by Warren Dean
After a brief conversion cycle, Seeker triggered a test run. Exceeding reasonable expectation, the new fuel produced a more powerful and sustained burst of acceleration than any fuel the drone had ever used before. It was not potent enough to resist the gravity on this side of the event horizon, but Seeker's systems calculated that its enhanced performance would give it a much greater range than usual. If the drone could just hurdle one last obstacle – a leap back through the event horizon – it should have enough propulsion to return to normal space.
Although that obstacle appeared insurmountable on the face of it, Seeker's systems were not designed to accept defeat. As its orbital spiral took it inwards, the drone's regeneralloy absorbed and stored the quantities of gas it would need to meet its anticipated power requirements.
Not forgetting to factor in the gas needed for the ongoing maintenance of its organic passengers, Seeker considered what to do with those passengers if and when it reached normal space. There was no protocol for the continual management of organic life forms within its systems cavity while it carried out scheduled surveys.
And even if there was, keeping those life forms operational indefinitely was not a viable option. The gases required to produce breathable air could be continually replenished but not the organic nutrients they needed to consume. Once those nutrients were exhausted the life forms would expire and, as long as they were susceptible to such expiry, Seeker could not classify their repair as complete.
In solving the conundrum, the drone borrowed from another of its directives; the one which required it to return to base when repairs could not be effected in the field. Because it was not capable of completing the repairs to its passengers, the drone resolved that it would return them to base. According to its log, its current base was the Repository and Seeker scheduled that as its next destination.
When the drone got close enough to the singularity, it used its newly acquired propulsive power to establish a stable orbit. The proximity gave it a good view, via its scanners, of the attendant mass of yellow gas and the ongoing formation of the gas jets. The data at the drone's disposal suggested that if it could locate a concentration of gas of optimal size and density, the resultant jet might be powerful enough to fire it across the event horizon.
It took several orbital revolutions before a promising build-up of gas began to form. Without hesitation, the drone slowed and allowed its trajectory to steepen. Carefully timing its approach, it entered the leading edge of the bubble as it erupted outwards.
This time, the acceleration was so fierce that the drone's survival was a close run thing. Drawing heavily on its recently acquired store of super fuel, Seeker was able to make several course adjustments to counteract the worst of the G-forces. Even then its regeneralloy was stressed way beyond the usual limits of its tensile strength, racing to cool areas heated to incendiary levels, or to reinforce areas stretched paper thin, or both.
Despite the drone's best efforts, the celestial sleigh ride did not do its organic passengers any good, re-opening several of their recently healed internal fissures. In order to keep them operational, the drone had to intensify infusions until their systems stabilised.
When the acceleration finally slowed, and the sudden reappearance of incoming starlight signified that Seeker had been hurled beyond the event horizon, the drone quickly replenished its stores of yellow gas. It was going to need every particle it could muster to clear the rest of black hole's gravity field.
The jet's impetus died and the gas receded, drawn inexorably back into the black hole.
Seeker set a course to take it back to normal space by the shortest possible route, engaged maximum propulsion, and ran.
CALCULATING…
When Connor came round the first time, he had no idea where he was. It was pitch dark and he couldn't see a thing. He was lying on a metallic surface, which felt like it was coated in some kind of gelatinous substance.
When he tried to move, the muscles of his legs and arms spasmed – as if they had been stuck in the same position for a long time. His neck refused to work at all and the right hand side of his cheek and jaw, on which the weight of his head rested, was completely numb.
As some sensation returned, he realised that his breathing was very shallow and he took a few deeper breaths. That was when he became aware of the smell. It was bad. It was as if people had been relieving themselves repeatedly in the cramped confines of a very small space. A nasty suspicion about the muck he was lying in began to form.
At the same time, his short-term memory began to yield a few of its secrets; the uneasiness of watching a tiny space station fade into a sea of distant stars, the suddenness of intense acceleration which made it feel like his brain was being turned into mashed potato, the ice-blue eyes of a neon angel boring into his soul, the dull pain of blood being coughed up from within, the sharp pain in his ribs – had he broken his ribs? He managed to get his left arm moving and prodded experimentally at his chest. There was no sign of any injury and he wondered whether he had imagined it. What else was he imagining? How much of this was real?
He was about to make a concerted effort to move when a hoarse whisper came from alongside him.
"Dios mio, what smells like that?"
Christina.
More came back to him; Hunter's impending doom, the desperation of crawling into Seeker's systems cavity, the despair of leaving a friend behind, the terror of losing consciousness believing that he was not going to wake up again.
But here he was, awake, and seemingly unhurt. Christina too.
"I don't think you want to know," he said, his voice coming out in a croak. He got his arms and legs moving, more or less in tandem with each other, and managed to pull himself into a sitting position. Agony surged through the right hand side of his face as the blood circulated through it. He reached out for Christina and helped her sit up too.
"I feel like I've been asleep for a long time," she groaned.
"Yeah, me too."
"How are your ribs…?"
