Dark Space Universe (Book 2): The Enemy Within

by Jasper T. Scott

  “I think it is my fault,” Brak said, and Lucien turned to see him on the level below, holding up the silver ball that was the key to the gateway.

  Garek barked a laugh. “Nice job, big guy.”

  “There might still be a way to open the portal from here,” Lucien said. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. We’re not going back—and we’re not going to Astralis.”

  “How about we vote on that?” Garek suggested. “We voted to join Katawa on this crazy quest in the first place, so it seems only fitting that we should vote to decide where we go next. All in favor of going to find Astralis?”

  Garek raised his hand.

  Addy’s eyes flicked from him to Lucien and back. “I think Lucien’s right. If the Polypuses can see the future and they wanted us to go to Etheria first, then it must be for a reason.”

  “Brak?” Garek prompted. “What do you think?”

  “My people must never become slaves again. If that is what we risk by Abaddon finding the fleet, then we must return it to Etheria as quickly as possible.”

  “Fine,” Garek gritted out and thrust an accusing finger in Lucien’s face. “But if something happens to Astralis, it’s on all of your heads!” With that, he stalked away, fuming.

  “What’s that?” Addy asked, as Lucien closed the contacts panel and returned to the star map. She pointed to one side of the cluster of green blips that was the Etherian fleet, to a region of brightness that dominated the right side of the map. “Are we orbiting a sun?”

  “I don’t know,” Lucien admitted. He zoomed out the display until all one thousand and fifty seven green blips clustered together into a single green speck. From there he continued zooming out until that region of brightness coalesced into the familiar shape of an accretion disk. “Uh oh...” Lucien whispered.

  “Uh oh, what? What’s going on?” Garek demanded, stalking back over to them. Upon seeing the map, he went suddenly very still. “Krak...” he whispered.

  Brak came up from the lower level of the bridge to see what had everyone so concerned. When he saw the display, he hissed with displeasure.

  They all had enough experience with space travel to know what they were looking at. Accretion disks formed around black holes. Lucien tried selecting the black hole, and a pair of brackets appeared around it. Sensors reported its size to be more than a hundred million standard solar masses. Making matters worse, this black hole was spinning very fast.

  Lucien remembered dealing with this type of black hole on a theoretical level at school while he’d been training to become a Paragon. They were dubbed time machines because the time dilation around them could be severe even at the range of safe, stable orbits. Most black holes only had extreme time dilation close to their event horizons, where the orbital velocity required to maintain a stable orbit was too high for any ship to safely reach.

  “What’s our time dilation?” Garek asked quietly.

  Lucien spied a link at the bottom of the sensor display to something called gravimetric readings. He touched that with his index finger, and the display changed, showing a wireframe visual of the black hole’s gravity field. The field was depicted as an infinitely deep funnel, which was technically only accurate in two-dimensions, but it worked well enough to illustrate the shape of space-time around the black hole. The green dot that represented the Etherian fleet lay along the steep, inward-sloping curve of the funnel. Radial lines in the wireframe were each marked a value for t=___, and according to the legend at the bottom of the display, the “t” was for the time dilation factor.

  The t values grew progressively larger as they approached the red radial line that coincided with the event horizon of the black hole, while the line closest to the fleet’s location was marked with t=700, but they were sitting just past that line, heading toward the next one, marked t=800. Lucien tried selecting the green dot that represented the fleet, and he got a new value for t.

  “Seven hundred and seventeen...” Garek whispered, reading the value. “So every second we spend here is...” he trailed off, and Lucien saw images flickering over his eyes as he ran the calculation on his ARCs. “Almost 12 minutes for a stationary observer!” Garek burst out.

  “That means every minute is almost twelve hours,” Addy said.

  “What if we have to spend a day trying to figure out how to fly the fleet out of here?” Garek demanded. He paused, and Lucien saw images flickering over his eyes once more. “Almost two years will have passed for everyone on Astralis!”

