The Void (18 page)

“We don't know why, but occasionally when one person goes, others will follow. They seem fine at first, but then . . .” Ridley snapped his fingers and then immediately regretted it as he watched her flinch. “It's very rare,” he said, trying to save the moment, “but obviously very dangerous as well. Just keep an eye out. It seems that some people on this ship are more comfortable with you than me. If they are going to let their guard down, you will be the first one to see it.”

As he left her behind, he was sure that she would be vigilant. It was her nature; that much he could tell. But he couldn't trust her. When he saw movement in the shadows out of the corner of his eye, he realized he couldn't trust himself, either.

*  *  *

Captain Gravely sat in the chair behind her desk, looking up at the image of the arrowhead-shaped vessel sitting a thousand miles off the starboard side of her ship. It was just one more complication.

“Computer.” The female voice chirped back its readiness. “Music. Beach Boys. Sloop John B.” The familiar chords started and Gravely smiled at her own joke. A metallic jingle interrupted, Gravely reluctantly admitted the visitor. It was Aidan.

“Have you already found something?” she asked.

“No, no. We haven't even started. Rebecca . . . Dr. Kensington was speaking with Dr. Ridley, so I thought I would take a moment.”

Gravely gestured to the seat across from her and Aidan sat down.

“The Beach Boys?”

She nodded.

“I always preferred the Beatles. Two hundred years and we still haven't come up with anything better.”

“You'll get no argument here. So what can I do for you Mr. Connor?”

Aidan didn't really know what he wanted to say. He felt for Captain Gravely. She had given him a shot when he didn't expect one, when he had resigned himself to some difficult, hard times with no food and less money. But things had gone badly for her. It had crossed his mind that some people would blame him. That they would question her judgment for bringing him on. After all, he was bad luck.

Superstitions never ended. It didn't matter how advanced the society, how plugged into technology. It didn't matter how secular or religious. Superstitions gave men power. When they were being flung through the deepest reaches of space, sedated and at the mercy of the warp drive and the machines, trapped in the midst of the dreams, they still had control.

They had worn the right shirt or played the right song. They had checked off the boxes of habit that had kept them safe all these years. As long as they didn't mess that up, as long as the candles stayed lit, the medals stayed around their necks, it would be okay. If something did go wrong, there must have been a reason. Someone must have made a mistake. How much worse to imagine it was all random chance? How much more terrible to believe that things happened for no reason at all? Just the result of the dial of dumb luck tilting against you. No,
that
was unbearable.

“I just wanted to say that this is not your fault. Cyrus, I mean. You couldn't have done anything about it.”

Captain Gravely looked down at the palms of her hands, tracing the pale lines that cut across her ebony skin. “I appreciate that, Aidan,” she said without looking up, “but the fact is, it doesn't matter. When you are in command, people put their faith in you. Their lives are in your hands, and whether it's your fault or not, when something happens to one of them, you feel responsible. You get over it. You don't dwell on it. But nobody ever forgets the ones they've lost.”

It was what Aidan expected. He had said his piece and he guessed she had said hers. There was nothing else. He wasn't even sure he should have said that much.

“Well, I'll get to work then, Captain,” he said, rising from his seat. “I've got a few ideas that I think might help us close in on that ship a bit.”

“That's excellent, Mr. Connor,” she said, looking up at him. “That is why I brought you on board. I do not regret it. Not in the least.”

He nodded and turned for the door. As it opened, Gravely spoke again. “And, Mr. Connor, I appreciate what you said. But it's not your fault either.”

He paused at the portal for only a moment before letting the door slide shut behind him.

*  *  *

It was only when Dr. Ridley left the bridge that Rebecca realized Aidan had stepped out. It was the moment she needed. She found Jack sitting at a desk in their quarters, staring down at his computer.

“We need to talk,” she said.

“Then talk.”

“I think we should abort the mission.”

