“That depends on what Ty finds. Once we know for sure what the effects are going to be we can begin our preparations.”
“What about Senator Farley?” asked Christy. “We haven’t received any threats from him at all the past several weeks. It makes me nervous. I just wish I knew what he was up to.”
“So do I,” Steve replied with a worried frown. “Underneath that cloud cover he could be doing anything. One thing for sure, he definitely hasn’t given up on knocking off Star One. That’s one reason why as soon as we can move the station away from Earth we should do so. The more distance we put between Senator Farley and us, the better I will feel.”
Steve recalled some of the stuff Teela had observed just before the heavy cloud cover had moved in over the military bases. “We know that he was working on more missiles before the storms moved in. This weather has probably put a damper on that at least.”
-
Jennifer was in her quarters brushing out her hair after a long, luxurious shower. The months aboard Star One had been extremely exciting with her job, the new people she had met, and of course, Teela. Every day was full of new challenges and new experiences.
“Only eighteen more days,” Teela said quietly from where she was sitting on Jennifer’s bed, watching.
“It’s hard to believe that it has already been over five months since they left,” responded Jennifer, pulling the brush smoothly through her hair. “The time has flown by so quickly.”
“Would you like me to insert a personal message into the FarQuest’s computer from you to Commander Erin?” inquired Teela, knowing that she could do it rather easily if she wanted.
“No, Teela,” replied Jennifer, remembering the last meal that she had shared with Ty. “Commander Erin will have enough to worry about when he awakes.”
Teela was quiet as she watched Jennifer brush her hair. It was times like these that she sometimes wished she were human. Of course, the holographic imaging program and its virtual reality interface allowed her to experience many of the feelings, smells, and tastes of the real world. Even so, she often wondered what other little things she might be missing out on.
“How are you and Todd getting along?” Jennifer asked. She tried to keep well abreast of Teela’s relationship with the lieutenant commander.
Teela’s development since she had fallen for Todd had been truly remarkable. Jennifer had taken particular note of Teela’s modification of her original program, giving herself slightly larger breasts and more flaring hips. Teela had taken on the appearance of a more mature attractive young woman, and Jennifer had approved. It showed an interest in looking attractive and appealing to the opposite sex, but not to the point of going overboard. She had also cautioned Teela about taking the modifications too far.
“Todd and I spend a lot of time talking,” responded Teela, leaning back on her arms on the bed.
Jennifer could see her in the mirror and couldn’t help noticing that the bed didn’t react at all to Teela’s presence since her holographic figure had no weight.
“He is so smart and kind. Last night we spent hours in one of the observation lounges, looking at the stars and talking about what might be out there.”
“I’m glad that you and Todd are getting along so well.” Other than Commander Erin, Jennifer hadn’t tried to go out with other men. Kathleen had taken her out several times dancing and to eat, but other men didn’t attract her as Ty did.
“He treats me like a real person,” Teela responded with her eyes wide. “When we’re talking, it’s so strange. I listen to his every word, and for some reason, it seems very important for me to do so.”
“I’ve been meaning to ask you; how are you picking your clothes to wear when you and Todd go out? Christy has mentioned that you are dressing a little revealingly. Are you sure you want to stimulate Todd that way?” Jennifer asked, carefully watching Teela’s reaction in the mirror.
Teela hesitated a moment before replying. “Todd doesn’t mind my dressing a little revealingly; he seems to enjoy it,” she replied with a slight blush showing on her cheeks. “We know that we can’t enjoy any type of physical relationship, even though I did offer to work something out using virtual reality if he really felt the need to. But Todd says that, for now, our relationship is very satisfying and stimulating enough. As for dressing up, I got Kathleen to give me some pointers.”
“I should have known,” said Jennifer, shaking her head amusedly. Kathleen and Teela together sounded like an extremely dangerous combination. With a sigh, she finished brushing her hair while Teela watched.
Chapter Nine
Far out in the depths of space a timer reached zero. It triggered a computer command and an antidote to the deep sleep drug was automatically administered to Lieutenant Strett. Her nonmoving form was resting peacefully in her cubicle. On the Flight Deck of the FarQuest, the environmental computer activated another program that began bringing the ship’s environment back up to human norm.
Time passed as the drug gradually took effect, until Evelyn painfully opened her eyes to the sudden brightness. The cubicle lid opened, and Lieutenant Strett took a long, deep breath. She lay there for quite some time as she regulated her breathing and waited for her strength to return. She felt so weak, she wasn’t sure she could stand up.
Sliding her legs slowly out of the cubicle, she nearly fell as the room spun around her. This isn’t right, she thought, as she grabbed the edge of the deep sleep cubicle to stop herself from falling. “Why do I feel so weak?” she mumbled, feeling a dryness in her throat. From the symptoms she was experiencing, she wondered if she was dehydrated.
As the room steadied, she walked slowly over to a small cabinet and opened one of the doors. She took a container off one of the crowded shelves and popped the lid open. Placing it against her lips, she slowly drank the refreshing contents. It was a combination nutrient and protein drink, which should quickly restore her strength.
