Event Horizon

by Steven E. Mcdonald

  “It’s complicated…” Weir trailed off, looking abashed at the weakness of this answer.

  “How much time do you need?” Miller said, taking several steps closer to Weir, leaning down on the briefing table, using his clenched fists for support. “We have seventeen hours and forty-two minutes. Now… what is in the Core?”

  Weir was silent for too long again. Miller began to consider less civil methods of getting information out of Weir. Suddenly, the scientist seemed to make a decision.

  Weir sat forward, staring wildly at Miller.

  “A black hole,” Weir said.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Miller and Starck stood at the end of the walkway into the Second Containment, watching the Core uneasily. Neither of them trusted Weir’s pet Tinkertoy. The rings were moving slowly, quietly, but the Core itself had an eerie rippling effect, a sense of a great dark power somehow confined to a small space.

  All around them, power hummed and sang of enormous energies. Miller felt dwarfed in this space.

  Weir, by contrast, was at ease again, walking around the Core, inspecting it, looking it over like a loving father. Miller almost expected him to reach out and pet the thing.

  Weir turned and looked up at them. “When a star dies, it collapses in on itself, becomes so dense that nothing can escape its gravity, not even light.

  It becomes a black hole.”

  Starck was staring at the Core, unwavering. “The most destructive force in the universe,” she whispered. “And you created one.”

  “Yes,” Weir said. He seemed infernally cheerful. “We can use that power to fold space-time.”

  Not as much power as Weir would like everyone to think, Miller reflected. He was ready to bet that Weir’s Core actually dealt with quantum black holes as postulated in the work of Stephen Hawking and others in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Given Weir’s ability to produce one on cue and trap it within the Core, there was enough power there to fold space-time nicely. It had been speculated that the 1907 Tunguska incident had been caused by a quantum black hole rather than a meteorite.

  Either way, Weir had a tiger by the tail in here, and he knew it. You arrogant son of a bitch, Miller thought.

  “It would take the Lewis and Clark a thousand years to reach our closest star. The Event Horizon could be there in a day.”

  Sotto voce to Miller, Starck said, “If it worked.”

  Weir smiled. “You can come down. It’s perfectly safe.”

  Miller and Starck exchanged looks, then walked down to the Core. Everything in here, with the exception of the Core itself, seemed to be coated with coolant. It gave Miller the uncomfortable feeling of walking willingly into the belly of the whale. Hello, my name is Jonah, I am an appetizer.

  Somewhere the idea had lost its humorous edge.

  Miller and Starck stopped before the Core, staring up at it, getting a closer look at the machinery as it moved around. Even at this close a range, the Core played optical tricks. Miller felt vaguely sick.

  “You let us board this ship,” Miller said to Weir, “and you didn’t tell us?”

  Weir turned to face Miller, folding his arms. “My instructions were .to brief you on a need-to-know basis. Given our current situation, you need to know.”

  Miller stared at Weir, barely able to comprehend the man’s attitude. “I want this room sealed. The Second Containment is off limits.”

  Weir was trying to stare Miller down, but it was not working. “There’s no danger. The black hole is contained behind three magnetic fields. It’s under control.”

  “Under control?” Miller growled. He waved an arm. pointing to somewhere out beyond the confines of the Event Horizon. “My ship is in pieces. Justin is dying.” Miller took a deep breath, trying to rein his temper in without success ‘No one goes near that thing.”

  Miller turned around and started back up the walkway. Starck stared at Weir for a moment more, then she followed her captain.

  Weir watched them leave.

  Overhead, the power sang.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Peters squeezed her eyes shut and rubbed at her face, trying to blot out, for a moment at least, the tedious log visuals from the bridge flight recorder. Captain Kilpack and his crew had been meticulous about making log entries, but had not had much of any consequence to record.

  She sat back, knowing she was starting to fade, and growing angry at doing so, even though she knew that was unreasonable. It would not have bothered her so much if she had something to show Miller. There was nothing yet.

  Another structural status report. She sighed.

  The lights nickered. Startled, she looked up, but the lights had steadied again. She looked back down at her screen.

  Behind her, something made a rustling sound, like something moving over paper. She turned around, slowly. “Justin?”

  Justin was still lying on the examination table, a sheet covering him. He had not moved or woken.

  Something had made the sound.

  The hairs rose on the back of her neck and she felt her arms breaking out in goosebumps. Cautiously, she reached out and grasped a scalpel from the instrument tray that DJ had set out for any further emergencies.

  The sound started again, became clearer, became the sound of someone scrabbling at plastic, trying to break through with nothing more than fingernails and determination.

  She stood up, walked past Justin, following the sound. The examination tables were covered in plastic sheeting, never having been readied for use.

  The plastic around the last table was moving, something writhing beneath it. Not certain why she was doing so, she reached out and grasped the edge of the plastic cover, pulling it back, needing to know what was under there, what was calling her.…

  Denny.

  She gasped, suddenly weak, nerveless. The scalpel slipped from her fingers, struck the deck, bounced with a tinny noise.

