With a nod from the captain, Gomez rose and stood at the front of the room. Stevens brought up the latest scans on the black hole, including what the S.C.E. team had found inside. Tev all but felt his mind twist. It looked odd, even in a universe as varied as one that could produce cities encased in static warp bubbles and warheads to ignite gas giants into small stars. Such challenges there still were to confront!
“As near as we can tell,” Gomez began as very rough schematics flashed up on the screen. They showed a wedge-shaped construction that displaced two cubic kilometers of vacuum. “The distress call originates from this station that we located inside the black hole, which we’re currently calling the Demon—the name from the transmission.”
The screen froze, pulled down into the bottom right corner, and was replaced by magnified images of the da Vinci’s approach to the black hole. A large dark circle expanded in the center. The stars around its circumference warped away at improbable speeds, as if reflected over a concave surface.
Which, in effect, they were.
“Am I seeing double?” Faulwell asked. “There’s a diamond-pattern of stars in the upper-left quadrant, and a smaller set just like it to the Demon’s lower-right?”
Of course, as a cryptographer, Faulwell would be adept at recognizing patterns and repetitions. Tev knew about the effect, but the language specialist had beaten him to seeing it. Inexcusable. “That is an illusionary effect known as an Einstein Ring. What you see is light from the same four stars, pulled around the far side of the black hole. You will see a better example in just a moment.”
The star field slowed its expansion. “Ten thousand kilometers,” Sonya intoned. Now the da Vinci crawled forward. A moment later it stopped. “Five thousand. This is highly magnified. As large as this singularity is, about one hundred times the solar mass of Earth’s sun, its photon sphere is only nine hundred kilometers in diameter.”
Several stars looked bloated, highly magnified from being dragged around the back side of the Demon, which stared straight ahead like the dead eye of some malicious entity.
The same metaphor suggested itself to Abramowitz, who shivered. “I keep waiting for it to blink,” she said.
The sky shifted as most stars tracked to the left. “The da Vinci,” Gomez continued her narration, “orbiting the Demon.” Her voice held a touch of awe, and Tev could hardly blame her. “At this distance, we’re fighting approximately six hundred gravities to maintain station.”
Marvelous. Tev noted several tense reactions around the table, though no one could tear their eyes away from the screen. It was an odd sky, the kind most explorers never dreamed of seeing (nor wanted to). The stars continued to track left, most of them, bending outward to flow around either side of the black hole. Except in a thin ring surrounding the void where the mirror images trapped in the first Einstein Ring counterrotated in the exact opposite direction.
The vessel finally came to rest, and the sky remained stable.
The table was silent for a moment, everyone lost in their own thoughts. There was a space station down inside that hell. What would they see? What kind of technology permitted them to survive? Tev’s hands itched to find out.
“This space station?” Dr. Lense asked. She sat at the other end of the table, and had remained very silent up to now. She often had just as much trouble following the engineer’s explanations as Faulwell, or Gold. “By ‘inside,’ you mean falling into?”
Gomez shook her head. “No. It is definitely anchored within the photon sphere, at approximately one-point-three Schwarzschild radii.” Lense frowned and Sonya explained further. “A Schwarzschild radius is equal to the radius of the black hole’s event horizon—the point where gravity goes to infinity. The photon sphere is where light can no longer escape, at one-point-five radii.” She smiled grimly. “That is the point where, if you look along the plane of the Einstein Ring, light would be perfectly bent around the black hole and you could see the back of your own head.”
The concept weighed heavily over the room for a few seconds. Faulwell skated a candy across the table to Lense. He pushed another over in front of the Tellarite. “So if this station is within the photon sphere, how can we see it?” he asked.
Tev ignored the candy and stifled the urge to lecture. It was not his discovery. Even though the process had been fairly rudimentary. Gomez nodded to Stevens, who took up the narrative from his seat.
