Galaxy Blues

by Allen Steele

  “I see…and we can’t leave unless you insert your key and program it to take us home.”

  “Correct.” Jas’s eyes slowly blinked. “Once you agree to my terms and accomplish them, this ship will return to Talus qua’spah, where you and I will report on the outcome of our mission. Once that is done, then you will be allowed to go home.”

  “Sort of a roundabout way, isn’t it?” I couldn’t help it; at this point, sarcasm was my best response to his generous offer.

  Hisher right eye flickered in my direction. “Mr. Truffaut, if you had not behaved in such a boorish manner, none of us would be here. Indeed, this is not my choice either. But the High Council has demanded atonement for your actions, and since I am the Prime Emissary to your race, it has fallen to me to carry out their wishes.”

  Ted and I glanced at each other. If Jas was telling the truth, then this wasn’t hisher idea. In fact, heshe was caught in the middle, forced by hisher diplomatic position to do the bidding of hisher masters.

  “Right, then,” Ted said, “so let’s hear it. But first”—he nodded toward Jas’s weapon—“why don’t you put that away? I give you my word; no one aboard will do you any harm.”

  Jas hesitated, hisher throat sacs inflating for a moment. Then heshe visibly relaxed, and heshe slowly lowered hisher arm. “Thank you, Captain. I apologize for any offense I may have given.”

  Ted didn’t say anything, but instead folded his arms across his chest and waited for Jas to continue. Still keeping an eye on him, the Prime Emissary reached into a pocket of hisher environment suit and produced something that resembled a datapad.

  “This is our objective.” Holding it out in hisher right hand, Jas flipped open its cover and touched a stud on its side. “Kasimasta, the Annihilator…”

  A small shaft of light twinkled into being above the pad’s surface, then resolved itself into something that I first thought to be a planetary nebula: a bright yellow nimbus, resembling a dust cloud, surrounded by a reddish orange disc. Yet plasma flares above and below the nucleus told me that it was no infant star but instead something much more menacing.

  “Holy crap,” I murmured. “That’s a black hole.”

  Jas’s right eye swiveled toward me. “You do not know of this thing?” Again, heshe cocked hisher head as heshe looked at Ted. “Captain Harker, you have not told your crew about this?”

  “No, Prime Emissary, I have not.” Ted slowly let out his breath. “Most of my people are unaware of its existence. It has remained a secret, known to very few individuals within our government.”

  “A black hole is classified?” I looked at him askance. “What for?”

  Ted shrugged. “Who knows? Most likely it’s because…well, because governments like to keep secrets, that’s all. Maybe they thought people would panic if they knew it was out there.” He nodded toward the holo. “Believe me, when Emcee and I first learned about this thing, it gave us the creeps.”

  “Since you do not know, Mr. Truffaut, I will explain.” Jas increased the magnification of the holo, and it slowly swelled in size. “Kasimasta is a rogue black hole, possibly created by the collision of two stellar clusters or dwarf galaxies billions of years ago. When the collision occurred, the intermediate-mass black holes at their centers, which were rotating in different directions, repelled each other, causing the smaller of the two to be ejected from the coalescent mass. It spun away at a velocity of four hundred miles per second, and hence began to travel through intergalactic space.”

  The holo image changed; we saw a miniature Milky Way, as viewed from some imaginary vantage point above galactic north. A red thread began to trace itself across the image, slowly moving toward the center of the galaxy. “At some time in the prehistoric past,” Jas continued, “Kasimasta entered our own galaxy. Since then, it has traveled on a spiral course toward the galactic core, one that has taken it through the outer rim and the Perseus Arm until, several million years ago, it entered the Orion Arm.”

  “Damn,” I whispered. “That puts it right in our neighborhood.”

  Ted said nothing, but only nodded as he listened to Jas. “During this time, Kasimasta has encountered several star systems. As it has done so, it has destroyed dozens of worlds. Most were uninhabited, but a few were the homes of intelligent races. The taaraq, whose ark Captain Harker’s expedition encountered, was one. The askanta, of whom the chaaz’braan was the spiritual leader, was another. The majority, though, did not survive the encounter.”