After several more minutes, she began to feel closer to normal, but still terribly weak. Walking over to the other deep sleep cubicles she quickly checked the occupants, noting with relief that they all seemed to be okay. She went over to one of the medical supply cabinets and took out a syringe. She would wake Commander Erin up next.
Ty struggled weakly against the darkness, as he slowly opened his eyes to see Lieutenant Strett bending worriedly over him. Instinctively, he put his hand over his eyes, blocking out the bright light. Finally, his eyes adjusted to the light and he removed his hand, seeing an anxious Lieutenant Strett standing by his cubicle. She held an empty syringe in her right hand.
“Take it easy, Commander,” she said gently, laying down the syringe. “The deep sleep drug has left you exhausted and extremely weak. Sit up slowly and drink this,” she continued helping Ty into a sitting position and handed him a steaming cup of soup broth. “Sip this slowly. It has some vitamins in it and other things that will help to restore your strength. You are also dehydrated from the deep sleep.”
Ty took the cup and took a cautious sip, realizing that his mouth felt exceedingly parched. Looking around, he saw that only Lieutenant Strett and he were awake.
“What about the others?” he managed to croak out between sips.
“They appear to be fine,” she reported, watching Ty closely. “The drug depleted our body’s energy reserves more than Doctor Wruggi predicted. It took me nearly an hour just to get the strength to crawl out of my cubicle and give myself a stimulant. I injected you with a powerful stimulate first and then with the antidote to the deep sleep drug.”
“I feel terrible,” Ty mumbled as he slowly continued to drink the soup in the cup.
“The broth you’re drinking should help you to recover more quickly than I did,” Lieutenant Strett added. “We will all have to watch ourselves for the next several days until we get our strength back.”
“How’s the ship?” asked Ty, starting to feel better as the broth began to take effect.
“I checked the Flig
ht Deck briefly, and everything seems to be functioning normally,” she replied, taking Ty’s pulse. She nodded to herself satisfied that it was near normal. “I want you to finish the broth and then lie back down for a few minutes. I’m going to wake up Captain Simpson next.”
“You should be strong enough to make it up to the Flight Deck in about thirty minutes; not before,” she added sternly. “It will take about an hour for Captain Simpson to regain consciousness.”
Thirty minutes later, Ty made his way carefully onto the Flight Deck, and a quick scan of the consoles showed everything still in the green with no amber or red warning lights. On the main screen, the neutron star was brighter but still over 200 million miles away. Strapping himself loosely into his command chair, he began playing the messages that were waiting from Star One. He was anxious to find out what the latest status was on their mission, as well as the current political situation back on Earth.
Ty was still there an hour later when Captain Simpson struggled weakly onto the Flight Deck and, with a sick grin, took his place in his pilot’s chair.
“I feel as if I’ve been run over by a herd of elephants,” he groaned, activating the flight computer and checking their current position and trajectory. “I thought we were supposed to feel rested after a long sleep like that.”
“I know,” replied Ty, recalling Steve’s ominous words recorded earlier that morning on the FarQuest’s computer. “I don’t think any of us expected to feel this weak when we woke up.”
Captain Simpson began checking his console, wanting to make sure all the ship’s primary systems were still functioning normally. He was surprised at how weak he still felt. Just moving his arms seemed to take a lot of effort.
Ty became silent, thinking over what he had just heard from Steve. He knew that the black hole, which Steve had spoken at length about, made their mission much more dangerous to complete. A damn black hole, Ty thought. How had they missed that at Farside?
Reaching forward, Ty adjusted the main viewscreen to the coordinates Steve had mentioned just to the left of the neutron star and boosted the screen magnification up to the maximum. Looking at the center of the screen, Ty could barely make out a small area of blackness that seemed to have outer edges tinged in dark violet and purple.
“What in God’s name is that?” asked Simpson, seeing the small dark area on the screen. He felt a chill go down his back. It seemed as if it was alien and out of place. It was something that should not be there.
“It’s a black hole,” replied Ty quietly, gazing at the screen in fascination. “That damned neutron star is in orbit around it. That’s what has caused all the problems with the data. Teela discovered it using the Farside array just after we went into deep sleep.”
“We are heading right into it,” Simpson said concerned, his eyes focusing on the flight computer and their projected course. “If I read all of this correctly, our speed is already beginning to increase from the combined gravity of the neutron star and the black hole. I wonder if our speed is high enough so that a course correction can take us safely around it.”
“Let’s check the ship’s systems out first,” suggested Ty, wanting to give the black hole a wide berth. “We may want to make that course correction very shortly.” He also wanted to talk to Pierre LaRann about the black hole. If Ty remembered correctly, LaRann was an expert in that field.
With that, both men got busy going over long checklists to ensure that the FarQuest was still in prime operating condition. They both knew that shortly the ship would be subjected to a lot of stress, perhaps more than she had been designed for!
-
Over the next several hours, the rest of the crew filed slowly in until everyone was awake and at their duty stations. Ty made sure the scientists were aware of the black hole data and wasn’t too surprised when Pierre LaRann requested that the cargo bay doors be opened. A few moments later, one of the FarQuest’s telescopes was activated and focused on the distant, dark object.
