Gage knew that was true.
Once GUTenergy had fueled the expansion of the Universe itself. In the heart of each GUTdrive Chiron ice was compressed to conditions resembling the initial singularity — the Big Bang. The fundamental forces governing the structure of matter merged into a single, Grand-Unified-Theory superforce. When the matter was allowed to expand again, the phase energy of the decomposing superforce, released like heat from condensing steam, was used to expel Chiron matter in a rocket action.
But none of that made a difference.
Gage sighed. “We’ve already abandoned half our tunnels because of tiny gradients we didn’t even notice under one gee. We’re slowly dying, under two gee, despite the AS units. We can’t take anymore. I guess this latest maneuver of the missile will be the end for us.”
“Not necessarily,” Mackenzie said. “I have another idea.” Gage turned her head slowly; she had to treat her skull as delicately as a china vase. “Your last one was a doozie. What now?”
“Downloading.”
It wasn’t a universally popular option. On the other hand, the alternative was death.
Eighty chose to survive, as best they could.
When her turn came Gage made her way, alone, to the modified AS machine at the heart of their warren of tunnels. The robot surgeon delicately implanted a sensor pad into her corpus callosum, the bridge of nervous tissue between the two hemispheres of her brain. It also, discreetly, pressed injection-pads against her upper arms.
All around her, in the improvised infirmary, people were dying, by choice.
So was Gage, if truth be told. All that would survive of her would be a copy, distinct from her.
The callosum sensor would download a copy of her consciousness in about eight hours. Gage returned to her cavern, lay on her back with a sigh, and fell asleep.
She opened her eyes.
She wasn’t hurting anymore. She was in zero gee. It felt delicious, like swimming in candy floss. She was in the ice cave — no, a Virtual reconstruction of the cave; the walls and house-stalks were just a little too smooth and regular. No doubt the realism of detail would return as their minds worked at this shared world.
Moro approached her; he’d resumed the crude disembodied-head Virtual form Gage had first encountered. “Hi.” He grinned.
“I just died.”
Moro shrugged. “Tell me about it. We’re all stored inside the shelter now.” This was a hardened radiation shelter they’d built hurriedly into the heart of the ice world; it contained a solid-state datastore to support their new Virtual existence, what was left of their vegetation, their precious clutch of human zygotes embedded in ice. “Our bodies have been pulped, the raw material stored in a tank inside the shelter.”
“You’ve a way with words.”
“…We’re up to a thousand gee,” Moro said.
Gage’s Virtual reflexes hadn’t quite cut in, so she made her mouth drop open. “A thousand?”
“That’s what the missile is demanding of us. All our tunnels have collapsed.”
“I never liked them anyway.”
“And the drones are having to strengthen the structure of Chiron itself; the thing wasn’t built for this, and could collapse under the stress.”
At a thousand gee, the time-dilation factor they would pile up would be monstrous. Gage found herself contemplating that, her growing isolation from home in space and time, with no more than a mild detachment.
Gage rubbed Virtual hands over her arms. Her flesh felt rubbery, indistinct; it was like being mildly anesthetized. Perhaps she was, in some Virtual way.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s see what the food is like here.”
The chase settled down to stalemate again.
Gage sat under (a Virtual image of) the sky, watching starlight bend itself into a bow around the ship. It was a beautiful sight; it reminded her of Saturn’s rings.
Their speed was already so close to that of light that time was passing a thousand times as quickly inside Chiron as beyond it. Everyone Gage knew in the Solar System must be long dead, despite AS treatment.
She wondered if the Squeem occupation still endured. Maybe not. Maybe humans had hyperdrive ships of their own by now.
This solitary drama might be the last, meaningless act of a historical tragedy, yet to play to its conclusion.
Most of the eighty had retreated to Virtual playgrounds, sinking into their own oceanic memories, oblivious of the Universe outside, isolated even from each other.
But Gage was still out here.
New problems were looming, she thought.
She sought out Maris Mackenzie.
“We’re going bloody fast,” she said.
“I know.” Maris Mackenzie looked lively, interested. “This is the way to travel between the stars, isn’t it? Carrying live, fragile humans through normal space across interstellar distances was always a pipedream. Humans are bags of water, unreasonably fragile. A starship is nothing but plumbing. Humans crap inordinate amounts, endless mountains of—”
“Yes,” said Gage patiently, “but we still can’t stop. Where are we going? Tau Ceti is long behind us. And we’re heading out of the plane of the ecliptic, remember; we’re soon going to pass out of the Galaxy altogether.”
“Um.” Mackenzie looked thoughtful. “What do you suggest?”
Gage set up a simulation of her old freighter’s pilot cocoon; for subjective days she reveled in the Virtual chamber, home again.
But she got impatient. Her control and speed of reaction were limited.
She dismissed the cocoon and found ways to interface directly with the sensors of Chiron, internal and external.
The GUTdrive felt like a fire in her belly; the sensor banks, fore and aft, were her eyes.
It was odd and at first she ached, over all her imaginary body; but gradually she grew accustomed to her new form. Sometimes it felt strange to return to a standard-human configuration. She found herself staring at Moro or Mackenzie, still seeing arrays of stars, the single, implacable spark of pursuing GUTlight superimposed on their faces.
Gage had been a good pilot. She was prepared to bet she was a better pilot than the Squeem missile. If she learned to pilot Chiron, maybe she could find a way to shake off the missile.
She searched ahead, through the thinning star-fields at the edge of the Galaxy. She had to find something, some opportunity to trick the Squeem missile, before they left the main disc.
The black hole and its companion star lay almost directly in the path of Chiron.
The hole was four miles across, with about the mass of the Sun. Its companion was a red giant, vast and cool, its outer layers so rarefied Gage could see stars beyond its bulk.
Gage had found her opportunity.
She summoned Maris Mackenzie. A pale Virtual of Mackenzie’s disembodied head floated over an image of the hole and its companion.
The hole raised tides of light in the giant. Material snaked out of the giant in a huge, unlikely vortex which marched around the giant’s equator. The vortex fueled an accretion disc around the hole, a glowing plane of rubble that spanned more than Earth’s orbit around its Sun.
Some of the giant’s matter fell directly into the hole. The infall was providing the hole with angular momentum — making it spin faster. Because of the infall the hole was rotating unusually fast, thirty times a second.
“Hear me out,” Gage said.
“Go on,” said Maris Mackenzie.
“If a black hole isn’t spinning — and it’s uncharged — then it has a spherical event horizon.”