  “Hold on.” I raised a hand. “Look, I’m no scientist, but I know a few things about black holes, and one of them is that their singularities are actually quite small. Even if this”—I stumbled over the hjadd word, and settled instead for the Anglo translation—“Annihilator is moving from system to system, wouldn’t it have to make direct contact with a planet in order to destroy it?”

  Jas’s head rose upon hisher long neck. “Under normal circumstances, this might be true. However, since Kasimasta is a rotating black hole that doesn’t remain in one place, every planet, moon, and even asteroid it has consumed during its long history has contributed to its mass, with a proportionate increase of its event horizon. At the present, we estimate Kasimasta to be nearly ten thousand solar masses in size, with an event horizon more than one hundred fifteen thousand miles in circumference and over eighteen thousand miles in radius.”

  I let out a low whistle. A monster that big could swallow Earth without so much as a burp. Hell, even Uranus or Neptune could fit into its maw. And I didn’t have to ask Jas to know that even a near miss could be deadly; the accretion disc spinning around the ergosphere of its outer event horizon could exterminate all life upon a planet, while the intense gravitational pull of the hole itself would cause massive solar flares to erupt from any star it passed. No question about it, Kasimasta was a killer.

  “Please don’t tell me it’s on its way toward Earth,” I murmured.

  Heavy-lidded eyes regarded me with contempt, as if I’d asked a selfish question. “That is no concern to you,” Jas replied. “The Annihilator passed your home system long before your race became civilized.” I breathed a little easier, and the Prime Emissary went on. “Nonetheless, it poses a real and present danger to this part of the galaxy. Even as we speak, it is approaching another inhabited system.”

  Again, the holo image changed. This time we saw a schematic diagram of a star system, with a large gas giant in its outer reaches and a couple of terrestrial-size planets orbiting closer to its sun. “This is the star you know as HD 70642,” Jas continued. “It is located one hundred thirty-six-point-six light-years from our present position. Its second planet, Nordash, is home to a starfaring race known as the nord.”

  As heshe spoke, a thin red line appeared within the system’s outer edge, slowly moving toward the superjovian. “Kasimasta has recently entered this system,” Jas continued. “In four days, its course will bring it very close to the gas giant, Aerik, where it will consume Kha-Zann, a large moon in orbit around it. Although the Annihilator will not encounter Nordash, nonetheless the nord are evacuating as many of their people as possible, in expectation that its passage will precipitate a planetary catastrophe.”

  “Smart thinking.” I nodded. “I wouldn’t want to…”

  “Be quiet.” Once more, the holo changed, and now we saw a close-up of Aerik’s satellite system. “The Talus has decided that this event, as unfortunate as it may be, represents an opportunity for us to gather precise information about Kasimasta. For this purpose, the hjadd have designed and built a robotic probe that can be deployed upon a planetary surface. This probe, once activated, will relay scientific data via hyperlink until the moment of its destruction.”

  “Right…” Ted hesitated. “Let me guess. You want this probe deployed on the moon that the Annihilator will consume.”

  “This is correct.”

  “And, of course, you’ve found the perfect candidate for the job of putting it there.”

  “You have made the cor
rect assumption.”

  “Uh-huh. And this probe…it wouldn’t already be aboard, would it?”

  Jas’s head weaved back and forth. “It was placed within the cargo hold of your shuttle earlier today, while Mr. Youssef was still asleep.” When heshe said this, I shook my head. Doc wasn’t going to like that one bit. “We did so in the belief that you would undertake this mission voluntarily,” Jas went on. “Unfortunately, since you refused to do so…”

  “You didn’t bother to tell us until now.” I sighed. “Great. And I get to be the guy who carries it down there.”

  “Jules…” Ted shot me a look, and I clammed up. “You realize, of course, that this makes the job even more hazardous. Why can’t we simply drop it to the surface from orbit?”

