Spaghetti West: A Space Odyssey (Part IV)

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After the Atmospheric Kugelblitz Black Hole event, Sugar had to sit down with Liselot to understand what they lost, and why it was more important than it sounded. Near the equator of Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida once lay a country called Eyrenland. They named it after the indigenous wildlife, or more specifically, what they produced. The uquira and uquirapods had an evolutionarily interesting dynamic.

They didn’t adhere to Earth’s rules of biology and taxonomy. Some were plants, and some were animals, but only as the closest analogs to human comprehension. Their reproductive cycle was multi-faceted, but what the locals and consumers cared about were the eyren. They most closely resembled eggs. They had a shell—which was iridescent and beautiful—a white—which was actually more tan—and a black yolk. The yolk actually kind of looked gross and rotten, but it was perfectly healthy, and irrefutably tasty.

When the yolk was touched by a tongue, it didn’t simply taste like whatever it tasted like. It reacted with the taste buds, providing them with whatever they preferred and desired most. It behaved less like a food, and more like a drug. It activated pleasure chemicals in the brain, creating a sense of euphoria and peace without limiting the user’s faculties, or inhibiting their judgment. It was a miracle food, and the most popular import across the stellar neighborhood. For centuries, philosophers believed exporting and importing would be irrelevant at interstellar levels, but people were determined to make it make sense, and the eyren trade was the result of those efforts.

Sugar asked why these special eggs couldn’t simply be reverse-engineered in a lab. Technically they were, but that defeated the purpose. Everything was composed of chemicals; nothing was made of magic. Anything that existed could be recreated from scratch. And to be sure, there were plenty of people who got their hands on the formula so they could do exactly that. But transhumans could also just flip a switch in their brains and release whatever hormones they wanted. They could literally trigger an orgasm with a single thought. That wasn’t the problem. Consumers wanted real eyren because they valued authenticity. The bounded source and finite supply were precisely what gave it its value. And now that was almost all gone, thanks to the AKBH.

Eyrenland served as the intake region for the whole world. They had a few space elevators for redundancy purposes, but the default was to come through here, specifically so they would be close to the uquira. They did it for the same reasons ancient museums often placed their exits in the gift shop. The refugees from Proxima Doma and Doma Tertia were given a patch of land to start their new lives here, so they lost their homes for a third time, which would be profoundly hilarious if it weren’t so sad. When they showed back up on the ship that brought them to this planet in the first place, they were pissed to say the least. They would have rioted had their numbers been greater.

That wasn’t to say the non-refugees were any happier. They just lost their homes, and they demanded to know why. The Interim Axiom of Eggs and First Axiom had to teleport up to Sugar’s ship to keep them calm so Axiom of Astronomy Liselot could explain what went wrong. Until today, they had no reason to believe that a KBH would enter the atmosphere. She strongly suggested that they be grateful for their lives. Not everyone there was streaming their consciousness to backups, and they would not have 

survived had Sugar not stepped in. Even then, some assumed that it was somehow her fault, only because of the suspicious timing.

There was a secondary source of eyren, clear on the other side of the world. Researchers were still trying to figure out how two separate populations of uquira/uquirapods managed to evolve so far from each other. Sugar could find out relatively easily with a bit of time travel, but she didn’t bring that up because she didn’t care and had more pressing matters on her mind. The Eyrenland farmers insisted that Sugar teleport them down to Quiratan, but that did not seem like the right thing to do.

Farmers were already living there, and were evidently more concerned with preserving the ecology. They harvested eyren too, and exported what they couldn’t consume themselves, but they didn’t scale to meet demand. They mostly stuck to themselves, and didn’t participate on the world stage. Vantu became extraordinarily protective of the Quiratani after being asked to basically use their immense power to kick the locals out. He took a shuttle down to show any would-be invaders that they would do well to stay out. For now, Axiom of Eggs Antinan and the Eyrenlanders were heeding the warning, but Van had to remain, leaving Sugar mostly alone on the ship.

It was fine, everything was automated. It wasn’t like Sugar had to babysit all the equipment. The KBHs were still arriving, but they were incrementally improving warning times, and none so far had appeared as close to the planet as the AKBH. They did not believe it would likely happen again. There was just too much other space, and while a pattern had not yet presented itself, lightning proverbially never struck twice. Fending them off had become routine to the point of monotonous, which was not good. That was why it was so important to complete that modified defense grid. Their ship was the only one capable of reaching the source, and it was now time to do just that.

