by Ian Douglas
He opened a ship-wide broadcast channel. “All hands,” he said over the internal link. “This is Commander St. Clair. The ship is about to cross the event horizon of the super-massive black hole at the Galaxy’s center. Our FTL drive is out, our gravitics insufficient to change our course. There seems to be no way to break free. I . . . I just wanted to say that it has been a privilege serving with each and every—”
The impact that rocked the ship was stronger, more savage, and more violent than anything St. Clair had ever experienced. It slammed him against his seat, slammed his brain into ringing darkness.
At least the ongoing, thunderous vibration had stopped. . . .
In Ad Astra’s #4 drop tube array . . .
LIEUTENANT CHRISTOPHER Merrick kept his eyes tightly shut—not to keep from seeing what was happening, but to close off the depressingly claustrophobic walls of the drop tube embracing his ASF-99 Wasp fighter. Merrick and the eleven other members of GFA-86, the Stardogs, were on Ready One, meaning their fighters were set to launch in less than one minute if the commander or the aerospace CO gave the word. For the past two hours, though, he’d waited there, locked inside the cockpit of his Wasp, unmoving in the launch tube array in Ad Astra’s aft hull complex.
His eyes were closed, but his mind was wide open to the flood of images streaming in from Primary Flight Control. Through the electronic feed, he could see the SMBH, vast and enigmatic, circled by its shroud of twisted light. He could see the sweep of the accretion disk . . . the glare of the starclouds thronging the galactic center.
And then a shudder slammed through the Ad Astra, a vibration that grew and grew and grew, until it felt as though the colony ship was about to shake itself into fragments. In another instant, the surrounding starlight flashed to red, as red as blood . . . and in another instant he was staring into blackness.
The shock yanked a sudden gasp from Merrick, and a stab of fear. Stifling the urgent yammer of panic rising in the back of his brain, he opened his eyes, saw the gray walls enclosing him, the distant circle of the launch tube hatch . . . and told himself to breathe. The vibration had stopped, and he blinked.
What the hell just happened?
In the Commander’s Quarters, starboard hab, in the hills above Bethesda . . .
LISA 776 AI Zeta-3sw had been getting out of bed when the shuddering vibration had struck . . . an earthquake, though she’d never experienced a seismic tremor on Earth. The jolt had flung her to the floor, bounced her across the room, and slammed her into the bedroom’s IS—the interface station.
Rising, she worked her left arm back and forth, realizing that it was broken. Lubricants were dripping from torn actuators, the skin had been peeled back, and she could see the carbofiber weave of the main strut bent at an awkward angle.
Lisa felt no pain, of course—gynoid robots didn’t. But the mechanisms in her arm were signaling that they were seriously damaged and that she would need repairs as swiftly as possible.
That, she thought with ruthless machine logic, might not happen for a while. The ship was obviously in serious trouble. A moment before that final shock, her link to StarNet had shown her the sudden reddening of the light beyond the ship’s hull, then sudden blackness.
And now there was no exterior feed at all.
Neither was there any vibration. Whatever had been happening to the Ad Astra had abruptly—and mysteriously—ceased.
She walked to the outside veranda, the door sliding aside for her as she approached. The house was built into the side of one of the artificial hills rising against the end cap of the starboard habitat, high enough up that the spin gravity here was only about half a G. Looking up, she saw the sunbeam glowing as brightly as ever behind a light scattering of clouds. Obviously they still had power.
But for how long?
Properly speaking, gynoids, like their android counterparts, didn’t feel fear . . . not in the human sense of the word. They could simulate it, of course, just as they could simulate any other human emotion in the execution of their programming, but emotional urges could be switched off as effectively as she’d just shut down the pain analogue in her arm. The idea of being driven purely by emotion, of acting without thinking was, quite literally, unthinkable.
One of the vista windows was open, and her dark eyes focused on it. As originally designed, O’Neill cylinders had three windows running the entire length of the habitat; the covers for those windows were mirrored, a design to reflect sunlight into the cylinder’s interior. In more modern designs like the Ad Astra, the sunbeam filled that role, but the cylinder still possessed several viewing transparencies, vista windows looking out into space.
