The Kalindy set course from JaParys to New Albion, a stronghold of the Quiet People, then went on to Solaraon where it picked up the line of the Major Axis Trade route which they planned to follow all the way to Earth. From Solaraon (where they harvest the fire snails) they travelled to Baltuik, a local centre of new melanism.
Four days after the ship left Baltuik, Quella took Prince Falym and Vega to see the Strip Engine.
The opaque hollow sphere that housed it had only two entrances - ring portals which circled round the axis of the Kalindy’s central spindle where it seemed to impale the burnished metal globe. But once inside it could be seen that the line of light traced by the artificial sun was not continuous; that it was in fact two lines which left the empty void in the centre of the sphere clear for the force of ultimate natural darkness.
“We should have done this at the start of the voyage really,” Quella said, “but not everyone is interested in the physics of star travel. Most of our alien friends are rather more blasé about it than we regulars.”
Vega had requested the tour. Falym seemed rather withdrawn. He affected an air of ennui. He was only interested in the trip for the leverage it might give him into the relationship between Quella and Vega.
A series of three smaller concentric transparent spheres lay between them and the motive power of the great ship.
“They are rather like St. Aristotle’s Celestial Spheres,” Quella said, “But they’re not made out of a fifth element. He thought that there were only four fundamental forms of matter in the terrestrial domain which were combined in various proportions to make everything else - Air, Earth, Fire and Water. A fifth mysterious crystal clear substance made up the Celestial Spheres. (It was perhaps similar to the way in which later regular physicists sought for a fifth force to unify the four forces of nature).”
“These, I’m afraid are glass”, she laughed. “but rather special glass. When the Strip Engine is operating they are revolving (and counter revolving) continuously at varying rates. At the centre is a small “extremal” black hole, negatively charged both to prevent quantum evaporation and to allow it to be bound by the containment fields. The spheres are electrically charged in a non uniform pattern and are shot through with magnetic monopoles in quantum “locales”. We have to change their relative orientation as we move through the galactic magnetic environment to compensate for local differences in vacuum energy fluctuation frequencies. The easiest way to do it is to allow these three spheres to rotate around the three normal axes of our conventional dimensions. We call them the X, Y and Z spheres.”
Quella touched a stud on her wrist and was in touch with Souveroon.
“I’m cutting the trans light drive now,” she said. A blue suited technician hung in front of an instrument bank near the ring portal. She nodded to her and the woman initiated the cancellation sequence.
There was a complicated light pattern which ran round the outer opaque globe and the inner spheres slowed and halted. The Kalindy was now travelling at a simple constant velocity in Einstein-Lorentz space somewhere in the desperate loneliness between the stars.
“We have to stop the Engine in order to pass through the spheres to the core,” she explained. She looked across to the technician again who activated another control.
The X, Y and Z spheres were about six metres thick through the ‘rind’ and as they watched, a portal that was equatorial with respect to the Z sphere was aligned with two mid latitude portals in X and Y to form an eighteen metre connected service tunnel. The tourists all donned fine mesh vacuum suits and were checked over carefully by the technician.
“The heart of the Engine is kept at a very low atmospheric pressure so as not to feed the black hole too much unwanted matter,” Quella said. “We can’t keep a perfect vacuum inside but we can keep the density down to a level where the small amount of mass accretion doesn’t affect the tuning of the Strip Engine. Seal your helmets please.”
They pulled themselves through on hand holds, the feeling of weightlessness still clearly a bit disturbing to the tourists who had spend most of the voyage under spin gravity. Air locks between the Z and Y spheres cycled the ship’s gasses outside so that they were now all relying on the in built oxygen supplies they carried on their backs. The varying sounds of irregular breathing came through the small speakers in their helmets.
At the centre, the singularity was surrounded by the blue warning glow of a high level electrical containment field. An open latticework spherical steel grid was anchored to the X Sphere and provided the physical substrate through which the field was managed. Insulated cross hatches in black non conducting polymers completed the structure. With a small motion of her tongue Quella set her microphone to broadcast to all the others in circuit.
“You can’t see the black hole,” she said, “Its only the size of an atom but it holds slightly more mass than the rest of the ship put together.”
“Please!” Falym said, “Don’t bore me. I know the basic facts about Strip Engines. It couldn’t have less mass could it, or we wouldn’t be going anywhere?” He yawned ostentatiously.
Vega lent across to Falym. “They say that if it passed through the body of a man quickly enough, it would puncture such a fine hole that the cells would knit together again without so much as a drop of blood leaking. Of course, you’d need to be fast, I don’t expect you could do it!”
Falym gave him a dirty look.
