But instead of ordering
Merrimack
out of the Myriad, Farragut told his exec: “Take us to Centro.”
Calli relayed orders to navigation. Lu Oh squawked as the helm steered them straight toward a force that could suck
Merrimack
through the eye of a number six needle.
Kerry Blue ran for her Swift. Three klicks away. She could do that. Piece of cake. She could run three klicks carrying a twenty-five-kaygee field pack.
But she felt as if she were wearing fifty-kaygee shoes, and someone was pulling her head up on a noose. The sky—the sky was not. A lurid dark bruise of a storm sky. Purple light lanced off coagulated clouds. The ground poked up and hit her. Her head banged from within. She wanted to pull her own skin off, open her skull, and let her brain out.
She ran on, swearing.
They left me. They left me.
She was going to reach her Swift, by hell, make it back to the
Mack
and piss on Colonel Steele for leaving her here. Had to stay angry, else she would cry.
Semper fi
. Oh, yeah, sure,
semper
frogging
fi.
That must be for somebody else. Nobody was
fi
to Kerry Blue. Why wouldn’t Steele displace her? She wasn’t the first Marine to lose a Swift.
Okay, so he was making her run to her Swift. She would run to her Swift. And just you see where I park it,
sir!
It had to be just over the next hill. Hill? She didn’t remember a hill. She mounted the crest on all fours, clawing at the spongy weeds to pull herself up, gasping, throat raw. Squinted through the gritty wind, water spray, and tears. Heart dropped through the bedrock.
She had taken a wrong turn.
She was sure she had been running toward her Swift, but here she had ended up on the waterfront somehow.
Shit.
She swayed on the thundering ground, shaking. Savage voice within ordered:
Get up.
Never say die. That’s what Captain Farragut always said. Unless it’s to the enemy, never say die.
Get up and get to your damned Swift, Marine!
Which way was her Swift? She thought she’d left it at the end of this road. Wrong road. But there were no other roads.
Did not know where the hell she could be.
A long lightning flash. Froze a picture of hard blue clarity. The cracked road led into the jagged water. And in a trough between frozen gray waves: the peak of a silver fin blazoned red, white, and blue.
Her Swift. Washing away.
“No!
” she tried to scream. Got out only a squeak.
The sky roared. A tearing sand wind pulled up the ground. A shadow fell across her with heat, thunder, and noise. She thought a house was falling on her.
The blocky structure fell hard, close, a scant five-meter miss. A hiss of air. A slash of light in the outline of a hatchway.
SPT 1 was here.
A gangway slapped down with a thunder crack.
Kerry pulled herself up, stagger-ran up the ramp, dove through the circle of light.
“Cowboy!” she cried, rolling on the deck under cool lights. He had come for her. She should have known Cowboy would come back for her. Steele would have his hide on the bulkhead for this.
The hatch’s shutting cuffed her eardrums. The activation of the ship’s distortion field brought instant relief, took the rack from her limbs, the bomb from her skull. Rejoined body to soul. She blinked gritty tears from her eyes to find her savior in the pilot’s seat.
Not Cowboy.
“Get your ass off the deck, and man the overrides, Marine.”
“Sir!”
Would it
kill
that man ever to use a normal tone of voice to her? It was always a snarl or a bark like she was a galactic fu. So she wondered bitterly why Steele wanted the likes of oh-so-stupid
her
at his right, then realized it was because there was absolutely no one else aboard.
Everyone else had gone ahead. It was she and Steele and no one else.
Kerry scrambled for the copilot’s chair. Couldn’t see anything out the front viewport but storming mud. The monitors looked worse.
The singularity. You couldn’t see
it
exactly. You saw what it consumed—whirling gases catching fire as they rushed and collided at speeds of millions of klicks per hour, all swirling into the vast void.
Kerry wrenched her attention away from the screens to her flight controls. Her instruments were telling that the power to achieve escape velocity from this little berg of a planetoid was a magnitude normally reserved for an FTL jump. Couldn’t be right.
She stole a glance to the man at her side. Colonel Steele breathed like a bull in a fight, his square jaw clenched.