Odd. All of the windows should have been sealed as Ad Astra made the final jump into the galactic core. Someone had ordered this one opened, perhaps to get a look outside when the data streams were cut off.
It was not precisely accurate to say that gynoids felt no emotion whatsoever. Loyalty, curiosity, determination, patience—all of those were traits associated with human simulants, hard-wired into their AI consciousness. And as Lisa stared through the window, miles across the up-curving valley of the starboard hab, she felt another.
Wonder.
In the starboard hab, above vista window SVW-12. . . .
MAJOR GENERAL William Frazier was human enough that he could feel fear, but he’d long ago found that he could suppress the emotion and carry on by focusing on the job at hand. The trouble at the moment was that he wasn’t certain what the job was. The data net was down, he had no linkage with the bridge or with Marine HQ, and, quite frankly, there was nothing that clearly needed doing. To get a better idea of the situation, he’d made his way to vista window twelve, physically jacked into the control, and rolled open the outside shield protecting the transparency. The window lay at his feet, like a rectangular pond dozens of meters across.
Superficially, he was taking a hell of a chance. Had the transparency opened onto a nearby nova or some other source of intense light, his optical sensors might have been burned out before the window’s imbedded circuitry could divert the radiation.
Frazier was a fully functional cybernetic Marine, which in fact meant that he was more machine than human. Although he could doff and don bodies as easily as other humans could grow a new set of clothing, at the moment he was wearing a Mk. III Marine Combat Unit: three meters of black plasteel, woven carbarmor, and nanochelated circuitry. His brain, however, housed inside its heavily armored computronium matrix within his chest, could still feel as well as think. He’d hesitated before making the link, a nasty mix of doubt and fear clamoring for attention until he pushed the feelings aside. He had to know what was taking place outside the Ad Astra . . . but he was afraid of jeopardizing the ship by opening her fragile hull to whatever might be out there.
But what he was looking down at now filled him only with awe.
Clearly, the Ad Astra was still deep within the galactic center, a realm thronging with tens of millions of brilliant stars. Of the supermassive black hole the ship had been falling toward a few moments ago, there was no sign—no sign at all, even as he waited through several cycles of the starboard hab’s rotation. He did see that the port hab was still there; he watched it swing into view as the starboard hab turned, a deep gray wall drifting up from the near side of the window, filling his view for a moment, then passing out of sight at the far side.
Except for that interruption, however, the vista window was filled with stars, a nearly unbroken mass of them. That, in itself, was not surprising. The Galaxy’s core was filled with suns—most of them huge, ancient, and red-hued, the Population II remnants of a far earlier epoch of stellar formation.
But the AI-machine component of Frazier’s mind was very good at patterns and pattern recognition, and at the moment it was fairly shrieking an alarm.
That massed throng of stars visible below Frazier’s feet was . . . different than it had been before.
Very different.
The stars were fa
r, far more numerous; they were brighter; and they were bluer than what he’d seen before through the data stream, just moments ago.
The entire Galaxy, somehow, had been transformed into something . . .
Other.
CHAPTER
THREE
Time passed for St. Clair before he again was fully aware of his surroundings, pushing up through a red haze of pain and dazed confusion. That final shock had been brutal, and according to his inner AI clock, he’d lost several seconds, either because he’d been unconscious, or because his organic brain had momentarily detached from the internal circuitry of his in-head AI. The connections were reforming themselves now, but he felt dizzy and weak. With an effort, he shut off the harsh yammer of pain receptors in skull and shoulders.
The safety of the ship was more urgent, though, and he began reestablishing his electronic connections to the bridge and to Ad Astra’s Network Ops Center. Even as the pain faded, he was checking his in-head window to see where the central black hole was in relation to the Ad Astra, and that brought on a shock of a different kind.
The supermassive black hole and its attendant accretion disk were gone.
Impossible. You don’t just take a singularity with a total mass of 4.3 million suns and make it vanish.