While they were predicting and deflecting the onslaught, Sugar was also trying to track where they were coming from. She thought, with enough data, she would be able to determine the answer, but it wasn’t there. There was no interstellar signature, or anything. She had come to realize that the only way to locate it would be to push one back through its portal, like she did with the AKBH, but this time, follow it through.

“That’s suicide,” Liselot warned. “And don’t argue that you’re backed up like everyone else; it probably doesn’t work like that. We were recently discussing the signal interference that it was causing. You will not likely beam back here. You will simply die.”

Liselot did not know about the afterlife simulation, which could capture one’s consciousness from anywhere in the galaxy, and Sugar didn’t think it was wise to tell her. There was a reason the architects kept it a secret. People were only meant to go there if all else failed. Still, it meant Sugar couldn’t explain why she wasn’t worried about the mission. She would have to make her case another way. “I’ll be fine.” Oh, how clever.

“I’m going with you,” Liselot insisted, “and I will not be arguing with you. I know you have the power to magically send me back down to the surface, but that would violate my autonomy. I’m still upset that you tried to convince me that Van was a hologram when we first met. I want to go, and I want you to respect that.”

“I don’t want to argue with you either,” Sugar began, “but you literally just said that I was gonna die. So am I the fool for going, or are you for coming with me?”

“Both,” Liselot answered. “Where I’m from, we believe that every day past 120 years is a gift. Our ancestors could only dream of reaching such ages, and for the vast 

majority of human history, that was close to the hard limit. If I die now...” She shrugged. “Well, I’ve surpassed it many times over, so it’s nothing to cry over. If it’s my time, I’m ready.”

Sugar shook her head. “I won’t violate your autonomy, even though as captain of this ship, it is well within my rights to decide who boards and who doesn’t.” She looked over at the screen showing a KBH’s pending arrival. “You have a couple minutes to change your mind, though.” She tapped a button, causing a bridge escape pod to open. “This will teleport you clear of the event horizon through burst mode until it makes it back to the space station. The ship, meanwhile, will be so close to the singularity, that even when I push it back, the gravity will be too strong for me to escape.”

Liselot nodded and stepped towards the pod before turning around to face Sugar. “I made up my mind before you told me what you were gonna do. I knew you would do it eventually. Don’t think I came to this decision on a whim.”

“Very well.” Sugar teleported the whole ship to the next arrival point. While they were waiting, she walked around the console holding her new device. “It’s preprogrammed, but if you’re coming, you need to get in here too. It’ll be a tight fit.”

“What is it?” Liselot asked, looking at the unfamiliar gizmo.

“Personal equilibrium generator.” Sugar attached it to her arm, activated it, then hugged Liselot tightly. The small egg-shaped energy field began to emanate from it. She held Liselot even tighter once they saw quite how small it was. They held onto each other and watched as the KBH appeared out of nowhere, and the ship began to shake around them. They couldn’t feel a single thing; it was like they weren’t even really there.

Sparks flew as inessential systems crashed under the weight of the gravitational disturbance. The ship lurched forward as it fell towards the center. Attitude control worked overtime to make sure the particle beam continued to focus on its target, with a little bit of leeway compensated with a gyroscope. The black hole fell back into its portal, dragging the ship along with it. Within seconds, they were in the wormhole. It took a surprisingly long time. Wormholes weren’t instant—they both obviously knew that—it was just taking longer than expected.

At last, they flew out of the tunnel, back into normal space. The ship stopped shaking, so Sugar deactivated the equilibrium generator. Sensors which had been gathering data the whole time were blinded for a moment while they recalibrated. Once they determined that it was safe, the viewscreen turned itself back on, and showed them where they were. They were entering orbit around a planet. The sensors still didn’t know where it was, or how far they had traveled from Tau Ceti. That was odd too, because a simple star chart reference should have come up with an answer rather quickly. It was picking up infrastructure, though. Whatever world this was, it was clearly inhabited.

An unknown vessel came up and matched the ship’s vector. The strangers opened their weapons...and fired.

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Spaghetti West: The Ark (Part III)

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The second black hole turned out to be far more than a coincidence, and far from an isolated event. They just kept coming after that. Now that Sugar’s sensors were tuned to look for them, they started popping up everywhere. They were appearing all over the system in no apparent pattern. Efforts on the development of the orbital defense grid were redoubled multiple times. All energy was going into building them as fast as possible, focusing almost exclusively on the ionic pulse canons, but she was also sharing her unique sensor suite to predict and detect subsequent intrusions. By the time they were finished, this was going to have to be the densest defense array in the stellar neighborhood—probably the galaxy, even though Castlebourne had that war.