He placed the thin piece of plastic to the side of the table and gestured at the chair in front of him. Kensington sat, though she couldn't help but feel like she was a child in the principal’s office. Crawford's crossed arms and blank stare didn't help.

“This is the second time in so many days that you have come to me and suggested we deviate from our orders. I thought I made myself clear last time that we are seeing this through to the end.”

“Well, Jack, I don't know if you noticed, but things have changed since then. You saw what happened to Cyrus. He needs a doctor.”

“He has a doctor.”

“He needs a real doctor.”

“Last time, I checked, Ms. Kensington . . .” Her face hardened, and he knew he had hit his mark. She hated it when he dropped “doctor” in favor of “miss.” “Dr. Ridley
is
a real doctor. And while you may not be familiar with Cyrus's . . . condition . . . I am. No one comes back from that. There is no 'help' for him. Besides, he's expendable.”

Rebecca's face fell despite her efforts to mask her feelings. “How can you say that? Besides, Jack, we can always return here later. That ship isn't going anywhere.”

The pounding headache Jack had suffered since the sudden end to the dream now thundered against his temples like the beating of a bass drum. He wondered if his skull might just crack open, spilling his brain out onto the table. His hand slipped down to the pistol he kept on his hip. Maybe he could pull it and shoot Rebecca in her right eye. The one that was just a little bit more closed than the other.

He had noticed it from the first time he met her. She was pretty he guessed, by the measure that most men count beauty. But the eye. That damned eye. All it would take was one bullet. Unfortunately, he needed her. And her eye.

“So what would you have me do? You want me to leave that ship behind with three witnesses knowing it's here? And you don't think anyone else would find out? You don't think we would have salvage crews scouring this area? Tearing it apart? Fighting to claim the prize? What am I supposed to tell Command? That you felt sorry for a dead man? Because he
is
dead, Rebecca. No matter how long his heart keeps beating. Now, what I need you to do is get in there with Aidan and figure out a safe path to that ship. The faster you do that, the sooner we can go. Am I clear?”

Rebecca stood up, and the screeching of the chair as she pushed it away was like a nail driven into Jack's brain.

“Crystal.”

*  *  *

Aidan was in a deep discussion with the computer when Rebecca entered the bridge.

“I'm not interrupting anything, am I?” she said with a smile.

“Hey! Where'd you go? Sorry I started without you.”

“Oh . . . that's alright. I had to get something from my room. Actually, you disappeared first.”

“Yeah, I wanted to talk to the captain.”

“How's she holding up?”

“She's a trooper. It shook her up, of course, but I don't think we have to worry about her. Anyway, I want to run this by you.” Rebecca watched as he called up a protocol he had just written. “So the sensors on this ship are basically useless. We don't investigate or explore; we carry cargo. We also don't go wandering out into space where there might be random black holes, so in a way, we are completely blind. But we do have these.”

A piece of U-shaped equipment materialized in mid-air, spinning on its y-axis. It was one Rebecca recognized immediately, though she didn't understand why Aidan thought it was significant.

“A Chandrasekhar Scanner?”

“Exactly. Every ship has one, because every ship in warp gives off Chandrasekhar radiation. The scanner is the only thing that warns the computer if two ships in warp are about to intersect. It's the one piece of equipment we have that's worth a damn. No telling how many lives it saves.”

Aidan looked up at Rebecca like she should understand. She did not. “How does that help us?”

“Hawking radiation.” He watched as the implications washed over Rebecca's face.

“We can modify the scanner to find it,” she said. “They aren't exactly the same, but they are close enough.”

“Do you think you can do it? I know the equipment, but the details are more your area of expertise.”

“I can do it if you help,” she said. She glanced at him with bright eyes over an open-mouthed smile. Her face was alive and happy for the first time since the dreams. He considered asking her how she was doing. But better to not open old wounds, he thought. “So,” she said, tinkering with the computer, “what's next?”

