The Star Collector

by Matthew William

  “Luckily, there’s a setting on the drill that I’ve never even used before,” Deniz said as he took a key and used it to access the top level of the building.

  “Is it strong?” Joe asked as the elevator ascended.

  “It could potentially rip a hole in the space time continuum. So, yes, I’d say it’s pretty strong.”

  The door dinged open to the control room. Before the massive window overlooking the mine shaft, was a rather simplistic set of controls – a single joystick for aiming and a touch screen.

  “The Chinese could be here any minute,” Tammy said looking at her watch.

  “Are you going to be able to hit it?” Joe asked, watching Deniz carefully aim the massive drill down into the gargantuan hole to where the tiny artifact was located.

  “Brother, I could shave with this thing if I wanted to,” Deniz said with a wink. “Not really, but I am very accurate. Let’s try out the crust buster setting first.”

  “For the record,” Joe stated. “I just want to warn you... I have no idea what’ll happen if we blow this thing up.”

  Deniz looked up at him for a second with his eyes opened wide. He gulped, nodded and pushed fire. There was a massive burst of flame from the tip of the drill in the sky, as if the gates of hell were opened, and went roaring down into the cavern. From the office it merely looked like a taut reddish thread falling into the hole, but the flame was potent enough to light the surrounding valley bright crimson, as if they were viewing a sunset. The office vibrated.

  “Anything happen?” Cassandra asked.

  Deniz checked the control panel. “Well, it’s a persistent little son of a bitch.”

  He concentrated the beam to a laser thin strip.

  “Can you break it?” Joe asked.

  “Not a scratch,” Deniz said. “Which is unnerving, because red is cleared for all matter in the known universe.”

  “Why are there even settings stronger than that?” Tammy asked.

  “Theoretical matter that could exist somewhere,” Deniz said. “The board of directors wanted to be ready for anything. With that said, let’s kick it up a notch.”

  He typed in the changes on the touchscreen and the flame increased, turning from red, to orange, to blue. The valley and the control room were lit in a cool aqua glow. Air surged out from the cavern, blowing dust and papers at the window. The office rumbled. Still the artifact remained unharmed.

  “Okay, so it’s tougher than theoretical matter,” Deniz said.

  “You’ve got one more setting?” Tammy asked.

  Deniz seemed hesitant.

  “There’s not going to be a board of directors to deal with if that thing goes off,” Joe said.

  “You don’t know that for sure,” Deniz replied. “Look, Joe, I can’t do this anymore. You’ve got to take it somewhere else. I’ve already lost...” he punched the numbers into the touch screen, “...one billion of the company’s credits over the course of your little visit.”

  This was it. This was how mankind was going to end – greed would be their undoing. Joe knew exactly what he had to do. He dove at the controls and pushed the lever forward to the max setting!

  Nothing happened.

  Deniz stared at him, his jaw dropped, his head shaking slightly. “What made you think just pushing the lever would do anything?”

  Joe stood up, embarrassed.

  “You’ve got to enter the instructions and everything,” Deniz said, flabbergasted. “Joe, I’m ashamed of you.”

  Cassandra took a gun from her jacket and aimed it at Deniz. She blinked twice. Joe knew what that meant – she had turned her empathy off. “Do it.”

  “Seriously?” Deniz said.

  “Yes,” she said. “Put in the instructions.”

  “You’re going to shoot me?”

  “If I have to,” Cassandra replied.

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “I will.”

  “I don’t care,” Deniz said.

  “Put the drill on the top setting,” Cassandra commanded one last time.

  “No,” Deniz said flatly.

  Cassandra shot him in the kneecap. The explosion echoed through the room, deafening Joe for a moment. Blood spattered the controls.

  “Do it,” Cassandra said.

  Deniz shrieked in pain as he rolled on the floor, holding his leg. “No.”

  “I’ll shoot the other one,” Cassandra said.

  “Go ahead, I’m not doing it.”