Speaking of Castlebourne, through a chain of contacts, Sugar was able to confirm that these singulararities were Kugelblitz, meaning they were made artificially. She learned that they were not weapons, however, but a vital component of Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida. This was what solved the mystery of the surface gravity. The planet was a high-density, high-mass terrestrial. These numbers weren’t as high as they could possibly go while still being rocky worlds, but they were too high for baseline humans to survive on. Before even one person stepped foot on it, thirty-two transdimensional gravity generators were installed at even intervals across the globe. Sugar still wasn’t sure who was responsible for them, but they must have been incredibly powerful.

These generators were essentially portals that linked to a different region of space. Specifically, it was a kubelblitz black hole, also known as a KBH. They basically just ignored Bida’s real gravity, and stole the gravity from somewhere else. A couple of decades ago, the owner of Castlebourne resorted to moving their entire star system away from its original spot in the galaxy in order to conceal their location from a violent enemy. They just so happened to move it within spitting distance of the KBH, which disrupted gravity on Bida. They ultimately fixed it, but something was going wrong now. They either didn’t do it correctly, or this was inevitable. Sugar put a call in to the time traveler who solved the problem, but had yet to receive a response.

There were not dozens of KBHs threatening the lives of the Bidans. There was only one, and that one was somehow being duplicated over, and over, and, and over again. She had to believe this was an accident. It was probably how Mirage Matic chose to save Bida, but it had evidently triggered a runaway chain reaction. And Sugar had no idea how to stop it. Her only hope was to keep deflecting them. It had been going on for weeks now, and they were getting pretty good at it. Could they hypothetically do this forever? Probably. While they didn’t appear predictably, their appearances had plateaued. But that didn’t mean it would stay this way. What happened when the duplicate KBHs exceeded the number of lasers in too short a time? What if in all the chaos, they accidentally deflected one of them towards one of their neighbors? What could they do if—

The sensor alarms started to blare. They would go off pretty frequently, but they were particularly urgent this time. The system knew that something was unusually wrong; that it had changed, and she had to shift all focus to the latest problem. “Oh my God,” she whispered as she stared at the screen in disbelief.

“What is it?” Liselot asked. She spent a lot of time up here, having chosen to move her base operations to Sugar’s ship. They now had a crew of dozens.

“We should have been worried about this the whole time. The next KBH. It’s not going to be in space. It’s going to be in the atmosphere.” Sugar desperately started to turn part of the array. They weren’t designed to fire towards the planet, but it was technically possible, as long as the angle wasn’t too steep. The computer was still narrowing down the entry point to a smaller area. The KBH was only millimeters in diameter, so it was hard to know exactly where it would appear. That normally wasn’t so critical, but in this case, it was more important than ever. They only had a few minutes.

“Where?” Liselot began snapping at her people. They knew what she was saying.

“What is this region here?” Sugar asked, pointing at the map. “It looks pretty heavily populated, and unusually densely so for your intentionally minimalistic world.”

“That’s...Eyrenland,” Liselot answered. “It’s the hub for our primary export, eyren. I don’t have time to explain it, but that’s where your friends from Doma Tertia are currently being housed while they figure out exactly what kind of life they wanna lead.”

“It’s about to be destroyed,” Sugar said as she pivoted to something else after syncing the sensors with the canons. They could fire at the right spot if that was what it came too, but if it was as close to the surface as it looked like it was going to be, it wasn’t the right way to handle it. And either way, the people down there were gonna die unless someone did something about it...unless she rescued them first.

“Thousands of people live and visit there every day,” Liselot explained.

“The rest of the planet isn’t safe either,” Sugar warned. “This is going to cause bidaquakes and general tectonic instability all around the world. Send that emergency broadcast over the air. They only have a moment to prepare, at best.”

“Where are you taking us?” Liselot questioned.

Sugar was at the helm now. “We have to position ourselves just above the entry point. I have two things to do. I have to pull everyone down there up here, and then I have to force the KBH back to where it came from.” She flipped switches and tapped on the console.

“What are you talking about?” Liselot pressed. “How can you do that?”

Sugar programmed the route, and made the jump. They still didn’t know the exact altitude, but it would be somewhere around here. “It’s something I’ve been working on since we found out that the KBHs were coming here through portals, and not simply wandering through realspace.” She made a short-range teleport over to the transport workstation. “If this works, I can push it backwards, but as of yet, my ship is the only thing equipped with the right hardware, which...makes this next part tricky, and I need your authorization.”