The highly magnified image was projected on the Flight Deck’s main viewscreen, and a dim maw with darker colors around its edges filled the screen. The whole mass seemed to be swirling around like a hurricane with calm at its center. The exact center was black or, lacking words to describe it, totally devoid of color; just a vast emptiness that swallowed light itself. The outer areas of the black hole were tinged in dark violets and purple as it swirled and turned around its massive center.
“We need to make a course change within twelve hours,” Captain Simpson informed Ty, looking up from the data scrolling across his computer screen.
“So soon?” said Ty, surprised at this. He had thought they would have more time than that.
“We are several million miles off our projected course and will be drawn into the black hole if we maintain our current heading,” Commander Simpson replied as he ran more figures on his computer. “We could delay the course change by nearly 24 hours if we want to use the SRBs, but I prefer to save them for later.”
“How long will we need to fire the ion drive?” asked Ty, wanting to conserve as much fuel as possible.
“The ion drive will need to be fired for eight hours to allow us to pass both the neutron star and the black hole safely and not be torn apart by the gravitational stress,” answered Captain Simpson as the data came up on his screen. The course change had already been calculated back on Star One and transmitted to the FarQuest’s flight computer.
“That really looks scary,” Lieutenant Strett said from just behind Ty, where she had been standing looking spellbound at the screen. She had just finished putting everything away in the deep sleep compartment. “What is it?”
“A damn black hole,” Winston muttered from his console where he had been checking the ship’s fusion reactor. “What’s going to turn up next?”
“Lieutenant Strett, go down to the science section and check on our three scientists,” Ty ordered not wanting to leave the Flight Deck at the moment. “We need to start transmitting data back to Star One as soon as possible. I don’t know what kind of problems the black hole may cause with our transmitting equipment as we draw nearer to it.”
“Yes, Sir,” Lieutenant Strett replied. “I need to check on them anyway to see if they have fully recovered from their deep sleep experience.”
Ty watched as she vanished down the central hatch, heading toward the science levels.
“We will give the scientists four hours to take observations and readings,” Ty said to Captain Simpson. “Set up our course change maneuver to begin exactly four hours from now.”
Looking at the screen, Ty felt an ominous feeling at the back of his mind as he stared into the swirling depths of the black hole. He knew that they would have to fire the drive to increase their speed and angle their trajectory just enough to take them past it. Then they would spend another six days decelerating, and then accelerate back around to study the neutron star-black hole binary in more detail. If everything proceeded as planned, in another eighteen days they would be back in deep sleep and safely on their way back to Star One.
-
Several hours later, Ty and Lieutenant Strett were down on level eight, watching the scientists complete their readings.
“Absolutely amazing,” Pierre LaRann mumbled from the viewscreen where he had been using one of the ship’s telescopes to photograph the black hole in detail.
“What type of particle emissions are you finding?” LaRann asked LeAnn Kelly, who was using several of the ship’s more sensitive instruments to probe the spectra in and around the black hole.
“I can’t believe some of this stuff,” she replied, her eyes glowing with excitement. “At the exact center of the black hole I show nothing, just emptiness. However, from its outskirts I have gathered a lot of data that could be extremely useful. This is really remarkable.”
“I’ve almost completed my initial study on the neutron star,” added Juan Raol, rubbing his eyes and stepping back from where he had been using a stellar sp
ectrograph to record data. “It’s 18.24 miles in diameter and 2.26 times the mass of our Sun. It’s rotating on its axis 1.95 times per second. Its mass is sufficient to form a gravitational lens, which is bending the radiation emitted by the star.”
Ty listened to the scientists as they talked excitedly about what they were finding. All three seemed to be decidedly thrilled with the information they were gathering. It didn’t surprise Ty. This was the type of discovery that would thrill most scientists.
“We will have our initial reports ready to transmit in about 30 more minutes, Commander,” stated Pierre, taking off his glasses and polishing the lenses with lens cleaning paper, which he always carried. “Our readings will give the scientific community years of study and conjecture. This black hole may even contain a corridor to another time or another section of space if we just had the technology to take advantage of it. The ramifications are truly astounding.”
“You believe that’s actually possible?” asked LeAnn Kelly, looking speculatively over at Professor LaRann. “Could this black hole contain a traversable wormhole?”
“It’s large enough and the center does not seem to be rotating from what we can observe of the event horizon and the outer environs of the black hole,” replied Pierre, thoughtfully. “The problem is keeping the wormhole open while an object passes through. Most theories demand the use of some type of exotic matter, but I’m not so certain that is actually necessary. Other forms of matter might suffice if contained in the proper type of field in suspension.”
“You are saying it would be possible to travel from one section of our universe to another in an instant using a traversable wormhole?” asked Ty, intrigued by the idea. It sounded like science fiction but someday, with the right technology, who knew what might be possible?
“Theoretically it’s possible,” Pierre replied with a nod, putting his glasses back on. “This is the first time we have been able to examine a black hole up close. Perhaps with this information we will know if a wormhole such as I described is possible.”
Star One: Dark Star Page 20