Black Hull (32 page)

Family…

The word was a like a bell to toll him
back to his sole self. Before him appeared the silhouette of a couch. A warm
fire crackled, and a tail wagged from atop a pillow. Voices crawled through the
living room—warm, happy hearts. They turned around.

“Dad, you forgot the popcorn,” Christopher
said.

“Oh, I’m—I’m sorry Christopher,” Mick
said.

“What’s a matter Daddy?” James asked,
crawling up on his mother’s shoulders.

“Nothing,” he said, wiping tears from
his eyes.

“Are we still going to fly my rocket
tomorrow?” Christopher asked.

“Let your daddy relax. Now, sit down and
stop kicking your brother.”

Karen…

Mick watched the back of her head,
waiting for her to turn to him.

Beep. Beep. Beep
.

“It’s done!” screamed James.

“James, quiet,” Karen said.

“I’m sorry babe,” Mick said.

She finally turned around, her face the
same as the night he’d first met her. She hadn’t aged a day.

“So am I. But we’re starting over, we agreed. So let’s move on. We’re open,
honest, and committed. And that’s all there is to it. We can work through it.
Can’t beat ourselves up.”

The kids were gone, along with the
couch, the fire, Selby, all of it. Replacing everything was a king size bed.
Mick’s wife stood before him, draped in a single thread of gold silk, watching
him, waiting. She smiled softly, her red lips curled into a sneer of lascivious
appetite. She offered him her hand. He took it. She drew him in, pulling his
body onto hers, sinking their merged bodies into the endless mattress.

“You don’t have to worry about it
anymore. I forgive you.”

“Karen…”

“Do you forgive me?”

“Of course I do.”

“It’s time to make up,” she said. She
poked his chest, drew a line down it toward his legs.

“I had the most awful dream,” Mick said.

“Tell me what happened.”

“I was lost in space, in the future. I
had no way to get to you. No way to fix everything. I felt awful and I—”

“Just a nightmare. Now lie down,” she
said. She flipped him onto his stomach, crawled on top of him, breathed hot
breath down his neck, then lower.

“It was
so
real,” Mick said.

“As real as this?” she said. He looked
down. Her hair fell over her face, then disappeared.

A UCA heavy-class set down on a
landscape of crumbling rock, sending gusts of shrapnel wind in each direction.
Two weathered droids approached the ship. A binary star tortured the surface of
Cnaf-2391, a fringe world in Bessel’s innermost asteroid belt. It had only one
inhabited stretch of land, a web of tiny tungsten silos insulated from the
extreme heat.

“We’re tracking a black hull light-class stolen from a UCA facility. This is a
standard search, nothing to worry about.”

“I wasn’t worried,” said one of the
droids.

“Can you take us on a quick tour of the
facility?” asked one of the officers.

“Of course, officer,” replied the droid.

The two droids led the officers, each
holding a UCA military scanner, over a rust-flaked terrain toward one of the
silver silos.

“What exactly do you produce here?”
asked the officer.

“A number of composites, all very
profitable.”

“I’m sure. All ore?”

“That’s right.”

They entered one of the silos. A
thousand containers lined the walls in neat, stacked rows. Each one was filled
with a powder of the same color.

“Mine a lot of the stuff, don’t you?”

“Like we said, very profitable.”

“We’ll need to see your communication and
docking logs.”

“No problem. Do you mind telling us who,
or what, you’re looking for?”

The officer looked at his comrades and
chuckled. “Fucking droids,” one of them muttered.

“Don’t you watch the UCA Media Channel?”

“No,” the droids said simultaneously.

“They have to push that regulation
through faster,” said the leading officer. “Pretty soon, the channel will be
patched in through your plant. That way, you won’t be left out anymore.”

“I don’t much like the thought of having
UCA news pumped into my mind without my consent,” replied the older of the two
droids.

“Well, that’s the shame in hanging onto
dead traditions. You get left in the dark, and you’re afraid of new
technology,” said the lead officer.

The droids looked at one another,
wondering if they might comment upon human irony. Neither did, but they kept
the UCA officials moving. Soon they stopped at a computer terminal and the
officers went to work scouring through its database.

“What the hell’s this?” asked one of them.
The old droid rolled over to see. There on the screen was a gap in arrivals. A
blank spot. A missing transaction of some kind.

“Oh, an error in our system. She’s
getting old.”

“Error in the system?”

“Yea, corrupt data.”

If a droid could express nervousness,
the old robot did not do it then. It stared directly into the eyes of its
interrogator until the other droid joined:

“It’s been happening a lot lately,” it
said.

“I don’t like it. It’s in direct
violation of UCA code. We could have you shut down immediately for one gap like
this—do you know that? Is there
anything
else you trade in? Any other
kind of service you offer on this world?” the UCA official asked, his pistol
drawn in a weak show of intimidation.  

The orange droid, a newer model, watched
the gun as it spoke, “Absolutely nothing sir.”

“And you’ve heard nothing of FOD? The
Q-bomb?”

“As we said, we don’t watch UCA news,”
the old droid replied, mimicking human agitation.

“Boss, let’s get the hell out of here,”
said another. “Looks good on this side of the server. Nothing here.”