“You have it,” Liselot replied. “Do what you need to do.”

Sugar shook her head. “No, you don’t understand. The only way to save those people down there is to teleport them all at once. The ship is already remodularizing to prepare for maximum capacity, but once they come up here, they won’t necessarily be safe, because this is also the gun. I’ve not had time to test it, so if I do this, and it literally backfires, it could kill everyone anyway. My emergency transporters can’t move people to anywhere else. It doesn’t have the data to make sure some of them don’t end up in the middle of rocks, or at the bottom of the ocean. They have to come here, but this could quickly end up the most dangerous place to be.”

“Besides the surface, where the black hole is about to show up?” Liselot pointed out. “They’re gonna die if they stay down there, so get them here, and hope for the best.”

“Okay.” Sugar looked over at the sensor readings. “They were now showing how high above the surface the marble-sized singularity was going to appear. It...wasn’t going to be high. She tapped on her comms. “Van! Open the pocket dimensions. Open them all! We can’t fit everyone in realspace!”

“You got it, boss!” Van replied.

While Sugar waited for the internal portals to be activated, she widened the capture radius. Thirty-one seconds from impact, regardless of what the unsuspecting inhabitants were doing on the ground, Sugar teleported every single one of them into the ship, mostly into the pocket dimensions. They would be confused, but they would be alive, and she would try to explain things later.

“Now that they’re clear, can you not just close the portal so the black hole doesn’t come here at all?” Liselot hoped.

Sugar shook her head as she went over and hovered her hand over the button. “If I tried, it would probably make things worse. Think of it like a swarm of biblical locusts trying to fly through a doorway. If you just close the door, they’ll congregate against it until it buckles. You have to slam the door shut so it expels them backwards.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Liselot argued. “A bunch of the locusts would get in anyway.”

Sugar sighed. “Exactly.” She watched the timer count down. Eleven, ten, nine, eight... “This hasn’t been tested. If it doesn’t work...that’s the end of Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida.” Three, two, one—

The Kugelblitz black hole popped into existence in the sky. The planet, which up until this point always tried to pull everything towards the barycenter near the core, suddenly had a competing mass to contend with. The trees, the water, the mountains; everything was pulled up towards the singularity. The objects closest to the event horizon were being tugged on more, resulting in them being strung out like spaghetti. The rest of the world tried to implode like a deflating football. The black hole was the heaviest thing around now, so it didn’t stay in one place. It began to fall towards the barycenter. If Sugar allowed that to happen, the whole planet would collapse in a matter of hours, if not minutes.

Sugar fired her new machine directly towards the black hole. It came from somewhere. They still hadn’t traced the source, but it had to form somewhere else in space, and she needed it to go back. As the energy wave reached critical mass, the biomass and geosphere continued to head towards a single moving point. It only took seconds for the KBH to disappear, but the devastation didn’t need long.

In this short amount of time, a land mass the size of a large country was reduced to a crater. All of the plant and animal life there was destroyed nearly instantly. The tremors continued to plague the surface all around as the gravitational disruption’s effects persisted beyond the initial shocking event.

“What did we just lose?” Sugar asked. “What did they use that settlement for?”

Liselot stared at the satellite images showing the barren landscape that once thrived. “Eggs. We lost the eggs.”

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Spaghetti West: The Three-Body Problem (Part II)

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When Pribadium Delgado’s father was seven years old, he was staying with his grandparents while his parents went on a boring business trip in Iowa. Valde loved staying over there, especially since they lived two hours away, making it a rare treat. He was particularly close with his grandfather, because he was a young soul. One thing they loved to do was have the grandfather hold Valde’s hands and spin him around like a helicopter. They would do it all the time in the park across the street. Not everyone was happy about it.

A neighbor was fed up with their fun, so she called family services, citing the danger. Of course, this did not constitute abuse or neglect, but it still meant they had to stop, because the grandfather did not want to antagonize this woman. This saddened Valde, so he begged the grandfather to do it again. They knew the busybody would be watching, though, so they decided to give it a shot in the house, and it did not go well.