  “And Etheria,” Addy said.

  “Yeah, and then we still have to calculate the jump to Etheria for more than a thousand ships, and who knows how long that will take,” Garek said.

  Lucien shook his head, speechless. This definitely threw a corkscrew in their plans.

  “What’s ten thousand years with that time dilation factor?” Addy thought to ask.

  Lucien ran the calculation on his ARCs—10,000 divided by 717. “A little less than fourteen years.”

  “So that’s how long the fleet has been here from its own frame of reference,” Addy said. “No wonder the Grays left the lights on. By the time these ships run out of power, another hundred thousand years will have passed for the rest of the universe.”

  “We’d better get started, then,” Lucien said. “Every moment we spend here trying to figure out how to get the fleet back to Etheria, Abaddon’s going to have seven hundred and seventeen moments to find us. Addy—see if you can find the nav station.”

  “What’s the point?” Garek demanded. “We can’t move more than a thousand ships by ourselves! Even if we could, it would take too long.”

  “The Polypuses must have thought we could do it,” Lucien countered. “I’m betting the ships are all set to follow each other, and since the gateway led to the largest ship in the fleet, it’s probably the one that all the others are set to follow.”

  “That’s just a wild guess!” Garek said. “The Grays might have had a pilot on board each of these ships when they maneuvered them into position.”

  “I found the nav station!” Addy called out.

  Lucien turned from Garek to see Addy now seated at a control station on the level below. “Good. See if you can break orbit—away from the black hole.”

  “That goes without saying... powering engines...” A whirring noise started up somewhere deep below their feet, and quickly rose in pitch until it became a steady thrumming sound. “Setting thrust to seventy-five percent, and nosing up twenty degrees.”

  “What’s up?” Lucien asked.

  “Away from the black hole,” Addy replied.

  “Just checking.”

  Addy was figuring out the nav systems fast. As a Paragon she had plenty of flight training, but Lucien was surprised that the Etherian control systems were so intuitive.

  “And?” Lucien prompted after a few seconds had passed. It was hard to believe each of those seconds was twelve minutes back on Astralis.

  “You were right!” Addy said. “The other ships are following us!”

  Lucien flashed a triumphant grin at Garek. “What’d I tell you?”

  “Lucky guess,” Garek mumbled.

  Lucien shrugged. “It’s what I would have done if I were planning to leave just one person at the helm of an entire fleet. He would have needed to be able to move the fleet easily by himself in case its location was discovered.”

  Garek snorted and turned his attention to Addy. “See if you can figure out how to plot a micro-jump and get us out of the time dilation zone.”

  “Yeah... I’ve already figured that out.”

  “That was fast,” Lucien said.

  “The controls are highly intuitive,” Addy said. “Anyway, that’s not the point. We can’t jump out of here. Not yet, anyway.”

  Garek’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Why not?”

  “We’re inside the magnetic field of the black hole.”

  Lucien grimaced.

  “How far does the field reach?” Garek asked.

&
nbsp; “That depends how much of a risk you want to take,” Addy replied. “The chance of scattering if we jump from here is sixty-five percent.”

  “We can’t risk that,” Lucien said.

  “The chances drop the farther out we get. If we plot a jump at five hundred light seconds from here, the probability of scattering drops to just ten percent.”

  “Five hundred light seconds?” Garek echoed. “What’s our ETA to reach that point at max thrust?” Garek asked.

  “Almost a full standard hour,” Addy replied. “And that’s probably an Etherian standard hour, which is even longer. By the time we get there, a month or more could have passed on Astralis, but that’s probably a lot less than the overall time it will take for us to get this fleet back to Etheria.”

  “And just where is Etheria?” Garek asked. “Have any of you thought to check that yet?”

  Lucien shook his head. “We’re probably going to have to dig through the ship’s star charts to find it. Why don’t you and Brak go find control stations and help us look? We’ve got an hour to kill, we may as well use it for something.”

