So much for the good side of this. But he wondered what could have happened to the guys on Octavia? Hell, they were probably okay. What could possibly go wrong screwing around with a black hole?
They submerged again and after a minute or two came back up. said Thwanna.
“Good enough.” Perry notified the passengers they could leave their seats and wander around as they liked. Then: “Thwanna, do we know who’s currently on board Octavia?”
“What’s Dipsar?” asked Betsy. Perry was surprised. She’d opened the door from the passenger cabin and was standing directly behind him.
“Hi, Betsy,” he said. “It’s the Department of Planetary Survey and Astronomical Research. It’s headquartered on Rimway.”
Harding was a pilot and an engineer. Perry had met him a couple of times, had even shared a mission with him when they’d both taken visitors to Toxicon. He’d never heard of Womack. Housman was apparently pretty well known. And he’d seen Charlotte Hill, who’d stopped at Ventnor Station on her way to Octavia a year or so ago. She was a knockout. Hard to forget.
asked Thwanna.
Caught in the act. “Octavia,” he said. “They put some of the smartest people in the Confederacy out here and they get lost.”
Betsy returned to the passenger cabin and Perry followed. Aaron asked if the captain had ever seen a black hole.
“Technically,” he said, “nobody ever sees a black hole. But yes, I’ve been out here before.”
Mark looked up. “If you can’t see the black hole, Captain, how can you find it? I mean, how do you know where to take us?”
“We knew the general direction from where we started. And we know what the angles to several stars are from the position of the black hole. So all we have to do is get to the intersection of those angles and we will have arrived.”
“Which stars?” asked Betsy.
“There are six of them. Castor, Procyon, Pollux. I don’t recall the others. But there’s no problem. We’ve got it locked into our course. If you look out the port-side window you can see Pollux. It’s the brightest star in the sky.”
“That beautiful,” said Betsy. “Bright red.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s good,” Mark said. “We wouldn’t want to run into the black hole.”
“Don’t worry. No way that’s going to happen.”
The conversation attracted Virgil’s interest. “What kind of research were they doing with the black hole, Captain? You have any idea?”
“I’d be guessing. Why don’t we ask Thwanna?”
“Who’s Thwanna?”
“Oh, she’s the artificial intelligence who helps out.” Years before, on his first flight as a captain he’d joked about how the AI was present to keep him from wrecking the ship. He still remembered the expressions he’d seen on the faces of his passengers. He’d never said anything like that again. “Thwanna,” he said, “why don’t you introduce yourself?”
she said.
They all looked around, trying to decide where the voice was coming from. The speaker was directly over the door that led onto the bridge. Mark and Betsy said they were glad to meet . Aaron said how he could never forget a beautiful woman and Virgil told him she was an AI so she couldn’t really be beautiful. That led to an argument between the comics that could have come right out of one of their movies. When they’d finished the routine, Mark repeated his question about the black hole.
Thwanna took a few seconds. Then:
Mark looked at Perry. “What’s a wormhole?”
Betsy stepped in: “I’m not sure. But I think they’re more or less tunnels, right? Through space. To another place. Sort of like traveling through what they call hyperspace.”
Perry let her see that she had it right.
said Thwanna, other
“But what does that have to do with black holes?” asked Virgil.
Thwanna continued,
“So they find one?” Mark asked. “A wormhole?”
He grinned. “What do you do with it? With a wormhole?”
said Thwanna.
Mark shrugged. “But what’s the value in that? This one has more real estate than we’re ever going to be able to use.” He started to get up, apparently headed for the washroom. “Back in a minute.” But he was too tall for the cabin. Almost bumped his head.
Betsy laughed. “Talk about crossing to another universe. Some of us have trouble getting to the bathroom.”
Perry took advantage of the time to get more details on Octavia. Everybody was interested, so he stayed with them in the passenger cabin while Thwanna showed pictures of the station and explained its analytical capabilities. Physics was not his strength and most of it went over his head. His mind was adrift somewhere about a beautiful young woman he was trying to get involved with back at Ventnor Station when Thwanna started talking about the cannon.
She put up a picture of what appeared to be a thin protracted gun barrel.
“I still don’t get it,” said Betsy. “Why does it prove anything simply because we activate them?”