Their hands slipped from each other, and Valde went flying through the air. His head slammed against the wall, cracking them both open, and giving Valde permanent brain damage. He got through it, and ended up having a fairly happy life, growing up to have a family of his own. He couldn’t be alone with his own kids until they were old enough to kind of take care of themselves, but he wasn’t abusive, just easily distracted. The grandfather, on the other hand, couldn’t deal with the guilt. After years of heavy drinking, he either fell, or jumped off, a cliff. They were never sure which.

Pribadium’s mother was an astrophysicist, which was what got Pribadium interested in science. Her mother always called the tragedy the three-body problem, likening the grandfather, the grandson, and the wall to celestial bodies. She noted the wonder in the universe, and used the story to teach Pribadium a valuable lesson. Well, multiple lessons, really. The first was social and behavioral, which was obvious. The deeper lesson, however, was about gravity.

Outer space was monumentally huge. Most of it was made up of dark energy, which was basically just another word for space. Baryonic matter only took up a small fraction of the composition, yet...objects struck each other all the time. Galaxies were literally colliding. Thanks to gravity. Gravity was responsible for making life possible. It held things together, where otherwise there would just be a bunch of random particles flying individually through empty space. But it was still good to have space. If Valde and his grandfather had been allowed to swing around in the park, they would not have been so restricted, and Valde would not have crashed into a wall.

Now Pribaidum was grown up, and had been for centuries. Her parents were long dead, and she didn’t know where her brother was. She went by Sugar now, and had an entirely new face, in order to distinguish her from the Pribadium native to this time. Even though she had all of Pribadium’s memories up to a point, she sometimes felt like a brand new person. She could be too blunt about things, and even a little emotionally attached. It wasn’t her fault, news didn’t surprise her as much as it did to others. And she always preferred to just get right down to the point.

“A black hole?” Liselot asked. “A stellaris collapsis?”

“No. Planetary-mass; possibly primordial,” Sugar clarified. She had gone ahead and started constructing the defense platforms to orbit Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida, but now she was going to have to halt the process and reprogram them. The basic design was just fine, but ablation lasers weren’t going to work for this situation, and they needed a denser solution to the spherical covering problem; probably dynamic.

“Possibly?” Liselot questioned. “What do you mean? What else would it be?”

“It could be a Kugelblitz,” Sugar answered. “Have you never heard of them?”

“I’m an astronomer, of course I have. It’s only recently become feasible for humanity to make one, though. If someone made it, we would have noticed, because in order for it to be passing through our system right now, it would have needed to form practically in our backyard. So unless you’re suggesting aliens are real... Wait, are you suggesting that aliens are real?”

Sugar had to ignore that question. “I need more time to study it. I still don’t know if it’s charged yet. That will tell me how we deal with it. I need to get closer.”

Liselot shook her head in disbelief. “Oh yeah, sure. Get closer to the singularity that just destroyed a moon and a planet in one fell swoop. Have fun, try not to get spaghettified, don’t forget to bring a towel. Will you be home in time for dinner?”

“Don’t worry, we’ll stay a couple hundred kilometers out. We’ll park, fire a few procession probes, and gather the data. Yes, we will be home for this proverbial dinner.”

“I’m coming with you,” Liselot insisted.

“No, that’s okay,” Sugar offered, knowing that it wasn’t really a request.

Liselot winced. “This is my planet, my responsibility. If you kick me off of your ship, I’ll just get my own, and pilot fish my way alongside you. They’re not expensive.”

Van was walking back on the bridge. “Read her in,” he encouraged. “It’s not illegal for non-travelers to know about this stuff, or I wouldn’t know. Read her in.”

Sugar breathed through her nose and considered it. Liselot was correct, this wasn’t their world. They needed help and approval from someone who lived here, and the Axiom of Astronomy was their best option. It already appeared like they could trust her. So Sugar nodded and cleared her throat to be blunt and aggressive again. “Time travel is real. Some people are born with the neurology necessary to hack the universe to manipulate timespace in one way or another. Others, like me—and now you—fell into the time traveler community.”

“Oh, she’s being modest,” Van says. “Sugar here invented her own, unique form of time travel. It’s entirely incompatible with how everyone else does it. Which means it’s protected from their vulnerabilities.”

“That’s not entirely true,” Sugar argued. “I...my brain connected to a primordial knowledge floating around the universe, from a different universe. It’s like—that’s what the cosmic microwave background radiation is. Someone else invented it, I found it.”

“Like transcendentalism?” Liselot asks. “You know that Bidans are essentially transcendentalists, right? We worship knowledge and science.”

“I didn’t give it much thought,” Sugar replied. “I try to stay away from religion.” She paused in a brief silence. “So you’re not freaking about learning the truth about reality. Do you just not believe it?”

