dart wanted change – he just needed someone to be brave for him.

  As the next person in line stepped forward and Stormrunner helped them, Wolfmouth hung back in the shadows of the food store. He had been bringing up inventory from the granary and keeping track of the rations. He was nauseous as he watched the cartloads of food vanish like a magic trick. He knew that after that night, they were going to have to ration for a long time. This was the compromise that he had struck with his sister. Stormrunner wanted them to celebrate today, but Wolfmouth wanted them to live tomorrow. And so, like people from thousands of years before, they were going to celebrate the end of the fall harvest and starve themselves through the upcoming winter.

  And part of their compromise meant that the twins were going to have to cut their own rations, to make sure that everyone had enough in the days ahead. They agreed never to say a word of their deal to anyone – to do so would be cruel and selfish. No one could ever know of the sacrifices that they were going to make. After all, the colonists had just freed themselves from slavery to the charter, and Stormrunner didn’t want them to know that the chains were not broken but simply changed hands. The colonists could never know that they were going to owe their lives to the Moser twins.