The engine whined. The Spit boat waddled aloft. Climbed like a slug. A view out the port showed Kerry the buck and wallow that the force field would not let her feel. Heard a quiet grunt at her side. Stole another look.
The muscles in Steele’s arms stood out, tensed hard as stone, as if he were physically pulling the boat up.
“Are we going to make it, sir?”
“They tell me no.” Steele slapped the monitors off to conserve power, brought the life systems down to nominal, channeling all available power to the distortion field and the thrusters.
The blocky spacecraft tore clear of the atmosphere—or else the atmosphere ripped away from the Spit boat. Down below, the planet fell away; up above, the stars soared away. Kerry shut her eyes against the conflicting images. Opened her eyes to focus on the instruments. Always trust your instruments.
Her instruments said the Spit boat was not climbing. The spacecraft peaked, stalled. Hung on a breath—
Steele’s face was inexpressive as granite, those ice-chip eyes determinedly cold, his big hands steady. But a sweat sheen broke on his white skin. Kerry was not sure what that meant. She never could tell what that man was thinking or feeling.
Red lines striped Kerry’s board; the Spit boat’s force field had maxed. Velocity showed negative. They were slipping back toward the singularity.
“Punch overrides,” Steele commanded, and Kerry batted down the switches.
“Balk,” she reported, reading the red lights. The Spit boat would not let her push the engines without compromising the distortion field.
The engine screamed. Distortion field status monitor flickered red. One or the other had to give. “Kill thrusters!” Steele shouted.
Kerry obeyed, quickly, unquestioningly. Would have jumped off a cliff if he told her to. Probably just had.
With the thrusters shut down, engine readings fell briefly back to safe levels, but soon recommenced a climb toward the redlines.
The river of fire about them darkened, thickened, carrying the Spit boat along with it into a well of infinite depth and unimaginable density. The crash and scrape and searing rain grew loud as the distortion field monitors all flickered red. Kerry looked to the colonel. “What now?”
Those pale blue eyes met hers. She couldn’t remember him ever looking into her eyes. He always glared straight over her head, as if there was nothing in her face worth looking at. He had really amazing eyes. But she found no rescue there. All he had to offer was not to let her die alone.
He answered,
“Semper fi.”
“SPT 1 sighted,” Tactical reported. “He’s spaceborne!”
“Yippee yo kay yay! Punch it, Kemo Sabe!” That was Cowboy. You could hear him yell from two levels down.
But SPT 1 had not achieved escape velocity so much as the planet Centro had been torn from under it.
The event horizon seemed to grow and approach, though truth was space was shrinking and the SPT boat was going into the singularity,
Merrimack
not far behind it.
Captain Farragut beheld the maelstrom through the viewports and the images on the monitors of an all consuming blackness, blotting out space and time. It looked like the end of the world.
God, who created such an unholy holocaust? It eats. It eats everything.
“He’s not going to make it,” Calli advised. “His field is losing integrity.”
Farragut turned to the sensor technician. “Do we have a res fix on him?”
“Sure do, sir. Not precise enough to displace him.”
“Then
hook
him!”
Calli barked orders to engineering.
Merrimack
heaved out a distortion field extension in the shape of a frog tongue to snag and surround the failing craft.
“Hook away,” Tactical reported. “And . . . Got him!”
As the event horizon swallowed SPT 1.
Captain Farragut had long since become accustomed to not
seeing
anything in normal space; still, he counted on having a visual image provided by the sensors. The monitors did not show the Spit boat. They showed a monstrous wall of oblivion, a titanic cascade of flaming gases falling into it and vanishing.
Merrimack
’s own distortion field showed on the screen like a vitreous thread in the inferno, extending for kilometers, breaking off at the maw of the bottomless pit.
“Engineering! Control Room. Status! Do we have him?”
“Got him, Mr. Carmel!” Engineering reported over the com. “Hook holding.”
To the sensor tech, “Can you get a reading beyond the event horizon?”
“Not exactly, sir. We can read inside our own distortion field. We can tell the Spit boat’s in there. Problem is we can’t use our exterior sensor array to read within our own field. But we got him. Can’t tell you too much else about him, but we got him.”
