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While Team Matic was living semipermanently on Castlebourne, Hrockas set up
an annual meeting on their days in the timestream. He typically wanted them
to be caught up on certain things, and maybe ask for their advice or help.
Even though the team had since left, this meeting was still going on and
going strong. It was a review of the prior year, and a general check-in for
the planet’s administrative staff. Of course, they held meetings all the
time, but this was the big one. Lycander left the meeting after the
unauthorized teleportation alert because responding to such threats was part
of his job. They were pressed about it because everyone who was given the
ability to teleport was in the meeting, and none of them had left. He
reported that all was quiet on the western front, and escorted them back so
they could join the meeting too. But they weren’t necessarily going to
participate as if it were business as usual.
Since Hrockas wasn’t expecting them, he didn’t simply continue with the
agenda. He called a recess for an impromptu debrief. His trusty bodyguard,
Azad leaned against the credenza behind him, and didn’t speak. “The last
time I checked, you did not have the coordinates to Castlebourne’s new
location. I’m not mad, but how did you find us?”
“Truthfully,” Leona began, “you can be found, but not by just anyone.
First of all, we did not come here on purpose, and we did not go through the
bulk. We were investigating a gravitational anomaly on Thālith al Naʽāmāt
Bida. We still don’t know how it works, but we found a key piece of
technology. Due to our presence, it sent us away. It sent us...here. We have
no idea how or why. Maybe it read our minds, and thought we considered it
home. I don’t know. We’ll need to look into it more, but to answer the
spirit of your question, Ramses created a map that sends signals through the
membrane of the universe, and pinpoints technological establishments. It is
precise enough to target a single-person habitat. So yes, we knew where you
were. We were using it to look for someone else, and initially avoided this
region, because we guessed that the signal was coming from you. That being
said, if Ramses could do it, that means it can be done. It doesn’t mean that
the Exin Empire can do it, but it’s not impossible. The bottom line is that
you’re not safe here, but to put it in perspective, you’re not safe
anywhere. Moving the star was still your smartest move.”
“You just answered all of my follow-up questions,” Hrockas said. “Thank
you.” He looked over to Ramses now. “I hesitate to believe that it was a
mind-reading machine. What is your hypothesis? I know you always have one.”
Ramses looked around at his friends as he hesitated. “Bida, and presumably
Varkas Reflex, generate their gravity artificially. Basically, what they do
is blanket a surface with an invisible portal that blocks the gravitational
pull of the celestial body that you’re actually on, and just gives
you gravity from somewhere else. That somewhere else part is
critical. It has to come from somewhere.” He looked around again, but this
time at the walls and ceiling. “My hypothesis, sir, is that it comes from
here. To Trinity Turner and-or Hokusai Gimura, it might have been a random
point in space. They might not have chosen it with any level of
intentionality. The gravity regulator may have even chosen it for them, and
it worked, so they left it as it was.”
Hrockas closed his eyes and nodded. “But then we moved a new solar system to
this region, and screwed everything up.”
“Honest mistake,” Mateo assured him. “In fact, not even a mistake. You
couldn’t have known that it was here.”
“Actually,” Hrockas said. “I think I did.” He stood up from his chair, and
tapped the back of his ear. Ramses had given him his own set of
communication discs, which operated on their own network. “Telman, could you
come to my office?”
A man they didn’t know appeared. “Sir?”
“What did that—what was that thing you saw a few years ago when we first
started decelerating the stellar engine?” Hrockas asked him.
“The blip?” Telman asked.
“Yes, the blip.”
Telman looked at the others in the room very briefly. “It was a blip. It
messed with our quantum connections. People’s consciousnesses weren’t
properly received for a few weeks. Fortunately, our safeguards worked, and
their signals were rerouted to an off-site back-up facility on the outer
edge of the system. But then for a few weeks after that, transmission to
Castlebourne started working again, and it was the off-site facility that
stopped working. We’ve had to shut it down permanently, and rely on a
second outpost on an adjacent side of the system for emergency
back-up streaming.”
“Teleportation stopped working too,” Azad added. “We all took the trains
during that period of time.”
Hrockas nodded again. “We didn’t know what to make of it. We never found the
source of the issue, but things are mostly back to normal.”
Leona paced clear to the other side of the room. “Your stellar engine, was
it polar?”
Hrockas cleared his throat. “There are some things even you are not allowed
to know, but...no. It wasn’t a traditional thruster. We used other means. We
just call it that because there’s no other name for it, and it’s what people
understand. We moved laterally, sometimes towards the planet, and sometimes
away from it, depending on its place in orbit at the time. We didn’t have to
worry about any sort of exhaust beam with the technique that we used, and
that was the direction we wanted to go.”
“That’s okay,” Leona said. “I’m guessing that the first back-up site was on
the trailing edge of the ecliptic plane, which means Castlebourne crossed a
particular point first, and then it followed.”
“Yes, that’s what happened,” Telman confirmed.
“Which means we can plot where it is now,” Leona said. “If you give us the
data we need, we’ll get your other outpost up and running again, and maybe
save a few hundred million lives in the stellar neighborhood while we’re at
it.”
Ramses holed up in his lab, and processed the data that Hrockas okayed
Telman to provide for him. Telman even spent a little bit of time in there
with him to discuss the issue. Ramses occupied himself all day with doing
that, and designing some kind of new probe. He launched that probe before
the team left the timestream, and reconnected with it after they returned on
the first of September, 2545. “I found it. The probe found it. This region
of the galaxy has its own gravitational anomaly. It’s kind of like a
planetary-mass black hole, but it behaves unlike what the science predicts.