  Denny. He looked up at her from the table, his waist and legs still beneath the plastic, looked up at her and giggled in that way that he had,,amused at a world that insisted on being silly to his perspective.

  He reached up to her, and she remembered the vid she had been watching on the Lewis and Clark. She should pick him up, she thought, that’s what Mom does, playing horsey.

  “Mommy…” Denny said, and he giggled again, as though this was just the best game in the world. His eyes shone, and she spilled over with love for him..

  She started to pull the plastic further back, knowing she had to get him out from under there and that they could figure out the explanations later.

  Then she saw what she had missed before. Where Denny’s atrophied legs should have been, beneath the plastic, something was squirming frantically, like a bag of angry snakes, the plastic pulsing up and down.

  Horrified, she dropped the plastic sheet, backing away. This could not have been Denny. Her son was on Earth, with his father.

  “Peters?”

  She turned too fast, almost losing her balance. DJ was standing in the hatchway, holding a collection of blood sample containers in rubber-gloved hands. His usual mask had slipped a little, revealing concern.

  She turned back toward Denny.

  The table was empty. Her son, or whatever was masquerading as her son, was gone. She looked back at DJ again.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, putting the blood samples aside.

  “I…” Peters started. She hesitated, trying to clear her mind. The images were trying to fade, becoming elusive. She squeezed her eyes shut, shuddering.

  “I’m very tired, that’s all. It’s nothing.”

  She made her way back to the workstation, trying to focus on her work.

  It’s nothing.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Right now EVA was not precisely the thing Cooper wanted to do, despite his earlier eagerness. If anything, he would have preferred being in a Gravity Couch, totally out of it and well on the way back to Earth aboard the Lewis and Clark. Thi
s mission was totally, crazily, out of hand.

  The one positive thing here was the size of the Event Horizon. That meant more airlock bays, which got around having the umbilicus in the way.

  The inner airlock door hissed open and Smith stepped into the bay, undogging his helmet and pulling it off. His hair was matted down, slick with sweat.

  “You been out there a long time,” Cooper said, looking him over. “Trying to break my record?”

  Smith sat down heavily on a bench, getting his gloves off. “I’d rather spend the next twelve hours outside than another five minutes in this can.”

  Cooper made a moue of disgust. “You don’t need to tell me that. I pulled a lot of ops in my time, seen decompression, radiation… but what I saw today…”

  Cooper trailed off, unable to say any more. He could not push the images out of his mind, no matter how he tried.

  “How is Justin?” Smith asked, interrupting the silence.

  Cooper shook his head, “Same.”

  Smith opened his suit, then reached down to get his boots off. An EVA suit keeps you alive but makes you smell very, very bad in the process.

  Suddenly, Smith said, “When I was a kid, my mother used to tell me I was gonna go to a bad place. And she was right.” Smith’s eyes were filled with a fervor that Cooper found more than a little spooky. “This ship, it’s crazy, you know. I mean, trying to go faster than light, that’s like the Tower of Babel. You know what God did to the Tower of Babel, don’t you? He cast it down.”

  Cooper sighed, shaking his head. “Smith, we got enough shit going on without you going biblical on me.”

  Cooper picked up his helmet, put it on, and sealed it, hearing the hiss.

  Without waiting for Smith to check him over, he walked over to the airlock, hit the door control, and ducked through.

  All of a sudden, being outside had become very, very attractive.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Miller, DJ, and Weir had gathered behind Peters as she recalled the last entry in the Event Horizon log. She had found nothing useful so far.

  “This is the final entry in the ship’s log,” she said, and pressed the play control.

  The video display cleared. Captain Kilpack appeared on the screen, sitting in the center seat. He looked excited, as well he should; this was the main event in the Event Horizon’s maiden voyage. His crew, all eighteen of them, were gathered behind him. A few solemn faces, many smiles.

  Kilpack said, “I want to say how proud I am of my crew. I’d like to name my station heads Chris Chambers, Janice Rubin, Dick Smith, Tom Fender, and Stacie Collins. We have reached safe distance and are preparing to engage the gravity drive and open the gateway to Proxima Centauri.”

  “I wonder if they made it?” Miller said, quietly.

  On the screen, Kilpack raised a hand in salute and said, “Ave atque vale.

  Hail and farewell.”

  Little did they know, Miller thought.

  There was a burst of static across the screen. At first Miller thought the log disc had simply run its course, but then realized that it would then have simply stopped playing, shutting off the system. There was something else on the disc.

  A terrible sound came pouring from the speakers, shrieking and inhuman, something out the depths of their nightmares. Peters yelped and reached for the gain slider, cutting the racket down.

  To Miller, there was more than static on the screen. There was something moving inside the image. He reached out, tapping the pause control. He squinted at the screen, trying to resolve the image in the frozen frame. There was definitely something there, but he could not make it out at all now.

  Peters was squinting at the frame too.

  “What is that?” he asked her.

  Peters shook her head. “I can run the image through a series of filters, try to clean it up.”

  There was a chance that they might learn something useful from the scrambled section of the disc. Miller nodded. “Proceed.”

