Jeremy Robinson - Blackout

He was moving again before he had an answer, crawling to where Alexander still lay pinned and almost completely spent, but he did not stop there. Instead, he kept going, out over the edge. He moved with the practiced caution of a veteran climber, picking out handholds, wedging hands and feet into cracks. His limbs felt like molten lead, and every maneuver required an extraordinary exertion, but his destination was close.

“Sara!” He called out, and then, “Fiona! I’m here.”

Fiona, wide-eyed with fear, looked at him and opened her mouth. The black hole’s gravity was making it impossible for her to breathe. She tried to shout back at him, a plea for help, but what came out was a barely audible squeak.

King held her gaze. “Fi. Remember what you were trying to do? The mother tongue? Singing this thing a lullaby? You have to keep doing it. You’re the only one who can.”

She gave her head a quick shake, fearful that any movement might dislodge her from her precarious position and send her plummeting into the black hole. “Can’t,” she mouthed.

“Yes, you can.”

“I don’t know what to say.” This time, she got words out in a hoarse whisper.

“You do know,” King insisted. “You just don’t know that you know. Start talking, start singing. It will come to you.”

“He’s right, Fi,” Sara said, whispering into her ear. “The words don’t even matter…”

Despite her own looming death, Fiona could not help but smile as she finished Sara’s statement: “It’s the thought that counts.”

But wasn’t that the truth? Alexander’s recordings had used the correct word, the precise frequency that should have prevented the black hole from reawakening, but it hadn’t worked because the words weren’t coupled to a specific intention.

She thought back to the words she had spoken to stop Richard Ridley’s golem; words in the ancient mother tongue, the language of creation, and wondered if her intention at that moment had been a source of greater power than the words themselves?

Those words would be of little use now. So also, she realized, was Alexander’s Bhuddist mantra. That word was meaningless to her; how could she believe in the power of a word she didn’t even understand?

But there was a language that she did know intimately, a language that had its roots in the ancient mother tongue, a language of which she was now the sole living guardian.

Fiona sucked in a breath against the crush of gravity, then freed one hand and began clapping it against her thigh, beating out a steady, insistent rhythm. Then, she began to sing.

King didn’t understand a word of what Fiona was saying, but recognized that it had to be her native language-the nearly extinct tongue of the Siletz tribe. The noises didn’t even seem like words, just a string of vocalizations, but he could see the effect that they were having on the girl. The pain and fear had slipped from her face, replaced by a serene, almost confident expression.

King focused on what she was saying, and began to distinguish certain words that were repeated every few seconds like a refrain. He began to anticipate when she would utter the phrase, and gradually, haltingly at first, but then with more gusto, added his voice. He became aware that Sara was trying to harmonize as well.

“This is wrong,” Alexander rasped from above. The words had to fight their way past clenched teeth. “You cannot control it this way. You must speak the word I taught you.”

Fiona ignored him, but when King glanced up, he saw a strange fury building in the other man’s eyes.

He wouldn’t…

There wasn’t time for King to finish the thought. He threw his right arm out and embraced Fiona and Sara just as Alexander’s grip failed.

There was simply no way he could hope to hang onto their combined weight or arrest their slide into the crater, but that didn’t stop him from trying.

He shoved his free hand into a crack, braced his feet against protrusions on the cave wall, and pulled back with all his might.

It was like trying to pull a locomotive uphill. The shoulder of the arm that held the falling women burned; the muscles and tendons taut like a wire about to snap.

He felt his feet slip from their perch, then his hand was torn free and they were all sliding down the slope. It was not a free fall, not like it had been with Brown. The slope was about forty-five degrees but there were plenty of protruding surfaces to provide a little resistance in the form of painful friction. Nevertheless, the end result would be the same. Gravity owned them now, and the journey would not end until they reached the event horizon, where time would stand still and they would spend an eternity on the cusp of oblivion.

Through it all, Fiona kept singing, as did King.

After a few seconds passed, King realized that they were no longer sliding toward the event horizon. His efforts to find a handhold had paid off; the fingers of his left hand had wrapped around a protruding horn of rock. What surprised him though was that he had been able to maintain the grip, and he understood that the tidal force of gravity had, if only momentarily, abated.

Whatever Fiona was doing was working.

He noticed a change in her song, new and unfamiliar phrases issued from her mouth, and when he glanced down, he saw that she had stopped clapping out the rhythm and in fact had gone almost completely limp. Her eyes had rolled back in her head and the words that burbled from her lips were the mumblings of someone in a trance state.

King listened for a moment, trying to learn the refrain of this new mantra-it didn’t sound like a Native American language anymore-but then a movement at the bottom of the crater arrested his attention.

Something was emerging from the event horizon.

King knew that what he was seeing could not really be happening. Nothing material could escape from the event horizon of a black hole. To do so would require acceleration to faster-than-light speeds-a physical impossibility-and would require more energy than existed in the entire universe. Impossibilities notwithstanding, there was a definite bulge in the visual distortion at the center of the crater.

The basilisk! King thought in a sudden panic. Maybe the explosion hadn’t killed it after all. Maybe he’d failed to destroy the quantum computer network with the IED.

Suddenly, the event horizon erupted. It was not the black mass of the basilisk that burst forth, but rather a gray-brown column that shot like a geyser into the air above the crater. The crown of the plume was lost in the dark night, but in the space of a few seconds, King saw particles of fine dust precipitating from the cloud.

As the fallout intensified into a choking miasma, he hastily tugged free a shirttail and fashioned an impromptu mask as the gritty rain began to cloud his vision.

In the darkness that followed, he heard Fiona’s voice, still speaking the strange language. Then, after a few minutes, she stopped, coughed twice, and fell silent.

King pulled Fiona and Sara close. He could see them now, though just barely. It had taken nearly twenty minutes for most of the dust to settle, but the finest particulate would probably remain suspended in the air for hours. King didn’t need to see the aftermath to know that the threat of the black hole was gone. The Earth had stopped shaking, there was no longer the sound of matter from the accretion disk being crushed into the event horizon, and the sense of disorientation and heaviness that had accompanied the alteration in gravity was gone.

King’s mind burned with questions about what had happened, but for a few minutes, he was content to simply hug the pair-his family.