by Tony Healey
Banks turned around, surprised at her request. “Are you serious?”
“Can’t you pull off a Corellian turn, Lieutenant?” King said.
Banks broke into a grin. “Of course I can. I’ve just never done it in a ship of this size before.”
“Well, there’s a first time for everything,” King said.
“Sir, we have an incoming transmission,” Ensign Boi reported.
King grew serious again. “Put it on.”
The reptilian face of Prince Sepix filled the viewscreen once more.
“Greetings,” Sepix said. “Once again, you run from us human.”
“We’re not on the run. We’re making you chase us for sport,” King hit back. “Our sport.”
Sepix chuckled, happy as a lizard stumbling upon a nest of bird eggs. “And what happens when I catch you, human?” he asked her.
“You realise we don’t taste that good?” King said with a cocky shrug.
She looked to the left. Rayne was conversing with engineering. Please hurry up, she thought. Come on Chief …
“I’ll tell you, Commander, I have sampled human flesh before and I must say, I found it quite appealing,” Sepix said with relish. “I look forward to a second helping.”
“I’m pleased for you,” King said.
Rayne turned to face her, both thumbs up.
King broke into a smirk. “Now Banks! Hit it!”
Sepix looked away in confusion, then disappeared from the viewscreen. Lieutenant Banks broke hard, then sent the Defiant up and over the Inflictor in a big loop. He arced back around to the ship’s rear, then took the Defiant under.
“Ensign Rayne, Jump!”
“But sir I don’t have co-ordinates set yet -” Rayne started to say.
King snapped her fingers. “Now!”
Rayne did as he was told. The Defiant shot out from under the Inflictor. The Draxx ship brought its weapons to bear. It fired. Space shrank back from the Defiant for a split second before it entered the Jump and blasted away.
* * *
Prince Sepix looked at the patch of space where the Defiant had been only seconds before. He turned to his crew.
“Follow their last trajectory, then pursue. And I warn you, don’t lose them if you all want to live past today,” he growled.
Two minutes later, the Inflictor made the Jump after the Defiant.
10.
She relaxed, but for only a breath.
“This is a risky move,” Commander Greene said anxiously. “We could be heading anywhere. Or into anything …”
King felt suddenly weary. “You’re right. Miss Rayne, exit the Jump now.”
Ensign Rayne eased a lever back slowly but with some relief, and the Defiant slowed before it slipped out of the Jump.
In her naivety, King had imagined they would emerge into empty space. She’d taken a gamble in making the Jump without having coordinates to actually Jump to. But the gamble was all they had. The Defiant would have been destroyed otherwise.
When they broke free from the Star Jump, the crew found themselves staring directly into the gaping maw of something horrifying; a system-wide maelstrom of gas, particles, planetary matter, debris, and energy swirling toward a central point like water in a bath rushing down a plug hole.
Making an unscheduled Jump, with no predetermined course was virtual suicide. You could tear right through the heart of a sun, or worse … you could find yourself in the iron grip of one of the strongest black holes ever recorded.
The Defiant groaned as if every bulkhead and structural support was a muscle being stretched in all directions at once.
“Full reverse! Lock in auxiliary and emergency power!” King yelled.
Banks worked the controls. “No effect!”
Chang clutched the edge of her console. There was a distinct sense of something trying to pull them all free from their seats, a huge well of gravity from directly ahead independent from the artificial forces keeping their feet to the deck.
King jabbed a button. “Engineering. Chief, how far can you stretch the reactor?”
“I can take her to one fifty, but it’s pushing it,” Gunn said.
“Take her to one sixty.”
“Captain, I don’t think she’ll -“ Gunn started to protest.
“Do it, Chief. That’s an order,” King snapped, closing the channel. “Banks, when you have that extra power, pump it into the engines. Try and get us away from this thing.”
A cloud of debris, islands of rock and ice hurtled past the Defiant on their way toward the centre of the black hole, as if the singularity plucked them from the cosmos to devour.
Ensign Rayne frowned at her monitor. “I think we’ve come out in the Koenig-Prime system …”
“The what? Koenig-Prime? But that’s half-way across the sector …” King said in disbelief.
The Koenig-Prime singularity was a huge black hole, and King was even more aware of the grievous error in judgement she’d made. But it was either that or let them be destroyed. She’d rolled the dice, and somehow they were still alive. For the minute.
“We shouldn’t have jumped … we shouldn’t have jumped,” Rayne said over and over, slipping into panic.
Commander Greene turned around and fixed her with a stare. “Now is not the time, Ensign. Get a grip.”
“I’m diverting the additional power from the reactor to the engines,” Banks said.
“Conduits struggling to cope with the additional charge,” Chang reported. “But holding.”
King tensed. The Defiant showed no change in its journey toward the black hole.
Banks shook his head. “Nothing.”
“Okay. Cut power. There’s no point in wasting precious energy in fighting what we can’t fight,” King said. “We need to think of something.”
“This shouldn’t have happened …” Rayne muttered.
