CHAPTER 25 - ONE LAST CALM?

Nothing of note happened during the twelve hours' recovery time and the trip back towards the warp boundary, besides Rachel going to sleep, alongside Kuw and Elektra.

The red alert blared, and the captain's voice informed of an impending attack by a swarm of yollkul ships! Apparently, Valters had been rescued from his half-destroyed ship and began chasing down the Pheidippides, announcing intent to capture and mind-scour every single one of its crewmembers for information to use in his upcoming conquests and plunders– including a planned invasion of Koumanlan.

She stumbled out of her bed and ran towards the CIC. Her footsteps echoed as if the corridor was a vast cave. The walls seemed to be closing in, and tilting like the insides of a sinking sea-ship that hit an iceberg.

Along the way, the lights began flashing in the same way the sun on New Arizona didn't. And then she fell to her knees and screamed as she entered a room she did not remember being there before. Temo Sabauri was Valters. Artur was Valters. Mo Laren was also Valters. Kuw was Valters. Everyone was Valters, and his disfigured face too stared from every screen, with now-fiery eyes and bleeding mouths from every multitude of screens and paintings and vents covering the walls and there were genemod victims of the civil war crucified on the now blood soaked black brick walls and their flayed screaming still living skulls were also Valters and

Rachel sat up from her bed, breathing heavily. "Holy shit," she mumbled as she checked the clock. It was that awkward time when it was too late to go to sleep again, but too early to get some proper rest.

She used the sleeve of her uniform to wipe the sweat from her face– it was going to self-clean anyways, and tip-toed out of the room, trying to not wake anyone up.

After taking care of herself, she stumbled into the mess hall, and approached the cook. "Hey Sean."

"How goes it, miss?" the cook said in his perpetually-rough voice. "You look like you haven't slept at all."

"I… well, yes might as well haven't," Rachel yawned. "An atomic coffee please!"

Sean Mainey was a little shocked, but complied. Soon, he returned with a large cup of nearly-pitch-black beverage that did not just steam but rather fumed. Nevertheless, a pleasant coffee smell wafted through the mostly-empty mess hall now.

"Enjoy!" he saluted.

Rachel smirked. "Traditional recipe for it?"

"Nope, nope, nope! I'm not that ballsy. And Patch would kill me!"

"Right," she giggled.

"I hope Elektra has enough heart medicine stowed away…" Sean mumbled as he walked into the kitchen proper. Rachel waved him off and rolled her eyes. She had to get all the sleepiness away, and do it now.

Atomic coffee had its origins in the Early Space Age, when even though Ugolnikov Drives were developed, they were too impractical to use for human interstellar travel due to barely-above-light speed, a far-too-distant warp boundary and nonexistent torch drives, and ships were mostly restricted to Sol. Even trips between planets, though fairly routine, took a long time and had very harsh conditions. Spacers worked long shifts and lived in harsh conditions, not getting much sleep due to the sorry state of accommodations. To properly wake up every ship-day, they brewed lots of coffee– and not just any coffee, but a drink that was almost more powder than water, and due to the chronically-unreliable and uncomfortable culinary hotplates on many vessels, they brewed it by putting the cup into the bowels of the engineering room, where the waste heat from the ship's drives would boil it quickly and thoroughly. As many engines of the time worked on nuclear rather than fusion power, it was called atomic coffee. Of course, by the 2230s it was brewed by mere unconventional uses of regular cooking implements.

Bitter. But Rachel enjoyed the bitterness. It was certainly an acquired taste. She wondered if those relmai drinks were similar in their specificity. Alas, that could not exactly be tested at this point in time. "They better damn deliver on those enzymes before I kick the bucket… there are billions of scientists in the Oval, why can't they figure out something?!" she thought as she took some small sips in quick succession, recalling the conversation she had in the Ancilla Bar. "I have trust in them. As much as I don't trust the eldritch-Laterals of Yig, maybe it's them who can crack the code in one of their asteroid-labs? Their whole culture and ideology is all about breaking established boundaries, after all? No need for any troglobitic fae and their demands for distilled monocerine flatulence."

