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33




The wormhole filled Columbus’s windows, occulting the stars behind it. Their sudden disappearance lent a perspective she hadn’t been able to discern before: black upon black, as if the void of space itself had disappeared.

The shimmering ring of starlight that was the only hint of its periphery blinked out of view as Columbus crossed its threshold. The incomprehensible distances between the stars seemed to collapse around her, coalescing into a membrane that looked as if it could be grasped and molded, as if space and time had become physically malleable. She was surrounded by the light from a trillion suns, the observable universe wrapping itself around her in a kaleidoscopic tunnel.

Ahead it had no discernible end, the wraparound universe stretching to infinity. She reflexively checked the feed from the aft-facing cameras, wondering if the familiar solar system she’d left behind might still be visible. Alarmed but not entirely surprised, she found it looked the same as it did ahead: Infinity in either direction while the universe around her had become incongruously finite. No beginning, and no end in sight.

She was suddenly aware of her heart pounding against her chest, her breath coming in sharp gasps. She reached for the emergency oxygen mask nearby, slapping it over her face but leaving the O2 flow off. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, forcing herself to relax. To not hyperventilate.

Traci replaced the mask in its cradle after a minute, keeping her eyes fixed on her instruments and not the chaos whirling around her. When she finally mustered the courage to look outside again, she tried to identify features of this bizarrely compressed space. Recognizing constellations or bright deep-sky objects, much less identifying individual stars, was so impossible as to be comical. All that she knew of the universe was now everywhere at once, as if she had been deposited into the middle of a rolled-up map of the deep sky.

She realized the AI had been silent throughout this bizarre experience. How was it perceiving this? “You still with me, Bob?”

“Affirmative. I was about to warn you against hyperventilating. I am relieved to see that you took action. How do you feel?”

That had become a very big question indeed. Puny and fearful, the spectacle outside a stark reminder of just how vulnerable she was before the whole of the universe. It was frighteningly godlike, in that she could now perceive all of known creation at once as it flashed by them.

“I think I’m okay now,” she finally said. Anticlimactic, but it was all she could muster. “Any idea where we are? Can XNAV identify anything?”

“The pulsar navigation platform has positively identified all objects in its catalogue. However, their relative positions have become so distorted as to render them unusable. It is most unusual.”

That was perhaps the greatest understatement she’d ever heard. It might have been better not to ask. “We have no idea where we’re going, and no way to measure our progress.”

“For now, yes. But the fact they are identifiable suggests we will remain within our own galaxy.”

“I suppose that’s comforting.”

“It is best to not worry yourself. There is no reason to think we will not emerge in the same region of space as Magellan. The XNAV platform should be able to deduce our position on the other side.”

Which she knew from current theory, though it was hard to maintain her objectivity when she was in the middle of testing said theories. It had been traversed once. Now they were about to find out if the openings didn’t dance around space, randomly spitting out their contents like a loose fire hose.

A glance at the master chronometer didn’t exactly calm her nerves. It marched on, ticking off each second while the GPS-referenced clock with Earth’s universal coordinated time had begun flashing error codes. Would it come back to life once they were through? Jack had sounded awfully sanguine about time dilation, as if it were somehow irrelevant to him. All those years in hibernation may well have led him to write off any sense of time beyond what he perceived in the moment.

She frowned as she thought to herself. You wanted to escape the chaos taking over Earth. What are you so upset about?

Suddenly the universe sprang open before her with pinpoint stars, at the moment unrecognizable but at least in the perspective she was used to. Space had abruptly returned to normal, though her notions of “normal” had been violently transformed.


Columbus’s flight computers were still working to recalibrate themselves, struggling to reconcile what the inertial platform told them with optical star trackers that were still searching for recognizable markers.

Traci wasn’t going to wait for the machine to figure itself out. She pushed away from her flight station and up into the observation dome, hurriedly opening the petals of its protective shield for a look outside. She tapped a brief command into a secondary control pad beneath the dome’s rim. A short burst of thrusters in opposite directions along the ship’s length put it into a leisurely roll. Outside, the stars began to turn slowly.

This new system’s host star became apparent right away. Its distant, pale yellow light was filtered by a gauzy ring, similar enough to Sol that it made her wonder for a moment if they’d been deposited somewhere else in their home system. Jack mentioned Tau Ceti had a pronounced dust cloud . . . 

Part of her hoped for it, a hope quickly dispelled by the utter incongruity of the star field outside.