  Garek didn’t need to be told twice. He stormed over to the nearest control station and took a seat. Brak hesitated for a moment before doing the same, and Lucien busied himself looking through various holo displays for the Etherian star charts.

  After a few seconds, he found a link to something called Universal Map. He opened that, and was immediately greeted with a kind of pinched sphere, wrapped with stars. He blinked in shock, his heart suddenly racing with excitement. With all the drama surrounding their dealings with the Faros, they’d lost sight of their original goal in traveling beyond the Red Line. Astralis’s mission was to discover the true nature of the universe, its shape, extent, and whatever else they could learn. And here, both its shape and extent were clearly marked.

  The universe appeared to be wrapped around a distorted sphere, pinched together at the poles, and bulging out at the rim/equator, with an infinitesimally small hole in the center. It was a type of torus.

  “I don’t believe it...” Lucien whispered.

  “What?” Garek called back.

  “The universe,” Addy replied. “It’s... a donut?”

  Lucien smiled at that. “A horn torus, actually, but yeah I guess that’s kind of a donut.” Lucien zoomed in on the torus and manipulated it with his hands, watching the stars glitter. “This is a 2D simplification,” he realized. “We can’t picture a 3D torus from the outside. We’d need to be able to see an extra spatial dimension to do that.”

  “Maybe we can ask the Polypuses what it looks like,” Garek said.

  “I don’t think we’d understand their description even if they could explain,” Lucien replied.

  “Simplification or not, it conveys the concept clearly enough,” Addy said. “Why’s the bottom half of the map dark and fuzzy?”

  Lucien studied the torus and frowned. Addy was right. The top half was bright with stars, but the bottom half was blurry and kind of grayed-out.

  “I bet that’s the universe on the other side that Oorgurak mentioned,” Addy said.

  Lucien nodded slowly. “I forgot about that.”

  “Whatever it is, it looks like not even the Etherians have been there,” Garek said.

  “I wonder why,” Lucien mused. “Seems like you could get there easily enough...” Then he noticed the dark band of empty black nothingness running around the equatorial rim of the torus, separating the top from the bottom.

  “The Great Abyss lies between the two universes,” Addy said, again noticing the same things as him.

  “So maybe it can’t be crossed?” Garek suggested.

  Lucien shook his head. “Maybe...” He found a search button to one side of the display, and tapped it. A holographic keypad appeared in his lap, and he typed in Etheria.

  A green dot appeared near the center of the torus, in the funnel-shaped hole leading up from the fuzzy bottom half.

  “Etheria is—”

  “On the other side of the universe,” Addy finished for him.

  “No wonder we’ve never been able to find it on our own,” Lucien said.

  “Fascinating. How long will it take us to get there?” Garek asked. “Try plotting a jump, see what the ship says.”

  “Hang on,” Addy replied.

  While he waited, Lucien played around with the Universal Map, zooming in to smaller and smaller scales. He picked a random spiral galaxy, and from there a random star...

  Only to be assaulted by a plethora of information about the system, its sun, planets, moons, intelligent species, governments, space stations... even large starships were listed on the contacts panel of the star system. As he watched, one of those ships disappeared, and the locations of the others shifted subtly as they moved through space.

  Lucien blinked in shock. The system wasn’t inside the Red Line, so where had all of that information come from? More importantly, how could any of it be live data?

  He tried searching for Laniakea, which the Red Line encompassed, just to be sure that the system he’d chosen wasn’t inside of it. The map zoomed all the way out to show him a red dot at the center of the universe.

  “Ah... guys, try searching for Laniakea.”

  “Why?” Garek asked. “Where is it?”

  “At the center of the universe,” Lucien replied.

  “What?” Garek asked. “You’re joking.”

  “No, he’s right...” Addy replied.

  “It would be funny if it weren’t so sad,” Lucien said. “Galileo must be rolling in his grave.”

  “Gali-who?” Garek asked.

