Chapter 18. Singularity.

It started off as a small, single cracking sound. Then twice more, another sharp crack. Kless looked around at the living, wounded and unwounded, with a savage expression on his face, trying to discern the source of the noise. Then he turned and looked at the body that was still sliding down the wall.

It fell to a sitting position and then tipped over. That was when he saw it.

The window.

The fucking window behind the dead X leader.

Besides the blood splatters on the glass, the clear surface showed a few small, opaque lines, like filaments of spider silk. There were three. One main line, then two that branched out from it. Then another pair of sharp noises and two more lines.

Kless was hypnotized for a moment by the pattern, then he turned to run for the door. As he turned, he heard five sharp sounds. One footstep. Then another five cracks. Before he could get two paces there was a noise. It was a small pop and a popping in his ears. He felt off balance for a moment. Had he been looking towards the window, he would have seen a small hole, about the size of two fists, in the glass, and the leader's body drawn up into the hole.

Then for an instant, or more accurately several milliseconds, the pressure drop stopped. The leader's body, drawn into that impossibly small space, became a sort of flesh cork, plugging up the leak.

However, the entire window had been weakened and cracks were propagating through its crystal structure. The atmosphere in the room had started to move, rapidly, out of the hole. And now it was suddenly stopped. All that air was moving towards the hole and now had nowhere to go. This fluid hammer slammed against the glass, shattering the entire window and tearing the structure of the window from the hull.

Then the hurricane force gale started again, only stronger. Knocking Kless off his feet towards the window, which for all intents and purposes had now become "down". He was falling into and through it, there was nothing to grab, nothing to hold.

The wounded in the room lost consciousness quickly as they flew into space. The uninjured two were knocked unconscious by flying debris as they exited the ship.

In fear, Kless had drawn a lungful of air. As he tumbled into space, his breath was literally torn from him. He was spinning, out of control, alternately seeing the wounded Circle's Edge with black twisted sections in back where its engines had been and a hole in its side like some ruptured cyst where he had recently emerged, and seeing the light of the white hole. It seemed like there were only two objects left in the universe, the hole and the ship, reflecting the light of the hole. He thought about taking his own life but could no longer move his hand. A few moments later his thoughts faded away.

****

Jenkins smiled. He had done it. He yelled and whooped. None of the scientists, the physicists, the engineers, no one could have managed to do that. He laughed merrily.

His laugh was cut off by a loud groan echoing through the ship and he was thrown against a side wall of the room. Though his enhanced perceptions were gone, his engineering knowledge told him that the ship was breaking. Structurally breaking. The T-space drop-out had stressed and damaged the hull. 1/6th of the ship was no longer present. And the entire weight of the ship, whatever that would be at this point in the gravity well, was being supported by four sturdy, though relatively small, points on the ship. This could be a problem.

Another groan, this time followed by a shrill sound echoing through the ship's hull and Jenkins as well as anything loose in the room was thrown against the glass window. He wasn't sure if it was one of the pieces of debris or his foot that knocked the dark energy field projector, but the gun was disconnected from the power source.

A part of his brain understood what was happening. Before the tendrils disappeared, they contracted, pulling the ship and imparting a motion almost directly into the gravity well. They began to pick up speed rapidly. It would be a few minutes before they reached the hole, and they would be crushed long before that. Perhaps 30 seconds given all the nascent matter that had been emerging. A encounter with a flaming, high-speed, planetary mass would be mercifully brief.

He also understood that the tendrils disconnected at both ends and were receding to their central point before they disappeared. Like some old iconic representation of a small flame moving down a long fuse coming from a barrel labeled "explosive", except in this case four fuses came out of one barrel, which was at the center of the tendrils. They would have a tremendous amount of energy, comparable to what they experienced in the T-space drop-out. But there would be no fireball or plasma blaze. At least not here.

The central point of the tendrils, the explosive barrel as he thought of it, would punch through the space-time continuum when it blew. It would create very small, very brief wormhole, less than ten thousand kilometers away, maybe much less. The exact position would be effected by all of the local masses perturbing the local gravity well, which was beyond his ability to calculate even when he was plugged into the tendrils. All he could tell at this point was that it would be behind the ship, up the gravity well by some amount. And the energy would flow through the hole. There would be an unexplained plasma blaze for a brief instant. No, not a blaze. It would flow through the hole, rather than be transported all at once, so it would be a plasma source for a few milliseconds, a fire rather than an explosion. In his mind, he changed the label on the powderkeg barrel; instead of "explosive" it should be something a little less violent, but just as powerful. He decided "rocket fuel" seemed more appropriate.

Jenkins was pinned against the far wall, facing the glass windows and the white hole. He had done something truly extraordinary. He smiled and closed his eyes. He was at peace as the ship impacted a chunk of nascent matter the size of the moon that winked into existence long enough reduce the Circle's Edge to atomic dust.

