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  "ETA to event horizon?"

  "Four minutes, thirty-one seconds."

  Soon, the dronebot disappeared from the visual range of the 3-D imager.

  "Tactical view, Dyna," Michelle said, and the 3-D imager gave a computer-simulated three-dimensional view of the black hole, its event horizon and the dronebot. They watched closely as the dronebot made ever tightening orbits around the black hole's event horizon. Now, the dronebot's path was represented on the 3-D imager as nothing more than an ellipse. This only because its velocity was so great.

  "Breaklight in ten seconds," Dyna said.

  "It's going awfully fast, Michelle. Are you certain the drone can survive the tidal forces?"

  "By now, the dronebot should be making about fifteen hundred orbits every second, Frank. But don't worry, the dronebot's computer is compensating for tidals."

  In the next moment, the 3-D imager flashed brightly and the trail of the dronebot was gone.

  "Breaklight exceeded," Dyna announced. "Radio link broken."

  "Theoretical projection please, Dyna," Michelle requested.

  The 3-D imager now displayed a theoretical plot of the dronebot's path, which was represented by a blue circle that drew tighter and tighter around the black hole's event horizon.

  "Event horizon in thirty seconds, twenty-three hundred orbits per second."

  "How do we know this is actually happening, Michelle?"

  "We don't. The whole projection is simulated. For all we know, the drone could be on the other side of the universe right now, or even destroyed. We can only guess."

  They watched and waited as the blue circle drew up and finally into the event horizon, stayed there for a few seconds, and then came out again. Fingers were crossed as the drone's path became a blue ellipse and began to expand again.

  "Ten seconds to debreak."

  The ellipse became wider and wider and ten seconds later, the blue ellipse disappeared completely from the screen.

  "Dyna, radio link?"

  "Negative radio link, Michelle."

  "Nothing?"

  "I'm scanning."

  "Where is it?" Frank asked.

  "It should be on the imager," Anna said, amazed. "It should be a white line."

  "So, what now?"

  "We wait."

  "How long?"

  "I don't know. We could wait forever and not see it again," Michelle answered. "But if the drone survived, it'll return to the ship. If it ends up on the other side of the universe, it'll try to find its way back to earth and report there. Eventually we'll know if it survived."

  "I have a scan," Dyna interrupted.

  "Radio link?"

  "Negative. An unidentified object is there at sublight velocity. And it's making an elliptical orbit around the black hole… velocity decreasing."

  "That has to be it," Michelle said.

  "But the radio link is dead," Anna responded, "Something's gone wrong."

  "We're being scanned."

  "From what?"

  "From the object."

  "ID?"

  "Negative identification."

  "It's paralleling our orbit and moving closer," Dyna said.

  The object was now portrayed on the 3-D imager as a red spot, for being unidentified.

  "Battle configuration, Dyna; warn the bridge. Go to Condition Yellow," Frank ordered, and as he said it the alarm sounded.

  "Sandy's at the helm and she's already ordered it, Frank," Dyna answered.

  "They've been monitoring the experiment. All hands are reporting in."

  "What's the object doing now, Dyna?"

  "It's moving on a collision course with us."

  "Have you identified it yet?"

  "Negative identification. I'm still scanning."

  "It has to be the drone, but why isn't it responding?" Michelle ventured.

  "Maybe it can't," Anna suggested.

  "Collision in one minute," Dyna reported.

  "Object identified," Dyna called, "it's the dronebot, but it's badly damaged and doesn't respond to commands."

  "Stand down Condition Yellow."

  The Condition Yellow alarm shut off and they waited for the next move.

  "Is there a danger of damage to the hull at the object's present velocity, Dyna?" Frank asked.

  "There could be minor damage, but that can be repaired quickly. The drone is programmed to slow before returning."

  "Okay. Let's see what it does before we do any evasives."

  As expected, the drone finally slowed and returned to the ship. Ten minutes later Dyna reported.

  "Radiation and bio-scan complete. The drone is prepared for examination," she said, as the drone was wheeled into the lab.

  Michelle was visibly shocked when she saw it, "What happened to it?"

  "Looks like the tidal forces got it," Frank answered, "I suspected as much. We're lucky we got it back at all."

  The drone was visibly stretched. What had been a dronebot two and a half meters in length and one meter wide was now four meters in length and three quarters of a meter wide. It clearly showed stretch marks down its length. The neutronium casing had been horribly distorted.

  "Aren't you glad we didn't go in there?" Frank said, amusingly.

  "Don't make fun of our experiment," Michelle said.

  Anna giggled. A couple of robots came out of their compartments and began dissecting the little ruined drone. Piece by piece of the dronebot's skin came off until its guts were exposed. Everything inside the drone was crushed to dust except the computer and the field-drive generator. The surviving components were visibly distorted.

  "It must have expended every bit of power it had just to keep itself from tearing apart," Anna said. "focusing its gravity fields on its critical components. The radio link must be some of that slag in the end there." She pointed.

  "We'll count this as a partial success, Michelle," Frank said.

  "Maybe," she answered, "but we still need to see the data it gathered."

  "Sure. Let me know when you've analyzed it."