“Well, we have a laser-based system on the ship for measuring distance. Basically, we fire a laser from the ship and whenever it hits an object the computer can tell you the distance down to the micron. The radiation will give us the general location of the black hole. The laser will tell us where the event horizon is located. We fire the laser at it and when the beam disappears, that's the point of no return. We can map the whole thing in a matter of seconds.”

“Impressive.”

Aidan wouldn't have traded a medal for that one word. “Okay, I think we've got it. Let's see how this goes.” He tapped the screen once, waited a second, and frowned. “Damn it.”

“What's wrong?”

“It's not working. Something's off,” he said, gesturing to the display. “I must have done something wrong.”

Rebecca looked at the screen. There were red pulses in no fewer than a dozen places, covering the entire screen, save for the narrow strip of space connecting their ship to the other.

“Aidan . . . I think you should try the lasers.”

“There's no point. These readings are garbage.”

“Aidan, just do it.”

“Computer,” Aidan said after a deep sigh, “run mapping protocol Aidan One.”

When he was a child, Aidan's father had spoken of soul-stealing moments. He was, in many ways, a primitive man, particularly by that day's reckoning. Even though his father had been an expert technician specializing in the latest holo-simulators, he remained an old soul, somehow tied into the wisdom of days gone by.

Soul-stealing
moments
, he said,
were
when
you
saw
something
so
frightening, so amazing, or
so
horrible
that
it
literally
scared
a
little
piece
of
soul
from
your
body.
‘That
, he told Aidan,
is
why
your
hair
stands
on
end,
why
you
feel
that
cold
chill
ripple
from
head
to
toe.
Aidan didn't know if that was true, but he pretty much assumed it wasn't. He did know he had never experienced one of those moments. Until now.

The computer had started at the closest ping, but its calculations were limited only by how fast the laser could fire and that was several thousand times a second. They watched as the screen ceased to be blank space and the black holes quickly materialized, painted in by the laser as it fired into that eternal vacuum, cut off at the point where nothing ever returned.

They were all around the ship. Great, silent, whirling chasms of destruction. The ship was surrounded, as much as one could ever be surrounded in space. It was an impossible configuration, spread out in a procession all the way to the derelict vessel. But the worst was just beyond it.

The computer displayed a representation of what a black hole “looked like,” though if such a phrase even has any meaning in relation to something that cannot be seen is unknown and unknowable. But as the computer sketched out that great darkness, a hundred times bigger than any of the others, Aidan felt true fear, as if he started into the very pit of Hell itself.

Chapter 13

When everyone reconvened on the bridge, the screens above revealed the horror to them all. They said that seeing was believing, but Aidan knew that what they saw was impossible to comprehend and thus impossible to believe.

“This is our best representation of what we are dealing with. Even with the lasers, we can't know the exact location of the event horizon and we need to be very careful moving forward. The computer has charted a path to the derelict and I have every reason to believe it is a safe one, but we should all know the dangers.”

“What's our present situation?” Gravely asked.

“Secure for now. As long as we stay here, we'll be safe.”

“And the other ship?”

“Well, Captain, I have some bad news. With the help of Dr. Kensington, I was able to recalibrate our sensors. Get a little bit more out of them. It's not much, but I learned a few things.”

Aidan tapped a control panel and the screen zoomed in on the derelict vessel. An ever-decreasing number appeared in the upper right-hand corner, though what it counted down to, only Aidan knew.

“Our initial readings told us that the ship was stationary. We now know that was incorrect. In fact, while at no great speed and apparently under no control, the ship is moving. Drifting, to be precise. And it is headed there.” Aidan gestured to a massive black hole at the top of the screen. “The number at the top of the screen represents our best guess at the distance from the ship to the event horizon. It is my estimation—and once again it is impossible to know for sure—that the derelict will cross the point of no return in approximately thirty-six hours. At that moment she, and everyone aboard her, will be lost.”