Commander Greene fixed her with a stare. “Stop! Put a lid on it, you understand me? This stops now,” Greene said, the vein at the side of his neck pulsing. “She’s your Captain. Don’t you forget it.”
Rayne looked suddenly ashamed. Her face was red. “Yeah, yeah, sorry,” she stuttered as she came to her senses.
“It’s okay to feel the panic, Ensign,” King said. “But you have to control it.”
“I know sir. Sorry sir,” Rayne said.
“Okay …” King said. “We need to figure this out. Rayne, how long until we hit the event horizon?”
Rayne looked flustered. She quickly studied her readouts. “Minutes, sir. Minutes,” she said.
King nodded. “Right. And from there, how long until we hit the centre?”
She knew that it meant certain death. Not even light could escape the dead void at the centre of a black hole. The ship would be crushed like a tin can.
“Again, a matter of minutes. We arrived at such a velocity; the singularity is only accelerating that. We won’t have long,” Rayne said, seeming to calm down now that the inevitable implications of their current situation were making themselves clear.
“Thank you Ensign. And for the record? I am sorry I made the decision to Jump. We all make mistakes. But I was trying to keep us alive. Given the choice of killing the whole crew or putting a gun to my own head, it would be the latter any day,” she said, then looked from one to the other. “I would give my life over and over again to save you all.”
“We know sir,” Chang said, her eyes wet with tears.
“Thank you Lieutenant. Now, is there any way -“
She was cut off by the sound of the proximity alert. Chang spun in her chair, quickly checked her display.
“Enemy vessel directly behind us,” she said. “It’s the Draxx.”
11.
“What?” Prince Sepix snapped.
The helmsman studied his readouts then stared in disbelief at the forward viewscreen.
“As I said my Lord, we are caught in the pull of a black hole,” he said.
Sepix scowled. “Unacceptable! Rev
erse engines!”
The Inflictor screamed from the forces at work, one pulling it forward the other pulling it back as the mighty engines produced as much thrust as the engineering crew could draw from them.
“No use! Port engines going into overload!” the helmsman reported.
Sepix growled in frustration. “Shut it down you fool!”
The helmsman’s claws clattered against the metal of the helm as he scrambled to reduce the engines to nominal thrust.
Sepix glared at the forward screen, at the Defiant. His whole body shook with rage. “Lock on weapons and fire at that ship! I’ll be damned if I’ll follow a pink skin down to hell!”
* * *
“They’re locking weapons,” Chang reported.
“Transfer all power to the hull plating. Concentrate it to the rear, where we’re exposed,” King ordered. “All hands brace for impact.”
They waited for what seemed an age. King shot Chang a look. “I thought you said they were locking weapons?” she asked.
Chang looked baffled. “They were. I don’t understand it …”
Ensign Boi spoke up. King knew he was a highly educated science officer in his own right, as well as being a fine communications specialist. He’d gone from Cadet to Ensign in no time at all. “If I may, Captain, they might not be able to fire. The intense gravity from the black hole could be affecting their weapons. If it’s having an effect on ours then it will be doing the same to theirs,” he said.
“Commander, test our weapons systems. Try to fire,” King said.
Greene tried the different systems. Nothing worked. “He’s right. Dead as a door-post.”
King grinned. “Well that gives me something to smile about. They’re stuck in this mess with us, and there’s literally nothing they can do. It’s going to upset his lordship no end to think he can’t even shoot us out of the way.”
A few of them laughed, more from nerves than amusement.
“Well spotted Ensign,” King said to Boi. “Please open a line to the Inflictor.”
Boi nodded and within seconds the swirling chaos of the Koenig-Prime singularity was replaced by the fierce face of Prince Sepix.
“Hello again,” King said. “It’s been a little while.”
“Luckily for you, Captain, we are unable to blast you to smithereens or we would not be having this conversation,” Sepix said.
“How sad,” King said. “Well, have a good trip won’t you? I believe we’re going the same direction?”
Sepix turned to one of his bridge crew, swiped a hand across his throat. The communications cut dead.
King laughed. She couldn’t help it. The others joined her. It was hilarious, in it’s own way.
However, one look at the black hole before them sobered any laughter. The bridge fell eerily silent again as they all regarded their fate.
Commander Greene broke the silence. “Any ideas?”
King stared ahead. He face became hard, serious. “Nothing, Commander. That’s the point. There isn’t anything we can do.”
12.
“What’s going to happen once we cross the event horizon, Ensign?” King asked Ensign Boi as they neared closer and closer to the black hole.
“We should experience no real change in time. However to witnesses away from the black hole it would appear we are taking forever to reach travel across it, when in fact it might already be over and done with. Time has a tendency to slow down, sir,” Boi explained. “But not for us.”
“Will we be destroyed before we reach the centre of that thing?” Lisa Chang asked him.
“Maybe,” was all that Boi could say.
“There’s no way of surviving a black hole, is there?” King asked Boi.
He shook his head but didn’t voice the obvious. That they were going to die. They’d be crushed by the extreme gravity, pulverised to nothing.
“So what do we do?” Greene asked.
King shrugged. “Sit and wait.”
