They crawled along the path which descended to the plain, every step an agony, every breath a reminder that they couldn’t find enough air.
At last they reached the foothills of the mountain range and were able to see again the huge plain in front of them. Yet the plain was now covered with large bumps, where lava domes had pushed up the rock, but not yet broken through.
They were stumbling through lack of sleep and physical discomfort, and there was a sensation of unreality about the whole journey, as if it were happening to somebody else, at some other time.
There was no question of rest, though. They gave the canths the remainder of the water they had brought with them, and drank the last of the waterpacks themselves. Then they unbuckled all the rest of the equipment from the saddles, letting it fall to the ground. They wouldn’t need it. If they didn’t get back to the shuttles within five hours, they wouldn’t need anything ever again.
Six caught Diva’s eye. “Ready?”
She put her chin up, although her chest was heaving. “Readier than you, Kwaidian!”
They both looked around at Bennel and Tallen, who gave grim nods. There was no point waiting any longer. They climbed up onto the backs of the canths, now bare of anything except the saddles, the artifacts which had appeared to them in the grotto, and the small bags containing the trimorphs. Each of them had one final mask pack, which would have to last until they reached the shuttles.
If the shuttles were still there.
It was an unspoken thought that all of them found weaving in and out of their minds.
If the shuttles were still there.
If the canths could make it.
If the air could sustain them that long.
The canths whinnied to each other; the whites of their eyes were spotted with red from the biting fumes. Then they leapt from the last slope of the foothills and down onto the plain, rings of white edging the black sweat of their coats and flecks of foam falling from their mouths.
This time the pace was mingled with utter desperation. The gallop which ate up the miles was at full stretch, and the gradual dehydration of the animals began to show. But the canths didn’t falter. They knew that their time had come, and they flew across the lethal sands, dodging instinctively each and every vent which appeared beside them.
Hour after hour went by, until at last they dared to hope that they might make it. Diva held on to the bridle of the seal brown canth, her head back in a glitter of determination, her back straight, an iron-hard control stopping her from giving up.
“We are going to make it, Namuri,” she shouted back over her shoulder, to the boy who was clinging on behind her. “Don’t let go!”
“I wasn’t planning on it, meritocrat!”
“I bet you never thought you would be racing to beat a black hole with someone like me!”
“I never thought I would even speak to someone like you!”
But talking took up too much energy and far too much air, so they both turned their attention back to the mad, wild race across the sands of the plain.
ANOTHER SIXTY MINUTES sped by, and they were feeling more and more light-headed. Breathing simply wasn’t enough any longer. The sparse oxygen left in the atmosphere couldn’t keep all their vital functions going, and was leaving them all in a cotton wool land where it was impossible to think or to do anything.
The canths were feeling the lack of air too. Although they kept moving, they seemed to sway from side to side and their gait slowed considerably.
And then Six spotted the shuttles, giving a shout loud enough to wake the long dead forests of Kintara. “THERE!”
He swiveled back in the saddle, yodelling and pointing. “The SHUTTLES! I can see the SHUTTLES!”
Bennel squinted past Six’s shoulder. At first he could see nothing but a mirage of water stretching out in front of them. Then his tired eyes made out the two small cylinders of metal, both miraculously still there, both waiting for their passengers. He gave a whoop of joy, and waved his arms.
Tallen spotted the movement, and dug his fingers into Diva’s ribs, causing her to jump with annoyance.
“WHAT?”
The Namuri pointed past her shoulder, showing her.
Her heart gave leap. “YES!” She punched the air. “We made it!” She bent forwards and clapped her canth on its withers, laughing and almost crying at the same time.
Even the canths seemed ready to make the last, supreme effort. They thundered on over the sand with a new lease of life, just wanting to get to the safe haven in front of them, to reach the only hope they had of survival.
Their riders threw themselves down onto the ground as they reached the metallic pods. Six took the one which would accommodate the canths and Tallen flung himself over to help load the animals. Both of the equines looked as if they might collapse altogether and have to be left on the planet.
“Just get the hatch down!” he told Six. “—As fast as you can. We have to get them aboard before their bodies have a chance to shut down.”
But Six was already doing just that. As the hatch came down, Tallen screamed into the ears of the first canth, which was quivering with complete exhaustion. Then the Namuri dug his heels into the equine’s belly and urged it forward with all his heart, dragging at the reins of the other as he did so.
Six moved swiftly behind them, and, as the first canth began to stumble up into one of the stalls, he vaulted on to the second, and chivvied it on as harshly as he could.
The animal teetered as it stepped onto the ramp up into the shuttle, and then paused. Six yelled at it again, aware that the animal was past anything less extreme. He felt it falter again, and then, to his great relief, the canth walked inside its stall.
Once in, the animals couldn’t collapse: the moveable walls soon held them upright. Tallen quickly clamped the side stalls and then moved to position the two back partitions which would immobilize the animals for transit. Six clambered up into the tiny bridge.