“Probes. We threw one in orbit around the Demon, and then sent it and another into its mouth. Our subspace connection deteriorated rapidly, but by forming a kind of relay system from Probe One to Probe Two and back to the da Vinci, we managed to get those basic images. They also helped us pinpoint the gravitational anchor.”
Tev could not take it anymore. His large hand trapped the candy Faulwell had slid in front of him just to have something on which to concentrate. A twist of cellophane dumped out a greenish rock of square candy. “An anchor had to exist,” he said, looking at the strange emerald in the palm of his hand, “or the station would have fallen into the event horizon decades ago. Even accounting for time dilation.”
Gomez nodded. “Right,” she said, stealing back the floor. “Of course, there was another large sign, when we finally noticed. The gravimetric waves. You would expect them to radiate out in a fairly uniform manner. But they don’t.” She tapped the console in front of her, and the display shifted into a bluish tint. The black hole roiled with energy. Now it looked more like a mouth, chewing.
“This is the Hawking radiation evaporating off the Demon. It shows a large disturbance centered here”—she pointed it out with a wave of her hand—“where there is a discontinuity in the tidal forces. The station is somehow anchored to space far outside of the photon sphere, which has kept it safe. It has also created a mostly stable channel for approaching the station where the gravitational pull is far less than it should be.”
“How much less?” Lense asked.
Gomez’s voice was very small. “Somewhere around the order of one point five million gravities, as you approach the photon sphere.”
“And the gravimetric waves?” Gold asked, bringing them back on topic.
“Backsplash,” Tev said. Gomez glared at him, and he popped the candy into his mouth.
“Backsplash is actually a good way to look at it,” she allowed. “Take an ocean tide, rolling waves near an atoll. One of those waves starts to shallow, and crest, and then strikes a large rocky protuberance.”
Apple flavor washed the inside of Tev’s mouth as the candy began to slowly dissolve. Tart. Almost sour. “Momentum has a lot of force to it when interrupted,” he said, adding to Sonya’s explanation. Why not? He had tumbled to the source of the gravimetric waves before her, after all. His mouth puckered as the taste built up, and he swallowed, catching the candy between his teeth to hold on to it. Remarkable.
“Apple Rancher,” Faulwell said, leaning aside to whisper the candy’s name. He skated one to P8 Blue, who declined. Abramowitz grabbed it instead—the cultural specialist went through them like, well, like candy.
Captain Gold leaned back into his chair, steepling his fingers in front of him as he looked at some point on the wall over Tev’s head. “So we are proceeding on the assumption that this was a deliberate attempt to place some kind of outpost—a research station perhaps—inside a black hole. But now something has gone wrong?”
Abramowitz nodded. “Details on the Resaurians are sketchy. A few brief mentions in some corrupted old logs of a pre-Federation Earth ship captain named Archer, and not much else. Without more cultural details to go on, a research station seems the most logical choice. Except—”
“Except what?” Gold pounded on her hesitation right away.
“Well, the images we have of the station itself. I spoke with Pattie earlier,” she nodded to P8 Blue, “and there don’t seem to be any escape pods. Near as we can tell.”
“Or if there were any,” the structural specialist said, “they have already been used.”
The ship rocked again, and Gold waited until it passed. “Communications?” he asked. “Life signs?”
Stevens again. Tev shifted uncomfortably. “Unable to be sure. No answer to our hails, but given the nature of their distress call, I’d say no.” He leaned forward, resting against the table with hands clasped before him. “They piggybacked their anchor, using it as a kind of transmission medium, or antennae, to escape the black hole. Life signs…same answer. Our probe’s sensors couldn’t penetrate the station’s shielding, except on a very specific band.”
This was new. Tev straightened up, eager for more data. A few seats down, Gold did the same. “And that is?”
“Transporters,” Stevens said. “The shield harmonics are meant to allow transport.”