I’m guessing the added mass of the solar system is interfering with its
function.”
“Why use this?” Olimpia questioned. “Why get your gravity from a random
point in space using an invisible black hole, when you can get it from a
planet that already has the mass you need, say, Earth?”
“Because as we’ve seen,” Ramses continued, “that interferes with the
equilibrium on both sides of the portal. You can’t share the gravity.
You can only steal it. I’m starting to think that this area wasn’t the least
bit random. Hokusai somehow managed to either find an Earth-mass black hole,
or collapsed a comparable planet into a singularity to create one. I’m
guessing that it was a rogue world, which made it inhospitable to life, and
ripe for the taking according to ethical standards.”
“The timeline doesn’t make sense to me,” Angela said. “Castlebourne and the
star both have deeper gravity wells than the outpost asteroid that it says
the black hole is next to right now. Why have things been getting
progressively worse on Bida? It seems like they would have been so much
worse before.”
“That’s why it was so hard to find,” Ramses started to explain. The black
hole didn’t pass through Castlebourne, or the star. They just got close to
it. They got the ball rolling, so to speak. Now that the solar system has
settled where it is, the issue has been worsening because it’s been
persistent. The current competing gravity hasn’t been enough to destroy it
all at once, but it’s been throwing things off. Before you ask, it’s
actually not just compounding gravity here that is raising the gravity on
the other planets. It’s simply disturbing the optimal operation of the
regulators on the other side of the portals. Indeed, they were
well-engineered to compensate for this disturbance, but are constantly
fighting against it, and it’s taken a toll.”
“So, what can you do?” Hrockas asked him. “Can you move the black hole,
or...should we try to move? I’m gonna tell ya, that’s not gonna be so
easy, and definitely not fast. I can’t reach out to my contact whenever I
want. We had a deal. Getting us here was the deal. I said nothing about a
second move.”
“Relax,” Leona said with a laugh. “We have another solution. For the
permanent one, we’ll need a reframe engine, but for the temporary one...a
slingdrive.” She glanced at Rames. “A bigger one than we have. Incidentally,
we must enact both plans, even if the permanent one sounds easier. It’s not
easier at all. I couldn’t help but notice that none of the crew of the
Vellani Ambassador was at the meeting. We really need them, and preferably
yesterday.”
“They don’t come back here much anymore,” Hrockas revealed. “Their days of
regularly transporting refugees are behind them. Anyone who wanted to escape
pretty much has already. They mostly go on diplomatic missions on an
as-needed basis. There’s still a lot of internal conflict that needs to be
managed so it doesn’t explode into all-out war.”
“I assume you know about the armada that is on its way to where Castlebourne
used to be,” Marie said to him.
“We do. We’ve been monitoring their progress. So far, they’re still headed
in the wrong direction, but we will be prepared to fight if we absolutely
have to,” Hrockas said.
“Do you happen to know where the VA is at this moment?” Leona asked.
“They don’t keep me updated,” Hrockas answered, “they don’t have to.” He
paused for a second. “I can call them, if this is an emergency. Is it an
emergency?”
“Not for you,” Romana said, “but for the Bidans and Varkas,
uh...Reflexers...”
“Varkans,” Leona corrected.
“All right.”
Hrockas stood up, but Azad placed a hand upon his shoulder. “I’ll take care
of it. It’s still glass, and you’re not armored.” He opened a cabinet on the
wall and removed a few objects, like a stack of tablets and what appeared to
be a king’s crown. Behind them was a second cabinet, made of glass. He
punched through it with the side of his fist, letting the shards scatter in
the main cabinet. He reached deep into a dark hole that they couldn’t see
into, then quickly jerked backwards.
“It might be a few hours,” Hrockas told the group, “and it might not happen.
Our needs do not take precedence over absolutely anything else going on.
They might not be able to get away quickly, but they will eventually show
up, and definitely within the year. Once they do, I’ll speak with them, and
I’m sure they’ll work around your schedule so they’re here next year. I wish
I could do better. I wish I had realized what we had done.”
“It’s not your fault,” Angela insisted. “Black holes are invisible.”
Mirage suddenly appeared, standing upon Hrockas’ desk. She was wearing an
extremely loud rainbow outfit, and presenting in a hero stance, with her
hands on her hips. “Have no fear! Mirage Matic shall be the tip of your
spear!” She looked down to see the team. “Oh, hey, guys.”
“Why do you still use my name?” Mateo questioned.
Mirage teleported off the desk, and onto the floor, right behind Mateo.
“Because I can see the future...husband,” she whispered into his ear. Then
she nibbled on his earlobe, and slapped him on the ass before starting to
walk towards the center of the room. “What can I do for you all? Your words;
my deeds.”
Ramses stepped forward, and evidently decided to lean into it. “My queen, we
ask for access to your great vessel. A marble-sized singularity must be
moved out of this solar system. It will take a great deal of quintessence to
perform such a feat, but we have no time to waste. Will you help us?”
Mirage frowned at him, but only still playacting. “This marble of yours, it
wouldn’t happen to have anything to do with what’s going on with Thālith al
Naʽāmāt Bida, Varkas Reflex, and Muñecai?”
The group looked amongst each other. “We didn’t know it was happening on
Muñecai, but yes,” Leona answered.
Mirage nodded. “I’m quite familiar with interstellar filter portals. That is
how we ended up in the Goldilocks Corridor in the first place.”
“So, is that a yes?” Mateo pressed.
Mirage pursed her lips, and turned her chin to the side. “You son of a
bitch, I’m in!” she exclaimed with a smile.
