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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.”