“Transporters?” Gold frowned. “Through that kind of gravimetric interference?” Gold might not always understand the engineering side of things, but he knew his ship well. Tev had to give him credit for that. “Risky.” He leaned forward, waving a finger in the air. “Didn’t Voyager fall into a singularity recently?”
The logs that had been coming in from Project Voyager—which had managed to make contact with that ship in the Delta Quadrant, where it had been all but stranded for six years—had made for fascinating reading for the entire S.C.E. team, Tev knew. They had encountered some phenomena that almost defied belief.
Stevens answered the captain’s question. “Their chief engineer rigged up a dekyon beam to reopen the ‘rift’ by which they entered. Nothing like that will work here. I think transporters are our best bet.”
Gomez nodded reluctant agreement. “I was thinking that Tev might be our answer.”
He was? Tev swallowed, the hard rock of candy forcing its way down his throat with reluctance. He coughed into a large fist, and Faulwell hit him on the back. He shrugged away from the affable linguist, able to recover better on his own. Faulwell looked wounded. “You want me to transport over?”
“I want you to rig up a transporter relay system that can get a team over there. We’ll take pattern enhancers, which should aid in recovery of any trapped crew.”
Tev blinked in surprise that Gomez was acknowledging his expertise. “A relay?”
“Through a series of probes. You wrote a paper on the miniaturizing of transporters, didn’t you? Can you rig up some kind of circuit that will pass through our patterns, without distortion?”
He snuffled. He should have thought of that. One of his specialties, in fact, and Sonya Gomez handed it to him as a favor! She certainly hadn’t wanted to share the credit, as competitive as the S.C.E. team always seemed to perform. “Yes. It can be done. Quite easily, I should think.”
“I’ll want a trio of security personnel to escort any away team,” Corsi said.
Lense nodded. “I’ll join it with medical supplies. There might be injuries over there.”
“Let’s set it up,” Gold said. “But I want it well tested before we commit any live personnel to it.” He pointed at the screen, where the Demon was frozen in timeless pause. “That is one of the most destructive forces in the known universe. We treat it with great, great respect at all times. Clear?”
Sonya answered for the team. “Yes, Captain.” She looked them over. Shrugged. “What are you waiting for? Get to work.”
Tev felt that last comment aimed right for him. It didn’t matter what he had solved yesterday, or even this morning. What mattered was what he contributed now. Commander Gomez had made that amply clear.
He stood, waiting while Gold and Gomez left first. He would have been third out of the room, by seniority, but he paused. Faulwell was gathering his wrappers. When the language specialist looked up, he found Tev standing just inside the door. They were the last two left.
“Dr. Faulwell, I was wondering?”
The slight man rubbed at his beard. “Yes, Tev?”
The Tellarite glanced back into the hall. No one. He snuffled. He needed to get back to work. He would have to try even harder. But first…
“May I have another piece of candy?”
Chapter
6
Gold kept his finger on the pulse of his ship, constantly in touch with engineering and the transporter room. The bridge was a beehive of activity as Tev diligently worked to become a miracle worker and transport the away team down to the station through a relay system, circumventing the titanic forces of a black hole.
The captain snorted softly. It would almost be worth interrupting Tev to see what his oh-so-dry response to “miracle worker” would be.
“Captain, I’ve definitely verified it’s an ion trail,” Shabalala said.
“How old?”
Shabalala tapped his screen with practiced efficiency. “I’m not sure. Our sensors are still catching massive interference. The best I can say is three to five days; just can’t narrow it down any more. I’m sorry, Captain.”
“That’s narrow enough.” He shifted slightly in his chair (would they ever make one of these that actually felt comfortable?) as he tried to accept what that meant.
“Captain,” Shabalala began as he turned a concerned look toward his captain, “that means—”
“It means that ship must have detected the signal and yet…what happened? Did they depart? Go in?”
Shabalala looked down at the sensors for a moment before answering. “The gravimetric waves, not to mention the massive flux of Hawking radiation, are making it very difficult to analyze the ion trail. Hell, we spent how many hours here before it was even detected?”