  She turned embarrassed to Joe. “I didn’t anticipate this.”

  Joe took off his belt and with shaking hands applied it as a tourniquet to Deniz’s leg. The man yelped in pain. Tammy came with a painkilling injection she had taken from a med-kit on the wall and stabbed it into the thigh above the gunshot wound.

  “I’m really sorry about this,” Joe said as he pulled the belt tight. A deep sense of sympathy overcame him when he saw Deniz writhing in pain.

  “You’re sorry? Joe, consider our friendship over.”

  A week ago, Joe would have been thrilled to hear Deniz say those words. Now, at the end of the world, it made him truly sad.

  “I think I might be able to figure this thing out,” Tammy said, rolling up her sleeves and approaching the drill controls. “I watched him pretty close while I was his secretary. Plus I read the manual.”

  “You read the manual?” Deniz asked. “You were here for a matter of hours.”

  “There was downtime between calls,” Tammy said, taking a seat at the controls

  “I’ve never even read the manual,” Deniz muttered to himself.

  Tammy put in the appropriate instructions, the combination of the right type of fuel, the right gauge of light, sent through the right type of crystals. She pushed the lever forward. The blue flame stopped.

  There was a moment’s pause.

  Suddenly from the drill in the sky came, a nearly invisible, pale violet flame. The world was lit periwinkle.

  “Holy... you’ve figured out a way to go purple,” Deniz said.

  The flame shot down into the hole. The ground rumbled.

  The drill in the sky began to crack.

  “Oh my god, you’re braking it!” Deniz yelled.

  Joe could see on the touchscreen that the artifact was still entirely intact.

  “Whats hotter than purple?” Tammy asked.

  “Nothing in the universe,” Deniz answered.

  “Oh,” Tammy replied.

  “Turn it off! Turn it off!”

  Tammy pulled back the lever.

  The flame stopped. A drone swept in to receive the artifact and began its long quest to bring the item back to them. Joe sat down in a chair and stared out at the horizon. What now?

  Without warning the purple flame began to shoot from the drill once more.

  “Turn it off, Tammy,” he commanded.

  “I did,” Tammy replied. “It’s firing on its own.”

  She pulled all the controls back to zero. Yet nothing changed. The flame continued. The front end of the drill broke off and went toppling down into the cavern.

  “No!” Deniz shouted. “You broke the safety!”

  The ground began to quake uncontrollably now. The office walls were shaking back and forth. The planet was being torn apart. Tammy tried again and again to turn the drill off, but it was too late. The controls had been overheated and couldn’t be deactivated. The laser continued to shoot purple fire. The air around the beam suddenly began to turn black as space-time was ripped apart.

  “I think we have to get out of here,” Joe said.

  “The board of directors are going to kill me,” Deniz lamented.

  “I’m going to kill you if you mention them again,” Joe said.

  The drone finally made it back with the artifact as they emerged from the facility. Joe approached the machine and took the orb. It was flashing faster than ever now, almost a continuous glow. There were now less than thirty minutes remaining before the countdown was complete, according to Hal
le’s estimation.

  “Never let Joe Corbit play with your things,” Deniz cried out. He whistled to the drone who flew over and helped him into his shuttle parked nearby. “Ciao!”

  Joe, Tammy and Cassandra scrambled into the Crown Vik.

  “Our only option is to run and hope this thing doesn’t go off,” Joe shouted. He flew up into the stratosphere and was about to punch it into warp, only to see the White Dragon appear in an instant, blocking the way.

  The massive frigate fired a barrage at the Crown Vik. Even the congealing membrane couldn’t help them and a hole was blasted in the hull at the far end of the kitchen. Air rushed from the cabin. Fortunately, they hadn’t yet reached the vacuum of space, otherwise the leak would have killed them. But they couldn't escape either. Cassandra immediately sprang to work on repairing the hull from the inside. Tammy held onto her seat belt for dear life.