In a flash, normal space had become conspicuously abnormal. She had long ago memorized the major constellations, their presence a comforting backdrop that defined her familiar stellar neighborhood. Traveling to the edge of the solar system had not been enough to alter this perspective, their unchanging asterisms powerfully demonstrating the immense distances between them.

All of that had been turned on its head the moment she emerged from the wormhole, the rigid background of the universe now nothing like she’d known before. Some star formations displayed a hint of familiarity, which she told herself was the product of her mind searching for recognizable patterns. She was as lost as if she’d been blindfolded and dropped into a completely foreign locale with no explanation.

She pushed away and flew back to the flight station to find the big nav display still filled with error codes. The star trackers had become useless, being reliant on those same patterns which had been so comfortably omnipresent in their home system. Their only hope was the XNAV, which Bob had dutifully employed to search out the handful of pulsars it used as guideposts. The backup to their star trackers had now become their main source for navigation.

Her only comfort was in the knowledge that their traversal had taken a surprisingly short time. Even in that strangely warped space, distance was an immutable factor. Or so she hoped. Was a tunnel through space-time indeed like boring beneath a mountain, or was it something else entirely? Was the portal the shortcut itself, or just one entrance that could go in different directions? Was it possible she’d been instantaneously spit out on the other side of the galaxy, or was it so short that she was merely a few light-years away?

A few light-years. How quickly perspectives could change. Distill a mind-boggling gulf into units you could count on your fingers and it didn’t seem all that frightening anymore.

She flew back up into the dome. More stars paraded past as the ship continued its slow roll. One group in particular caught her eye, a dense cluster of blue and white gems that stood out among the stellar background. It looked an awful lot like the Pleiades.

Could they have gotten that lucky? If that was it, then the rest of Taurus should be apparent, though the V-shaped arrangement of stars that defined the bull’s horns was out of kilter. Aldebaran wasn’t where it should be, closer to the base of the V. She spotted what might have been the orange giant, slightly out of position but still in the general vicinity.

Her heart pounded as more stars appeared, unmistakable and as comforting as finding a familiar landmark after being hopelessly lost. Orion soon crept into view, its distinctive three-star belt standing out like a beacon though mildly distorted. The stars that defined its feet and shoulders, Rigel and Betelgeuse, were likewise out of position but still identifiable, as if the asterism had been printed on rubber and stretched at the corners. But the belt was there, as was the magnificent nebula in the center of the hunter’s sword. It was definitely Orion, but was this the correct perspective from Tau Ceti?

Relief washed over her like a waterfall. She wasn’t home, but she wasn’t far, at least not in a cosmic sense. She hurriedly tapped in another command on the control pad and the same thrusters fired in opposite directions to halt their roll.

She killed the lights and control screens to let the darkness envelop her. Soon the starlight was all she could see. Despite their positions being distorted, she had enough familiar references for a starting point. It would take a considerable amount of work to recalibrate the star trackers but it could be done, especially once the XNAV aligned itself. Rigel, Bellatrix, Aldebaran, and Betelgeuse were all there, road signs to point them along their way. She’d survived the first leg of the journey and made it to . . . wherever this was. Soon she’d be able to figure that out as well.

She laughed and wiped at a tear, overcome with relief and fresh determination. They’d gone down the hole and come out the other side; now they had to find Jack. She closed her eyes with the sublime relief of not being hopelessly lost on the far side of the galaxy.

A rendezvous beacon began pinging the comm panel down below, snapping her out of her reverie. It was Magellan, transmitting its position. Her head still swimming, she began tapping more commands into the dome’s small control panel, sending the nav display to its screen. She couldn’t pilot the ship from here, but she could at least see where they were pointed. “Bob, do you have a lock on that beacon?”

“Affirmative. I have their relative position and vector, but the guidance platform is still recalibrating to the local environment. I must generate a new chart of guide stars and pulsars before we can accurately plot a transfer orbit.”

She was growing impatient now that they’d found what they came for, but first they had to know where they were in relation to it. Though it couldn’t stop them from moving, as nothing was stationary in space. “It’s still enough to establish relative motion,” she said. “For now, decelerate us coplanar to that beacon’s vector at one-tenth g. I don’t want us to go sailing past them.”

“Understood. Executing now.” The stars outside immediately began to wheel about as the AI turned the ship around. Soon, the rumble of fusion engines reached her ears as the gentle acceleration pushed her against the railing. Gravity had never felt so good.

Soon after, a familiar voice sounded in the dome’s small speaker:

“Ahoy, Columbus.”


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Framed