Empire Games Series, Book 1(64)
“Why is it here?” she asked.
“We need to study the singularity. Right now there’s nobody posted here—they’re all in their regular weekly team meeting back in the dome. But we’ve usually got a crew who keep an eye on it: astrophysicists, mostly, but also the life-support engineers who keep the whole thing running. Unlike the international space station, we can feed it power and air and hydraulics through the Gate and commute home daily. So we ripped out a whole lot of stuff NASA would have needed. But it still takes a lot of TLC to keep it running and safe to work in.”
“What’s the singularity?” Rita asked as she peered through the big circular window at the bottom of the cupola. There were stars. As her eyes adjusted to the semidarkness, she saw more and more of them. Centered in it was a dim, glowing blue cloud, about as big as the full moon but fuzzy around the edges. A violent pinprick glare at its heart illuminated it from within.
“It’s a planetary-mass black hole. The glow you can see is coming from the accretion disk around it. The hole itself is only about a centimeter in diameter, but it’s still chowing down on all the gas and debris that leaked through the Gate before we plugged it. Stuff heats up down there due to friction and tidal drag as it falls in. So that glowing dot is actually at about a billion degrees, putting out as much energy as a ten-megaton nuke every second. Luckily it’s eight thousand kilometers away, or we’d be toast. We’re not in orbit around it: we’re effectively hanging off the end of a bridge to nowhere, the other end of which is anchored back in the dome. We think”—Julie paused—“it’s all that’s left of the Earth in this time line. After the forerunner adversaries crushed it.”
Rita stared. “The Colonel wanted me to see…”
“Yeah.” Julie was silent for a few seconds. “Whoever did this could still be out there, Rita. Somewhere in para-time.”
Rita swallowed. “They crushed the Earth down to a black hole?”
“Just like the Clan world-walkers nuked the White House.”
Julie was watching her, Rita realized: wearing her DHS agent hat. Doubtless she’d write up a report for the Colonel. A horrible realization struck her. “This Earth, the one that was crushed—it was inhabited, wasn’t it?”
Julie shrugged, the gesture almost invisible in her space suit. “Probably. Who can tell?”
But why would anyone destroy an uninhabited planet? Rita thought, sickened. “But if they’re still out there…”
Julie completed the thought for her: “… it’s our job to make sure this doesn’t happen to our time line.”
Deployment
NEW LONDON, TIME LINE THREE, MAY 2020
Miriam was deeply asleep, dreaming of an earlier life in another world’s Boston, when the red telephone rang.
Once upon a time she’d been a go-getting business journalist, working for a high-profile magazine that covered the BosWash tech community. Her particular beat was the Cambridge/Boston biotech start-up sector, but she’d covered other businesses too, until her investigation into the connection between a chain of secondhand car dealerships and a medical clinic had cost her her job—and nearly her life.
That kind of journalism didn’t exist anymore in the United States. Caught in the crossfire between the Internet’s corrosive impact on advertising and the burgeoning security state’s disapproval of unauthorized snoopers and unembedded media, it had died out a decade ago; and in any case her path had taken her unimaginably far from there. But she still dreamed of it from time to time, oppressed by a vaguely claustrophobic sense of nostalgia for her youth in a land of opportunity, when she’d been driving toward goals she’d long since outgrown. These days her objectives were so huge, shimmering in the distant heat haze of the future like a Mosaic vision of the promised land: she no longer expected to live to see them.
It was three in the morning, and she was dreaming that she was on a conference call in the Insider’s offices, waiting on the line to speak to a source in a monoclonal antibody start-up while an inexplicable earthquake rumbled. The telephone began to ring, louder and louder. It wasn’t the single long ring of an American phone, but a sequence of three short trills, then a pause, then three more. A Commonwealth telephone, summoning her to—
She rolled over and, barely awake, reached for the handset on the nightstand. “Burgesons. Miriam here.” Beside her Erasmus thrashed and snorted loudly, stopped snoring, and sat up.
“Commissioner? This is Commonwealth Crisis Command, I have General Benn on the line for you. Is Commissioner—the other Commissioner—Burgeson with you? This is an all-ears Cabinet flash.”
The bedside light flickered on. Miriam rolled on her back and pushed herself up against the headboard. Her husband looked at her: “Flash message for both of us,” she said.
Seconds passed as Erasmus untangled the telephone cord on his side of the bed and other Commissioners joined the party line. Miriam waited, heart pounding. The cobwebs of sleep were fading, replaced by bone-deep fatigue and apprehension. Is it the French? she wondered.
“Citizens?” A new voice came on the line: “This is Colonel-General Benn, watch commander at Triple-C. I am calling this Cabinet flash because Air Defense Command has just reported the shoot-down of a high-altitude radar-occult aircraft, sixty nautical miles off the New England coast. A capital weapon was used to complete the interception. Air Defense has had a system-wide alert in force just in case the intruder was French, but observation and backtracking suggests the intruder materialized out of nowhere—it was traveling out to sea when ADC lit it up—and was well within the Capital Defense Zone. In accordance with standing orders, we are declaring War Condition Two. The Continental Bombardment Force is scrambling its petard carriers to their dispersal stations. The Continuity Authority has been activated, and I am now notifying Commissioners and Senators of the crisis. Thank you for your attention.”