“Then get us the hell out of here,” said Farragut.
His XO, the navigator, tactical, chief engineer, and the helm were already conferring over escape coordinates. Conferring too long.
“Mr. Carmel, why aren’t we moving?”
Calli’s brown eyes lifted in a brief, dire glance, then back to the helm’s console, muttering over the readouts.
Merrimack
maintained its distance from the event horizon, but that meager distance was not increasing. The thing out there was feeding, sucking in dust, with a horrific hiss and flash. And under it all,
Merrimack
’s six engines bellowed, the great ship straining at the edge of all her strength.
It fell to Calli to report, “Can’t, sir. We can maintain the integrity of our force field and our hook, and that’s a max. We cannot escape. We’ve got nothing else to give.”
Farragut turned to the viewport, astonished. Insulted.
That?
That is going to defeat me?
He could not accept it. Said to his XO, “A black hole by definition is where escape velocity exceeds the speed of light. We regularly travel a thousand times that. What is the holdup?”
“It’s not the velocity, John. It’s the acceleration that’s always been the trick to FTL. We travel faster than light, but we never actually travel
at
light speed. Moving a mass at light speed takes infinite force, and that is exactly what it’s going to take to drag the Spit boat through the event horizon.”
“Break the hook off now,” said Colonel Oh. Might’ve been advice, but it came out a command. “Break off, or we’ll be sucked in with it.”
Merrimack
maintained, steadfast within the torrent of matter raging into the abyss. The atomized debris spilling round the ship might have been the planet Centro with its 900,000 lives. Dead long before they went in, but Lord Almighty, 900,000 of them.
“Did you hear me, Captain?” Lu cried over the swelling din. “Break off!”
“Not without my men.”
“You’ve already lost them! They’re inside the singularity!”
Farragut consulted the specialists at the tactical station. “Can Steele possibly be alive in there?”
“Not exactly charted territory, sir,” Mr. Vincent answered apologetically. Oldest man on deck. Forty-two. Unflinching. “Theory says the laws of physics break down inside a singularity, but the colonel is not exactly in the singularity. He’s inside the
Mack
’s distortion field.”
“But it’s going to take infinite power to pull him
out
of it,” said Colonel Oh. “So here you sit like the boy with his fist stuck in the candy jar. The little idiot can’t figure out that the only way to get his hand out of the jar is to let go of the candy. Let go of the candy, sir, or we’ll die in this jar!”
“We’re not talking about candy, Mr. Oh,” said Captain Farragut.
“No. No, we’re not. We’re talking about a corpse! Let go!”
Merrimack
’s six engines groaned. Farragut addressed the personnel on his command deck, “Someone—someone besides Colonel Oh—plot me the shape of this monstrosity.”
The suns at the core of the Myriad had been rotating when they collapsed into the singularity, dragging bent space-time around them, spinning. The event horizon had to describe a moving torus.
“Compute any point that might be more vulnerable to escape than any other point. Black holes give off X rays. Get us out the way the X rays are getting out.”
“Aye,
sir!
” Calli responded for everyone, her vehemence directed toward the spindly CIA spook.
“Your Marines are dead,” said Lu.
Farragut faced her. Made her look him right in the eyes. “Do you
know
that, Colonel, or is that an opinion?”
“It is obvious,” said Lu, staring back, unwavering.
“Not to me,” said Farragut.
Mr. Vincent at the tactical station sang out. “We have company. Roman point is on the grid.”
Farragut moved to the tactical station, looked over Vincent’s shoulder to survey the monitors. “What is he?”
“Striker,” Mr. Vincent answered. Small craft. Wickedly fast. Toting some heavy weaponry. “Approaching on the eights at threshold velocity.”
Lu Oh vibrated reedy indignation. “This is an inappropriate risk to take to recover a pair of corpses, Captain Farragut. The singularity is as good a grave as any. Let go.”
“Striker in range,” said Mr. Vincent.
Calli called Fire Control. “Icky, what can you give me?”
“Nothing, sir. We have no weapons. We can’t breach the distortion field without breaking up. Gunports are capped fast and barrels secured inboard. We keep sealed or we are
string.
”