"Nothing wrong with them as far as I can tell," he said, prodding the side of his chest to make sure, "and you?"
"I feel much better. I can breathe properly again and my head doesn't feel like someone is hitting it with a hammer."
He heard her feeling about in the darkness. "We're still inside Seeker, aren't we? And this mess on the floor…"
"Doesn't bear thinking about," he interjected hurriedly. "I don't know how, but we're alive. Perhaps it was something Xzaroth programmed Seeker to do before…"
He tailed off, her shaky intake of breath at the mention of the flyer making him regret his words.
"I'm so hungry I could eat a horse," he said, hoping to distract her from the sadness she must be feeling.
"I'm so thirsty I can't even cry."
As if on cue, a clanking noise came from the inner shell of the drone low down to his left. He felt towards the sound and found, within a small recess, a large cup of liquid. He took it out and sniffed the contents, then took a sip. It was water, not very cold and with a faint chemical taste, but he didn't care. He drank half of it and then handed the other half to Christina, taking care not to spill a drop. He heard her gulp down the rest.
She handed him back the cup and, not sure what to do with it, he put it back in the recess. It filled up with water again and they drained it. He put it back and it filled up again. After sharing five cups of water, they had had enough and he withheld the cup.
A few minutes later, another clank signalled that there was something else in the recess. This time it was a metal bowl filled with soft paste. He dipped in a finger and tasted it. If he had to describe the contents of the bowl, he would say it was porridge embedded with flecks of plywood. Whatever the mixture was, it was marginally edible and he was badly in need of food. There were no utensils so he used his fingers to eat half of what was in the bowl. The ambient smell made him gag a few times but he got the paste down and kept it down. Then he gave the bowl to Christ
ina.
"The menu needs work, I'm afraid, but it isn't too bad if you eat it quickly."
He heard her take a mouthful and then gag. Eventually she swallowed. "What are these hard bits? They taste terrible."
"Probably protein. This must be from the food system the flyers installed. Seeker is using it to feed us."
He put the bowl back in the recess and it filled up again. He took it out and began to eat. "And the second course is… the same as the first," he quipped, handing the bowl to Christina when he had finished half.
She took it from him but didn't eat immediately. "Where do you think we are?" she asked, her voice small with trepidation.
"I've been wondering about that too," he said. "We're sitting on the floor, which means there must be gravity around. And the only gravity around comes from the black hole. But the fact that it doesn't feel like we're being pulled through the floor anymore tells me that we're further away from it than we were. And I think we're moving; when I had my ear to the floor earlier I thought I could feel a vibration. I think Seeker is travelling away from the black hole."
"What happened to the portals Baxzaeth and Axzael were supposed to open for us?"
He grimaced in the darkness. "We missed them, presumably."
"I suppose we should be grateful to be alive," she said, a little doubtfully.
"Not to mention healed," he added, "although I can't imagine how that happened."
"How long is it going to take to get out of the black hole, do you think?"
"Who knows? It depends on how fast Seeker can go, I suppose. I remember the flyers saying it would take months."
"Months! But that means we're going to be too late to help Earth."
He sighed heavily. "I think it means more than that. Remember that a month for us means decades on the outside."
"But didn't Xzaroth…" she said with a hitch in her voice, "say we were going backwards in time?"
"That was only while we were inside the event horizon," he said. "Given the state of this place," he sniffed loudly to illustrate what he meant, "we've been in here for weeks, so we would have made up for any time reversal by now."
"So when we get back, everyone we know will be dead?"
"Not everyone," he replied, trying to sound more positive than he felt – trying not to think about the fact that his parents would probably be gone. "Some of the Nerds were having infusions, I'm sure they'll still be around. And your flyer friends on Aquasolis; Baxzaeth and Axzael and the others." As he said it, he realised he didn't really know who her friends were on Aquasolis and he lapsed into silence.
"Elexzath," she whispered. "Oh Connor, what am I going to say to Elexzath?"
He had no more answers for her, so he reached out, found her hand in the darkness and squeezed it. She ate the rest of the food in the bowl and Connor put it back in the recess. He was still weak with hunger and ate three more bowls, sharing them with Christina.
When they could stomach no more, he placed the bowl and cup back in the recess. Seeker must have taken that as a sign that they were finished and produced nothing further. A few minutes later, Connor felt himself getting drowsy. At first he thought it was just the effect of the meal, but then he noticed a subtle change in the air. It was not easily detectable, given the ambient odour, but he suddenly realised what was happening.
"Lie down, quickly, and get comfortable," he said to Christina.
"Why?" she asked, her voice already thick with fatigue.
"Because Seeker is putting us back to…"
----------
Connor lost count of the number of times Seeker woke them up to feed them. About half a dozen, he thought. The first couple of times he tried to find a way to stop it from happening, feeling about in the dark in an attempt to work out how to operate the drone's systems. But Seeker had not been retrofitted with interface panels, as Hunter had. No-one had anticipated the survey drone having to carry passengers. So, even if he could find any of the systems, there would be no way of interacting with them. And even if there was, he wouldn't know how to operate them.