Her internal musings became at once more ornate and less coherent, and by the time her derailed train of thought came to a stop, the coffee was lukewarm, and it was already five minutes past her time to report to the CIC. After frantically gulping down the whole cup, the now-jittery catgirl sprinted out of the hall and clambered up the ladder.

Along the way, she met Jamaad and Artur, who simply waved to her with no signs of repercussions for her slight lateness– not that she would have heard anything they said amid the sound of her own thunderous footsteps. With a weight off her chest, she slowed down a bit, but it was too late. As soon as she stumbled into the command room, with her pupils dilated by the caffeine which had just fully mixed into her bloodstream, Rachel clutched her chest and yelped as she fell to her knees. While the coffee alone, or the sprinting alone, would have been tolerated by her trained and genetically-optimized vascular system, both combined were clearly too much.

Elektra, who was idly browsing medical records while listening to an audiobook– on low volume of course, jumped out of her seat. The headphones, which Rachel had bought and given her, clattered onto the floor. Kuw followed her, while Patch measuredly inched forwards.

As the CMO approached her, Rachel toppled backwards, gasping loudly and repeatedly.

Patch suddenly chimed. Its voice was sped up, in the same way a disclaimer at the end of a commercial would be. "Analysis! Factor one: Rachel must have only recently woken up. F-two: Rachel is late. F-three: Rachel was clearly exerting herself. F-four: Rachel has a fondness for caffeine. Very likely scenario: overdose of c."

It was, unfortunately, so fast that only select words could register to baseline ears. But Elektra was an empath-genemod, imbued with intuition beyond any baseline human. Thinking quickly, basing her actions only off the word "coffee", she reached into the medical bag clipped to her hip and pulled out a tiny autoinjector.

What happened next was a blur even to herself. The routine that was drilled into her in medical university was so ingrained that she could do it in her sleep.

Rachel's gasps became somewhat more regular, and gradually stabilized into ragged breathing. As soon as she realized what happened, she embarrassedly zipped her jumpsuit back up, ignoring the pain of the rushed injection, and hugged Elektra's legs tightly.

"Are you okaaaay?" Kuw helped her stand up.

"I… I think? Thank you so much Elektra. You saved me from a heart attack."

"Glad to help!"

"Was it really the coffee?" Kuw said.

"...I don't want to talk about it," Rachel simply wrapped her arms around the relmai, adding her to the group hug.

***

30 Apr 2231

Rachel and Kuw were happy that their shift was during warp. As soon as Patch and Elektra left, they were alone with nothing to look at and nobody to listen to. They performed some system checkups.

Normally, they'd uphold the usual formality by simply talking to each other, which they did for around two hours, wandering between topics ranging from math (which Kuw did not know much of, and what she knew did not have the same names as human concepts) to fondest memories of service (Rachel once used a destroyer's powerful active sensor beam to deflect a chunk of debris that would have hit a settlement on a barren moon) to past relationships (Kuw's amount of them continued to shock Rachel).

But this was likely one of their last opportunities to get some proper recreation in, and they wanted to waste none of it. While either bringing the board game to the command room or engaging in less wholesome pursuits was obviously untenable, there was a much more plausible way of entertaining themselves, and the rest of the many crewmembers who had nothing important to do at this point. That something would have been called a LAN party centuries ago… and was still called so. After all, it was still a local area network. As for the captain, if he was even made aware of this upon waking up, they were sure he'd understand.

If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

Of course, the group they gathered spent over fifteen minutes debating what game to play. In the end, they picked a little-known, easy to pick up hybrid-rhythm-FPS made by a multispecies team. It was one of the thousands of games stored in the ship's entertainment databases, and was playable on datapads. The game's origin made it less human-centered in its design, so Kuw could properly enjoy it unlike most human games.

Everyone finally selected their characters, their weapons, their songs. Their characters dropped into the semi-abstract, angular world of platforms and towers.

As soon as the first round started, Rachel's console suddenly emitted a shrill sound. Then, everyone felt the kick of a sudden warp exit: a jolt through spacetime itself, dissolving into a splitting headache. The lights flickered.

"Right!" Rachel said in the global voice chat. "Looks like the game's canceled. Sorry everyone!"

