For Love and Glory

XXVI

Shrouded in fire, the black holes sped to their destiny. Minute by minute, second by second, they swelled in sight, blazed more wildly brilliant, roared the louder throughout every spectrum of radiance. The discs were whirling storms, riven, aflare with eerie lightnings. Vast tatters broke off, exploded into flame, torrented back down or threw red spindrift across heaven before vanishing into vacuum. It was as if the stars, their light rays bent, scattered terrified from around those masses. Afloat in the captain’s globe, Lissa heard the blood thunder in her ears like the hoofs of galloping war horses. And yet this was only a shadow show. To have seen with your bare eyes would have been to be stricken blind, and afterward die.

She gripped Valen’s hand. It was cold. His breath went harsh. The sky had burned over Naia too; but not like this, not like this.

The black holes met.

Nobody in real time saw that. It was too swift. At one heartbeat they were well apart, at the next they blurred into streaks, and then light erupted. White it was at the center, raw sun-stuff; thence it became night-violet, dusk-violet, day-blue, steel-blue, gold-yellow, brass-yellow, blood-red, sunset-red. Outward and outward it bloomed. The fringes were streams, fountains, lace in a wind. They arced over and began to return in a million different, pure mathematical curves.

“I didn’t know it would be beautiful!” Lissa cried.

Force crammed her against her harness. Her head tossed. With no weight for protection, dizziness swept black across vision and mind. Another, opposite blow slammed, and another. The metal of the ship toned.

“Graviton surges,” she dimly heard Valen gasp. “Predicted-uneven—hang on—”

The waves passed. He floated. The noise and giddy dark drained from her head. He, in his chair, strained toward her. “How are you, darling?” The words quavered. “Are you hurt?”

“No. No. I… came through… intact, I think. You?”

“Yes. If you hadn’t—” He mastered himself. “But you did. It was a, a wave of force. The physicists didn’t expect it’d be this strong, with this short a wavelength. Most of it was supposed to spread out in the orbital plane— Look. Look.”

The fire geysers rained back toward what had become a single fierce, flickery star. As they fell, their lovely chaos drew together and made rivers of many-hued splendor. The flows twisted, braided, formed flat spirals that rushed inward, trailing sparks. A new accretion disc was forming. Elsewhere, though, half a dozen blobs of dancing, spitting luridness fled from them.

The light played unrestful over Valen’s face, as if he were a hunter on ancient Earth, crouched above his campfire in a night where tigers and ghosts prowled. “Report,” he said at the general intercom. “Everybody. Dagmar?”

“All well,” the ship said. Her serenity was balm. “Minor damage, mostly due to a blast of lasered gamma rays that struck well aft. Nothing disabling or not soon repairable. Interior background count went high for half a second, but the dose was within safe limits and the count is down to a level acceptable for twenty watches.”

“We’ll be gone well before then,” Valen promised. “Uh, crew?”

The replies babbled, joyous, one (never mind whose) half hysterical. No harm sustained.

“How’d the observations go?” Valen asked tartly.

“We won’t know for weeks,” Esker answered. “That flood of input— But it seems like every system functioned. I do believe we… we have a scientific revolution at birth.”

Lissa’s attention had stayed with the mystery. “It seems to be dimming,” she ventured.

“It’s receding fast,” Esker said. “The resultant momentum. But, I’m not sure yet, but I think the tensors aren’t quite what relativity would predict. Something we don’t understand came into play. Certainly that gravitational effect exceeded my top estimate by orders of magnitude. Captain, we will follow the star. Won’t we?”

“Of course,” Valen replied. “For as long as feasible. Taking due precautions. Positioning ourselves here, we took a bigger gamble than we knew. I don’t want to push our luck further.”

“Nor I, sir.” Esker laughed like a boy. “Not with everything we’ve got to carry home!”

They’ve forgotten their feud, Lissa thought. I have too. At least, it doesn’t matter anymore. Probably it will again, when we are again among human things. But today it’s of no importance whatsoever.

Carry home.… Yes, this precious freight of knowledge. There must be more data aboard now than we could transmit back in days, maybe in tens of days. We have more in our care than just our lives.

“Those fiery clouds that got ejected,” she asked, “why weren’t they recaptured?”

“The energies released caused them to exceed escape velocity from the vicinity of the ergosphere,” Esker said. “I’m half afraid to calculate how much energy that was. However, it seems to have expended itself mostly on that escape. They’re not giving off much hard radiation. The ergospheres themselves, like the event horizons, went through contortions as they met and fused. Spacetime did. I don’t know what happened in those microseconds. Maybe we never will.” Awe shook his words. “For an instant, the gates stood open between entire universes.”