****

A sizeable chunk of matter appeared in front of the ship and then appeared to turn into pure light. The pod was bathed in intense light. Reflexively, Lon closed his eyes and winced.

He felt the light, everywhere. It was inside him. After a moment, he opened his eyes. The light was not burning, it was not blinding, it was merely everything, including him.

He body felt light. Not lightweight, but light, pure light.

And then some instants or eternity later, his mind knew light.

It was a singularity of time. In an instant it was a conversation. It was a memory. It was a plan, a hope, a dream, a desire. It was the past, in every perspective imaginable. It was questions and answers. It was equation and calculation, of precision beyond expression. It was blood, it was bone, it was flesh, it 5 phases of matter. It was the equivalent of quantum-paired Lagrangian points. It was a balance of light and dark, energy and dark energy, all about to topple over. It was time, as mutable, as flexible, as bendable as... as... as a length of beryllium conduit, or the distance between endpoints of a short-range wormhole. There was no realization, merely an instant when it all was there, all together, all understood.

In his own mellifluous voice, Lon spoke one word, "Now."

Behind him, status indicators came to life as an unimaginable torrent of energy channeled through the drive system and the light was extinguished as the ship left normal-space passing into trans-space.

****

X'til continued speaking as the ship shuddered and he was thrown into a seat. He told everyone to remain calm and described the view from the front of the ship.

When the engines worked, the ship would commonly travel faster than light, but only by "cheating"—traversing T-space and using various similar mechanisms derived from modern neo-physics and related fields. When using only "conventional" travel in N-space, the ship rarely traveled faster than .4c, and more commonly less than .05c. So the relativistic effects from blue-shifting were rarely seen on most ships. Looking out at the front display, the blue tint to the glow emanating from the white hole become more and more apparent.

X'til laughed wildly as he shouted, "BEHOLD! THE WHITE AND BLACK HOLES MEET! FINALLY, I ACHIEVE MY TRUE POTENTIAL! THE STARS THEMSELVES WILL BOW DOWN BEFORE ME! WELCOME TO THE NEW ERA!!!"

And to the screen he said, "Welcome my Brothers, come join me now."

A microsecond later, the Circle's Edge was nothing but an energy wake of atomic dust.

****

A bit over 250 light minutes from the center of the anomaly floated two small beacon drones with their sensors focused on the vicinity of the white hole in general, and the Circle's Edge in particular. Some information they measured using sensors bound by light-speed constraints, while other was gathered using inverse third-order quantum field dynamics. Philosophers still debated the question of simultaneity, but in practical terms, their sensors could detect things that occurred far away, significantly before conventional E-M sensors could detect them.

The relevant sensors were looking for indications of the movement of the Circle's Edge or its destruction. They were also looking for indications of engine use, both conventional and faster-than-light. In particular, they were looking for the telltale signs of a mass shifting from N-space to T-space.

A normal T-N or N-T transition consists of the event itself, plus harmonics, or echoes, extending outward in time, both before and after the event. For the sensors on the beacon-probes, a typical ship generates 6-8 echoes in each direction. The sudden T-space drop-out experienced by Circle's Edge would have probably produced more than 15 echoes from the energy wake that transitioned into N-space uncontrollably around and through the ship.

The sensors detected a transition event and recorded two echos, possibly a third but it was already below the equipment's noise floor. Nothing that smooth had ever been observed, nor had it been thought possible. Moments later, they also recorded indications of the ship's destruction. It would still be hours before any visual indications would be received.

They transmitted their findings back in the direction where the escape fleet had headed, with both beacon-probes corroborating each other's evidence. Then they shifted back into observation mode, watching the white hole for further activity. They detected nothing. After some time, they detected so much nothing that they became suspicious. While the recent space-time shifting they recorded had been severe and extremely unusual, there are always minor fluctuations detectable. It was as if it were too quiet. The two probes initiated some self-tests and deliberately moved a bit apart and then towards each other. Although they could detect each others presence accurately using conventional electromagnetic signals, they detected no shifts to the local space-time as their two masses separated and then approached each other. Their quantum sensors were blind.

They ran diagnostics and tried to figure out what was going on. Before they could complete their analyses, a monstrous, flaming asteroid a billion times their mass appeared less than a kilometer away from them, collided with them at 0.8c, and then disappeared a few milliseconds later, leaving a small cloud of atomic dust and plasma. Had there been a second set of beacon-drones observing the first set, the colors and energy patterns seen would have been spectacular.

A few moments after the flaming rock disappeared the white hole was gone. Conventional observers using visible light would have seen it disappear, even though it would be hours before the light from the Circle's Edge crash arrived. After that, the sector became a rather boring place again.

****