Curious, confused, and concerned murmurs were accompanied by the sounds of everyone closing their instances. Rachel did not close the connection, however, in order to inform everyone of what happened.

The sensors officer inspected the readings on her console. The passive sensors showed a lack of any and all heat signatures, while the visuals showed only the boundless starfield, crossed by the Milky Way. Perhaps this was a rogue planet, she thought: a particularly old one, without notable amounts of radioactives to heat it up, and thus having cooled to such a degree as to be undetectable by sensors designed for noticing ships and installations. This was a rare event, but not so critical as to be worth causing a ship-wide ruckus about. Rogue planets were routinely discovered by long-distance missions, and forgotten about unless they had something special about them.

However, the chohjozra-made sensor dish was highly adjustable in its settings. It could have been easily reconfigured into something closer resembling a deep-space planetographic package, in only twenty minutes of adjustments.

There was still not a single blip. Rachel was now getting confused. It was now time for the 'nuclear option', an active-sensor sweep of the immediate surroundings. Planets were much smaller than stars, and their gravity wells were accordingly smaller. That meant ships exited warp a short distance from any such sub-stellar bodies, causing them to take up a relatively large portion of the sky. Thus, if this really was some kind of planet as cold as the cosmic microwave background, a semi-focused signal should have bounced off of its frigid surface, revealing, at the very least, its location. It would have taken an hour and a half, with the sensor dish sending a pulse, waiting for a response, then slightly rotating to repeat the process.

The required period went by quickly as Rachel ended up giving a somewhat garbled impromptu lecture on the topic of sensor modules. She grew more and more nervous as the estimated time approached its end.

There were no stellar bodies detected.

Rachel was just confused now. She verified that, indeed, there was a gravity gradient, and thus this was not simply a drive failure.

She cleared her throat as she began speaking into the voice call after a lengthy pause. "...folks, what kind of celestial body has a massive gravitational pull, but either absorbs all radiation or is too small– no no this can't– wait…"

Kuw squinted at the readings. She could not make sense of them, but she could make sense of Rachel's musings. "Black hole?"

"No way! There's no evidence of black holes being in the Oval. I refuse to believe this. This must be some kind of glitch in our sensors, or cyberwarfare, or maybe Yectkogg sabotaged them somehow. No way this is a black hole."

"Maaaybe there's no evidence because ya won't see one until you run iiiinto one?" the relmai grinned.

"Kuw, do you realize what this shit would mean? It'd be the first goddamn black hole anyone could ever reach! And we just… ran into it? I don't buy this."

"Okaaay. Let's say it's a one-in-a-million-chaaance. But look how many other one-in-a-million chances happen every day, yet ya don't notice them because they are tiny little inconsequential things ya don't notice. Yet when it's something major, something that would rock the whole world, ya call bullshit."

"I… I don't…"

Kuw sighed, and turned to her own console. A few keypresses, a few clicks.

"Captain Warren, sir, would you come over to the CIC? I'm sorry to wake you up but this is veeeery important! I apologize in advance sir. We will explain when you get there… no no this isn't exactly an emergency. Yes? Yes."

Rachel blushed, but did not say anything. Gradually, her initial disbelief gave way to elation as she realized that they had discovered something truly wonderful. Something that would bring them true glory. Cheers began being heard through the still-ongoing call as that same realization spread to the others. Even Mo, ever stoic, slowly clapped and mumbled something about becoming Oval-famous. Gradually, people disconnected from the call, as with the exit from the warp there were several errands to do.

But she did not pay them much attention. Instead, she contemplated the empty sensor display. She knew it was there, in the distance. Somewhere beyond, tens of astronomical units away, was the shriveled corpse of a star. There was nothing to obscure yet, yet it was still completely invisible. At such a distance, something a few tens of kilometers in diameter, which did not emit signals, was as detectable as something a few centimeters in diameter: not at all. And yet, in order to become a black hole, its origin star must have been many times more massive than Sol, and hundreds of times wider. Perhaps, if humans evolved only a few millions of years earlier, which was a moment by astronomical standards, they would find a luminous giant star here. But now, there were no traces of it. The accretion disk had long been absorbed, and any remnant planets were invisible.

