“It can’t just turn on by itself,” Weir snapped.
Cooper turned angrily, rising from his seat. His right arm snapped back, forward, sending the ball at Weir’s face. To Miller’s surprise, the scientist ducked fast, the ball doing no more than ruffling his hair. The ball struck the rear bulkhead and caromed off into the deck and back into the air.
“Cooper!” Miller reached out and plucked the ball from the air. Cooper sat down heavily, boneless. Miller gave Weir a hard look. “Dr. Weir, Justin may die. Whatever happened to him could happen to all of us.”
Weir hesitated for far too long, a pause that told Miller that the scientist was trying to sugarcoat the truth. Finally Weir shrugged and said,
“Maybe Mr. Cooper saw an optical effect caused by…” Weir frowned, hesitating again. “Gravitational distortion.”
Cooper glared at Weir. His hands were clenched into fists. “I know what I saw and it wasn’t a fucking ‘optical effect’!”
“Mr. Cooper!” Miller barked. Cooper subsided, glaring at Weir. This was all he needed—Cooper acting like Smith. He was faintly glad that Smith was elsewhere, working on the Lewis and Clark. Miller turned his attention to Weir, who was warily resuming his seat. ” ‘Gravitational distortion?’ “
Weir hesitated for a moment, watching Cooper. His scrutiny made no difference in Cooper’s attitude or posture. Reluctantly, he looked at Miller.
“If a burst of gravity waves escaped from the Core, they could distort space-time. They could have made Justin seem to disappear. They could also have damaged the Lewis and Clark.”
As far as Miller was concerned, there was something missing, something Weir was avoiding saying. “What could cause them?” Weir was silent, staring helplessly at Miller. “What’s in the Core?”
“It’s complicated…” Weir trailed off, looking abashed at the weakness of this answer.
“How much time do you need?” Miller said, taking several steps closer to Weir, leaning down on the briefing table, using his clenched fists for support. “We have seventeen hours and forty-two minutes. Now… what is in the Core?”
Weir was silent for too long again. Miller began to consider less civil methods of getting information out of Weir. Suddenly, the scientist seemed to make a decision.
Weir sat forward, staring wildly at Miller.
“A black hole,” Weir said.
Chapter Twenty-four
Miller and Starck stood at the end of the walkway into the Second Containment, watching the Core uneasily. Neither of them trusted Weir’s pet Tinkertoy. The rings were moving slowly, quietly, but the Core itself had an eerie rippling effect, a sense of a great dark power somehow confined to a small space.
All around them, power hummed and sang of enormous energies. Miller felt dwarfed in this space.
Weir, by contrast, was at ease again, walking around the Core, inspecting it, looking it over like a loving father. Miller almost expected him to reach out and pet the thing.
Weir turned and looked up at them. “When a star dies, it collapses in on itself, becomes so dense that nothing can escape its gravity, not even light.
It becomes a black hole.”
Starck was staring at the Core, unwavering. “The most destructive force in the universe,” she whispered. “And you created one.”
“Yes,” Weir said. He seemed infernally cheerful. “We can use that power to fold space-time.”
Not as much power as Weir would like everyone to think, Miller reflected. He was ready to bet that Weir’s Core actually dealt with quantum black holes as postulated in the work of Stephen Hawking and others in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Given Weir’s ability to produce one on cue and trap it within the Core, there was enough power there to fold space-time nicely. It had been speculated that the 1907 Tunguska incident had been caused by a quantum black hole rather than a meteorite.
Either way, Weir had a tiger by the tail in here, and he knew it. You arrogant son of a bitch, Miller thought.
“It would take the Lewis and Clark a thousand years to reach our closest star. The Event Horizon could be there in a day.”
Sotto voce to Miller, Starck said, “If it worked.”
Weir smiled. “You can come down. It’s perfectly safe.”
Miller and Starck exchanged looks, then walked down to the Core. Everything in here, with the exception of the Core itself, seemed to be coated with coolant. It gave Miller the uncomfortable feeling of walking willingly into the belly of the whale. Hello, my name is Jonah, I am an appetizer.
Somewhere the idea had lost its humorous edge.
Miller and Starck stopped before the Core, staring up at it, getting a closer look at the machinery as it moved around. Even at this close a range, the Core played optical tricks. Miller felt vaguely sick.
“You let us board this ship,” Miller said to Weir, “and you didn’t tell us?”
Weir turned to face Miller, folding his arms. “My instructions were .to brief you on a need-to-know basis. Given our current situation, you need to know.”
Miller stared at Weir, barely able to comprehend the man’s attitude. “I want this room sealed. The Second Containment is off limits.”
Weir was trying to stare Miller down, but it was not working. “There’s no danger. The black hole is contained behind three magnetic fields. It’s under control.”
“Under control?” Miller growled. He waved an arm. pointing to somewhere out beyond the confines of the Event Horizon. “My ship is in pieces. Justin is dying.” Miller took a deep breath, trying to rein his temper in without success ‘No one goes near that thing.”
Miller turned around and started back up the walkway. Starck stared at Weir for a moment more, then she followed her captain.
Weir watched them leave.
Overhead, the power sang.
Chapter Twenty-five
Peters squeezed her eyes shut and rubbed at her face, trying to blot out, for a moment at least, the tedious log visuals from the bridge flight recorder. Captain Kilpack and his crew had been meticulous about making log entries, but had not had much of any consequence to record.
She sat back, knowing she was starting to fade, and growing angry at doing so, even though she knew that was unreasonable. It would not have bothered her so much if she had something to show Miller. There was nothing yet.
Another structural status report. She sighed.
The lights nickered. Startled, she looked up, but the lights had steadied again. She looked back down at her screen.
Behind her, something made a rustling sound, like something moving over paper. She turned around, slowly. “Justin?”
Justin was still lying on the examination table, a sheet covering him. He had not moved or woken.
Something had made the sound.
The hairs rose on the back of her neck and she felt her arms breaking out in goosebumps. Cautiously, she reached out and grasped a scalpel from the instrument tray that DJ had set out for any further emergencies.
The sound started again, became clearer, became the sound of someone scrabbling at plastic, trying to break through with nothing more than fingernails and determination.
She stood up, walked past Justin, following the sound. The examination tables were covered in plastic sheeting, never having been readied for use.
The plastic around the last table was moving, something writhing beneath it. Not certain why she was doing so, she reached out and grasped the edge of the plastic cover, pulling it back, needing to know what was under there, what was calling her.…
Denny.
She gasped, suddenly weak, nerveless. The scalpel slipped from her fingers, struck the deck, bounced with a tinny noise.
Denny. He looked up at her from the table, his waist and legs still beneath the plastic, looked up at her and giggled in that way that he had,,amused at a world that insisted on being silly to his perspective.