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“What time is it?” he groaned as the overhead light set off a throbbing in his temples.

“Oh five hundred. Get up!”

“Go back to sleep. I have second watch this week and I was up until 02:00 this morning.”

“Don’t you remember what day it is?”

He groaned and threw an arm over his eyes to protect them. Suddenly, it came back to him. Today was the day! It had been 380 days since they had left Earth. In a couple of hours, they would arrive at their destination. The interminable waiting was nearly over!

It seemed unreal somehow. They had been sealed up in this vacuum flask of a ship for so long that it was hard to remember when it had not been the whole universe. Everything that had gone before - his parents, Moira Sims, … Jani!!! - all of them seemed a fading memory. Earth was hazy in his recollection, as was every single human being he had ever met who was not currently aboard this ship. Even the earlier parts of the voyage, like the day Sar-Say had electrocuted himself, seemed indistinct and hazy in his mind.

Finally, he yawned, stretched, and noticed the old-sock taste in his mouth. “It’s breakout day, isn’t it?”

“You are sleepy, aren’t you? Damned right it’s breakout day! We are going to have something to see other than blackness in a few hours, and all you can do is lay here and stare at the overhead.” He felt a movement on the bed and turned in time to see her back disappear into the sanitary cubicle. He found watching her movements in microgravity endlessly fascinating.

If it had surprised the ship’s quartermaster back at Neptune when the two of them asked to room together, that dour-faced individual had not shown it. He had merely checked his computer list, arranged for the transfer of one name to another cabin, and then assigned the newly emptied compartment to the two lovers. Nor had that been the only change in berth assignments during the voyage. Several other couples had set up housekeeping during the long outbound months. Some had changed their arrangements several times, in fact. It is lonely in space, and especially so when one is so far that the light from home was older than human civilization.

Staccato banging in the overhead announced that Lisa had turned on the shower. Just as quickly, the noises subsided as she used up her 15-second ration of fresh water. The water system was another improvement they had added to the alien transport. The previous owners, it seemed, had used hot sand for cleaning their fur. Much of the sanitary system’s installation had taken place on the outbound voyage, and no matter how long they ran the filtration plant, there never seemed to be enough clean, hot water onboard.

“Done!” she called out from the cubicle.

He untangled himself from the light sheet that was all the covering one needed in space, and floated to the cubicle just as she exited, her hair wrapped in a towel. She smiled up at him as they passed close enough for an intimate touch. Bleary eyed, he pulled himself inside and closed the door.

Ten minutes later, he floated out again. After attending to his body’s basic needs, he had brushed his teeth, shaved, and wiped himself down with a damp washcloth. It was not as satisfying as a shower, but it was all that he could afford this week, having recently discovered that he was overdrawn at the water bank. He felt at least a little human, which was a one-thousand-percent improvement over a few minutes earlier.

Lisa had put away the sleeping net and was lounging in midair as she watched him dress.

He saw her looking at him and said, “What?”

“Oh, nothing. I am just admiring my man is all.”

“Careful, Wench! You don’t want to miss breakout, do you?”

Her gaze shifted from his face to a lower spot on his body, then up again. The contented look she wore suddenly transformed itself into a taunting grin. “Methinks, sir, that thou doth brag to excess.”

#

The whole ship’s crew was awake and anxious as the Ruptured Whale droned on through the stygian blackness of superlight velocity. Breakouts were a social occasion aboard ship, a chance to confirm that the universe still existed beyond the small bubble of curved space that their stardrive generator wrapped around them.

This breakout would be different. This would be the last before they rendezvoused with the rest of the fleet.

System 184-2838, which the crew was already referring to as The Hideout, would be their first stop in what could prove to be the outskirts of the Sovereignty. As Dr. Bendagar had mentioned in their final pre-launch briefing, The Hideout was very likely to be uninhabited. Not only was the star a variable G-Class giant, but also the system had been sterilized by radiation from the Crab Supernova within the past ten thousand years. Should their speculations prove incorrect, however, they had an alternate system mapped for fleet rendezvous. In fact, there were four such star systems mapped -- just in case.