There was something else, too. Somehow, the Ad Astra had picked up some velocity. Space astern had taken on a distinctly red hue, with a large, circular blind spot empty of stars at the center. Forward, the stars appeared blue, again with a spot of black emptiness directly ahead. He recognized the optical distortion of relativistic spacetime dilation; the Ad Astra was moving at a high percentage of the speed of light, her velocity making the rest of the universe appear to be compressed into a thick ring around the hurtling vessel. At a guess, they were moving at 70 to 80 percent of the speed of light.
How had they picked up that much velocity?
Slingshotting around a supermassive black hole might do it, he thought . . . but that brought him back to the other question: where was Sag A*? Had the Ad Astra been moving at near-c long enough that the SMBH was no longer visible?
St. Clair shoved aside the questions. Time enough to look for answers later. Right now, reports were flooding in from all parts of the ship, a distant but incessant murmur of voices—a litany of casualties, of failed power, of structural damage, of falling pressure, and interrupted life support. It sounded like his section chiefs had things under control, thank God, but a small army of AI agents dispatched from the NOC—the Network Operations Center—were electronically checking for more serious damage, just in case. The sheer size and complexity of Ad Astra meant that it might take a while to make sure they were out of immediate danger.
Most important on the list: none of the reported injuries he’d heard of so far was worse than a broken bone or a concussion—no mass casualties as atmosphere gushed out into space from one of the thin-walled hab modules, as one chilling example. So far as St. Clair was concerned, that constituted a minor miracle. The Ad Astra was not designed for bumpy flights or massive, hull-rattling vibrations.
“Lord Commander!” Symm called. “We’ve located Sagittarius A-Star! I . . . I think . . .”
“What do you mean you think?” St. Clair demanded. “You’ve picked it up, or you haven’t!”
“It’s . . . I don’t know, sir. Something’s wrong. ”
“What?”
“Our mass readings show . . . my God. Its mass has doubled! The total is nine million solar masses, maybe a little more.”
“That’s not possible.”
“I know, my lord. I know. But . . .” She waved a hand in confused frustration, passing it through the holographic projection in front of her. “There it is.”
There it was indeed, both on his own holo display and on an in-head window tapping into the ship’s sensor data, a silvery ring of shifting light encircling a disk of blackness all but lost against that dazzlingly bright backdrop of stars. Mass, range, and diameter readouts flickered to life alongside the images. The vast sprawl of the accretion disk was gone, wiped away . . . which was why he’d not seen the SMBH a moment before when he’d looked for it. The sensors were placing the hole ten light-minutes from the ship, but it was far larger than it ought to be.
Something very peculiar was happening . . . and St. Clair couldn’t figure out what it was.
“Engineering.”
“Martinez, Lord Commander.”
“We’ve picked up some speed. What the hell happened?”
“Don’t know, yet, sir. Best guess is we just got slingshotted clear of the SMBH.”
“We were supposed to be trying for an orbit.”
“I know. We’re playing back the AI records now. Should know in a sec. . . .”
“While you’re at it, bring our velocity down. I don’t want to blindly slam into a piece of rock at this speed.”
“I agree, sir. But I suggest we do so gradually. I’m still not sure how much damage our framework sustained in . . . in whatever just happened to us. We’re also tumbling, though at a slow rate. We need to address that, too.”
“Good thoughts. Use your discretion.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
St. Clair allowed himself a slight exhalation of relief. Attempting to slip into orbit around a SMBH had been an act of desperation; likely, Ad Astra would have been trapped there—at least until Martinez had been able to repair the shift drive. If repairs had been impossible, they would have been stuck there for a fair percentage of eternity, until the black hole evaporated at the end of time, or until something big had hurtled in and smashed the Ad Astra into infalling debris. He still wasn’t sure what had just happened, but the outcome appeared to have been a good one . . . as good as could be hoped for, at any rate. Ad Astra’s main drive was still off-line and she’d been battered hard, but at least she was drifting free in open space, not pinned to the ergosphere of a supermassive black hole, as their Coad escort was.