  Frank left and headed back for the common recreation room. When he arrived, Suni, Paddy and Heidi were discussing something about a solar system.

  "We watched the experiment—too bad," Paddy said.

  "Not really bad. We discovered quite a lot."

  "That's good. We've been talking about a solar system we found nearby—fifteen light-years away."

  "Yes," Suni interrupted, "we think we've located satellites—planets."

  "And we'd like to investigate," Heidi joined in.

  "Sure, but what about Michelle and Anna's experiment?"

  "We can wait. But we'd like to make that our next destination," Paddy said.

  "Okay. We’ll discuss it over dinner with the rest of the crew," Frank answered.

  That evening, everyone agreed on this idea and new plans were made. Michelle and Anna launched the second dronebot the very next day.

  "This one will go in at sublight speed. The fields will activate gradually, and hopefully counteract the effects of the event horizon," Michelle explained.

  They watched as the second drone was launched, made a small orbit around the black hole's event horizon and finally disappeared into it. Thirty seconds later the drone popped out of the event horizon.

  "Dyna, verify radio link, please," Michelle said.

  "Radio link verified, the drone reports all systems good, Michelle."

  Frank had a big grin on his face when Michelle turned to look at him. She walked over and gave him a kiss and a hug.

  "You see, our experiment worked."

  "I never doubted you for a moment."

  "That's what you say now," and Frank laughed.

  "When do you launch the third drone, Michelle?"

  "Tomorrow. The third drone will go deeper—into the heart of the black hole to collect data. It'll be inside the event horizon for thirty minutes."

  The next day the third and final drone was launched into the heart of the black hole. Eve
ryone on board watched as the little drone disappeared into the event horizon.

  "How long has it been now?" Frank asked.

  "Only five minutes," Anna said.

  "Seems like an hour. Will it take any samples?"

  "No, but it is going to do an experiment."

  "What sort of experiment?"

  "The drone is going directly to the heart of the black hole. Once there, it'll attempt to alter the gravitational field of the singularity—the particle that lies at the center. If it succeeds, we'll detect a momentary change in the event horizon."

  "Then what?"

  "If we're able to weaken the gravitational pull of the singularity, then we'll be able to go in with a much more powerful drone and remove the event horizon altogether."

  "Then we can grab the singularity and run?"

  "Well, not quite," Anna said, chuckling, "But what we may be able to do is alter the gravitational field of the singularity itself, and then absorb the matter piece by piece as it expands."

  Twenty-five minutes had gone by since the drone had been launched and the crew was waiting for the final experiment to show its effects.

  "One minute from now, we'll know if we can alter the fields of a black hole," Anna said, "Dyna, display diameter of the event horizon."

  "Compliance Anna—displayed."

  The number came up. It read "67.18223 Kilometers."

  "That's it?" Frank exclaimed, "Sixty-seven kilometers across?" Frank watched as the last digit in the number on the imager toggled between three and four.

  "Ten seconds," Dyna announced.

  Some of the crew watched the large screen 3-D imager of the black hole and some watched the number on the small imager. The number on the imager changed. It read "67.18267 Kilometers," but only for a moment, and then returned to the original number with the last digit toggling between three and four.

  "That’s it!" Michelle said.

  "But it didn't change very much," Frank said, confused.

  "It didn't have to," Michelle answered, "we already know that if we can change it a little, we can change it a lot."

  A few minutes later the drone finally popped out of the event horizon. Dyna reported that radio contact with the drone was good, and that the drone was unharmed. That evening, ship time, they decided to have a big dinner with Anna and Michelle as the guests of honor.

  The next morning someone yelling over the ship’s intercom jolted Frank out of bed.

  "Frank! Frank, wake up!" it was Michelle.

  "What?"

  "Come down here, quickly."

  Suni had been with him that night and she also was crawling out of the bed They both threw some clothes on and rushed down to Anna and Michelle's lab where they'd been doing their experiments. When they arrived, they found Anna and Michelle peering into a 3-D imager.

  Michelle saw them first, "You have to look at this."

  Frank and Suni both looked into the 3-D imager while Anna made room for them. Michelle pressed a key and another display popped up.

  "Here's another one." She pressed another key, "And another… and another."

  "What are they?" Frank asked.

  "They're starships! Starships."

  "Where?" Frank started looking around for the large screen 3-D imager to see where they were.

  "In there," Michelle had her finger pointed at the large imager on the wall. Frank looked, but the only thing he saw was the image of the black hole.

  "In the black hole?"

  "Yes."

  "Wow, how many?"

  "We've counted four so far."

  "Gee, how long have they been in there?"

  "We estimate that the oldest one has been in stasis for eighteen thousand years—our time, and the newest has been, perhaps four hundred years. But they're definitely starships. And there is much other debris also. If we remove the gravitational field of the singularity right now, we'll have a disaster on our hands. Nothing at the center would be able to survive the influx of matter because it would all be moving too fast."

  "You're right. But I think that we ought to try and get those starships out of there. The people onboard are probably still alive."

  "But we don't know who they are or what they can do."

  "We know that they can't get themselves out of a black hole. That puts us at least one step ahead."