Gold tried not to read too much into the defensive tone, but his own lack of sleep had him on edge as well.
He leaned back in his chair, staring out the viewscreen at the awesome maw before him and tried to think through the sensor readings. He began to knead the muscles of his neck when his skin prickled with the knowledge that this flesh did not belong to him; Gold almost shivered when an echo of his nightmare shimmered before his eyes, as though part of the maw itself. He stood abruptly and walked around to Shabalala’s side at the tactical station behind his chair, trying to hide his agitation; that had never happened once he was fully awake. Though he felt the need to face down this specter again, he set it aside for another day.
His crew and his ship needed him right now.
He laid his hand comfortably on the lieutenant’s shoulder. “What can you tell me about the trail?”
The gesture and tone of voice seemed to work, and he felt the tension draining out of Shabalala’s muscles. “I can place it about three to five days ago. There appears to be a second trail—almost a mirror image—but that could simply be an echoing effect: a version of the Einstein Ring, where the trail is duplicated.”
“There’s no debris?”
“None.”
“Then I’d say that leaves us with two possible answers. One: a ship approached, drew almost to the photon sphere, perhaps hearing the distress signal, and then departed. Two: a ship approached, heard the distress signal, and attempted a rescue by actually taking the ship beyond the photon sphere.”
“Captain,” Tev interrupted. Gold turned to see the Tellarite standing almost at his shoulder, snuffling.
“Yes.”
“Your second hypothesis is incorrect. If the ship traversed the photon sphere, our sensors would still be able to locate its presence—or the absence of its presence. As such, for the craft to simply have vanished to the point that our sensors refuse to reveal its location, it would need to pass through the event horizon, not simply the photon sphere.” The black orbs of Tev’s eyes reminded the captain of the black hole: light, matter, even emotions, seemed to vanish into those depths without a trace, without a reaction from Tev in the slightest.
“That would, in effect, be the same thing, wouldn’t it?” Gold could feel the shaking of Shabalala’s shoulders as the tactical officer attempted to repress his laughter. Poor Tev. We humans can be more difficult to understand than Klingons or even Romulans. Nothing we say can be taken literally.
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Gold’s words finally seemed to affect Tev as he raised his bushy, foliage-quality eyebrows, as though shocked his own captain could be so dense. “Of course it is different, Captain. Though I could explain it in detail, the most telling difference would be the location of the ship. With the right knowledge and technology a ship might survive crossing the photon sphere. No ship could survive crossing the event horizon.”
Gold raised his hand. “I’m sorry, Tev. I know what you meant. What I meant is either the ship stayed, or it passed and simply vanished. Either way there is no trace of it and we’ve still got our team heading across that same barrier.”
Tev snuffled loudly, and Gold suddenly realized this must be a Tellarite way of clearing their throat before speaking. Could Tev actually be nervous about something?
“Captain,” Tev began. If he was nervous, it didn’t show. “The modifications are completed. I’m leaving now to monitor a test directly from the transporter room as we send a probe into the Demon. As soon as it succeeds, the away team can be sent.”
“Excellent.”
“You know that it should be me leading the away team. My theories and ultimate application allowed for this success. My knowledge and experience on this matter are greater than any other crew member’s.”
“Exactly,” Gold said. “Which is why Gomez wants you to stay on the ship. If there’s a problem, your knowledge is the only lever we have.”
“It will not fail, Captain.”
“Of course it won’t. But other problems are likely to arise, and you’re the one needed here.”
Tev snuffled and then bowed his head ever so slightly; orders were still orders. He shuffled off, and Gold watched him head toward the turbolift.
“And Tev?”
The second officer stopped and turned. “Sir?”
“The composition of the away team is Commander Gomez’s decision. You have a problem, talk to her. Don’t think you’re going to accomplish anything—with her or with me—by going over her head. Got it?”
“Yes, sir.”
The Demon Book 1 Page 3