“It would be very foolish,” Quella said, and afterward wondered if she shouldn’t just have ignored the remark. “The main danger wouldn’t be the black hole, it would be shorting your body through the electric conduits and damaging your vacuum suit which isn’t electrically insulated. Please keep well clear of the protective cage.”
She turned to the inner surface of the X sphere, where the magnetic and electrical switch housings were located and some of the strip engine monitoring instruments. In all truth there wasn’t much to see because most of the Strip Engine’s work was done in the peculiar physics of NoSpace. The mathematics of NoSpace and its relationship to the real universe (or universes to be strictly correct) was not really interesting to the tourists. Even the captain herself, although she had of course received a thorough mathematical grounding in basic Einstein-Lorentz mechanics, didn’t really understand the Strip Engine calculations. If Strip Engine calculations failed there wasn’t exactly a lot you could do about it.
Still, Quella thought, I’ll take them to the Fuser next, and that is impressive.
Something subliminal seemed odd. Afterwards she realised that Vega and Falym had switched to a private communications circuit. There had been a brief silence without their breathing. It was long enough for only for shortest exchange of words.
Quella was five metres away by the compensation meters pointing out a feature of the control system. Only the scream of an alarm wrenched her head back. Sometimes even for experienced professionals the free floating environment of zero gravity acquires that dreadful quality of a nightmare where each movement seems to take an age…
Falym had somehow crossed the inner barrier and was pushing off towards the black hole!
The security cameras caught every detail of what happened next. At the critical moment that Falym’s foot left the polymer strut, Vega reached out and grabbed his leg.
He told the security team, “I thought I could stop him. My instincts played me wrong. I didn’t think about the zero g environment.” But they didn’t believe him and neither did Quella.
The effect of Vega’s action was to slow Falym’s movement to an agonisingly slow drift towards the centre of the Strip Engine. Quella immediately kicked back towards the scene but by the time she reached the edge of the cage, Falym was out of reach. He had arrived at the singularity.
Had his stupid action been allowed to go to the completion he intended, he might have got away with it. The short range event horizon of the unnatural black hole was capable of doing tremendous damage but only on an atomic scale. It needed time to act on the matter around it, and its own gravitational field was very weak in absolute terms (but dreadfully powerful at local distances). Falym could have reached the far side of the containment field without damaging himself. But he didn’t.
He flailed desperately around as realisation dawned but with no reaction mass to affect his velocity, his body continued as St. Newton ordained and took a full ten seconds to cross the gap. During that time the black hole made a leisurely pass through his heart. After a starvation diet on a drip feed of gas atoms, its perfect geometric incisions made no allowances for the messy organic functions of the sudden feast of solids flowing past. It had ample time to tear apart the delicate structures which supported his life.
When it was quite clear that he could not be saved Quella turned to Vega. A loose smile played around his lips, visible even beneath the glass of the helmet. A spasm passed trough Falym’s body as it drifted towards the opposite side of the sphere.
The edge of Quella’s right hand cut up and struck Vega just in the neck where the suit was thinnest. She was shaking with rage and as he bent over, gasping she cut the speaker so she could not hear him. Two security men arrived through the tunnel.
“Take him away and lock him up,” she said. The technician had followed them into the inner chamber.
“Get him out of there!” the woman wailed, but she was referring to the dead body not the live one. Although Quella had never had to do it before there was a procedure laid down for retrieving matter from inside the cage. She had bypassed the higher functions of her brain and was operating on the instincts her training had inculcated. It was safe to switch off the electrical containment fields for a few moments, during which she released a catch and hauled Falym’s body outside. His face was twisted with shock as though he could not quite believe that the universe had failed to follow its usual pattern of obedience to his whims. The instant that the cage was sealed, the technician restored the fields. By now, Vega had been escorted outside the Z sphere and through the three transparent layers of glass, Quella watched more security guards arriving.
She had to get to the Reference Bridge. A group of fresh technicians had already come through the air lock and were beginning to clear up the mess as she left the inner sphere. She felt a momentary but overwhelming reaction and cut the suit microphone to allow one loud strangled sob. By the time she reached the outer atmosphere and removed the helmet, her emotions had begun to solidify. She shook her long blonde hair free in one last irrational gesture which she instantly regretted as it clouded round her in the zero gravity, but she felt her pulse slow. Her immediate thought was for the ship. Her voice sounded remarkably steady as she spoke to Souveroon.
“Set the safety locks on the trans light drive. Don’t ask questions now. I’ll see you in the Reference Bridge as soon as I can get there.”