  That day, they discussed what should be done about the four alien spacecraft found inside the black hole. They agreed that their ability to manipulate gravity should be kept a secret, and that being the case, the four spacecraft should be rescued, but remain in stasis, so their crews would not know who had rescued them. Such they would remain until the Butterworth arrived near a more populated area of space, then the four starships would be cast into orbit about some planet from a distance. Unfortunately, no one had the slightest idea how all this would be done.

  "What about suspended animation?" Sandy asked.

  "We know nothing of their physiology," Tia said.

  "We could study them and perhaps learn something that way."

  "That may be possible, but how?" Suni asked.

  "Perhaps the same way we did the drones. We could send in a couple of workbots to pry open the ships, and a couple of medbots to analyze the aliens, find out how to freeze them and then pull them out. We could leave the spacecraft behind and just collect the bodies," Sandy answered.

  "But we need to know they're still alive. I can't imagine how those spacecraft were caught in a black hole unless they were disabled and just running adrift. And if that's the case, they could've been drifting for thousands of years. By now their bodies would be nothing more than dust," Frank interrupted.

  "Then I suggest that an exploratory would be our first step. Collect all the information we can right now, because we can't go much further on theories and guesswork," Sandy said.

  Everyone else agreed. It took two weeks to design and construct the workbots that would pry their way into the four alien spacecraft. Since Michelle and Anna were the ones who understood the most about the black hole, they were put in charge of the project. They were also charged with designing the medbots that would analyze the alien bodies. And then they had to create a new device, a gravity field injector. This would be needed for the delicate work of boring into the alien spacecraft and moving around in the thick atmospheres inside. Temporal stasis would be difficult to do.

  Six bots were sent into the event horizon, two workbots, two medbots and two databots. All were armed with the new gravity field injectors that Anna and Michelle had designed. An hour later, two more workbots were sent in to begin collecting up debris and converting and containing it as pure neutronium. Every hour, a dronebot was sent in to get progress reports. In the third hour, another spacecraft was discovered.

  "A passenger liner," Michelle announced, "and the medbots report eight-hundred and sixty-six passengers, alive and well. They've been in there for three hundred years. The medbots are reporting eight different species of alien life forms aboard."

  "This is a mess," Frank said, disgusted, "now we have to pull that whole starship out."

  "Why?" Michelle asked.

  "Because there's just too much we'd have to do to freeze all those people. It would take a couple of months just to build all the suspension chambers."

  "Did they say how big the liner is?" Anna asked.

  "I'll check." Michelle examined her imager and said, "The liner is four hundred meters in length."

  "Okay, so we can tow it out. It's too big to put inside our ship. What about the other four?"

  "The databots say they're all cargo vessels, the smallest one is three hundred and fifty meters in length, and the but largest one is over fourteen hundred meters long."

  "Good lord, that's almost a mile!"

  "But, there is good news."

  "Yeah?"

  "I've been doing some experiments with the gravity field projectors. I think there's a way for us to move the alien starships, and keep them in stasis at the same time.
"

  "Good, get on it right away. And let me know when you have something."

  The exploratory bots all returned twelve hours later, while the two workbots collecting debris remained. Two more workbots were sent in the next day to help. After a week, Michelle and Anna had designed a new contraption and were ready to show Frank and the rest of the crew what it could do.

  "We call it the Kiruna-Corbyn engine," Michelle announced.

  "What it does," Anna explained, "is project a gravity field strong enough to reproduce it's own containable event horizon, thereby keeping it's host in stasis. But a second field is produced outside of the event horizon that allows the entire assemblage to be accelerated to breaklight. The final portion is a standard Jameson Drive."

  "Jameson Drive?" Frank queried.

  "Yes, the one you designed. We felt that you should have your name on it."

  "Okay," Frank chuckled, "so how do you know it works?"

  "We're fairly certain it'll work from the experiments we've done. We've already removed a small meteor from the black hole and have been able to keep it in stasis. The next step is to remove one of the cargo ships. We've chosen the one with the smallest crew aboard. A databot will remain aboard while we do this, and if anything goes wrong, we'll immediately desist in the experiment and replace the cargo ship inside the event horizon. Is everything ready, Dyna?"

  "All systems are ready, Anna."

  "How big is this cargo ship?"

  "It's the small one. It has a crew of twelve aliens. "

  "We're ready to begin the experiment."

  "Sure, go ahead."

  "Dyna, please begin."

  "Compliance, Frank. Drones launched."

  They looked on as four small drones and a large drone, which Frank assumed, must have been the Kiruna-Corbyn Engine. Twenty minutes later, the first drone emerged from the event horizon, as a hole grew as a faint red glow. The Kiruna-Corbyn Engine appeared out of the red glowing hole that grew larger and larger. The Engine backed away slowly from the red glowing hole in the event horizon. Then two more drones popped out of the black hole, and stationed themselves around what appeared to be an elongated black hole.

  Then the red glow on the event horizon went away. One of the two drones stationed outside of the invisible spacecraft moved closer and disappeared into the new black hole that had been created around the cargo vessel. A minute later it popped out again.