“It’s massive enough to make one,” Singer said, “but too large. . . . Actually, let me enhance the view. I think I am resolving something.”
He projected it for us, and we gaped in wonder at the enhanced images. There was . . . a pale, moving shimmer, first. Galaxyshine, that blue-white iridescence, on a curved surface that looked, in the faint reflection of massed starlight, like overlapping scales or layers of panels or cells. Next I saw a series of narrow, faint, dully red lines, hair-fine, a network that appeared and disappeared, moved and fractured, broke apart and vanished again.
“That’s huge,” Connla said. “What in the Well is it?”
“That,” Singer answered, “is a fascinating question. And one without an immediately clear answer. It’s engineered, whatever it is. I’m reasonably confident.”
Cheeirilaq’s antennae quested. I cannot think of a known natural phenomenon that would manifest so.
“That’s comforting,” I said. “I was afraid it might be alive.”
I knew it was impolitic as it left my mouth, and I didn’t need to hear Singer’s mild tone to realize it. “Are the two necessarily exclusive?”
He let me bask in being ashamed for a moment, then said, “Shall I bring us a little closer?”
“Do you think it’s noticed us?” Connla walked up to the windows—slow, low-gravity bounces—and leaned forward as if those few centimeters of distance would help him see more clearly. In the dimness of the observation lounge, twice-reflected galaxyshine limned his profile.
“Another excellent question,” I said. I felt intensely aware of how distant we were from everything homey and comforting. How long it would take help to reach us—help we couldn’t even signal for.
How far we had to fall.
“I suppose there’s one way to find out. Singer, can we be ready to bolt if we have to?”
Smugly, the shipmind answered, “We already are.”
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The Prize did not use an EM drive of the usual sort for sublight travel. Rather, it glided on manipulated gravity, accelerating with smooth rapidity as it surfed down a wave of space-time toward the heavy mystery at the bottom of this particular well. We did not race directly toward the mass, but rather came at it on a long, looping curve that would be easy to transmute to an orbit—or an exit strategy.
I tried not to consider what would happen if whatever lay at the bottom of this well were to reach out with some weapon and swat us. What kind of weapons might such a thing have? What kind of object might such a thing be?
As we drew closer the structure slowly revealed itself. The massive enigma at the bottom of the well was concealed behind a swarm consisting of smaller but still enormous plates or scales or what-have-you, revealed in the galaxyshine of the Milky Way we’d left behind to be huge flat objects. It was the gaps between them—in their looping, overlapping orbits—that showed moving glimpses of the glowering crimson light beyond.
“Spectrographic analysis suggests that there is a star in there,” Singer said. “A red giant. A dim one.”
“I wish I could say I was surprised,” Connla said. “What’s its diameter?”
“Can’t say exactly,” Singer told him.
Admittedly, it was hard to determine the size of the collection of objects ahead of us, given the lack of things like a definite outline, objects of known size to measure against, much background for it to occlude, and so on. But I had expected a firmer answer.
I guess Singer had me spoiled.
“We’ll have a better idea as we get closer,” Singer said. “I should tell you that my spectrographic analysis indicates that the star is nearing the end of its lifespan.”
“How near are we talking, exactly?”
“Precise numbers are hard to give. Stars in this size category measure their existence in tens of millions of ans, not billions, however.”
“Live fast, die young, leave a highly radioactive corpse?”
“Hawking radiation, in this case.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. I realized too late I could have sensoed the answer. I was out of practice, I guess.
“He means,” Connla said, “when stars this big run out of fuel, they tend to expand. Violently. Then to collapse into black holes. Wells.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Think of the science we can do!” Singer exulted.
“Cheer up,” Connla replied. “Odds are good nothing will happen while we’re here. And if it does, we can run away.”
“Can we run away fast enough?” What even happened, I wondered, if you tried to drop into white space while a star was going supernova behind you?
He did that thing where I could hear the shrug in his voice. “If we can’t, I don’t expect it will be uncomfortable for long.”
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Getting anywhere in space takes a long time, speaking from a human perspective. Either you’re moving extremely fast, but wherever you might be headed is incomprehensibly far away, or your goal is a lot closer, but you’re not cruising along at such an exceptional clip anymore.
Actually, when you’re moving the fastest, relatively speaking, you’re technically not moving at all, just scrunching space-time up around yourself. And half the time when you’re moving more slowly, all your energy expenditure is actually going to the process of slowing your v.
Basically, it’s all an enormous pain in the ass. But better than being stuck in one solar system, or worse, on a fragile old tub of a generation ship. Sitting in one not even particularly hospitable solar system is just kind of asking for it, in terms of extinction events and not having taken out adequate insurance against them. In my more misanthropic moods, and considering the crimes of which I, myself (my past self), was guilty of, it occurred to me that the systers might have been better off in the long run if we hominids had just stayed home.
Then I remembered the Jothari rendering ship, and how the Jothari had wound up worldless in the first place, and I got over my cynical pretensions. Humans were far from the only species capable of atrocity.
Anyway, we were on a long, slow spiral down the well toward the Koregoi megastructure, and we had—the spacer’s mantra—plenty of time to kill. So we spent it taking measurements and trying to get our hands on Farweather. I was honestly a lot more interested in the former. The physics weren’t really my thing, but the engineering certainly was, and whatever was going on down there was fascinating and complex enough to eat up all my cycles and then some.
Honestly, I was grateful for the distraction, because I was dealing with the ongoing pressure of trying to ignore the fact that Farweather was out there doing who-knew-what, and she was somehow—despite the best efforts of Singer, six constables, and a Goodlaw—basically a ghost. We couldn’t track her; we couldn’t even find her.
Connla and I ran Ops, and between our analysis of the dense and multilayered swarm of alien artifacts surrounding the enormous star that we were approaching and our constant security surveillance to make sure Farweather wasn’t affecting the operations of our barely understood alien ship, we were pretty busy. At least Connla and I were getting pretty comfortable with the design and structure of the ship, and with Singer’s help, learning how to operate many of its functions.
We also got some of the hydroponics functioning again, thanks to a gift of water and plants from I’ll Explain It To You Slowly. Singer showed me how to use a siphon. Siphons are weird. Gravity is weird.
The Prize got a Synarche transponder and a formal name, registry, and call sign. It felt like the end of an era. We were legit again.
His formal, registered name was Synarche General Vessel I Rise From Ancestral Night, which I admit was pretty. The Hlaoodari poets’ guild charged with naming ships registered to the Core generally does a good job, and they do take suggestions. They’d sent this one out, along with the transponder, in case SJV I’ll Explain It To You Slowly did catch up with us. So we were preregistered.
If the Prize were a Terran vessel, we could have named him ourselves. Which is why Synarche vessels have names like I Find A Way When Ways Are Closed, and Terran Registry vehicles have numbers, and if they have names they’re names like Enterprise or Space Clamshell II.
Bureaucracy is the supermassive black hole at the center of the Synarche that makes the whole galaxy revolve.
We still called the AI Singer. That wasn’t going to change. And they let us keep Koregoi Prize as the call sign. Maybe it wasn’t the best name, but it was what she would always be in my heart.
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