Callsign: King - Blackout

49

King didn’t understand a word of what Fiona was saying, but recognized that it had to be her native language-the nearly extinct tongue of the Siletz tribe. The noises didn’t even seem like words, just a string of vocalizations, but he could see the effect that they were having on the girl. The pain and fear had slipped from her face, replaced by a serene, almost confident expression.

King focused on what she was saying, and began to distinguish certain words that were repeated every few seconds like a refrain. He began to anticipate when she would utter the phrase, and gradually, haltingly at first, but then with more gusto, added his voice. He became aware that Sara was trying to harmonize as well.

“This is wrong,” Alexander rasped from above. The words had to fight their way past clenched teeth. “You cannot control it this way. You must speak the word I taught you.”

Fiona ignored him, but when King glanced up, he saw a strange fury building in the other man’s eyes.

He wouldn’t…

There wasn’t time for King to finish the thought. He threw his right arm out and embraced Fiona and Sara just as Alexander’s grip failed.

There was simply no way he could hope to hang onto their combined weight or arrest their slide into the crater, but that didn’t stop him from trying.

He shoved his free hand into a crack, braced his feet against protrusions on the cave wall, and pulled back with all his might.

It was like trying to pull a locomotive uphill. The shoulder of the arm that held the falling women burned; the muscles and tendons taut like a wire about to snap.

He felt his feet slip from their perch, then his hand was torn free and they were all sliding down the slope. It was not a free fall, not like it had been with Brown. The slope was about forty-five degrees but there were plenty of protruding surfaces to provide a little resistance in the form of painful friction. Nevertheless, the end result would be the same. Gravity owned them now, and the journey would not end until they reached the event horizon, where time would stand still and they would spend an eternity on the cusp of oblivion.

Through it all, Fiona kept singing, as did King.

After a few seconds passed, King realized that they were no longer sliding toward the event horizon. His efforts to find a handhold had paid off; the fingers of his left hand had wrapped around a protruding horn of rock. What surprised him though was that he had been able to maintain the grip, and he understood that the tidal force of gravity had, if only momentarily, abated.

Whatever Fiona was doing was working.

He noticed a change in her song, new and unfamiliar phrases issued from her mouth, and when he glanced down, he saw that she had stopped clapping out the rhythm and in fact had gone almost completely limp. Her eyes had rolled back in her head and the words that burbled from her lips were the mumblings of someone in a trance state.

King listened for a moment, trying to learn the refrain of this new mantra-it didn’t sound like a Native American language anymore-but then a movement at the bottom of the crater arrested his attention.

Something was emerging from the event horizon.

King knew that what he was seeing could not really be happening. Nothing material could escape from the event horizon of a black hole. To do so would require acceleration to faster-than-light speeds-a physical impossibility-and would require more energy than existed in the entire universe. Impossibilities notwithstanding, there was a definite bulge in the visual distortion at the center of the crater.

The basilisk! King thought in a sudden panic. Maybe the explosion hadn’t killed it after all. Maybe he’d failed to destroy the quantum computer network with the IED.

Suddenly, the event horizon erupted. It was not the black mass of the basilisk that burst forth, but rather a gray-brown column that shot like a geyser into the air above the crater. The crown of the plume was lost in the dark night, but in the space of a few seconds, King saw particles of fine dust precipitating from the cloud.

As the fallout intensified into a choking miasma, he hastily tugged free a shirttail and fashioned an impromptu mask as the gritty rain began to cloud his vision.

In the darkness that followed, he heard Fiona’s voice, still speaking the strange language. Then, after a few minutes, she stopped, coughed twice, and fell silent.