She moved Parsona gradually closer to a new heading, using a rough guess while the nav computer struggled with an enormous Lagrange calculation. She wondered if Cole could feel the slight change in their heading and the forces acting on their bodies.
He counted down the second missile’s impact over their private channel:
“Six . . . ”
Molly concentrated on the nav computer, waiting on it to spit out an answer.
“Five . . . ”
She remembered, all of a sudden, that her mother was in there somewhere.
“Four . . . ”
Hopefully the grueling load on the CPU eased her boredom, slowing down her sense of time—
“Three . . . ”
Molly shook the thought out of her head, amazed her brain would even go there right then.
“Two . . . ”
The calculation finally popped up. Molly was impressed to see how close the answer was to her rough estimate.
“Detonation!”
••••
The missile behind them expanded into a miniature version of the nearby star. Cole felt a change in his flightsuit as the explosion slewed the back of the ship slightly. He tried to pump his fist in celebration, but they were moving at a blistering pace. The suit could keep his flesh from being crushed—and the gravity panels in the dash could make it easier for his hands to work the controls—but nothing could help him wave his limbs in jubilation.
Then he realized there wasn’t anything to celebrate. Molly had altered their heading, giving up on the slingshot maneuver. Even if the other three missiles exploded from the heat, the fleet was going to catch up to them, engaging them while they were trapped in this crazy system. A red warning indicator flashed on the SADAR screen. It finally struck Cole that Molly’s new vector had problems. Whatever celebratory mood he had felt quickly drained away.
“Why’re we heading toward the black hole, Molly?”
He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
“We aren’t. We’re heading for the L1 in this system.”
“This system doesn’t have an L1, it’s—” Cole realized he was wrong just as he voiced his complaint. It was easy to see the star orbiting the black hole as an anomaly, as if there was only one “body,” and the black hole was just an exotic companion. But they were both just points of gravity to the computer. Lots of gravity in the case of the black hole.
Between the two masses, there had to be a Lagrange point, an L1 where the force of gravity from both objects cancelled out. And Parsona should be close to the L1—it would be much nearer the less-massive star.
Cole looked at his nav screen and saw Molly had already calculated the spot. When had she done that?
“Uh . . . we might be going too fast for a safe jump to hyperspace. We aren’t gonna to be in the L1 for a full second at this speed.”
“I know. So you’d better time it just right.”
“Me?”
Cole looked over the numbers, trying to remember the recommended limitations for their hyperdrive. It wasn’t a question of whether they were exceeding them—he just couldn’t tell if they were tripling or quadrupling the max speed on the warranty card.
“Yeah, you, navigator. And try to anticipate the flinch that’ll probably come just as you thumb the drive.”
Cold checked the hyperdrive. It was still spooled up from his last shift. A glance at the three missiles on SADAR told him they’d be a non-issue—the jump would come before the explosion. Still, the warheads trailing behind were like snarling dogs chasing him toward a high fence, helping to steel his resolve.
Most likely, they wouldn’t come into play at all. Because he was probably going to get them all killed first.
••••
Molly smiled to herself, resigned. Just as with the last missile gambit, the die had already been cast. Now she could enjoy the wait while Fate read the pips.
The radio hissed to life, interference from the solar flares garbling the transmission and drowning out every other word in a chorus of pops and hisses. It sounded like the Navy was warning them of the impending danger.
Someone in the command ship must’ve plotted their new course and realized what they were up to. Probably someone right out of the Academy, Molly thought. Someone whose creativity hadn’t been beaten out of them. She pictured a young navigator, maybe someone a class or two ahead of her, possibly even someone who’d picked on her. She could imagine him going to the fleet commander with a sense of excitement, his voice trembling as he explained her wild plan.
The radio crackled loudly, ending the garbled warning message.
“So says the assholes trying to blow us up,” Cole remarked.
