Michael McCollum - The Void

“We project a war of less than two years,” she answered, no longer as sure of herself as when she’d boarded her gig this morning. In truth, history was rife with such rosy predictions. They seldom came true. “There will be plenty of time afterwards to study this void of yours.”

Vannick gazed at her as one does a student who is slow to understand the lesson being taught. When he spoke again, there was soft pity in his voice. “The Void may not be our only problem.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, suddenly suspicious.

He dimmed the lights and brought the display back up on the screen. He passed his hands quickly over the controls. The violet void dimmed until it became a phantom object framed against the obsidian blackness of space. Somehow, it had also grown larger and fuzzier, as though it had developed a halo. The halo wasn’t violet like the sphere. It was pale yellow and indistinct, so much so that it was nearly invisible.

“What did you do?”

“I’ve filtered out the highest energy tachyons. What you are seeing now are low energy particles that tend to be washed out when we look at The Void.”

“Low energy tachyons? What is the source?”

“Starships.”

Tessa Hallowell barely reacted to the news. There had been too many shocks this past hour. She was put in mind of an old expression: “You can’t wet a river.” That was the way she felt.

“What starships?” she asked in a voice made toneless by too much emotion.

“The races of the Virgo Cluster, of course. What you are looking at are the waste tachyons emitted by their engines, flung outward toward the far comers of the firmament as they race in this direction. You didn’t think that we were the only starfaring race in the Universe, did you? God wouldn’t be so wasteful.”

“But it has only been two years since the appearance of The Void. How did they arrange an evacuation so quickly?”

“A good question,” the astronomer agreed. “In some cases they must have only had a few months warning, possibly less. Even on such short notice they managed to send billions of starships in this direction at velocities substantially in excess of a million lights. We are going to have to deal with those people before The Void’s event horizon passes this way. Do we want to be engaged in war when those ships arrive in this vicinity? And what about all of the other races from all the thousands of galaxies who will soon be taking flight? Just how crowded do you think it will be on whatever distant planets we finally choose for refuge?”

It is often said that one’s life passes before one’s eyes at the moment of death. Tessa experienced a similar sensation. She suddenly found herself floating above her father as he blasphemed New Rome. Her detached consciousness seemed to hover in a classroom at home on Askar as her teachers and fellow students plotted rebellion in hushed tones. She watched as though detached from her body as she once again slaved through the twenty-seven-hour days to gain admittance to the Hegemonic Space Academy, and she relived the overwhelming surge of pride that she’d felt when she’d been given Warwind to command.

It was as though all of her emotions had been burned out through overwork. Try as she might, she could not recapture the patriotic fervor she had once felt at the thought of throwing off the Communion’s yoke. Indeed, as she watched the tracks of starships fleeing The Void, it was difficult to recall the Hegemony’s reasons for wanting to separate from the Communion of Man. Suddenly the coming fight with the gigi’s seemed akin to two ant colonies fighting over the same crust of bread.

The attack of ambivalence lasted an eternity that measured a dozen seconds by chronometer. When it passed, it left behind a Tessa Hallowell who was not the same woman who had set out from her ship a conquering hero. This new Tessa Hallowell was much older and wiser than that adolescent of a few hours previous. She turned to Vannick and with deceptive calm said, “I want recordings of all your observations, along with all communications relating to The Void.”

“You’ll get them, Captain.”

“Good. I will broadcast them to my headquarters as soon as my ship breaks orbit. I suggest that you send a warning to New Rome about what you have learned today, as well.”

“Does that mean that you aren’t going to destroy the observatory?”

“It means that I will probably be shot for not doing so, Professor Vannick. I hope it is worth it.”

“It is,” the relieved astronomer said. “And, Captain… thank you.”

Tessa barely heard him. She keyed her personal communicator. “Sergeant Major Cochrane.”

“Yes, Captain?”

“Prepare to disembark the observatory. We’re going home.”

There was a heart beat’s hesitation before the customary response. “Yes, ma’am!”

“Patch me through to the ship.”

The next voice she heard was that of Warwind’s communications officer.

“Pasqual, send ‘Vertigo Veritatus Velocipede’ to headquarters. Do you have that?”

“ ‘Vertigo, Veritatus, Velocipede.’ Aye aye, Captain!”

Tessa listened to the words that would cause a mighty armada to halt in its tracks, turn around, and then return to base without a shot fired. She hoped she was in time. She waited tensely for the automatic acknowledgement from Hegemonic headquarters, knowing that it would take a few minutes before the angry questions began to fly starwards. She ordered communications to shut down, anxious that her own arrest order not arrive before she’d had time to explain her actions to her crew and superiors back home.

She turned to Vannick and said, “We’ll have to draw from your stores in order to get home, Professor.”

“You are welcome to everything we have in surplus above our barest necessities, Captain.”

It was a very chastened Tessa Hallo-well who climbed aboard her gig half an hour later with several record cubes tucked into her pockets. She gazed neither at the Milky Way, nor the tiny patches of other galaxies. She no longer felt any desire for stargazing. The Universe no longer seemed the overwhelming giant that it once had. In fact, despite being fifteen billion light years in diameter, it seemed almost claustrophobic.