Ted Kosmatka: In-Fall

The disc caved a hole in the starshine.

Smooth, graphene skin reflected nothing, blotting out the stars as it swung through the vacuum—black on black, the perfect absence of color.

It was both a ship and not a ship.

The disc lacked a propulsion system. It lacked navigation. Inside, two men awakened, first one and then the other.

In truth, the disc was a projectile—a dark bolus of life-support fired into distant orbit around another, stranger kind of darkness.

This second darkness is almost infinitely larger, massing several hundred thousand sols; and it didn’t blot out the stars behind it, but instead lensed them into a bright, shifting halo, bending light into a ring, deforming the fabric of spacetime itself.

From the perspective of the orbiting disc, the stars seemed to flow around an enormous, circular gap in the star field. It had many different names, this region of space. The astronomers who discovered it centuries earlier had called it Bhat 16. Later physicists would call it “the sink.” And finally, to those who came here, to those who dreamed of it, it was known simply as “the maw.”

A black hole like none ever found before.

By the disc’s third day in orbit, it had already traveled three hundred eighteen million miles, but this is only a tiny fraction of its complete trajectory. At the end of the disc’s seventy-second hour in orbit, a small lead weight, 100 kilograms, was fired toward the heart of the gravity well—connected to the ship by a wire so thin that even mathematicians called it a line.

The line spooled out, thousands of kilometers of unbreakable tetravalent filament stretching toward the darkness until finally pulling taut. The line held fast to its anchor point, sending a musical resonance vibrating through the disc’s carbon hull.

Inexorable gravity, a subtle shift.

Slowly at first, but gradually, on the fourth day, the ship that was not a ship changed course and began to fall.

The old man wiped blood from the young man’s face.

“ Ulii ul quisall ,” the young man said. Don’t touch me .

The old man nodded. “You speak Thusi,” he said. “I speak this, too.”

The young man leaned close and spat blood at the old man. “It is an abomination to hear you speak it.”

The old man’s eyes narrowed.

He wiped the blood from his cheek. “An abomination,” he said. “Perhaps this is true.”

He held out his hand for the young man to see. In his hand was a scalpel. “Do you know why I’m here?” he asked.

Light gleamed off the scalpel’s edge. This time, it was the old man who leaned close. “I’m here to cut you.”

The old man placed the scalpel’s blade on the young man’s cheek, just beneath his left eye. The steel pressed a dimple into his pallid skin.

The young man’s expression didn’t change. He stared straight ahead, eyes like blue stone.

The old man considered him. “But it would be a kindness to cut you,” he continued. “I see that now.” He pulled the blade away and ran a thumb along the young man’s jaw, tracing the web of scar tissue. “You wouldn’t even feel it.”

The young man sat motionless in the chair, arms bound to the armrests by thick straps. He was probably still in his teens, the beginnings of a beard making patchy whorls on his cheek. He was little more than a boy, really.

He had probably once been beautiful, the old man judged. That explained the scars. The boy’s psychological profile must have shown a weakness for vanity.

Or perhaps the profiles didn’t matter anymore.

Perhaps they just scarred them all now.

The old man rubbed his eyes, feeling the anger slide out of him. He put the scalpel back on the tray with the other bright and gleaming instruments.

“Sleep,” he told the boy. “You will need it.”

And the universe ticked on.

“Where are we going?” the boy said, after several hours.

Whether he’d slept or not, the old man wasn’t sure, but at least he’d been silent.

The old man rose from his console on creaking knees. Acceleration accreted weight into the soles of his feet, allowing the simple pleasure of walking. He brought the boy water. “Drink,” he said, holding out the nozzle.

The boy eyed him suspiciously, but after a moment, took a long swallow.

“Where are we going?” he repeated.

The old man ignored him.

“They have already tried to interrogate me,” the boy said. “I told them nothing.”

“I know. If you told them what they wanted, you wouldn’t be here.”

“And so now they’re sending me someplace else? To try again?”

“Yes, someplace else, but not to try again.”

The boy was silent for a long moment. Then he said, “For that they have you.”

The old man smiled. “You are a smart one.”

Rage burned in the boy’s eyes, and pain beyond measuring. The earlier interrogations had been harsh. He pulled against his straps again, trying to jerk his arms free.

“Tell me where you are taking me!” he demanded.

The old man stared down at him. “You are scared,” he said. “I know what you are thinking. You want out of your restraints. You’re thinking that if you could get loose… oh, the things you would do to me.” The old man glanced toward the tray of gleaming steel. “You wish you could use that blade on me. You wish that you were in my shoes, that I was sitting where you are.

“But you don’t understand,” the old man said, then leaned forward again and whispered into the boy’s ear. “It is I who envy you .”

The ship hummed as it fell. Charged ions blasted carbon skin.

“Why won’t you tell me where we’re going?”

The boy repeated the question every few minutes.

Finally the old man walked to the console and pressed a button. The wall revealed a view screen, exposing deep space, the looming maw. “There,” the old man said. “We are going there.”

The black hole filled half the screen.

Abyss, if there ever was one.

The boy smiled. “You try to scare me with death? I don’t fear death.”

“I know,” the old man said.

“Death is my reward. In the afterlife, I will walk again with my father. I will tread the bones of my enemies. I will be seated at a place of honor with others who fell fighting for the side of God. Death will be a paradise for me.”

“You truly believe that, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“That is why I envy you.”

The boy was a mass murderer. Or a freedom fighter.

Or maybe just unfortunate.

The old man looked at the boy’s scars, noting the creative flourish that had been lavished on his face during previous interviews. Yes, unfortunate, certainly. Perhaps that above all.

Life in deep space is fragile. And humans are as they have always been.

Bombs though, are different.

In space, bombs can be much, much more effective.

If placed just right, a simple three pound bomb can destroy an entire colony. Open it to the sterilizing vacuum of the endless night. And ten thousand people dead—a whole community wiped clean in a single explosive decompression.

He’d seen that once, a long time ago, when this war first began. Seen the bodies floating frozen inside a ruptured hab, the only survivors a lucky few who scrambled into pressure suits. A lucky few like him.

Because of a three-pound bomb.

Multiply it by a hundred colonies and a dozen years. Three airless worlds. A fight over territory, culture, religion. The things man has always fought over.

Humans are as they have always been. In space though, the cost of zealotry is higher.

A thousand years ago, nations bankrupted themselves to raise armies. It cost a soldier to kill a soldier. Then came gunpowder, technology, increased population densities—gradually leveraging the cost of death along a sliding scale of labor and raw materials, until finally three pounds of basic chemistry had the power to erase whole swaths of society. Ever more effortless murder, the final statistical flat-line in the falling price of destruction.