His voice, and the laughter that followed, sounded good in Molly’s helmet. She checked her nav screen and made sure they were on a perfect line for the L1. It was a shame she had to approach it from this direction—skimming past the star and heading straight for the black hole. It made their window narrower than if they’d come in perpendicular to the system.
She imagined it as a runway in space, stretched out in a wide plane of safe jump points between the star and the singularity of the black hole. Anywhere along that plane, the gravities pretty much cancelled out. But, the way they were moving, that plane was more like a sheet of tissue they would tear right through, rather than a long safe zone they could run down for a length of time. It meant their jump needed to occur the exact moment they bisected it.
They had another problem. A big one, even if it was created by something very small. The actual black hole was probably no larger than a fist, but its effects, its incredible density, spread out before them like a mitt poised to catch a hurtling ball.
“Cole, if that hyperdrive doesn’t fire,” Molly took a deep breath, her chest heavy as the grav suit could no longer remove all the force of acceleration, “I can’t clear the event horizon.”
She could see the invisible border clearly. It formed the edge of a black circle ringed with a halo of light. No stars could be seen through the circle, and any photons that fell in that disc were consumed completely. However, a lot of the stars on the other side could be seen along the rim. Their light bent around the black hole, coming to Molly’s eyes from the edge of the event horizon.
If the hyperdrive didn’t fire, Parsona would be another dollop of mass added to the crushing center. The Gs required to pull up wouldn’t matter; they’d already be in the object’s massive grip.
“I already thought about that,” Cole said, a tenor of calm resignation leaking through the physical strain in his voice.
The radio hissed again. Molly snapped it off with the switch in her glove. She sank back in her chair, allowing the Gs the flightsuit couldn’t handle wash over her. It felt comforting, like a heavy blanket on a crisp night. She’d done all she could, and now it was up to Cole; the next minute could be spent just admiring the rare sight in front of her, the black emptiness that could crush entire worlds.
Beside her, a river of orange and white plasma flowed in a column, arcs of flame licking out as the torrent fell parallel to them, toward the dark beast ahead.
She took it all in as if the sight would be her last. The void ahead loomed larger and larger, a blackness so rich there needed to be another name for it. A new color. A primary color. It was the shade of absence. A nothingness so real, it had an edge.
Molly imagined them falling into a pit in space—a gaping well with no bottom. Then, the bubble of black seemed to expand rapidly, like the ground rush she’d felt the first time she’d trained with a parachute. There’d been a moment when it seemed as if she’d waited too late to pull the ripcord—that the plummet would be to her death.
Just like that first fall toward Earth, the visual spectacle overwhelmed her other senses, the sight of approaching doom drowning out all else.
She didn’t even hear Cole cursing into his mic, yelling with fear as he jammed the hyperdrive switch.
4
The bubble of absolute darkness popped, the disk filling with stars that hadn’t been there a moment before. The color of the cosmos—the usual hue of space that lies between the stars like black velvet—suddenly seemed gray compared to the oily substance that had just been there. Molly’s brain churned through it all, still in an observational, not a thinking state.
In the background, she could hear Cole yelling. It wasn’t coming through her speakers—he must have keyed the mic off in his glove—the sound came to her through both of their helmets, arriving muffled, like the dull roar of a beach a block away.
Molly pulled her gaze from the stars to look at him; her head snapped to the side, pressed painfully into the back of her seat. She looked down and saw the throttle still pressed all the way forward, Parsona continuing to accelerate as fast as it could.
Straining against the Gs—and assisted by the grav panels in the dash—Molly reached forward and got a hand on the throttle. All she had to do was relax her muscles and let the rearward pull bring the stick to neutral. The thrusters shut down completely. Molly eyed the temperature gauges warily.
As soon as they stopped accelerating, Cole’s arms joined his mouth’s jubilation. He waved them, clapped them together, slapped Molly’s back. She tried to process what he was so happy about, the memory of the extreme L1 gradually returning as he tore off his helmet and threw it over the back of the seat. His dark complexion made the wide, white smile of his seem blinding. Molly stared at him, still a little dazed, her hand on the throttle, her helmet resting on the back of her chair.
