Chapter 50

Time: January 1, year 204,894 9:11 PM London Local Time (T plus 12 minutes)

Jim was lying quietly on his mat, his eyes closed and pretending to be asleep. He suddenly noticed a slight lemon taste in his mouth and breathed a sigh of relief. It was Gary's signal that he was back in the area, and lemon was the code for full success. Profoundly happy that his son was almost free forever from the grips of the WFM, Jim settled down and tried to get some real sleep.

Time: January 1, year 204,894 10:21 AM Honolulu Local Time (T plus 21 minutes)

After spending twenty minutes examining the external sensors and internal ship diagnostics, Brianna sat back down in her command chair and opened her audio log.

"This is Candidate Brianna of the slip-ship The Daughter of the Stars, at twenty-one minutes into the launch. It worked! Mathematically I know exactly what happened, but to experience it in practice... It worked! My gosh it worked! Orbit injection worked perfectly! I am at NBHX35, in a circular orbit of one billion kilometers radius. Observed mass of the Black Hole is registering at 13.768 standard solar masses, near the center of our preflight estimate. My current orbital period is 1700 days, though that will... will... soon change... What?! Ah!"

Brianna heard a rattling in the deck below her, and for a moment she thought some cargo might have shaken loose. She was puzzled for a brief instant, for there should have been no vibrations within the ship to rattle anything. But then the noise returned, and louder. There was an unmistakable sense of purpose to the noise...

Brianna shivered in fright in her command chair on the flight deck. There were now unmistakable sounds of footprints approaching her from below, and all her childhood fears of monsters of the deep and nasty black holes seemed to have come true. She stared in dread at the open hatch, and then let out all her breath in one explosive burst of astonishment as Kyle's head appeared in it.

"Hi Brianna! Hey, this is neat! Uh, you okay?"

Time: January 1, year 204,894 1:00 PM Honolulu Local Time

Three hours after launch, the slip-generator shifted reality, and the slip-ship's orbital radius decreased from one billion to one-hundred million kilometers. The orbital period decreased to 53 days 18 hours...

Ten minutes later...

"Still another pleasant surprise Brianna!" Kyle called out over the open comm line. "Cargo Bay Two. Looks like material for prefab shelters."

"Yeah. I'm still unpacking all the goodies in the medical bay. You won't believe our good fortune! Uh Kyle, meet me in the astrometrics lab."

"Sure." He was there a minute later.

Brianna walked over and kissed him. "I want to remind you I owe you a lifetime of apologies for not completely trusting you."

Kyle nodded and smiled. "And I'll probably spend my entire lifetime deciding whether to forgive you. In the meantime though, want your feet petted?"

Brianna laughed. "Oh, I love you!"

"I love you too." They spend several minutes in a passionate embrace.

"Uh, Kyle?"

"Hmm?"

"Are you totally sure, about when you got here?"

"The troops at my kennel were watching the holocast. I remember the announcer calling out the T minus ten minute mark. And then... I don't know why... I just got sleepy. I went and lay down."

"This makes no sense!"

"I know. And all this cargo too. We are in so much better shape than we dreamed possible!" There was a faint whir in the ship. "Ah," said Kyle. "We're about to make the second planned mini-jump."

At T plus 3 hours, 20 minutes, the slip-ship shifted from one hundred million to ten million kilometers from NBHX35. The orbital period of The Daughter of the Stars was reduced from 53.75 days to 40 hours and 48 minutes. Kyle and Brianna studied the readouts in the astrometrics lab as the jump occurred.

"Analysis of the jump should be available on the bridge. Want to go back up?" asked Kyle.

"Not yet. There's something down here I want to see," replied Brianna.

"The safety-cord bit?"

Brianna laughed. "Ha! No, not that..."

Communication between the slip-ship and Earth was limited to two separate bits of information. The slip-ship and Earth Control were following a pre-programmed series of entangled jump sequences, the last jump being the one that would return the slip-ship to Honolulu at the end of its scheduled 24-hour flight. Brianna's one bit of information that she could send to Earth would be to collapse one component of the dual slip channel controlling the slip-generator. She could do that by breaking the seals on the slip- generator bay.

Earth would then have the choice of doing nothing, or collapsing their component, which would cause the slip-ship to return immediately to Earth. It was this ability of absolute control and that allowed the xenophobic WFM to make a few limited flights with the slip-ships, three thousand years after the gender wars. But even this absolute control was vaguely troubling, and a lack of the ability for complete monitoring stopped the ships' further use for almost two thousand centuries.

Brianna walked over to a console in the astrometrics lab. "I wanted to make sure we're recording everything. This is a completely new perspective for observations, and we'll never come this way again."

Kyle nodded. "Recording anything interesting?"

Brianna was quiet for a long moment. "This part of space is very vacuous. But there's a red giant just sixteen light-days from here. The red giant and NBHX35 form a loose binary star."

"Ah, let's see..." Kyle stared at the displays for a while and made some adjustments with Brianna. "There's a gas giant in orbit around the red giant... Just about the same size as Jupiter, as far as I can measure... and a little further out than Jupiter is from the sun."

"Yeah, I see it Kyle. It's still getting a fair amount of heat from the red giant though. Look at the thermal readings! It's a heck of a lot warmer than Jupiter..."

"And take a look at the spectrometer readings... Interesting! A lot different than Jupiter! I'm getting line patterns for free molecular nitrogen... Interesting! And water! Look how strong the water lines are..."

And the time passed quietly for the two young scientists.

Time: January 2, year 204,894 6:03 AM London Local Time (T plus 9 hours, 3 minutes)

"Wake up puppy! Puppy want to go for a walk?"

"Sure! I'd like that very much mistress!" Jim had actually gone to sleep during the night. He stretched and rubbed his eyes and tried to act casually. He finally had to get up, and he was a bit embarrassed about being naked in front of ten young women he didn't know. But he knew this was normal for the society so he tried to grin and bare it, smiling a bit at his own thought pun.