The Lost Fleet: Courageous

VICTORIA Rione successfully avoided Geary during the six days needed to reach Sendai. Geary spent the time going over possible battle scenarios, trying to figure out how to avoid losing his battle cruisers and their commanding officers and coming up with nothing. There simply wasn’t a good excuse for holding those ships out of battle.

He sat on the bridge of Dauntless again as the fleet left jump space. The odds the Syndics had been able to plant mines here or even guessed that the Alliance fleet was headed to Sendai were very small, but Geary wanted to be ready to react, just in case the Syndic leaders had been able to make a very lucky guess.

His guts wrenched as the transition to normal space occurred, and the dull gray of jump space disappeared as the infinite stars became visible.

Geary couldn’t waste time admiring the view; his eyes locked on the star system display, watching for any sign of Syndic ships or mines.

“Looks completely empty,” Desjani remarked. “Not even picket ships. You were right, sir. The Syndics had no idea we’d head for Sendai.” She gave him an admiring smile.

“Thanks,” Geary muttered, feeling uncomfortable. “There’s not even any satellites monitoring the system?”

“No, sir,” a watch-stander reported. “Because of that.” He pointed to the center of the display, seeming nervous.

Normally the display would be centered on a star, the object with enough mass to warp space around it and create the conditions necessary for jump points. Sendai had been such a star, once. A very large star. It had certainly had many planets back then, unknown millions of years ago.

Until it ran out of fuel, exploded in a supernova that turned its planets into burnt fragments, then collapsed into itself, the matter making up Sendai crushing tighter and tighter together, denser and denser, until all the mass of a huge sun was compressed into a ball of matter the size of a small planet so dense that the gravity from it kept even light from escaping.

Captain Desjani nodded, then swallowed in apparent nervousness as well. “The black hole.”

Nothing was visible to the naked eye where the remnants of Sendai still existed. But on full-spectrum displays, a riot of radiation shot out from the black hole in two tight beams from the north and south poles of the dead star, the death screams of matter being sucked into the black hole at incredible velocities.

Geary looked around and saw every man and woman on the bridge staring at their displays in the same edgy way. Veterans of unnumbered battles, they seemed unnerved by the black hole. “Do ships ever visit black holes anymore?”

Desjani shook her head. “Why would they?”

Good question. When using the jump drives, ships had to go to every star intervening between themselves and their destination. But the hypernet let a ship go from any gate to any other gate. Black hole star systems, which weren’t really star systems anymore because the holes ravenously sucked down all of the matter that had once orbited them, offered nothing for ships and held peril from the radiation being pumped out into space. Even modern shields wouldn’t stand up indefinitely to that sort of radiation barrage.

But still, it was just a black hole. They weren’t going to linger here but just transit quickly to the next jump point, while avoiding those jets of radiation at the black hole’s poles. Geary leaned close to Desjani. “What’s the matter?”

She looked down, then spoke reluctantly. “It’s…unnatural.”

“No, it’s not. Black holes are perfectly natural.”

“That’s not what I mean.” Desjani took a deep breath.

“They say if you look at a black hole too long you…you develop an overwhelming urge to dive in, to take your ship below the event horizon and see what’s on the other side. That which was once the star calls to you, seeking to consume human ships just as it does everything else.”

He’d never heard such stories, and the sailors Geary had served with as a junior officer had enjoyed regaling him with all manner of ghost stories and tales of mysterious threats that devoured ships and people in the cold reaches of space. But then a hundred years was plenty long enough to develop new stories. “I haven’t been around a lot of them, but a few. I’ve never felt that.”

“I’d wager that no one in this fleet but you has ever been around a black hole,” Desjani replied.

The unknown. Still the most fertile ground for human fears. And as Geary took another look at the display, now aware of the beliefs of those around him, he could almost feel a tug from the invisible mass at the heart of Sendai. Something more than simply gravity so great it held light itself hostage.

“That’s why the Syndics aren’t here,” Desjani announced suddenly. “They knew if they tried to order ships to be pickets here that the crews would revolt rather than stay around a black hole for a long time.”