He threw himself at the control panel, only stopping to make sure that Diva and Bennel had reached the safety of the other shuttle. Once he saw that they were already inside, and that Bennel was only waiting for Tallen in order to close the hatch, he began to push buttons.
Outside, Tallen waited until the hatch closed securely on the canths, and then dived for the safety of Diva’s shuttle.
Six looked across. He saw, or perhaps imagined, an anxious look on Diva’s face, and then the engines of the shuttle fired. He pressed the start sequence of his own, heavy-duty shuttle, and closed his eyes. His heart was pounding, apparently still terrified that one of the volcanic vents would burgeon up even now, and stop their flight. He concentrated on the flight sequence, totally ignoring all the safety checks which came up on the panel. If it wasn’t ready to fly, then there wouldn’t be time to fix it, in any case.
Then the throaty engines of the big shuttle turned over, and began to pick up speed as they heated up. There was a huge eruption right in front of the cabin, and a volcanic vent opened up, lava spewing out in a molten river. He shook his head grimly, gritting his teeth together. No! He wouldn’t let the planet get them now! He would fly this thing by determination only, if he had to.
He forced the screaming engines to levitate the behemoth off the ground, listening to them squeal in resistance to his wishes. Then he poured on the thrust, slowly building it manually instead of waiting for the computer to come into its own. He knew that, for once, he would be faster than the computer. He knew that he was the only chance this shuttle had.
He deftly added the thrust, at first only able to keep the shuttle vertical, then gradually managing to achieve a slow sort of lift off from the surface, which was changing to molten lava right beneath the pod.
Action and reaction, he told himself. It didn’t matter that there was no longer solid land beneath them. The rockets didn’t need to push off anything, after all.
The shuttle hung there for long, long moments, as the sand around it disappeared,
and molten magma took its place. Red and orange flames began to lick at the pod’s metal, angrily trying to snatch it back within their grasp.
But the rockets had stabilized now, and Six piled on more thrust. With a deafening roar, the metal rent itself out of the jaws of the volcano forming underneath it, and up, up into the air above, uncaring that it was now full of volcanic ash in suspension.
Six looked down at his knuckles, which were white. That had been a bit too close for comfort! He programmed the autopilot to follow Diva’s shuttle up towards the waiting New Independence, and put his head on his hands for a second.
“Nearly became a widow there, Diva!” he muttered to the distant energy trail his wife was leaving through the atmosphere. “Very nearly!”
Chapter 13
THEY WERE ALL waiting for Six and the canths when he finally managed to dock on the New Independence. The canth keeper bustled up to the partitions, an intensely worried look on his face. Diva had already told him about the desperate race to safety and the toll it might have taken on the equines.
With great tenderness, and assisted by Bennel and Tallen, the man who spoke to canths led each of the two extenuated animals out of the heavy duty shuttle, and down the long metallic corridors until they reached the hold. Once there, he patiently rubbed them both down as they drank and ate enough to keep their body functions going. Then he walked them around and around the hold, talking to them calmly, intent on bringing their fright down to a manageable level. He tutted as he found burnt patches on their skin, where burning lava had touched them, and fussed over their food as if they had been kings.
Neither Diva nor Six could stay long enough to see all this, because the main priority now was to get the trader as far away as possible. Six had no idea how they were to break free – first from the dying planet, and then from the grasp of the black hole itself. He started the engines, and looked at Diva.
“How are we going to do it?” he asked. “We haven’t anything like enough thrust to reach escape velocity from here; we nearly lost the ship coming in as it is.”
Diva bit her lip. She had no idea.
“There must be some way we can do it! Come on, Six! You’re the one who passed his quantum mechanics exam first time!”
“You’re implying there might be some remnant spark of intelligence inside this bonehead of mine?”
“Yes, knucklebrain, I am!”
He bowed. “Then I guess I shall have to come up with something.” He stroked his chin thoughtfully.
“Err ... you might like to hurry up? Only, we are about to fall into a black hole.”
He raised a stern hand. “Don’t interrupt – genius thinking.”
Diva’s response was somewhat mangled. He opened his eyes wide. “Please. I am trying to reason. Don’t nag, woman.”
After a sharp gasp of outrage, she fell silent, and limited herself to staring accusingly out of the visor, apparently prepared to take on the challenge of the Great Magnet single-handed.
Six closed his eyes. On the back of his own eyelids, he tried to visualize the process. The planet, racing around the singularity. Periapsis, when it would be just within the grasp of the immense gravitational pull. The moment when the black hole finally succeeded in pulling the planet inside its hungry jaws, never to be seen again.
How to get away? It seemed truly an impossible feat.
Except ...
Six sat up suddenly. “It’s spinning!” He blinked, considering the possibilities. “And the planet is still moving orthogonally with respect to the singularity.” He paused. “But what about the black hole itself? Is that black hole spinning?” He stared blindly out of the visor. “If there is substantial frame dragging there might be a way. But would it work?” Then his eyes narrowed. “Did the computer detect an ergosphere?”
“Err ...” Diva leapt for the screen, “... Yes, yes it did. Does that mean the black hole is spinning?”