  “Some of its instruments are intended to register and record seismic activity leading up to Kha-Zann’s disintegration. Because of this, the probe is designed to be carefully placed on the surface. Otherwise, it is a very simple procedure. All Mr. Truffaut will need to do is unload the probe, carry it a short distance from his craft, and activate it. This should take only a few minutes.”

  Ted didn’t respond. He seemed to think about it for a few seconds, then he looked at me. “Your call,” he said quietly. “I can’t make you do this, you know.”

  Of course he could. He was the captain, after all. And even though Morgan had already fired me, I was still a member of his crew. Besides, there were two other people aboard qualified to fly Loose Lucy; if I chickened out, either Emily or Ali could handle the assignment. So he was offering me a way out of what could well become a suicide mission.

  Yet that was out of the question. I had gotten us into this mess; I had the moral obligation to get us out of it. Ted knew that, as did I…and so did Jas, come to think of it, because there was no other reason why heshe would’ve summoned me to hisher quarters in the first place.

  “Sure…why not?” I shrugged, feigning a casualness that I didn’t feel. “Sounds like fun.”

  “Very good.” Jas switched off the pad; the holo vanished, and heshe turned to retrieve hisher helmet from where heshe had slung it in a bulkhead net. “Let us then return to the command center, so that I may set course for Nordash.”

  Heshe paused, then stopped to look back at us. “I am very happy that you have agreed to do this, Captain Harker. I did not wish to die in this place.”

  “Yeah, well…” Ted seemed to be at loss for words. “I’m not sure you gave us any options.”

  “On the contrary, I did.” A stuttering hiss that sounded like a snake’s laughter. “It is only that none of them were acceptable.”

  PART 4

  The Great Beyond

  ( SIXTEEN )

  Firemen in a burning house…

  who bells the cat?…

  the trouble with women…

  words for the blues.

  I

  We came through the starbridge at HD 70642 to find ourselves in a traffic jam.

  That’s the only way to describe what I saw through the portholes. Emily had raised the shutters just before the Pride made the jump from 51 Pegasi, and it was fortunate that she’d taken that precaution—otherwise, we might have struck the nearest starship waiting to enter the ring. As it was, the first thing we heard upon coming out of hyperspace was the shriek of the collision alarm, followed by a string of Arabic blasphemies from Ali as he hastened to switch off the autopilot and take control of the helm.

  Jas hadn’t been kidding when heshe told us that the nord were evacuating their homeworld. All around us, as far as the eye could see, was a vast swarm of what appeared to be titanic jellyfish, their umbrella-like membranes several miles in diameter. It wasn’t until the Pride passed the one with which we’d nearly collided that we saw that its translucent hood was, in fact, a solar sail. Tethered behind it was a streamlined cylinder a little smaller than our own ship, its hull ringed with dozens of portholes.

  A high-pitched voice like that of an irate turkey gobbled at us from the speakers, its language indecipherable but the meaning nonetheless obvious: watch where you’re going, jackass! Jas patched into the comlink and responded in hisher own tongue. Apparently the nord captain had his own translator, because after a brief bit of back-and-forth between them, the com went silent.

  It’s been said that a fireman is someone crazy enough to run into a burning house while everyone else is running out. That’s what I felt like just then. As the Pride slowly glided between the scores of nord vessels waiting their turns to collapse their sails and enter the starbridge, I saw a civilization in full rout. Several hundred thousand miles away, Nordash was a blue-green marble that bore an unsettling similarity to Earth; it was all too easy to imagine multitudes of nord—whatever they looked like—clamoring to board the shuttles that would ferry them to starships in orbit above their doomed world. How many of their kind would be left behind, though, and where the survivors intended to go, we did not know. Nonetheless, we were witnessing an interstellar diaspora.

  No one said much of anything as the Pride carefully picked its way through the evacuation fleet. Save for a few subdued words between Ted and Ali, a dark silence fell over the command center, and it wasn’t until our ship had eased past the outermost ships of the nord armada that anyone was able to breathe easy again. But we were far from safe. The nord were leaving…and we’d just arrived. Like firemen in a burning house.