Once the fleet rendezvoused, the first order of business would be to find a suitable small planetoid on which to set up housekeeping. They would also erect their gravity wave observatory, positioning its three delicate instruments a precise 1000 kilometers apart. With luck, they would be able to pinpoint the location of the local Broan stars within a few weeks or months of beginning observation. Without luck, they would be forced to search the surrounding stars one by one.

After inhabited stars were located, starships would approach to within one light-year of the targeted systems and quietly spy out their communications and other energy signatures. Those emanations would be recorded and studied until the expedition scientists felt it was safe to move closer. The scouts would then move to the outskirts of the system for follow-up surveillance. Only when they had evaluated their observations would they send the Ruptured Whale in for a closer look.

The best method of injecting the Whale into a Broan-held system had been the subject of hot debate for much of the voyage. Since Sar-Say claimed the stargates were unmanned, most favored placing the Whale into a long cometary orbit that would pass near a stargate, then pretend to be a ship that had just arrived from some other system. Assuming the local authorities had no way to verify the claim, they would request permission to approach. The masquerade would begin in earnest when they took up orbit about a Broan world. Under the guise of disposing of their cargo, they would spy out the true state of affairs in the Sovereignty.

Dan Landon gazed at the other members of the control room crew without being obvious about it. Two of the crew he had brought with him from Magellan. Raoul Bendagar was again his Chief Scientist, just as he had been nearly two years ago on that fateful day in the New Eden system. The other crewmember was Perry Grandstaff, now Lieutenant Grandstaff. The boy had grown up since his first cruise with Landon. No longer did his voice occasionally squeak during “All Hands” announcements, and his skin had almost completely cleared up.

The other members of the crew had been recruited for various aspects of the project. Two - Fairfax the astrogator, and Klein, the sensor operator - were merchant spacers, while Laura Dresser continued to pamper her beloved generators. Her obsession with the operation of the stardrive was one of which Landon approved. After 7000 light-years, the stardrive was still running as smoothly as the day they had gone superlight.

“Two minutes, Captain!” Astrogator Fairfax announced.

Landon acknowledged the report by repeating the information. He could see the countdown chronometer as well as Fairfax could, but there are certain traditions in the space services. One was that the astrogator kept the captain apprised of the countdown whether he needed to or not. On at least two occasions in the historical past, that custom had averted impending disasters.

In this case, the maneuver the Ruptured Whale was performing was closer to a reentry than a launch.

Having vaulted over the mountain that is light speed, they were now sliding down the far slope, preparing to reenter the real universe.

“One minute, Captain,” the astrogator announced.

“One minute, aye. Mr. Grandstaff, make your announcement!”

“Attention, All Hands. Breakout in one minute. I repeat. Prepare for breakout. One minute warning, and counting.”

The numbers on the countdown chronometer continued rolling downward. After an indeterminate time, the numbers on the screen read 30. Then some time later, they read 20. Finally, they began to count backwards at a variable rate, with each second taking approximately twice as long as the one that preceded it.

“Ten … ” came the voice of the communicator. Some of the high pitched overtones had crept back into Grandstaff’s tone, reminding Landon of those moments after the gravity wave had rattled the ship at New Eden. Still, the boy recovered in time to pick up the count at five.

“Five … four … three…”

Dan Landon found his fingers hovering over the “kill” switch of their own accord. He was ready to intervene if anything went wrong with the flight system. Finally, it was time.

“Two … One … Breakout!”

The bridge viewscreen had been black for nearly the entire 9,000-hour journey from Earth. No longer.

One moment it was a stygian pool, the next it cleared to reveal … more blackness. Except, this blackness was punctuated by a scattering of diamond-like points, a typical deep-space star field.

Arrayed before them were the stars of that section of the galaxy’s spiral known as the Orion Arm.