Quella had another worry. Falym’s fellows might cause trouble which would be better forestalled before it could begin. She contacted Tyndal who was able to inform her that the Iron Suns’ troops were running circuits of the ship, which their sergeant supervised as part of their regular routine. Their weapons would be locked in barracks.
“Send security personnel round to appropriate them,” she said. “Do it quickly and do it quietly. They are about to receive some bad news about their leader and I don’t want any unfortunate reactions disturbing the peace…”
The security chief asked no further questions and Quella cut the link. There was a lot of work to be done.
The Kalindy XII was stranded in the ocean of night. She drifted like dead zoo plankton in the vast empty spaces between Baltuik and IsoStar Eleven. With her Strip Engine working, the sixty eight Dopplers that separated her from the wan red light of her destination would have taken only a little over three days to cross. But the Strip Engine was not working. The extra mass Falym had contributed to the black hole, though only the tiniest fraction of its total, was quite sufficient to upset the precise calculations required to enter and exit NoSpace. The Strip Engine needed calibrating and it was not an operation they could carry out on board.
There were alternatives.
They could sit back and wait for a rescue mission but without precise information about their location, it would be a matter of considerable luck if they were ever found.
Or if the Kalindy ran her Fuser at maximum and allowed for a very anti social time dilation she could expect to cross those same Dopplers in EL space in just under twenty subjective years. She was a large ship and would probably be able to support them but after such a long time without Replenishment there was a chance that the ecosystem would collapse leaving them all to starve to death. And no one wanted to lose all those years in personal time (and more in the galactic flow).
Fortunately Vital Void’s design team had allowed for a third option although it was one which very few ships ever adopted. At considerable cost both in energy and in resultant engineering complexity, they had provided a matched pair of much smaller Strip Engines which were contained in small life rafts. The tiny craft could carry only one person but they could bring help.
No one had seriously expected that they would have to put the life rafts to use, but they were designed for exactly this kind of problem. Quella ordered their immediate dispatch and was greatly relieved to find that their Strip Engines worked. She sent one on to IsoStar Eleven and the other to Ryland IX, a white dwarf off their route but a little closer than IsoStar Eleven.
They were lucky (or had Vega planned it this way?) Souveroon smiled when he consulted the charts. Ryland IX had a Vital Void engineering base where there were ships and technicians who could retune their main Strip Engine. But it would not be an easy job. Now all they had to do was sit and wait…
On the fourth day, Quella went to visit Vega in his cell.
He was reading at a long wooden table when she entered. She sat down opposite him. He seemed quite calm as he put down his book and turned to face her.
“Ship Law demands a trail soon,” she said. “I shall be conducting it myself.”
He smiled, reached out a hand and took one of her own with it.
“No Quella. You won’t have to face that ordeal.”
She felt her heart fumble. Part of her was reminded of the time so long ago when he had rescued her from Falym’s men. But mainly she felt angry. Angry and betrayed. She had trusted this water weed harvester against the judgement of her crew.
“Whatever you might think of me now, you still don’t want to try me. Admit it. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
It seemed as though she were the prisoner but she held his gaze. She didn’t understand and she needed to.
“I want an answer,” she said at last. “I want to know why you did it. And I expect better of you than the feeble excuse you’ve given to my security guards.
"But in any case, what you or I want is beside the point. There will be a trial.”
He sighed and released her hand, turning away, head bowed.
“I am appealing to Galactic Law. I have something to say about all the dead tourists and it must be said in a universal court.
"I can do this.
"Where multiple cases are involved and take place over more than twenty seven standard days, a defendant can appeal for them all to be taken into consideration in a single Galactic Law Trial. This overrules Ship Law, even in such an obvious case of Ship Law violation. Consult your library. You will see that it is true.
"I want a Galactic Law Trial at Earth.”
Quella blinked, caught by surprise. In all her mental rehearsals for this meeting she had not anticipated this. He looked up again and faced her.
“There will be a Galactic Law Trial,” he said. “I will make my request public and I’m sure that everyone will be very interested in what I have to say. Society would not understand, if I weren’t given a chance to explain it all in public.
"You see there’s no need for Ship Law.”
And it was true and had to be conceded. She left without another word.
So they waited some more. Six standard days after the death of Prince Falym, tugs arrived from Ryland IX and the engineers began the complicated task of re tuning the Strip Engine. This involved a large number of string balance and high energy particle analyses. The charge on the black hole was adjusted to a precise ratio with the other forces it embodied - gravitation of course but also strangeness density, charm density and a variety of more obscure abstract properties which though forever locked out of sight, were preserved by strict information conservation laws linked to the fundamental nature of this universe and essential to a successful return from NoSpace. In another five days they were ready to resume trans light travel.