He frowned. “I think so. I wonder if it will be enough.”
“Have you found a way?”
He made a face. “I’m not sure,” he told her. “I just don’t know if it will work. It has never been tried.”
“Whatever it is, it has to work. If we don’t do something right now, we are going to be sleeping inside that big black hole in the sky tonight. And, as far as I know, what goes in doesn’t come out.”
“Actually, there is a school of thought which says that ... but you don’t want to hear about that now.” He moved over to the console. “Right. We are going to use the Gammasennon effect.”
She stared.
“—We are going to jettison the whole of the freight shuttle, as soon as we are inside the ergosphere of the black hole. If I am right, one bit of us should be able to escape to infinity, and the other bit will fall into the black hole.”
“Ye-e-ss. How do you know which bit?”
He glanced at her, but didn’t seem to see her. “I work it out. As far as I can tell, we are the first people to get caught up in the process of the tearing apart of a planet by a black hole. This isn’t exactly something you can find out about from your local vimpics, you know!”
“You’d better get this right, no-name.”
“Or?”
“Or our journey of colour is over.”
“You have a point. Then, look, here’s what I want you to do ...” Their heads bent together as he tried to explain how the moment of jettison was absolutely critical. Diva’s tooth protruded over her lip. It seemed rather arbitrary. She told him so.
Six shook his head. “Not really; in theory it works. I remember studying the Gammasennon effect with Atheron. The physics behind it is impeccable. But it does have to be a spinning black hole, in order to present frame dragging. If this one is sedentary, we are through. But I am sure he said that all supermassive black holes would necessarily have spin. Now, have you got the idea?”
She nodded.
“We are going to have to time it just right.”
“I know.”
“And you are the one who is going to have to monitor the moment that we let go of the shuttle. If you don’t release the ballast at the critical moment, we are going to find out whether black holes really do stretch you into spaghetti as you fall into them.”
Diva nodded. “No pressure, then. The ballast being the freight shuttle, I presume?”
He grinned. “You do realize that, if this works, we may be hyper-accelerated to low relativistic speeds?”
“If the New Independence doesn’t shake apart first. Have you figured out just when to disconnect the shuttle yet?”
Six was hunched over the screen, jabbing at it from time to time to answer the questions the sophisticated computer was asking him.
“This stupid computer tells me it can’t be done.” He sighed. “—What can you expect from something built by the Sellites? It hardly has all the answers. I’ll have to write my own program. And I have to calculate when to give the necessary engine boost first, when we are on the far side of the planet. And we have to be inside the ergosphere, but still outside the event horizon.”
“Six! That sounds impossible! There isn’t time!”
“Then stop chattering. Get the others prepared. I’ll pass you the exact co-ordinates when I have them worked out.”
Six turned to his screen, and tuned out the rest of the world. Diva flicked her hair back, and then pressed the intercommunicator. Tallen and Bennel were still back down in the hold, helping the canth keeper to tend to the animals.
She told them what to expect, first when the thrusters were applied, and then when the freight shuttle ballast was released, and asked how the canths were.
“They will live, but their lungs may be damaged permanently. Even so, they were lucky. I can’t detect any ash cement, which means that their life expectancy hasn’t been affected.”
Diva giggled. She didn’t think any of them had a very high life expectancy just now. At first she didn’t think any of them had heard, but then Bennel’s voi
ce came back to her. “—That bad?”
She couldn’t lie to them. “Worse. But Six is checking his calculations now. Don’t worry. He was always great at physics.”
“I have complete faith in him,” came back Bennel’s laconic voice.
There was a murmur in the background. Tallen didn’t sound so convinced. Diva giggled again. “Tell the Namuri to pray to his blue stone,” she said.
Bennel didn’t hesitate. “We all are. Good luck to both of you. Cutting the connexion.”
At last Six sat back and the tension through his shoulders released. “That is as good as I can get it,” he told her.
“Left it a bit fine, didn’t you?”
He grinned. “Cut me a break, will you?”
“Well? When do we start?”
He motioned at her, while still watching his screen. “You had better strap yourself in. In three ... two ... one ...” His finger pressed firmly against the screen and the engines began to whine. A tremor ran through the entire ship, which started to shake. The high-pitched squealing got more and more intense with the vibrations, and the whole bridge was juddering.
“If you’re not careful, the freight shuttle will shake itself free before it is time!” shouted Diva over all the noise.
Six nodded, clutching onto the screen in front of him so as not to be thrown onto the floor. His eyes, though, never left the figures in front of him. About five minutes passed before he spoke again.
“READY?”
She nodded.
“COUNTDOWN TO BALLAST RELEASE ...THREE ... TWO ... ONE ... NOW!”
Diva’s nimble fingers slipped the couplings holding the heavy duty shuttle to the New Independence, and stabbed at the release mechanism on her screen. Then there was nothing to do except hold tight, and wait.
Ammonite Stars (Omnibus): Ammonite Galaxy #4-5 Page 49