The radio crackled loudly, ending the garbled warning message.
“So says the assholes trying to blow us up,” Cole remarked.
His voice, and the laughter that followed, sounded good in Molly’s helmet. She checked her nav screen and made sure they were on a perfect line for the L1. It was a shame she had to approach it from this direction—skimming past the star and heading straight for the black hole. It made their window narrower than if they’d come in perpendicular to the system.
She imagined it as a runway in space, stretched out in a wide plane of safe jump points between the star and the singularity of the black hole. Anywhere along that plane, the gravities pretty much cancelled out. But, the way they were moving, that plane was more like a sheet of tissue they would tear right through, rather than a long safe zone they could run down for a length of time. It meant their jump needed to occur the exact moment they bisected it.
They had another problem. A big one, even if it was created by something very small. The actual black hole was probably no larger than a fist, but its effects, its incredible density, spread out before them like a mitt poised to catch a hurtling ball.
“Cole, if that hyperdrive doesn’t fire,” Molly took a deep breath, her chest heavy as the grav suit could no longer remove all the force of acceleration, “I can’t clear the event horizon.”
She could see the invisible border clearly. It formed the edge of a black circle ringed with a halo of light. No stars could be seen through the circle, and any photons that fell in that disc were consumed completely. However, a lot of the stars on the other side could be seen along the rim. Their light bent around the black hole, coming to Molly’s eyes from the edge of the event horizon.
If the hyperdrive didn’t fire, Parsona would be another dollop of mass added to the crushing center. The Gs required to pull up wouldn’t matter; they’d already be in the object’s massive grip.
“I already thought about that,” Cole said, a tenor of calm resignation leaking through the physical strain in his voice.
The radio hissed again. Molly snapped it off with the switch in her glove. She sank back in her chair, allowing the Gs the flightsuit couldn’t handle wash over her. It felt comforting, like a heavy blanket on a crisp night. She’d done all she could, and now it was up to Cole; the next minute could be spent just admiring the rare sight in front of her, the black emptiness that could crush entire worlds.
Beside her, a river of orange and white plasma flowed in a column, arcs of flame licking out as the torrent fell parallel to them, toward the dark beast ahead.
She took it all in as if the sight would be her last. The void ahead loomed larger and larger, a blackness so rich there needed to be another name for it. A new color. A primary color. It was the shade of absence. A nothingness so real, it had an edge.
Molly imagined them falling into a pit in space—a gaping well with no bottom. Then, the bubble of black seemed to expand rapidly, like the ground rush she’d felt the first time she’d trained with a parachute. There’d been a moment when it seemed as if she’d waited too late to pull the ripcord—that the plummet would be to her death.
Just like that first fall toward Earth, the visual spectacle overwhelmed her other senses, the sight of approaching doom drowning out all else.
She didn’t even hear Cole cursing into his mic, yelling with fear as he jammed the hyperdrive switch.
4
The bubble of absolute darkness popped, the disk filling with stars that hadn’t been there a moment before. The color of the cosmos—the usual hue of space that lies between the stars like black velvet—suddenly seemed gray compared to the oily substance that had just been there. Molly’s brain churned through it all, still in an observational, not a thinking state.
In the background, she could hear Cole yelling. It wasn’t coming through her speakers—he must have keyed the mic off in his glove—the sound came to her through both of their helmets, arriving muffled, like the dull roar of a beach a block away.
Molly pulled her gaze from the stars to look at him; her head snapped to the side, pressed painfully into the back of her seat. She looked down and saw the throttle still pressed all the way forward, Parsona continuing to accelerate as fast as it could.
Straining against the Gs—and assisted by the grav panels in the dash—Molly reached forward and got a hand on the throttle. All she had to do was relax her muscles and let the rearward pull bring the stick to neutral. The thrusters shut down completely. Molly eyed the temperature gauges warily.
As soon as they stopped accelerating, Cole’s arms joined his mouth’s jubilation. He waved them, clapped them together, slapped Molly’s back. She tried to process what he was so happy about, the memory of the extreme L1 gradually returning as he tore off his helmet and threw it over the back of the seat. His dark complexion made the wide, white smile of his seem blinding. Molly stared at him, still a little dazed, her hand on the throttle, her helmet resting on the back of her chair.
Cole leaned over and kissed her visor, leaving a comically perfect imprint of moisture on the plastic shell.
“CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT?!” he yelled through her helmet, shaking it with both hands. He smiled wide and planted another kiss on her visor.
Molly reached up to snap her own helmet off. She had a sudden impulse to check the SADAR for missiles, then realized the threat no longer existed. The image of the black hole, with its mesmerizing event horizon, returned. Molly tried to focus, but her ability to think straight had been sucked down that well, pulled in and destroyed by the attraction of something too beautiful to remember.
Cole held her head just as he had the helmet and pecked her face with loud kisses. He broke away and attempted a frown, which came out more as a subdued grin. “Don’t you put me in a situation like that ever—”
A strange roar interrupted him—an anguished howl rumbling up from the cargo bay. It dissipated the fog in Molly’s head and brought an end to Cole’s celebrations. They both tried to scramble over the flight controls at the same time, jostling with each other in panic.
Molly shoved Cole back into his seat.
“We’re going too fast,” she told him. “Spin us around and decelerate, but no more than the gravity plates can compensate for.”
He nodded gravely and reached for the forward thruster controls; the couple had spent too many hours in simulated warfare to unlearn that ability: snapping to an important task, distractions set aside for later.
Molly jumped down from her chair and nearly passed out. She caught herself on the cockpit wall and waited for the dizziness to pass, for the blood in the rest of her body to redistribute itself after all those Gs and the effects of so much anti-grav fluid racing through her flightsuit.
“MOLLY!” Edison yelled her name in that deep, guttural voice of his, the solitary word thundering up the passageway like an enraged animal. She staggered forward, fighting off another dizzy spell, worried about her large friend.
As soon as she rounded the corner, she saw the problem lay with Anlyn, not Edison. Walter, strapped to the neighboring seat, leaned as far as he could away from her. Edison knelt before Anlyn, his normally dexterous paws fumbling at the flight harness.