  Without warning, the lights faded out slowly. Emergency lighting came on, illuminating them with a dim, reddish wash.

  “A power drain,” DJ said. Miller had to agree—something had been activated. He had a terrible suspicion about the reason for the drain.

  “The Core!” Weir snapped, turning to Miller.

  “Go!” Miller said.

  Weir ran for the door.

  “The rest of you stay here,” Miller said, before DJ could head for the door. “I don’t want anyone else going near that thing.”

  Miller took off after Weir.

  He caught up with the scientist halfway down the main corridor, surprised at how fast Weir was able to move. They ran together through the First Containment and down the tunnel into the Second Containment, not waiting for the main door to open fully, squeezing by as soon as they could, not an easy trick for a man as tall and broad-shouldered as Miller.

  “What’s causing the drain?” Miller asked, as Weir went over to the main console.

  “The magnetic fields are holding,” Weir said, examining the readouts. He shook his head, looking baffled. “Maybe a short in the fail-safe circuit. I’ll check it out.”

  Weir turned away from the console and opened a wall panel. To Miller’s surprise, there were tools and flashlights inside. Weir handed tools to Miller, and waved him over to an access panel on the wall. They set to work silently, removing bolts and magnetic clamps.

  Behind the access panel was a cramped-looking duct. Miller could see circuitry and modules inside as he bent down to look. The duct seemed to go for quite a distance.

  He looked at Weir, dubious. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  “Of course,” Weir said. To Miller, he sounded as though he believed it too.

  Miller handed him a flashlight and a small, wrapped toolkit.

  Weir tossed the flashlight and tools into the duct, then hauled himself inside. He almost filled the duct, but he seemed to have no trouble moving.

  Miller shook his head. Weir was a walking contradiction.

  Weir’s boots vanished from sight.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  The air in the operations duct was even more stale than the air circulating in the main part of the Event Horizon. Weir managed to tolerate it with difficulty—there was a job to do, and the sooner he did it, the sooner he would be out of there. He wished he had had a chance to sample real Earth air once more before coming out here, but he had not been off Daylight Station for years.

  He had found himself unable to conceive of taking a journey back down the length of Skyhook One.

  His breathing echoed in the cramped duct.

  He crept forward, counting off circuit panels for Miller’s benefit.

  “E-Three… E-Five… E-Seven… where are you…?”

  Starck had settled into a routine at the engineering board, trying to hammer the bio-scan into behaving itself. So far nothing had seemed to help.

  A yellow light began flashing in the upper left corner of the console.

  Starck stared, a feeling of dread stealing over her. New lights joined the first—more yellows, greens.

  “What is—” she started.

  The bio-scan flickered to life, the meters immediately pegging at the end of the scale on all readouts.

  She hit the intercom switch. “Captain, the bio-scan just went off the scale.”

  She shook her head.

  Something bad was going on here.

  DJ made it across the medical bay in record time, only to realize that there was little he could do at the moment. Justin was in the throes of an epileptic seizure, thrashing about on the examination table.

  DJ leaned over him, ready to intervene if Justin’s seizure showed signs of being dangerous or of throwing him to the deck. This might be a breakthrough point too, a sign that Justin was coming out of the coma.

  “Justin!” DJ said, on the off chance that his patient was regaining consciousness. “Can you hear me? Justin!”

  T
here was something going on. Justin’s mouth was working as he tried to speak, and his eyes were open, albeit unfocused. DJ leaned in towards him, trying to hear.

  Justin suddenly arched, all of his muscles becoming rigid, as though he were being electrocuted. DJ looked up, alarmed.

  “He’s coming,” Justin hissed. His voice sounded broken, a remnant of the torturer’s art.

  DJ felt cold. “Who? Who’s coming?”

  “The dark!” Justin hissed. Something bubbled in his voice.

  It might have been laughter.

  There you are,” Weir said.

  Module E-12 was making a curious spitting and fizzing sound, very faint, but enough to indicate a potentially serious problem.

  Weir produced a screwdriver from the toolkit, opening up the module in a few moments. The cause of the problem was immediately evident—one of the circuit boards was quietly frying itself, a handful of sparks flying off. Weir reached into the module and yanked the board out.

  He pulled more tools out of the kit, and set to work. These modules were triple-redundant throughout the Event Horizon, but the removal of a board meant installing a bypass so that the system would not go looking for the missing chunk of circuitry. Getting the bypass in place was a minute or two of cramped, uncomfortable work.

  As he started to back up, readying himself to get out of the duct, his flashlight began to flicker. He grunted, annoyed at the timing, and banged it against the duct wall, making the metal boom. Miller had handed him one of the Event Horizon’s flashlights, which might explain why this one was dying now.

  The flashlights had been equipped with lithium-ion batteries, but even those had limits when it came to their life.

  The light dimmed again. He shook it, but it did not help. The flashlight gave a last fitful glow and went out, plunging him into darkness.

  “Um, Captain Miller?” Weir said, slowly. “I seem to have a problem with my light.”