Ammonite Stars (Omnibus): Ammonite Galaxy #4-5 (59 page)

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 voice 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.

The juddering of the whole ship seemed to intensify, as she fought to extricate herself from the huge gravity potential threatening to engulf her. Once again, their own teeth were rattling in their heads, and Diva bit her tongue on one particularly unsettling jolt.

Six’s eyes traveled from the screen to the visor, and then back again. It was an anxious wait. He knew there was no solution possible if this didn’t work. It did seem to him that there was less rattling now, that the ship was reacting better, but he wouldn’t know for sure until the screen in front of him confirmed that they were on a trajectory out of the ergosphere.

Then, at last, he gave a whoop. The screen was telling him that the New Independence was smoothly accelerating away, both from the remains of the planet, and from the black hole. Six gave a shaky sigh of relief, and Diva looked up sharply. When she saw his face, she punched one fist skywards, before hastily grabbing the sides of her screen again as the ship pitched.

It took some long time, but at last Six managed to distance the New Independence enough from both the planet’s influence, and from the pull of the singularity, to be able to relax for a moment.

“Six ...?” Diva pulled her hands away from the console and looked at him.

“What?”

“Why didn’t I understand about the colour thing before?”

He shrugged. “How should I know? You were brought up in a different world, I suppose.”

“But Grace understood, and she was brought up on Valhai, and you know what the Sellites are like! You could hardly imagine a race so diametrically opposed to the Xianthans.”

He finished programming the last part of the journey, and leant back. “Honestly, Diva, does it matter?”

She gave one of her ferocious frowns. “Of course it matters. Only, now I have seen what the colours mean ... it seems ... I can hardly go back to the other way of life.”

He raised one eyebrow. “You finally realized that being a meritocrat doesn’t bring you any colour?”

“Yes!”

“But, Diva, you already
knew
that. If it did then people like Tartalus would be panchromes, and even you must have been able to see what he was like when you were little.”

She nodded. “I could. But ... but I never saw Bennel clearly until you talked about colour. You brought him out from the background, and shone a light on him.”

“That is what colour does. It isn’t that special. It simply spotlights each person, makes them measure their progress, is all.”

“Yes. I know. I just never applied it to myself.”

“So how does it feel?”

She hesitated. “I’m not sure. Do you think our colours are even, now?”

He stared at her face. It was softer than usual, the harsh angles of her determination and will had been slightly smoothed.

Six nodded slowly. “I think we are pretty close. I’m glad there are still some differences – I wouldn’t like things to get too easy around here.”

Diva tucked her long legs under her and swayed towards him slightly. He put an arm around her as she let her eyes close.

“You know something ...?” she said.

He hugged her closer, while using his free hand to reprogram the flight computer, setting them for the co-ordinates where they were to meet the orthogel entity. “What?”

But there was silence on the bridge of the New Independence. Diva was fast asleep.

ARCAN PICKED THEM up effortlessly from the same point he had dropped them off what seemed like ages before. Six shook Diva awake as the orthogel entity appeared. But even Arcan was nervous.

“There is something interfering with my decoherence.” He darkened ominously. “I need to get us out of here before we all get trapped.”

“I got us beyond the event horizon. We can’t be sucked in now, can we?”

Arcan shimmered. “Things are not that bad, Six. But I am finding it ... difficult to stay this close to the singularity, as if I were being squeezed in a twist. I feel ... heavier, and lethargic. I am afraid that if I don’t get us away very soon, then we might still be trapped here forever. It is even becoming hard for me to speak to you.”

Diva stood up, still rubbing her eyes after the brief sleep. “Just get us as far away as you can at the moment. You don’t have to take us all the way back to the binary system.”

Arcan disappeared, and Six got up too, standing side by side with Diva as they both stared towards the singularity.

The jet black round hole in the sky was still there, but now there was a stream of matter billowing in towards it from the destroyed planet. The light from the stars in close orbit reflected off the debris, which sparkled against the inky background. It looked ominously beautiful.

As they watched, they became aware that the metal fuselage of the New Independence was itself shimmering. It seemed to pulsate – at one moment falling into the Great Magnet, and in the next dragging itself away. Arcan was struggling to pull them completely out of its attraction.

They exchanged glances. Nothing was happening. The slight quivering of the ship was being neutralized by their position in spacetime. Six gave a gulp.

“Err ... now might be a good time to come up with something to help.”

Diva shook her head. “I don’t think there is anything we can do ... if Arcan isn’t able to get us out of here, nobody can.”

Six looked around desperately. She was right. If the orthogel entity was in trouble, then there was not likely to be anything a mere transient could do.

They stared at each other, and then another squeal of metal made up their minds for them. The whole structure of the trader was shaking again now, and it felt as if there were only seconds before it would disintegrate in a final wrench of the metallic plating. They were forced to grab at each other and the bulkhead to keep their balance.