“We got a repeat beam—from a robot beacon. There’s a lot of distortion from the ES 110, sir. It’s heading into the Singularity—and Buchanan says the Singularity’s brewing up for starquake!”
“He’d have hoped to lose us,” said Lientand slowly. “Now he’s lost. And the girl.” He pushed the sensor-pad away. “Keep ranging. Gunners at action stations.”
He watched but they did not see the doomed ship again. All aboard the cruiser could imagine the progress of the transport as it was swept nearer and nearer the rotating, blurred ragged hole where Buchanan’s tiny station hung.
“Buchanan asked for instructions, sir,” said the young lieutenant.
“I’ll talk to him,” said the tired man.
Buchanan saw that the ship was blind, almost helpless.
Its drive left a churning, twisting shape briefly among the tongues lapping out from the Singularity. Tendrils of power snaked out from the rotating coruscation and flung it about. Buchanan sensed as a physical thing the jerking, rushing movement of the ES 110. He remembered another ship that had left him reeling with vertigo as it danced and plunged in the grip of starquake until it was at the edge of the great maw of the Singularity.
Inevitably the ES 110 must join that strange fleet, that time-lost collection of silent ships. It would be a doubly bizarre end for the expellees in their coma-cells, for they would be embalmed in the cocoon of foreverness without ever waking to their danger.
Buchanan located the cruiser squadron. They held off, coasting well beyond the Singularity’s lapping tongues. They had chased the hijacked ship until it was forced against the swirling fields of the Singularity. Their task was over. Inside the transport, Maran and those that survived would realize it. Already they must know that it was too late to surrender. When Buchanan had called to Maran, there was only the remotest of possibilities of saving the ship. Only a freak combination of fields, such as that which had saved him three years before, would enable the prison-ship to loosen the grip of the serpentine coils. The ship’s failing engines would not provide shields for long against the strange vortices. It was a doomed, dying ship.
Buchanan watched its inelegant shape as the Singularity reached out. He could sense the tumult within the Singularity through the pads in his hands. Starquake was imminent, might even now be mangling space and time. The black hole would open, the ship would lurch through—
“Starquake confirmed, sir,” a robot voice informed him.
Buchanan spoke again to the cruiser commander: “I ask again, have you any instructions for me, Commander Lientand? I have your message regarding Maran and the ES 110. This is Buchanan at the Jansky Singularity Station. I have your message. I have just seen the ES 110 begin to enter the Singularity. Starquake condition is confirmed. The ES 110 is going, Commander. Starquake emissions have the ship. No ship can hold against these conditions. I repeat, have you any instructions for me?” Not that there’s anything I can do, thought Buchanan.
“Buchanan, Jansky Station,” he called again. “The ES 110’s going.” Impelled by a macabre curiosity, he moved the station closer and closer to the doomed transport. The little station edged among increasingly powerful surgings as the effects of starquake split the dimensions. And then Buchanan saw the twisting ship clearly.
Inside it, was Maran fighting for his life? Was he trying some desperate expedient in a vain effort to hold back the blackness at the Singularity’s core?
He could not succeed. The drive was visibly failing. Buchanan watched its jagged, fading wake. Often the ship was totally obscured by the boiling waves of the Singularity’s emissions. What remained of power in the ES 110 was a weak, splintered thrust. Nothing could save Maran. There was no chance that the robotic systems could hurl a part of the ship clear of the Singularity, for the engines were dying. The little station slid nearer, a greased nut in the bizarre serpentine coils. Buchanan saw the details of the prison-ship’s last plummeting flight. Great chunks of the ship fell away. A complete engine pod burst into a nuclear holocaust, to be instantly extinguished by the weird emissions from the black hole. Snuffed out, the engine’s debris at once drifted into the core.
Buchanan was fascinated and horrified by the big infragalactic ship’s end. It was so like the last careering plunge of the Altair Star. Again, an overwhelming freak of nature was gobbling a minuscule and frail victim. Struggle as it might, the ship could do nothing.
By the time the cruiser commander acknowledged Buchanan’s reports, the ES 110 was a wreck. The Singularity’s roaring fields almost wiped out the powerfully-beamed message, but enough of it came through. Buchanan listened as he saw the prison-ship begin to fall apart.
“…Buchanan at… cruiser…. Your message received…. agreed, Buchanan, there can be no hope…. My field man’s readings… starquake emissions….” Lientand’s voice crackled. And there was a long break, so that Buchanan’s attention was diverted to the screen. But Lientand’s voice, as well as his image, came through clearly for the latter part of his message, the part that burned into Buchanan’s mind like white fire: “Especially regret the loss of the courageous woman passenger. She enabled Commander Rosario to escape just before Maran released the surviving expellees. If you can do anything to get a message to her, please do so, Buchanan. Tell her Commander Rosario is safe. And the rest of the expellees were picked up unharmed. It’s largely through her efforts that Maran was traced. I know there is nothing any of us can do to help her, but let her know at least that we are all in her debt. My instructions, Buchanan, are that you should tell Elizabeth Deffant that—” It was all Buchanan heard, for though Lientand’s voice went on the words would not register. Buchanan saw the gray face, the long jaw, the lean upright body. The beam came from a cruiser hovering beyond the Singularity’s peripheries, and it showed the commander’s image: his face, with the lips moving and words coming out slowly, a face gray with fatigue and with lines of age etched deeper by mental torment. The man was suffering, Buchanan recognized. And he was ordering him, Buchanan, to get a message to—
“…Deffant?” he whispered. “You said ‘Elizabeth Deffant’?” The shape of the commander vanished as the processes that made up the seismic monstrosity of starquake struck out and splayed the dimensions adrift. Buchanan was unable to respond.
“He said—” and moments passed as Buchanan, slit-eyed, jaws clenched, his thin face white, repeated the commander’s message. “He said—aboard the ES 110—Liz.” Thoughts spun wildly about his tormented mind. Liz? Liz Deffant on the prison-ship? Why!
It was inconceivable. Enforcement Service ships didn’t carry passengers. Their function was to take expellees to newfound star-systems, Liz had been on her way to her home planet, to Messier 16, not to the Rim of the Galaxy! Buchanan sweated coldly as seconds passed. Futile questions rang around his mind. Worse answers followed. And he would not admit that he had heard Lientand’s words.
“No,” said Buchanan.
It had been an effect of starquake distortion. That, and his own guilt feelings. He had imagined Lientand’s message. He had invented the commander’s mention of an Elizabeth Deffant because his loneliness had worked on his mind to such an extent that he had needed to hear someone mention her.
“Ravings—hallucinations,” Buchanan decided. Lientand hadn’t said anything about a woman passenger who saved commanders. Especially Lientand hadn’t said a word about a Liz Deffant who was nowhere near the Singularity—who was making for her home planet in a fit of righteous indignation at being cast off like an old shoe! Buchanan blinked. Wrong.