  Joe tried to steer the Crown Vik over to the other side of the planet but the ship wasn’t quite moving the way it was supposed to. The steering kept wanting to pull him back down towards the surface.

  “What’s going on?” he wondered aloud.

  “I think we created a black hole,” Tammy said looking out the window.

  Joe looked out past her and was paralyzed with fear. The planet beneath him was collapsing in upon itself, the blue matter shattering and falling into the blackness. Great swaths of the planet’s crust were sucked into the nothingness, like water swirling down a drain. Joe’s greatest fear was festering right beneath him and he was unable to run away.

  The words ‘black holes are portals into other universes’ rang in his ears.

  “We can shoot the artifact into the void,” Joe said.

  “How?” Tammy asked.

  “We’ll load it into the torpedo hold.”

  The White Dragon fired another barrage, but this time the ammunitions were sucked into the black hole before they could reach the Crown Vik.

  “We’re out of range,” Joe exclaimed.

  A squadron of ten Chinese interceptors, flat, speedy fighter ships, flew out from the White Dragon and up over the top of the planet, taking the long way around to avoid being sucked into the black hole. They began a firing run towards Joe’s ship.

  “You have to go up to the turret and fight them off!” Joe yelled to Tammy.

  “I can’t,” Tammy replied.

  “You have to,” Joe screamed. “Cassandra’s fixing the hull!”

  “I won’t kill anyone.”

  The interceptors came roaring in towards them. Joe closed his eyes. Shots ripped violently through his ship. Joe opened his eyes. He hadn’t been hit. Tammy next to him was unharmed as well. He looked back to the kitchen to survey the damage. Cassandra laid on the floor, a dozen bullet holes in her chest. Joe’s body went numb.

  He left the controls and ran back to her on tingly feet. He got down on his knees and rolled her onto her back. The circuits in her face were misfiring, causing random twitches to come to the fore.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so,” she answered, a look of terror appearing for a second then vanishing.

  “We can upload your consciousness onto a network, can’t we?”

  “There’s not enough time,” she muttered. An expression of curiosity appeared then faded. “It’s happening too fast.”

  Joe put his face onto her chest. The anxiety was rippling through his body.

  “It’s okay, Joe,” she said, with a sad, sullen look.

  “It’s not okay. You’re going to die…”

  “I know.”

  “Without you… I can’t… I don’t know how to do anything right…”

  “Shh,” she whispered and touched his face the way she used to, knowing this was the end of the line. “I’ll always love you, alright? No matter where I go next, I’ll be loving you.”

  After all the time they spent together and all the time they had spent apart, this was how it was going to end. And Joe was powerless to do anything. It didn’t matter how much she meant to him or how much life she had left to live, her time had run out.

  Joe knelt there, his body stiff as the circuits in the love of his life slowly ceased to function.

  Finally, the power faded and her eyes went blank.

  “No!” Joe cried out.

  “I’m so sorry,” Tammy said from the cabin.

  Joe got up and stumbled back to the controls once more. “I can never forgive you for this.”

  “I’m sorry!” Tammy said, with tears in her eyes.

  Joe checked the status of the torpedo system only to realize he had sold it to the scrap yard. He growled and punched the steering wheel.

  “What are we going to do?” Tammy asked.

  “We have to drive the artifact into the black hole,” Joe announced.

  Tammy sat quietly and looked out the view screen.

  “Any objections?” Joe asked.

  “Just drive,” Tammy said.

  An array of shots came tearing through the hull once more as the fighters approached for a second pass. The Crown Vik’s artificial gravity generator was destroyed and Joe floated up in his seat. Debris and smoke floated through the cockpit.

  “I sure hope this wasn’t a hoax,” Joe said. “I was almost a billionaire.”

  “Joe,” Tammy said, looking over at him. “I’m scared.”

  “Me too.”

  The steering wheel rumbled like crazy in his hands. Ahead of them the planet appeared to be swallowing itself and the black hole loomed like a giant glass marble in the center of it all.