Liselot smiled softly. “Many in our culture suspect that it’s real. In the year 2400, the collective knowledge of the known galaxy exploded unpredictably. I mean, just look at how fast a new substrate can be built on Castlebourne, and the artificial gravity on The Tangent. Actually, it must be the reason for the artificial gravity on our planet. Time travel would explain a ton of these leaps in understanding, wouldn’t it? It vindicated a lot of our beliefs about secret a priori knowledge, and now I’m in the inner circle.”

“Hm,” Van says. “I think she’s all right with it.”

“This is what you were afraid to tell me?” Liselot questions. “I’m sure if you spent time in Victorian England, you might be afraid to out yourself, but I think you’ll find if you’re honest with people in the modern world, they’ll be more receptive and calm.”

“It’s more complicated than that. Telling one person isn’t illegal,” Sugar explained. “Telling everyone is, because it’s a unilateral decision which robs others of consent. There’s a prison. If I were to make a broadcast announcement, they would undo that, throw me in prison, and potentially never let me out. I don’t even have to be the one to make that announcement if there’s a risk that you will, or if you go blabbing to your therapist, and they do it.”

“I understand, I know how to keep a secret,” Liselot assured them. “I’m sure there’s a lot more to know, but I’m guessing you needed to quote-unquote read me in because you’re not just gonna throw procession probes at the singularity.”

“Uh, no,” Sugar confirmed. “We’re gonna get a lot closer than I said. This ship was built with transdimensional shielding, which will protect us from the dangers of high gravity, though we could end up experiencing minor time dilation.”

“I’ve experienced relativistic dilation before,” Liselot says. “I went on a cruise around H-Gimura-11 in my youth. Lost eleven years.”

Sugar smirked. “I personally know Hokusai Gimura, from before she discovered HG-11. She was my mentor; introduced me to all of this.”

“Small world,” Liselot decided. “So are we going?”

Sugar looked over at Vantu and nodded lightly.

He teleported the ship away. “Now orbiting S-Delgado-1.”

Sugar rolled her eyes. “We are not calling it that.”

“We have to,” Van reasoned. “You discovered it.”

“If it’s a Kugelblitz,” Sugar argued as she was calibrating the sensors, “That means they discovered it.”

“I don’t see them here,” Van fired back. “We’ve still not proved it yet anyway.”

Sugar shook her head. “Would you just open the exterior spectrometers?”

They ran the sensors and gathered the data, ultimately confirming that it was indeed Kugelblitz. They didn’t know who made it, or where it came from, but now Sugar knew how to deflect it. Unless it was sent here intentionally as a weapon, they could fire ionic pulses at it, and get it to move out of the system. It only took a few weeks to complete the array, and that was all they did. They scrapped the full orbital defense complement, which was something this planet should have had the whole time. A Kugelblitz black hole was more dangerous than a primordial one. They didn’t have time to protect the globe against all threats. They needed to be offensive, and concentrate their efforts in one spot on the celestial firmament.

It took a couple of days for Sugar to be confident that they had pushed the object clear, so it didn’t cause further damage. If they had shot the black hole head on, each shot would have taken an immense amount of energy to make it reverse directions. By constantly striking it on the edge, they conserved that energy, and used it more wisely. They just wanted to change its course enough so that it moved out of Tau Ceti space. Now that that was done, they could focus on the debris from Qishra. That was their ongoing, long term problem, but it was possible to keep them at bay, especially once they did finally cover the sky in those defenses.

The world rejoiced and partied, and Sugar was happy for them, but then something new came up on their sensors. “This is impossible.”

“What is it?” Van asked.

“It’s the black hole. It’s...back.”

“So it is a weapon,” Van determined. “Someone’s controlling it.”

“I don’t see how,” Sugar argued. “We should be able to detect them, and what would be the motive?”

“Should we call Liselot?”

Sugar sighed. “She has a right to know. Just give me one moment to check something.” She frowned at the screens as she waited for her long-range sensors to respond. Her eyes widened when the information came in.

“What? I don’t understand what I’m seeing here.”

Sugar looked up at Van hovering over her shoulder. “That’s what you called S-Delgado-1.”

“Oh, okay.”

“It’s moving away.”

“Oh, so false alarm. We’re good.”

While still staring at him, Sugar reached up and tapped the screen to switch to a different readout. “If we’re sticking with the same naming convention, we might have to name this one S-Delgado-2.”

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