“The hints alone should reveal a new cosmos to your minds,” Orichalc murmured.

Lissa nodded, dazed more than comprehending. “But what, now, holds the clouds together? Why don’t they whiff away, evaporate?”

Esker laughed afresh. “Do you take me for an oracle, milady? At this stage, we can only guess. Magnetic bottle effects, conceivably. Or maybe each is the, the atmosphere around a new-formed mass. Yes, I think that’s a bit more likely. But we’ll find out.”

“Those masses would need to be planet-sized,” Valen said low. “That gas is incandescent hot. It’d never stay around anything less. As if… this union tried to beget worlds—”

“Signal received,” Dagmar broke in. “Audio on the fifth standard laser band. Code: ‘Distress. Please respond immediately.’ ”

A dream-hand caught Lissa around the throat.

“You know where it’s from?” she heard Valen snap.

“Yes. The Susaian ships just south of us. One of them.” If Dagmar has to correct herself, is she frightened?

“Acknowledge and translate, for God’s sake!”

Lissa had an impression that the hisses and whistles beneath the impersonal robotic voice were equally calm. “Moonhorn, commanding Supremacy, beaming to Asborgan vessel Dagmar. We request information as to your condition after the event.”

“We’re in good shape,” Valen said. “You?”

“Not so,” came after seconds of time lag. “We and Amethyst were tossed together, too fast for effective preventative action. Both ships are disabled. Casualties are severe.”

“A gravitational vortex,” Esker said raggedly. “A potential well, an abnormal local metric, expanding principally in the main inertial plane. It didn’t flatten to the ordinary curvature of space-time till it had passed you.” Lissa thought he found refuge in theory. Did he utter mere guesses? Belike he did. Who was sure of anything, here?

Her eyes tracked the dwindling star that was not a star. It gleamed exquisite, like a ringed planet seen from a distance, save that it was also like a galaxy with a single spiral arm. There passed through her: If Gerward hadn’t settled for less than we wanted, Dagmar too would be drifting helpless, a wreck. I might be dead. Oh, he might be!

“We’re sorry to hear that, madam,” Valen said. “Can we help?”

“I do not know,” Moonhorn answered, “but you are our single hope. We have contacted our nearer fellows. Ordinarily we could wait for them. However, observation and calculation show we are on a collision trajectory with one of those gaseous objects spewed from the fusion. We shall enter it in approximately four hours and pass through the center. At its speed, that will go very fast. But radiometric measurements show temperatures near the core that even in so brief a passage will be lethal. No Susaian craft is close enough, with sufficient boost capability, to arrive before then.”

Stillness descended. The time felt long until Valen asked, slowly, “You have no escape? No auxiliaries, anything like that?”

“Nothing in working order,” said Moonhorn. “Else I would not have troubled you. We realize that for you, too, a rescue may well be impossible.”

“We can cross the distance between at maximum boost, ten Terran gravities, with turnover,” Dagmar said, “in approximately one hundred and fifty minutes. To escape afterward, we should accelerate orthogonally to the thing’s path, but at no more than five gravities, since you have injured persons with you and the hale will have no opportunity to prepare themselves either. This acceleration must begin no later than half an hour before predicted impact, if we are to avoid the hottest zone. Before we start, my crew must make ready; otherwise, at the end of the first boost, they will be disabled, perhaps dead. Allowing time for that also, we should have half an hour, or slightly less, for the transfer of crews from your vessels to me.”

In short, Lissa thought, the operation is crazily dicey. No. We can’t. The odds are too big against us.

Her gaze went to the clouds. She didn’t know which of them was the murderer on its way, but they seemed much alike. Faerie nebulosity reached out around a glowing pink that must be gas overlying the white-hot, ultraviolet-hot, X-ray-hot middle. As she watched, small light-streaks flashed from it and vanished. Meteors. No, they must in reality be monstrous gouts of fire.

“I see,” Moonhorn was saying gravely. “Our hope was slight at best. Since those are the actual parameters, the risk is unacceptable. I would make that judgment myself, were situations reversed. Thank you and farewell.”

“No, wait!” Valen clawed at the locks on his harness. “We’re coming. Crew, prepare for ten gee acceleration.”

Is this possible? “Gerward, you can’t mean that,” Lissa protested.

His look upon her was metallic. “You heard me,” he said. “All of you did. Get into the tank. That’s an order.”