  “I have a confession to make…” Tammy said, staring out the view screen at their impeding doom. “I never won that video game tournament.”

  Joe looked over at the girl floating there. He had never felt more sorry for another individual in his entire life.

  “I just wanted you to think I was cool,” she confessed.

  “I think you’re cool, Tammy, in your own way.”

  The words made the deputy smile.

  Another round of fire came from the interceptors. Joe looked over to see Tammy blasted away, her side of the cockpit blown to smithereens and her body sucked outside. Debris and frozen air showered over him. He held his breath so his lungs wouldn’t freeze.

  There was incoming call. Joe didn’t press the accept button but Enoch Applebottom’s face came up on the view screen anyway.

  “Don’t go into the black hole,” the man pleaded.

  Joe couldn’t answer.

  “Whatever you want, we can make it happen.”

  The only thing that Joe wanted was to have Cassandra alive and well. He wanted Tammy and Alma back too. He wanted the past seven wasted years of his life to be undone. He wanted to have never known about the artifact and what was about to happen to the human race. He wanted to go home. But Applebottom couldn't give him any of those things.

  All that was left for Joe was to make sure that the death of he and his friends meant something. That was a luxury few people got. That’s what kept him diving towards the void.

  Inside, Joe would surely be crushed beyond oblivion. And, hopefully, so would the artifact. He looked over at it. It was almost a steady glow – the targeting was nearly complete. He pushed on the thrusters and his ship, the good old trusty Crown Vik, chugged into the abyss.

  Time began to slow.

  Matter swirled around the black hole the way a pale cloud circled the eye of a hurricane, except the eye of this hurricane was impossibly dark. Light ricocheted off that sphere – flashing back into Joe’s eyes. The ship didn’t rumble anymore, and it seemed as if every atom in his body was being pulled forward. Light was trickling up the surface of the sphere, like the snow melting off the roof of his childhood home. Suddenly, he found himself at the edge of a cliff. This was the event horizon.

  Reality around Joe seemed to bend – stretching, so that all his atoms were drifting apart. Still somehow he was able to see. Beside him, the artifact remained in tact. For
an instant Joe saw himself, face to face. He wasn’t sure which one was him. Suddenly, he was sucked down the drain with a sharp cling.

  He was in complete and utter darkness.

  Space and time were deformed.

  Nothingness.

  Joe was in another universe. This one was empty, he was sure of it. His mind tried to understand the information his eyes were telling it – like a computer receiving a code it was unable to interpret.

  The artifact floated next to him, a ball of pure light. There was a flash.

  Joe either blacked out or was traveling so fast that light was unable to keep up with him. Maybe he was leaving our universe entirely.

  27

  “He’s gone…” Saburo said.

  Applebottom stared at the void, hoping secretly that the White Dragon would get sucked in as well.

  “My office please, Applebottom,” the Chairman said, springing up from his command chair on the bridge.

  Applebottom nodded and followed. He watched the view screen as the White Dragon gently pulled away from the black hole.

  The chairman’s office was beautifully decorated. Tapestries adorned the wall and the furniture was from the late Qing Dynasty. Applebottom would have admired it all under different circumstances.

  “I suppose you’re going to kill me,” he said finally, trying to beat the Chairman to the punch.

  “No. That’s what your expecting and that would be too good for you. And if you were a person without dreams then physical pain would be an option, but I’m not going to do that either. The punishment should always fit the crime.”

  “So what then?”

  “I’m going to let you go,” the Chairman announced. “And I’m going to make sure that the world knows it was you who was responsible for this whole disaster. You’ll take the blame for Bolstra 5, and the science facility and this planet here. And it was your plan that wasted trillions upon trillions of taxpayer guanzi looking for an ancient alien super weapon. You wanted to be remembered as the greatest scientist who ever lived? Instead, you’ll be known as a lunatic.”