  Ted instructed Ali to get a fix on Aerik and start plotting a trajectory, then he unfastened his harness and pushed himself out of his seat. “Right, then,” he said quietly, grabbing hold of the ceiling rail. “Everyone who doesn’t have business here just now is relieved…at least for the time being. Take a nap, get a bite to eat, whatever. We’ll call you back when we need you.”

  Good idea. I got up from my seat, arched my back to get rid of the kinks, then looked over at Rain. She didn’t seem to be in a hurry to leave the bridge; there was a pensive look on her face as she gazed out the nearest window. I hesitated, then decided to let her be. All I wanted to do was follow Ted’s advice: change out of my sweaty clothes, grab a sandwich, and maybe catch a few winks in my hammock.

  As I floated over toward the manhole, Ash rose to join me. Morgan didn’t pay any attention to him—indeed, it seemed as if Goldstein was deliberately ignoring him—and Jas remained strapped into hisher couch. Ash didn’t say anything as we entered the access shaft, but as soon as we were alone, he took hold of my arm.

  “Keep an eye on Youssef,” he whispered. Before I could ask why, he beat me to it. “I caught something from him just before we went into hyperspace. The only reason Jas is still alive is because Ali knows we still need himher.”

  “Yeah, well…” I was too tired to deal with it just then. “I figured that already. But Ali’s not dumb enough to…”

  “All I’m saying is, keep an eye on him. Okay?” Ash let go of my arm and pushed past me. “We have enough problems as is.”

  II

  I went down to my cabin and put on some fresh clothes, then floated down the corridor to the wardroom. I was making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich when three bells rang, giving me just enough time to stow everything away and plant my toes within a foot restraint before main engine ignition. I could tell from the way the ship trembled that it was no maneuvering burn; the Pride was slowly building up thrust, and it wouldn’t be long before its acceleration reached one g. The captain wasn’t sparing the horsies. At least we’d be able to move around the ship without having to use handrails.

  Just about the time I was finishing lunch, Ted’s voice came over my headset, asking me if I’d return to the bridge. So much for my nap. When I got to the command deck, I found that everyone had left except for him, Doc, and Ali. Ted’s face was grim as he waved me toward Emily’s seat.

  “We’ve set course for Aerik,” he began, “and Ali and I have come up with a tentative mission profile. Sorry to bother you, but we thought that you needed to be in on this stage of the planning.”

&nb
sp; “Sure. No problem.” I gazed at the holotank. A model of the local system was suspended above the console, with the orbits of Nordash and Aerik depicted as elliptical circles surrounding HD 70642. A curved red line was traced between the two planets. “Is that our course?”

  “Uh-huh.” Ted entered a command in his keyboard that overlaid a three-dimensional graph upon the holo. “We’re pretty lucky, actually. They’re presently in conjunction, with both at perihelion on the same side of the sun. So instead of being three AUs apart, their average distance at almost any other time, they’re only about one and a half AUs away from each other…approximately two and a quarter million kilometers.”

  I nodded. The Nordash system wasn’t nearly as large as Earth’s, which was fortunate for us. The nord would’ve disagreed, of course. Just then, they would have preferred that their world was at aphelion on the far side of the sun…or, in fact, anywhere Kasimasta wasn’t.

  “Anyway,” Ted continued, “this means we should be able to reach Aerik before Kasimasta does…provided, of course, that we don’t do any sightseeing along the way. I’ve given the order to run the main engine at its rated capacity, two hundred and fifty thousand impulses per second. Once we reach cruise velocity, that’ll mean we’ll be doing about twenty-five hundred kilometers per second.”

  My heart skipped a beat. Maybe it wasn’t light-speed, but it was a sizable fraction nonetheless. “Good grief, skipper…do we have enough fuel for that?”

  Ted glanced over at Doc. “The Pride has sufficient reserves for four and a quarter AUs,” he said, “enough to get from Earth to Jupiter and back again. We barely put a dent in that on the way to Hjarr, thanks to the starbridges, and the hjadd were kind enough to top off our tank before we left.”