“But what’s so hazardous? Apart from vacuum?”
“There’s no there there. The lab is anchored to the Gate and there’s gravity, but there’s no surface, just a point mass several thousand miles down. Because on this side the Gate is sitting on the surface of the Earth, the far side is being carried around the point mass at a few hundred miles per hour as the Earth rotates. That’s well below orbital velocity, so if you jaunted through to that time line you’d fall below ground level really fast. Best case, if you didn’t fall right into the center, is that you’d eventually drift up: in which event, if you jaunted back at exactly the right moment and had a parachute, you might survive. But if you drifted too far down, or got too close to the center—”
“Yeah, I get it.” Rita’s mouth was dry. “So the Gate’s in two time lines at once, isn’t it?”
“Yes. That’s why it’s a gate.” Julie pulled the heavy airlock door open and walked inside. A red line painted along the floor of the room continued up the far wall, bisecting the door opposite. “Come on in. I’ve done this dozens of times—it’s routine as long as you don’t screw up.”
“Okay. Just a minute.” Rita paused on the threshold and squeezed her left forearm, hoping she’d remembered the multitouch gesture correctly and that it would register through the padding of her skinsuit. Then she followed Julie into the chamber. “I’m ready now.”
“Don’t let the airlock hit you on the ass.” Julie pulled the door closed and dogged it. “Hold the handrail and follow me.” Demonstrating, she walked across the red line. “Come on, nothing to it.”
Rita followed her. A faint wave of nausea gripped her stomach as she stepped over the red line, but it had to be her imagination. There was no way her inner ear could register her sudden departure from the universe of light and air and gravity, was there?
“That was the Gate. Easy, wasn’t it?” said Julie. She paused before the opposite airlock hatch. “Pressure’s equal. I’m opening up.” She rotated a handwheel and pulled the door open. “Come on inside.” Julie left the airlock; Rita followed, marveling. She’d seen the old movies 2001 and Apollo 13: Okay, so now I’ve fallen into a sci-fi flick she thought dizzily. It was a giant leap too far: all disbelief faded, burned out like an overloaded fuse. They were in a dimly lit corridor, lined with velcro pads and cable ducts, with drawers on all four walls. A docking node at the far end contained sealed hatches to either side. Inset in the floor, a cluster of windows like the nose of a Second World War bomber opened onto starry darkness. “That’s the cupola,” Julie told her. “It’s a duplicate of the one on the international space station.” Rita drifted toward it, fascinated.
“Why is it here?” she asked.
“We need to study the singularity. Right now there’s nobody posted here—they’re all in their regular weekly team meeting back in the dome. But we’ve usually got a crew who keep an eye on it: astrophysicists, mostly, but also the life-support engineers who keep the whole thing running. Unlike the international space station, we can feed it power and air and hydraulics through the Gate and commute home daily. So we ripped out a whole lot of stuff NASA would have needed. But it still takes a lot of TLC to keep it running and safe to work in.”
“What’s the singularity?” Rita asked as she peered through the big circular window at the bottom of the cupola. There were stars. As her eyes adjusted to the semidarkness, she saw more and more of them. Centered in it was a dim, glowing blue cloud, about as big as the full moon but fuzzy around the edges. A violent pinprick glare at its heart illuminated it from within.
“It’s a planetary-mass black hole. The glow you can see is coming from the accretion disk around it. The hole itself is only about a centimeter in diameter, but it’s still chowing down on all the gas and debris that leaked through the Gate before we plugged it. Stuff heats up down there due to friction and tidal drag as it falls in. So that glowing dot is actually at about a billion degrees, putting out as much energy as a ten-megaton nuke every second. Luckily it’s eight thousand kilometers away, or we’d be toast. We’re not in orbit around it: we’re effectively hanging off the end of a bridge to nowhere, the other end of which is anchored back in the dome. We think”—Julie paused—“it’s all that’s left of the Earth in this time line. After the forerunner adversaries crushed it.”
Rita stared. “The Colonel wanted me to see…”
“Yeah.” Julie was silent for a few seconds. “Whoever did this could still be out there, Rita. Somewhere in para-time.”
Rita swallowed. “They crushed the Earth down to a black hole?”
“Just like the Clan world-walkers nuked the White House.”
Julie was watching her, Rita realized: wearing her DHS agent hat. Doubtless she’d write up a report for the Colonel. A horrible realization struck her. “This Earth, the one that was crushed—it was inhabited, wasn’t it?”
Julie shrugged, the gesture almost invisible in her space suit. “Probably. Who can tell?”
But why would anyone destroy an uninhabited planet? Rita thought, sickened. “But if they’re still out there…”
Julie completed the thought for her: “… it’s our job to make sure this doesn’t happen to our time line.”
Deployment
NEW LONDON, TIME LINE THREE, MAY 2020
Miriam was deeply asleep, dreaming of an earlier life in another world’s Boston, when the red telephone rang.
Once upon a time she’d been a go-getting business journalist, working for a high-profile magazine that covered the BosWash tech community. Her particular beat was the Cambridge/Boston biotech start-up sector, but she’d covered other businesses too, until her investigation into the connection between a chain of secondhand car dealerships and a medical clinic had cost her her job—and nearly her life.
That kind of journalism didn’t exist anymore in the United States. Caught in the crossfire between the Internet’s corrosive impact on advertising and the burgeoning security state’s disapproval of unauthorized snoopers and unembedded media, it had died out a decade ago; and in any case her path had taken her unimaginably far from there. But she still dreamed of it from time to time, oppressed by a vaguely claustrophobic sense of nostalgia for her youth in a land of opportunity, when she’d been driving toward goals she’d long since outgrown. These days her objectives were so huge, shimmering in the distant heat haze of the future like a Mosaic vision of the promised land: she no longer expected to live to see them.