Rachel nearly jumped out of her seat as a clawed, muscular hand tapped her on the shoulder. It was not Jamaad.

The weapons officer stood there, sleepiness visible in his eyes. He looked completely unthreatening in this state.

Jamaad, oddly enough wide awake, dragged a similarly-sleepy Elektra behind him.

Rachel explained everything, stammering every other word. The captain listened, looking upwards and tapping his chin. "Very interesting. Very, very interesting… yes, I agree with you. This would give the whole Oval so many opportunities for research. But here's the issue that makes me not as excited as you and Kuw: we're on a military mission, and one of highly dubious legality. Imagine the shit this would stir up: 'humans trespass into yollkul borders, discover a black hole'. They might try to claim responsibility for it. They might build their installations here first. And so on and so on. I suppose it's time to discuss what we should do here."

"Wait…" Elektra rubbed her eyes. "Are you saying to suppress the discovery, sir?"

"Well, yes but actually no. Record everything. But wait to drop it until we come back to the Federation. Honestly, don't even drop it at Ilsh-Vusbaw. I don't really trust the ilsh to handle any outpost they set up properly, or not screw over the Alliance proper."

"Isn't that a little specist?" the CMO said.

"Nah. I only meant their government. The ilsh are good people. Fairly close to humans, at least in terms of mindset. It's just that where the Federation succeeded in controlling its fractiousness, they have failed."

"And what if we… fail in our missioooon?" Kuw said. "I mean, if our ship gets irreparably crippled or destroyed… wouldn't this discovery disappear forever, theeen?"

"Well, save the data to cards or the like and put them in your pockets, and also the shipboard blackbox. Wouldn't save the data if we get vaporized, but take that as an extra incentive to make it there."

Artur stared at the display. "You folks talk about this being a huge thing for science and shit… what would it actually bring?"

Rachel spun around in her chair, nearly knocking Jamaad off his feet. "You see, there are no black holes and no neutron stars known in the Oval. These are the two densest types of objects and thus have the strongest gravity pulls. They cause time dilation and many other curious effects… and yet the only study we could have done of them for what, three centuries of research, was in the form of equations and simulations. Which are, obviously, inherently imperfect. Once a station is built in a relatively close orbit of this thing, we could collect data about the way things spaghettify, or use the time dilation as a de-facto time machine to the future, and so on and so on. It's extremely strategically and scientifically important."

"Right. Are you sure we won't get sucked in?"

Patch, who had apparently silently entered the room sometime in the middle of the conversation, could be heard from its console. "I have updated myself on the entire conversation via logs. Answering Artur's question: no. Gravitational pull equivalent or lower than the origin star. Risk of falling into black hole is the same as falling into star: negligible."

"Alright then. So… I assume there's nothing to see here?"

Jamaad coughed. "Even if there was, and even if we could see it, it'd require wasting days going deeper into the system. We have a drive that allows us to essentially skip systems; we damn better use it. Leave the exploration to the explorers."

Artur yawned. "Do we still go to that yollkul frontier system?"

"Actually, this thing is just far enough out that we could get to the Roiling Collectives immediately after this jump," Rachel said.

"If we weeere in any other region of space, I'd have said, amazing! But the akyzh aren't any better…"

There was a short period of silence, which Kuw broke. "Should we name this thiiiing, sir?"

Jamaad was deep in thought once more. "Well, I am the captain, I set the rough course, but Rachel is the navigator and it was her who figured out that this thing was a black hole. In the interests of fairness, I propose not referring to any individual here."

Elektra brightened up as she got an idea. "Call it New Mariana! A black hole is sort of the astronomical equivalent of a deep-sea trench, if you think about it?"

"I see humies, well, Terrans sorry, still aren't good at naming their discoveries!" Kuw giggled. "Ya have been doing this since many centuries ago, doesn't it get old?"

***

The transit was even calmer than most transit shifts were. In fact, the overall situation was that of a feeling of crushing isolation. In even backwater systems, there was at least the distant comfort of barren planets and skittish ships in the distance, and the light of the star. While in warp, there was an ever-changing landscape of hallucinations. Here, there was nothing. The glow of the ship's torch drives was probably the brightest thing the black hole and its hypothetical companions had seen in billions of years.