Chapter 9: THE LONG ROAD TO NOWHERE
Simone was right about one thing, Shade did remember the trajectory of ASO-3. That, it turned out, was the easy part.
It also turned out that there were two hard parts. The first was revealed when Shade used her finger to trace the path of ASO-3 on a computer monitor showing a map of the Milky Way Galaxy.
"No stars," she said flatly, pointing at a big region of empty space between two arms of the spiral galaxy for emphasis. "There is no star or star system that the ASOs could conceivably have come from. I managed to get the trajectories of the other ASOs from our good friend Eliopoulos, and, well, same thing. They all shared the same original path before hitting our solar system, and they all came from that exact same region of utterly blank space. Even the other galaxies in our local cluster don't match the path, so it probably didn't come from another galaxy. Whatever it is, it either came from some random drifting exoplanet, that is, a planet without a star . . . or . . . "
"A black hole," Malik finished coolly, showing little emotion. "Or at least a planet orbiting one. Starless regions of space are often a sign of black holes. Any star that gets too close gets sucked in and destroyed, ergo, a black hole would usually have this kind of void near it."
"Then how would a planet be orbiting it?" Dekka pointed out.
Shade shrugged. "It's just a guess, but, a planet could be orbiting far enough away, or else fast enough, to escape the black hole's gravity." She sighed. "Of course, black holes usually form by a star going supernova. Which would likely have destroyed anything on the planet, assuming the planet was orbiting the star before that. The alternative is that the black hole picked up the planet later, which just brings us back to it having been a random exoplanet wandering about."
"The supernova idea might actually make some sense," Astrid said thoughtfully. "Whatever lives on the ASOs generally appears to be able to feed on radiation, so a supernova might have kick-started-"
"Lives on? Feeds on?" Simone interrupted, looking distinctly nauseous. "That stuff is alive?" She stared uneasily at the still-visible pockmarks in her skin.
"Maybe," Astrid said. "Or maybe more like a virus, where it's kind of alive, but not really."
That added explanation very clearly did not improve Simone's queasiness. She looked like she wanted to start digging the long-absorbed fragments out of her skin with her fingernails.
Shade sighed again, deeper this time. "Black hole or exoplanet, both of those possibilities are fiendishly hard to detect," she said. "We can only find black holes because of the way they warp the light of stars, so we would have to wait for a star to pass right behind it before we could see it. And exoplanets are even worse. It would have to be big enough to dim the light of a star that it passes in front of, and even that's only if we get really lucky. It's like we're looking for a needle in a haystack, only we're blindfolded. We know the path, but not where along that path, the ASOs came from." She leaned back in her swivel chair, looking up at the ceiling. "I would say we could just follow the path and we'd know it once we got to it, but . . . "
Which hinted at the second "hard part" of this whole discussion. How to get there. Even the very most modern spacecraft weren't built to take human beings much farther than Earth's orbit. There had still never even been a manned mission to Mars, let alone out of the solar system. And with civilization crumbling, funding space exploration was not high on anyone's list of priorities.
So, the only viable option was to try to make use of the Rockborn Gang's own powers, but even that was dubious. Simone could apparently survive in space for a while, but nowhere near long enough to get anywhere. And in any case, she couldn't help the rest of them. Sam could create airtight force-field bubbles that would allow all of them to survive in space, but he could not cause his bubbles to move on their own, let alone move them at the speeds needed to reach wherever they were going before they all ran out of air. The only one of them capable of reaching even supersonic speed, which still wasn't nearly fast enough to cross the immense vastness of space, was Shade. And, needless to say, she could not run in space. Dekka's, Cruz's, Armo's, Malik's, and Astrid's powers were completely useless against this.
Which left Francis. She was the one member of the Rockborn Gang whose powers they all seemed to rely on again and again. She could do more than just travel through space, she could escape three-dimensional space altogether. Take an even shorter path than a straight line between point A and point B.
But even for her, it would be a massive undertaking. It would be like going from one side of the world to the other (already something she had never even dared to try) about a billion times over. Not to mention that the air in n-dimensional space had to come from three-dimensional space. The vacuum of space would be just as deadly to her as it was to anyone (except perhaps Simone and Sam).
Francis felt everyone's eyes resting on her after Shade had let her last statement hang. And so, even knowing the danger and the absolute impossibility of what the others didn't dare ask of her out loud, Francis grinned and stepped forward, signalling her willingness, even eagerness, to try.
She had a pair of shooter's earmuffs around her neck, Dekka noticed. She'd just come from the firing range. She'd been learning how to handle a gun.
Even though Dekka had been no stranger to guns herself at Francis's age, it was still a jarring image.
"It will take a lot of practice, and I mean, a LOT of practice, with my powers. But I feel like I'll eventually be able to make a kind of wormhole," she said. She looked for Armo for a moment, before remembering he was currently guarding Knightmare's cell. "It'd sure be nice to know where Armo's power boost came from, since I could really use one right about now," she said. Then Francis looked at Sam. "I'm going to need your force fields, so you'd better practice with your powers, too."
Sam nodded, clearly trying to hide some lingering uneasiness. Even after all these years, it seemed, he was still leery of the dark. And that empty black void of space, where they would be headed right into the heart of, looked very, very dark. "Easy peasy," he said with a smirk of false bravado. "I can make all the force fields you need."
Malik cocked a skeptical eyebrow at Sam. "You already know how to make n-dimensional force fields, then? Spheres in more than three dimensions? A three-dimensional sphere won't be airtight Over There."
The false-bravado smirk instantly disappeared. "Oh," Sam said dully. "Okay, so maybe I could use a little practice, too."
Dekka smiled at Francis, appreciating her bravery, but then sighed. The need for "power-practice" represented yet another delay. They knew now more-or-less how to save the world, but who knew how long it would be before they actually could? In the meantime, the hydra eating the world was only growing more and more heads.
And even after they reached wherever the ASOs came from, then what? Would they be able to reason with, or defeat, the thing that was doing this?
Too many questions. But Dekka could feel everyone's eyes turning towards her, wanting answers.
"Okay, well, first things first," she said tersely. "Before you two can start practicing anything 'Over There,' we need to let a certain unhappy cat out of the n-dimensional bag."