  “Galileo. The inventor of the telescope... he was the first person to propose that Earth wasn’t the center of the universe.”

  “Actually that was Copernicus,” Addy said.

  “I’ll take your word for it,” Garek replied. “It’s been a long time since I studied any of that stuff.”

  Lucien tried zooming in on another random system, and this time he made sure that it was far from the red dot of Laniakea at the center of the universe.

  The system was called Tekken Prime. It had two suns, six planets, and twenty-seven moons, with just one intelligent species—the Tekken—and a unified feudal government. The Faros were not mentioned, which Lucien took to mean that they hadn’t found or enslaved the Tekken yet. Again the contacts panel for the system was populated with live data for all the ships and space stations in the system.

  “That’s impossible...” Lucien breathed, shaking his head.

  “What’s not possible?” Garek asked.

  He explained what he was seeing, but it sounded even more absurd when he said it out loud.

  “There’s no way our sensors can detect that level of detail from here,” Addy said.

  “Exactly—there’s no way, and yet the Etherians seem to have found one,” Lucien replied.

  “Then maybe Etherus is God. Or at least a god. He has to be,” Addy said.

  “Maybe, yeah...” Lucien replied. “At the very least, it means the Etherians have found a way to tap into a truly instantaneous form of communication.”

  “I wonder if the Faros have this technology?” Garek asked.

  “If they did, then they wouldn’t need to find the lost fleet in order to find Etheria,” Lucien replied.

  “Then I guess they don’t have the same tech. You realize what this means,” Garek said.

  Lucien shook his head. “No, what?”

  “It means we can probably find Astralis from here. We don’t have to risk looking for them by jumping to random systems around their last known location. And it also means we can identify a safe route to get there, checking systems for signs of the Faros before we make a jump.”

  “Garek’s right,” Addy said. “This changes everything. Now we have a clear tactical edge over the Faros.”

  Lucien frowned, unconvinced.

  “I think we need to re-take the vote,” Garek said.

  “Hang on,” L
ucien said. “Before we get carried away, let’s be sure we really can find Astralis. It’s a big universe. Searching every system for it will literally take forever.”

  “Found it!” Garek crowed.

  Lucien’s frown deepened. He tried searching for Astralis this time. Almost instantly, a new star system appeared, and sure enough, his view of that system was centered on a green dot labeled Astralis. Lucien selected that contact to read more about it, just to be sure.

  “The size and shape match,” Addy said, beating him to it. “It’s them all right.”

  “They’re twenty-nine billion light years away,” Lucien pointed out. “It could still take a long time for us to reach them.”

  “Plotting a course...” Addy said. “Got it!”

  “You calculated a jump there already?” Lucien asked, suddenly wondering if Etherian jump tech was somehow instant, too.

  “The route is finished calculating—” Addy clarified. “—not the actual jumps. There’s over a hundred stops along the way, and the time to reach our destination is estimated at... twenty-six days, eight hours, and thirty-eight minutes.”

  “Less than a month!” Garek said.

  Lucien’s brow felt heavy, his eyes tight. “We’d have to make sure all those stops are safe before we jump to them.”

  “We can adjust the route as we go,” Garek suggested. “Zigging or zagging by a few light years here or there isn’t going to make a difference to our arrival time. So?” Garek prompted. “All in favor of going to Astralis, and then Etheria?”

  Everyone stuck their hand up except for Lucien. Seeing that, he gradually raised his own hand.

  Garek twisted off his helmet and set it beside him. “It’s unanimous,” he said, looking around and nodding with a rare smile on his face. “We’re going home.”

  “Yeah...” Lucien replied, feeling unsettled by that decision. If this was such a good idea, then why had the Polypuses been so adamant about them going to Etheria first? Lucien had a bad feeling they were making a big mistake. “What if Astralis overrules our decision to take the fleet back to Etheria?” he asked. “They might want to use it to continue their mission. With perfectly accurate recon data we wouldn’t have to worry about running into Faros again.”