Despite its yearlong voyage, the
Ruptured Whale
had traversed considerably less than one-tenth the diameter of the Milky Way. That was the problem. They were still in Earth’s backyard and so, potentially, were the Broa.

The few stars visible began to move in unison as the ship’s computer found its bearings and began to execute a preprogrammed command. Slowly, so as not to disorient viewers, the star field flowed off the upper-right corner of the screen, to be replaced by new stars at the lower left. For a few seconds it seemed as though nothing else had changed as the dimensionless points marched one after another. Then something did change. At the corner of the screen, a foggy line appeared, followed by a translucent wraith through which the background stars remained clearly visible. The dimly glowing cloud brightened as more of it climbed up the screen, then took on the illusion of depth as the observers’ brains worked to make sense out of the swirling patterns of light and dark. After long seconds made longer by racing hearts, the ghost climbed fully onto the screen.

Dan Landon let out the lungful of air he had been holding, attempting not to sigh audibly as he did so.

Whether the Broa lived around here or not was something to be determined. However, one thing was certain. They were close to their planned breakout point. They had definitely arrived!

#

About the time humanity was learning to farm the Po River Valley of China, a star ten times more massive than Sol finally came to the end of its life. After billions of years spent transmuting hydrogen into helium, then helium into carbon, and finally, carbon into iron, the star had used up all of the available fuel at its heart. Had it been of average size, a dwarf star like Sol, it would have slowly dimmed over time, becoming redder and redder, until eventually, it would extinguish itself completely.

This was not to be. The size of the star prevented it from leaving the scene in such an inconspicuous manner. With the last carbon atoms transformed into iron, the star’s nuclear fires went out and the ever-present pull of gravity took control of its fate. With no new energy being produced, the core of the star fell inward, and the energy of position stored in gigatons of star stuff was instantly converted to heat.

In a matter of seconds, the temperature within the “cold” star had risen to the point where iron nuclei began to stick to one another.

Iron is unique in the universe. It is at the top of what scientists call “the curve of binding energy.” Fusing lighter elements into heavier ones (or splitting heavy elements into lighter) results in energy being released, a process that human beings first harnessed in the atomic and hydrogen bombs. Iron, being at the top of the curve, is a dead-end in terms of energy production. Iron has nowhere to go but down. Fusing iron consumes more energy than it produces.

The iron-iron fusion reaction in the core robbed the star of what little energy remained to fight the implacable pull of gravity. Far from halting the collapse, the fusing of iron nuclei accelerated it and again, in-falling matter heated the center of the star. Suddenly, the interior was hotter than anything seen since the first moments of the Big Bang, and within the boiling cauldron, neutrinos began to condense from pure energy. The “neutrino storm” phase of the star’s death throes had begun.

In the menagerie of subatomic particles, the neutrino is the most slippery of them all. Where photons, protons, and electrons might spend millions of years bouncing around inside the star as they worked their way to the surface, neutrinos were not so constrained. A neutrino can pierce the body of a massive star as easily as it can fly through hard vacuum, and that is precisely what the new-formed neutrinos did. In the moment of their creation, they leapt skyward as though the intervening layers of dense plasma did not exist - which, to the neutrinos, they did not. This powerful, invisible stream of energy robbed the star of as much energy per second as it had produced in its entire life.

Of all the reactions taking place simultaneously, the neutrino storm predominated. All other effects were relatively minor byproducts of the exploding neutrino population. However, “minor” is a relative term, especially on the scale at which the universe operates. What happened next was spectacular, even when the aftermath was viewed ten thousand years after the event.

To say that the star had lost all of its fuel is not correct. It lost the fuel down where the nuclear fires had always burned. Out in the gaseous envelope surrounding the core, however, there remained plenty of nuclear fuel in the form of hydrogen and helium. With an interior temperature measured in the billions of degrees, it was suddenly hot enough to fuse hydrogen even in the outermost layers of the star. Suddenly, the entire star was aflame with nuclear reactions. Gravity, which had been on the verge of winning its ages-old battle with the star, was suddenly inadequate to the task of holding the gas mass together.