“It’s the Xeelee,” Torec said. “They’re streaming out of the Cavity. I don’t believe it. They are abandoning Chandra.”
Burden said, “It looks as if they agree with Nilis. There are some things just not worth destroying, whatever the cost.”
“Let’s go home,” Pirius said.
The five battered ships swiveled as one and turned away from the heart of the Galaxy, where the Xeelee ships were still rising, countless numbers of them.
When Pirius Blue came to, he was embedded in darkness, unable to move. Impact foam, he realized.
To his own surprise, he was still alive. He had survived the flak assault, and the destruction of his ship. He wasn’t even injured, as far as he could tell.
With voice commands he brought up sensor data, which flickered before his eyes inside his visor. Drifting at the center of the accretion disc, he learned, he was rather a long way away from any possible pickup. And nobody knew if he was alive or dead. Suspended in darkness, locked into the foam, he came to a quick decision. He uttered a command.
His foam shell burst and flew apart, leaving him in his skinsuit. He was falling in a cloud of fragments, and a bath of brilliant Galaxy-center light. His visor turned jet black, and its inner surface immediately lit up with red warning flags.
He checked his suit’s systems. All overloaded, all on the brink of failure. A skinsuit wasn’t designed to withstand the ferocious conditions of the center of the Galaxy, and it knew it. But it didn’t matter. This would be over soon, one way or another.
With more commands he coaxed his visor to leak through a little of the hard light that battered it. Soon he could see again, if sketchily.
He was floating through a forest of shining threads, silvery lines as straight as laser beams — but some of the threads were broken, twisted.
With a jolt, he understood. He was falling through the net structure around the black hole. There was no sign of those vessels they had spotted crawling over the net, however. And there was no sign of his ship, or his crewmates, who, if they had not died immediately, must be drifting as helplessly as he was.
To his surprise, one comm loop was still working. He couldn’t talk to the squadron, but there was a line to the ops room on Arches. With brisk commands, he set it to transmit only, and patched in a visual feed from his visor. He was happy for them to watch what he watched. There might be much for them to learn, however the operation worked out. But he didn’t want to talk to anybody. No good- byes. Not when there was another version of himself who could do all that for him.
Still falling helplessly, he swiveled in space, and looked down at the event horizon.
Though infalling plasma crawled across its surface, reddening as it fell out of existence, it was dark, a dark plane beneath him. The ferocious light that bathed this place was either absorbed by the event horizon or else was deflected by the black hole’s immense gravity field; he was in the shadow of the black hole, a strange relativistic shadow left by bent and distorted light.
He lifted his head. The event horizon was like a monstrous planet, so vast it was a plain beneath him that cut the universe in two. Everywhere redshifted plasma writhed and crawled, raining into the hole, and immense auroras flapped. But at its straight-line horizon he saw bands of light; one, two, perhaps three stripes, running parallel with the edge. The rings were another product of the hole’s huge gravity field, as light was not simply deflected but pulled through one orbit, two, before being flung away.
But now he was falling ever more rapidly toward that fatal surface. Telltales warned him that his signal lock to Arches was being lost: the increasing redshift he must be suffering was affecting the frequency control. It was a secondary effect of the distortion of time itself by the black hole’s gravity. He tried to divert some of his processing power to adjusting the signal, to keep the lock as long as possible.
Time, time: from the point of view of his own younger self in the outside universe, time would pass more and more slowly for Blue as he approached the event horizon, until at last duration ceased altogether, and he was pinned against the horizon like a fly embedded in glass. It wouldn’t be long, he thought, before relativity played a final trick on his tangled lifeline, and Pirius Red became the older twin after all.
Blue would know nothing of that. He probably wouldn’t feel anything when he passed through the event horizon itself. This far out from such a massive object, tidal forces had not yet begun to pluck at a body as small as his. Once inside the horizon, though, his fate would be determined.
Inside a black hole space and time pivoted about the constancy of lightspeed, and exchanged roles. Outside, time proceeded inexorably forward, but you could move back and forth in space. But inside a hole it was space that was one-directional. No matter how hard he struggled, his progress would be one way, toward the singularity at the geometric center of the hole — the singularity was now his only future. And there, long after the tides had torn his body apart, the strings and membranes that underlay the very particles of his body would be stretched and torn, before being crushed out of existence altogether.
The telltale acknowledgment signal from Arches turned to a high-frequency chirp that disappeared into inaudibility. He turned the comm system off; it was no use now.
He glanced back the way he had come. Though the crowded sky directly above him seemed unaffected, toward the hole’s horizon his view was blueshifted and muddled. It was as if he was looking out through a shallow, mirrored cone: even light was being pulled into the hole’s gravity field, and was starting to rain down on him. As he fell further the light would fold up behind him, and eventually all the light in the universe would be pulled tight into a pencil-thin cone, spearing down after him as he fell into darkness.
Of course the most likely cause of his death would be his suit’s failure. But perhaps he could juggle its systems, force the hole itself to kill him. He grinned fiercely. It would be a challenge.
Chapter 59
On the long journey back to Arches they saw no sign of Xeelee.
Ops told them that when the black hole web was abandoned, the Xeelee appeared to have ceased their operations, right across the face of the Galaxy, from Core to rim. Pirius found it hard to believe that this one action had made such a difference. But he was glad that they weren’t harassed; they would have been easy targets.
He was only bringing back four ships, though. This Burden Must Pass had volunteered to stay at Chandra for an additional day. He would record what he could of the field of action, and search for any survivors of the lost ships. Pirius agreed to this reluctantly. It was standard operating procedure, and as the sole surviving flight commander Burden was the right man for the job. But Pirius knew that this offer had more to do with the contents of Burden’s own head.
Besides, he didn’t like the idea of leaving anybody behind. He made sure Burden’s crew were happy with the idea before he agreed, but they seemed loyal to Burden.
Four ships left, then — and then another was lost. It was another systems failure — catastrophic, as the containment of the point black-hole bombs failed, and the ship was immediately torn apart. After that, Pirius ordered the crews to dump their remaining bombs. He knew he would regret for the rest of his life not having thought of this precaution earlier.
So in the end only three ships returned to Arches Base. They were directed to a hangar with enough cradles to hold the ten that had flown out from Orion Rock fifteen hours before.
Pirius was the first down. He made a shaky landing, dropping his ship too hard into its cradle. There were dozens of ground crew on standby, and they came swarming around immediately. But of course there was only Pirius and Bilson to help out of their blisters; the stump of Cabel’s nacelle was a mute testament to the loss.