“Do we tell the crew?”
“No,” King said with a shake of her head. “No, we leave it. Why panic them? It’s going to happen. Why should we make their final moments one of suffering?”
Greene admitted that she was right.
“Crossing the point of no return,” Chang reported, her voice shaky.
“Banks, shut down the engines. Shut down all manoeuvring systems. Everything apart from the hull plating and the forward repulsor array.”
The repulsors were located beneath the nose of the ship. They nudged particle matter and debris out of the Defiant’s way when travelling at substantial speeds, as they were now.
“What’re you thinking?” Greene asked her.
“I don’t know. Something. Anything that might give us a chance of some kind. I’m thinking pump every ounce of power to the hull and the repulsors, see if it helps us survive a few seconds longer.”
“I’ll take those extra seconds sir,” Banks said as he shut down every non-essential function across the ship. The lighting dimmed to next to nothing around them.
“I thought you would Lieutenant,” King said.
Up ahead there was a huge flash of light. They all looked up in time to see a small planetoid tumbling over the rim at the black hole’s centre. It seemed to happen in slow motion, though King was aware it was happening quickly. The atmosphere and surface matter was stripped away first as the planetoid fell. Then it broke apart like a ball of dry dirt, down into the nothingness. There was an explosion from the crushing of its core, but it lasted a mere second before the energy of that, too, was swallowed by the singularity.
“My god,” Greene said.
“Not even he can help us now,” King quipped.
* * *
The Defiant slid sideways as the black hole pulled it in, as if it were reeling in a catch on a line. They could make out the centre of the black hole in detail now. The ship seemed to rattle around them with the forces pulling on it.
“Hold together baby,” King said, looking around.
“Hull is holding,” Chang said. “For now.”
“If I could get up from this chair, I’d get a wee stiff drink but I can’t move,” Lieutenant Banks said.
“I could use one too,” King admitted. “How long do you think, Ensign Rayne?”
Rayne did a quick calculation in her head. “About fifteen minutes until we arrive at the centre.”
His voice trembled with fear.
King swallowed. “Everyone, I’d like to say a few words, if I may.”
The bridge crew listened.
“It’s been a mad few days. A lot has happened. The death of Captain Singh, now this … but you know, even now we stand together. And that’s the important thing. We’ve pulled through. It may not mean much to you all now, but I am so proud of you all. I’m grateful for having the opportunity to serve alongside you.”
She looked from one crewman to the next.
“And I’ll miss you all.”
The black hole seemed impossibly close now. King’s body felt like it was weighed down with lead. She knew that if it weren’t for the artificial gravity on board the Defiant, they’d all be dead by now. The force of the black hole would have torn them free from their seats and crushed them against the far wall.
She had never been so frightened in her life. Or disappointed. After everything they’d survived, it had come to this. A slow and excruciating death. She feared the darkness at the black hole’s centre. She imagined it to be cold, empty. A nothingness that stretched on forever. She absently wondered what it would feel like to be crushed to death like that. Would she feel pain? Would it be so quick that she didn’t even know it was happening?
Her heart pounded in her chest. Jessica gripped the chair. She thought of Andrew. She thought of everyone she’d ever served with. She thought about the mystery regarding her own origins, the lack of parents in her life to guide her through her early years.
Andrew had been there for her. Had seen to it she followed the right pat
h. Had seen the potential within her. Had been a Father to her.
“This is it people,” she said.
Nobody said anything. They were each concealed within their own cocoon of fear.
The Defiant went into a nosedive, down into the black hole. She saw Commander Greene clamp his eyes shut, his body braced for whatever was coming. She did the same. She covered her head with her arms, clutched herself, closed her eyes, and held her breath.
The Defiant was consumed by the singularity.
King felt herself get pulled in all directions at once. She would have screamed, but she had no mouth. No voice. She was nothing and everything all at once.
“We can give you a life, give you a purpose,” Singh was saying.
Jess shook her head. “I’m not good enough. I’ve tried already. I don’t have what it takes.”
Singh tilted her head up, his hand under her chin. “With my help you will have. If you’ll trust me …”
She was by his side as he perished.
Tears streamed down her face.
Her voice cracked as she spoke. “Please don’t go, please.”
Captain Singh shook his head slowly. Smiled. “Jess … We each have our time. My own is at an end …”
“No …” she managed to say.
Singh reached up, stroked the side of her face. “Now it is your turn to do as much as you can with the time you have …”
He smiled again, then his eyes seemed focus on something far away. The light in them faded. Singh’s hand fell away from hers and the sound of his last breath issued slowly from between his lips.
“No …”
Everyone was around her, even Singh, then she was alone.
Floating in a sea of black. A never-ending night, devoid of stars. She saw the Defiant, no more than a foot long, and hundreds of little tiny people falling from it like confetti. She reached out to try and catch them. They fell through her fingers like grains of sand. She cried out, and everything split apart … then there was nothing at all, not even thought.
13.
Everything had been scattered. Blown apart like dust on the wind. Now it came back together. She felt herself becoming whole once more. Becoming herself.