“Lord Commander,” Mason said. “We have a go from Engineering to attempt to control our tumble.”
“Do it.”
Instinctively, St. Clair braced for a jolt or a burst of acceleration, then mentally kicked himself for the anticipation. Ad Astra maneuvered in normal space with a powerful gravitic drive, one that reshaped the matrix of spacetime around her, but like normal gravity, it acted on every atom within its field uniformly. Ad Astra could boost at a thousand Gs, and the people in her zero-gravity compartments, like the bridge and Engineering, remained in free fall and felt nothing. Those in the hab cylinders forward continued to experience only the spin gravity of the rotating habitats . . . not a high-G acceleration that would have smeared them into a thin red jelly across the nearest aft bulkhead.
Habits are habits, though.
The electronic model of the ship in front of St. Clair’s workstation had been showing a gentle end-for-end tumble since they’d entered open space, but now, gradually, it began to stabilize.
“Our tumble has been arrested,” Mason reported.
“Very good, Helm.”
“We have a go from Engineering to begin deceleration, my lord.”
“Proceed,” he said, before adding, “with caution.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“Start with ten Gs and then step it up slowly.”
“Ten gravities, stepping up slowly. Yes, my lord.”
He didn’t want to slam on the brakes, even if the grav drive couldn’t be felt. If there was a structural problem with the badly shaken starship, and the gravitic drive didn’t act on all parts uniformly, a thousand gravities would tear them to shreds.
“Decelerating at ten gravities, my lord.”
St. Clair found he was holding his breath—watching, listening, feeling for any change in the structure of the ship. No warning icons flashed up on the holodisplay, no AI messages screamed at him inside his wired-in brain.
At ten gravities, however, it would take them about nine years to slow to a halt relative to the nearest st
ars. “We seem to be in one piece, Mr. Mason. Take us to fifty gravities.”
“Fifty gravities, aye, aye, sir.”
There was no increased stress at fifty gravs . . . or at one hundred . . . or at five hundred. Ad Astra slowed steadily from its headlong plunge through the inner galactic core.
“Lord Commander!” Scott Forrester, the tactical officer, called out. “We’ve got company!”
“Show me.”
“Three targets under acceleration, bearing one-eight-zero by zero, relative. Range two hundred fifteen million kilometers . . . closing at point six c.”
“Directly astern. From the black hole.”
“Pretty close, sir. I think they were some distance on the far side of it, and have been chasing us ever since . . . since we got hit back there.”
“Do we still have fighters on ready one?”
A brief pause. “Yes, sir. They report being shaken up a bit . . . but ready for launch.”
“Launch fighters,” St. Clair said.
Whoever was following the Ad Astra might be whoever was responsible for destroying Harmony—a decidedly hostile act. He checked something on his displays. Curious.
There were no more fragments of the structure left in the area, as far as the ship’s sensors could detect. No matter at all, in fact.
St. Clair thoughtclicked an in-head icon, sounding general quarters throughout the ship. He didn’t want to fight; Ad Astra had teeth, but St. Clair was unwilling to risk the ship and a million passengers in a fight against unknown forces with unknown but highly advanced technologies. He would keep those unknown ships at a generous arm’s length if he possibly could, though. Ad Astra’s fighters would serve as a screen.
He hoped.
“FIGHTER RELEASE in three . . . two . . . one . . . launch.”
The sensation of zero gravity was replaced by a slam of acceleration as Merrick’s Wasp was magnetically propelled down the long launch tube. He emerged into empty space, half the sky filled first by the ventral surface of the ship’s CCE section, the rest teeming with stars, many brighter than Sirius or even Venus seen from Earth at its brightest, all crowded together in a stunning display of radiant beauty. Not that Merrick was much interested in beauty at the moment. Wired into his ASF-99’s cybersystems, he was now technically a part of his fighter, an eight-meter wedge-shaped combat machine with a brain partly electronic, partly organic. Numbers—range, velocity, mass, angle—flowed through his brain in a rushing stream, as his AI painted graphics across his mind’s eye.