Cole leaned over and kissed her visor, leaving a comically perfect imprint of moisture on the plastic shell.
“CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT?!” he yelled through her helmet, shaking it with both hands. He smiled wide and planted another kiss on her visor.
Molly reached up to snap her own helmet off. She had a sudden impulse to check the SADAR for missiles, then realized the threat no longer existed. The image of the black hole, with its mesmerizing event horizon, returned. Molly tried to focus, but her ability to think straight had been sucked down that well, pulled in and destroyed by the attraction of something too beautiful to remember.
Cole held her head just as he had the helmet and pecked her face with loud kisses. He broke away and attempted a frown, which came out more as a subdued grin. “Don’t you put me in a situation like that ever—”
A strange roar interrupted him—an anguished howl rumbling up from the cargo bay. It dissipated the fog in Molly’s head and brought an end to Cole’s celebrations. They both tried to scramble over the flight controls at the same time, jostling with each other in panic.
Molly shoved Cole back into his seat.
“We’re going too fast,” she told him. “Spin us around and decelerate, but no more than the gravity plates can compensate for.”
He nodded gravely and reached for the forward thruster controls; the couple had spent too many hours in simulated warfare to unlearn that ability: snapping to an important task, distractions set aside for later.
Molly jumped down from her chair and nearly passed out. She caught herself on the cockpit wall and waited for the dizziness to pass, for the blood in the rest of her body to redistribute itself after all those Gs and the effects of so much anti-grav fluid racing through her flightsuit.
“MOLLY!” Edison yelled her name in that deep, guttural voice of his, the solitary word thundering up the passageway like an enraged animal. She staggered forward, fighting off another dizzy spell, worried about her large friend.
As soon as she rounded the corner, she saw the problem lay with Anlyn, not Edison. Walter, strapped to the neighboring seat, leaned as far as he could away from her. Edison knelt before Anlyn, his normally dexterous paws fumbling at the flight harness.
Anlyn’s face looked awful. Blotchy and bruised. The sight should have exacerbated Molly’s dizziness, but she was in charge.
Responsible. Adrenaline surged through her body, working miracles. She unbuckled Walter first.
“Give us room,” she told him, which he did eagerly.
Next, she tried to push Edison back, but his bulk was a steel wall draped in fur. “Edison, I need you to get back.”
Edison shook his head, but did as she asked. He cradled Anlyn’s helmet in both paws, rubbing it.
Molly knelt down in front of the young Drenard. The girl’s skin, normally a translucent light shade of blue, had turned a splotchy purple. Individual capillaries and veins streaked across her bald head in a tangled web. Two rivulets of blood snaked out of the hearing holes behind her jaw and tracked forward to the center of her face, pulled there by the force of acceleration.
Her chin rested on her chest as if she were merely sleeping, but the back of her head was ashen. She was clearly suffering from SLAS. Molly tried to remember how many Gs they’d been pushing before the jump and whether any of Cole’s alterations to her suit had required retooling the anti-grav pockets.
She reached into the collar of Anlyn’s flightsuit and encircled the Drenard’s thin neck with both hands, the universal method used to locate an alien’s pulse. It occurred to her as she waited for a sign of life just how unprepared she was for commanding her own ship and its crew. The Navy taught her how to shoot down aliens from a distance but not how to manage living with nonhumans while caring for their well-being.
Looking over her shoulder, she asked Edison, “Do you know where her heart is?”
The pup shook his head. Molly could see the skin around his nose where the fur was thin. Normally it was pink and healthy—now it was as pale as the back of Anlyn’s head.
“Take her to your bunk and get her flightsuit off,” she told him. Molly reached to unplug the suit from the anti-gravity and life-support module but noticed someone had already done so. She ran back for the first aid kit above the galley sink.