Eventually he realised that what Seeker was doing was for their own good. There was no point in Christina and him lying awake for months on end. There was nothing for them to do and very little room to move around in. They could not exercise and the pain and stiffness of atrophying joints and muscles would soon become unbearable. Not to mention the fact that they would run out of food and starve to death.
So he did the sensible thing and resigned himself to the cycle of waking, eating, and sleeping.
----------
This time something felt different. He sat up, groggily shaking his head to try and clear it. As he did so, his body rose from the floor and his head banged painfully on the inner surface of the drone's shell. Ah, weaker gravity, that's what it was. He heard Christina stirring in the darkness and reached out to steady her so that she wouldn't rattle around too.
"What's going on?" she asked blearily.
"There's very little gravity. I think we're just about clear of the black hole. Hopefully this means that Seeker will soon be able to jump us back to the Repository."
"Thank goodness, I don't know if I can take any more of this."
He moved closer to her so that he could put an arm around her shoulders. They were painfully thin, as were his own limbs, and he knew that, had it not been for Seeker's careful management of their meagre resources, the two of them would have starved long ago.
The familiar clanking noise signalled the arrival of a cup of water, and he reached over to pick it up and hand it to Christina. She drank a little and then gave it back to him, her hand shaking with weakness at the effort. They drank some more water, sitting silently together in the dark, and then forced down some of the paste.
They hoped they were nearing the end of their journey, but nothing was certain. They couldn't even be sure where Seeker was taking them. Although they had set out from the Repository, the little drone had been around a long time and travelled far and wide. There was no guarantee that it wouldn't drop them off on some uninhabited world for electronic reasons of its own.
Thankfully, they didn't have to worry about it for long. A familiar wobble and a sudden normalisation of gravity signalled that they had jumped through fold-space to somewhere planetary. Moments later, a metallic thump indicated that the drone had come to rest on a hard surface.
Connor's heart began to race with anxiety. Desperate as he was to get out of the dark, stinking prison which had been their home for what seemed like forever, he had no idea what to expect. Where were they now? If they were back at the Repository, who would be there to greet them? How much time had gone by? Was anyone they knew still alive? He could feel Christina trembling, presumably wrestling with the same doubts and fears.
Nothing happened for a while and he had a sudden dread that whoever was out there didn't know that there were people inside the drone. It was never designed to carry passengers, after all, so why would they think to look? And who knew how long it had taken Seeker to clear the black hole. His recollection of the flyers' mention of months was a dim one and he wasn't sure what variables had been assumed in arriving at that estimate. And even if the estimate was accurate, that was the time that would have gone by for the drone and its occupants. In normal space much more would have passed. What if the Nerds had abandoned the Repository? Earth's fate must have been sealed by now, one way or the other, and they may have had no reason to stay.
There was no guarantee that the Journeyman was still around either. What if he had decided that the Nerds were his last roll of the dice and, when they went, he had given up and left too. What if there was no-one around who remembered their mission into the black hole? What if it was long forgotten history and whoever was there now simply assumed that the drone had returned for routine maintenance? Perhaps they would decide that it was too old to be repaired and send it down to an artefact store – or, even worse, schedule it for demolition – all without investigating
whether there was anyone inside.
"Hey," he yelled, even though he knew that no-one would be able to hear him through the regeneralloy of the drone's shell. "Let us out!" He tried hitting the shell with a bony fist, but the blow produced more pain than sound. He scrabbled around, trying to find something hard he might use to make more of a noise. Belatedly remembering the cup and bowl, he grabbed one of them and pounded on the shell with it.
Then, mercifully, a little light began to seep into the systems cavity as the regeneralloy covering the drone's hatch began to thin. It didn't take much before he had to screw his eyes shut against what, to him, was a blinding glare. Once the hatch had opened fully, a cool breeze wafted into the systems cavity, dispelling some of the stench he had lived with for so long. He had become so used to it that he hardly noticed it anymore, until it began to dissipate, that is. Then the contrast between it and the new air circulating through the cavity brought its acridity back with a vengeance. The new air smelled fresher and sweeter than the mixture that Seeker had been producing for them. It smelled better than any air he had ever breathed before.
The desire to get out of the cavity gave him a burst of energy and he forced his eyes open so that they would adjust to the light faster. He felt Christina stir alongside him – she too was eager to move – and he took her arm, intending to help her towards the hatch. But then into his blurry line of sight crawled a spider-like creature which clambered through the hatch from outside and he pulled her back towards him in reflexive fright.
Red laser-light shone briefly from the spider's head, and he realised that it was just a machine scanning the inside of the cavity. The spider withdrew and he hesitated, wondering whether the Repository was fully automated now, run by robots instead of sentient beings.
Then a human head appeared at the hatch, its face shadowed by the light behind it. Whoever it was stared into the dim cavity for a long moment.