The UCA officers filed out, trailed
closely by the droids.

“You know why we came out here?” the UCA
leader asked as they boarded the light-class.

“Routine check, sir?” the orange droid
replied.

“Rumors about some reverse time travel
bullshit. Something UCA scientists say is impossible. Yet here we are, on a
bumble fuck detail, checking the toilets of the cosmos. Crazy, isn’t it? All
because of something they think they may have scrambled in one of FOD’s transmissions.”

“But wouldn’t that be impossible, sir?
To go
back
in time? Time is simply a property of motion.”

The officer laughed again, much louder.

“It would be. God knows why—these higher ups. The FOD is dead. Everyone knows
it. Of course, General Sirma is a paranoid son-of-a-bitch.”

The others laughed with him, then
departed, their heavy-class cruiser rising into the gloaming sky.

“Think he suspected anything?” the
orange droid said to the older one.

“Not a thing.”

“Think it really worked?”

“Hell—it was FOD who built it? I
wouldn’t know what to say the odds favored—wouldn’t know what…”

“Name’s Nelson, you?” asked a scrawny,
pimple-ridden boy of a man. He struggled to wield his suitcases, which he
quickly plopped on the bunk bed in front of him.

“Mickey.”

“Nice to meet you. I’m in for
engineering, you?”

“Was shooting for FRINGE, but I’m
undeclared. I’m reconsidering things.”

“Well, FRINGE is about as hard as it
gets. Don’t hurt to think about some other options.”

“Yea, you’re right. Here, let me give
you a hand.”

“Thanks a lot. Hey, there’s going to be
a welcome dance tonight. You thinking about going?”

“In a few years,” Mick said.
“What?”

“In a few years I’ll go.”

“That signal, the M-82 signal I was
telling you about?” said physicist Darian Harper.

“Yea, it’s an anomaly. What of it?”

“Not anymore it’s not,” Harper said.
“Sit down Bill.”

“What do you mean
not anymore?
What
the hell are you talking about?”

Despite Bill Doss’s normal skepticism of
the brash young genius, Darian Harper, who’d just come through Harvard’s
doctoral program, having started his work at CERN the previous summer, he sat
down. The office window revealed a starlit night over a Hawaiian tide. Mauna
Kea was littered with white domes, powerful telescopes aimed at space, the
bastion of his pioneering research.

“Well? What is it?” said Bill.

“I’m going to need you to run some
really tight images for me, but it’s already been confirmed by Gemeni South in
Cerro Pachon and Yunnan in Lijiang.”

Anticipation started to roll through
Bill’s veins, and he put down his mug of tea. His eyes widened, and the
distinct foreshadowing of a breakthrough pulsed through the phone at him.

“It’s a black hole, Bill.”

“Like
hell
it is.”

“I know, it sounds crazy.”

“Moving at four times the speed of
light?”

“It’s inconceivable, but it’s
mathematically sound. We just have to get your confirmation and we can publish
and present at Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft.”

“Darian, do you know what that would
mean?”

“I know, it’s terrifying. But, even if
this proves correct by your images, and the others, which
it is,
it
is
correct Bill—it won’t reach us for—”

“Don’t tell me. I’ll figure it out. Send
the image coordinates you need.”

Bill hung up the phone.

He worked all night, got the exact
images Darian needed, and Darian called him two days later to confirm his
hypothesis. The directional aspect of the M-82 anomaly’s velocity had been
misinterpreted, skewed by a powerful swell of dark matter; in reality, Darian
Harper had discovered that the anomaly was expanding out equally in all
directions, at four times the speed of light. His math had proved true.

Bill stepped outside of the kitchen, saw
the lapping blue waves roll onto the white sand beach, a concentration of
nature’s beauty. He knelt to pick up the morning paper.

PACIFIC BUSINESS NEWS – July 12th, 2034

His eyes lowered.

That was fast.
He read his own
name and the rest of the headline.

HUMAN RACE IS ON BORROWED TIME CONFIRMS
HAWAII’S WILLIAM DOSS

A subheading ran:
What do we choose
as our purpose?

“Spin anything for a buck. Hacks,” he
grunted, then went back inside.

Baroque chamber music filled a pillared
hall of white. A woman clad in a waterfall of tight gold silk pushed her way
toward a broad-shouldered man in black. Dark handsome eyes turned to receive
the luminous form. Her lips curled with awkward excitement—sprightly eyes wove
a net about the man’s past. He was no longer alone.

“Dance?” she asked.

“I had hoped we would,” he replied.

She held out her hand, he took it.

That is your voice. Somewhere, a long
time ago, I forgot it. Never again.

Violins caressed his neck and arm.
Foreign movement confounded them both, and the heat of the hall increased.
Gentle gold upon a smooth black suit—her hair eased out, flew about, the cosmos
intact therein. The wild scent of flowers twined with the musk of man.

A sigh.
My luck cannot get better.
A planetside desk job with time off during the summer for travel and
adventure.
Her tonight
and hereafter
. His heart engorged,
flooded with gratitude. The gratitude formed three smiling faces—two robotic,
and one nearly as beautiful as that which looked at him presently. They smiled
and vanished.