Somewhere around the Canis Majoris Constellation Approximately 3,900 light years from Earth
‘’To all ship’s departments, this is the Captain. Do a visual check with all your personnel and start a thorough check of all systems. Repair at once any damage found.’
72
Tina then switched off her ship intercom system and looked at Reena Shapour, who was frantically working her navigation station.
‘’Talk to me, Reena. Where are we?’
‘’That is actually easy to answer, Tina.’ replied the ethnic-Iranian woman born on Titan, one of the moons of Saturn. She placed an electronic red circle around a large nebula that was clearly visible on the holographic sphere. ‘’We are close to VY Canis Majoris, a variable red hypergiant star which is about the largest star in our galaxy and which is situated 3,900 light years from Earth. I am now working up a more precise location for us, so that we could jump back towards Spacers League Space. Where do you want us to go from here?’
‘’First, I will wait to see if we sustained any damage or injuries from that black hole encounter, Reena.’
‘’I noticed that the flash of light during our jump was of an unusual color, Tina.
Somehow, that last jump didn’t feel normal.’
‘’Maybe the gravitational pull from that black hole caused some kind of doppler shift which distorted our vision. We will have time to wonder about that after we will have checked out our people and our ship.’
Renée d’Argenteuil was next to speak with Tina from her weapons station.
‘’I believe that this asteroid ship we were chasing can now be scratched as destroyed by that uncharted black hole. It was much closer than us to the black hole and was still heading towards it despite it being plainly visible. My feeling is that those Predators felt they were doomed and tried to sucker us in and destroy us, using that black hole.’
‘’I believe so as well, Renée. This could indicate that we were dealing with the last remnants of those monstrous bastards, who made a last attempt at revenge.’
‘’I certainly hope so, Tina.’
Tina then stayed quiet in her command chair for the next hour while receiving and compiling the reports from her various ship departments. Thankful, no casualties were declared and only very minor damage from the encounter with the black hole was found...except for a report from her navigator, who came to her command chair with worry on her face.
‘’Tina, there is something wrong with our star charts in STARCHILD’s databanks.
While they are still there and apparently intact, there are slight discrepancies between
73
the positions listed in our star charts and the actual observations I just made of known stars.’
‘’How many of the star positions listed in our charts show discrepancies and by how much?’
‘’All of them!’ answered Reena, making Tina stiffen in her chair. ‘’The discrepancies are at most of a couple of degrees but they are across the board.
Furthermore, I couldn’t find a common pattern to those discrepancies: they all differ from each other. STARCHILD is presently in the process of running a complete check and diagnostic of its databank and circuits.’
‘’Can we still navigate around safely, Reena?’
‘’To a point and in manual mode only, Tina. I can aim visually for the star we want to go to and enter a distance slightly smaller than what is listed in our charts, in order to avoid possible collisions due to wrong distance set for our jump. That will result in us appearing a bit short of our intended destination but we can then compensate by following up with a micro-jump.’
‘’That sounds safe enough to me, Reena. Proceed as you just told me and plot a course via multiple jumps towards the Solar System. Maybe the results of our first jumps will help us understand the cause of those discrepancies. We will do our first jump back towards Earth as soon as all the checks will have been completed.’
‘’Understood, Tina.’
As Reena returned to her navigation station, Tina sat against the back of her command chair, analyzing that new problem. Even if the discrepancies in the star charts proved infinitesimal, it still constituted a most serious problem for her and a danger for her ship.
Without precise navigation around Space, the risks of collisions with asteroids, planetoids and other celestial bodies were worrisome. Then, she got another anomaly report, this time from SPIRIT.
‘’Tina, I have a report from FIXER, my maintenance AI sub-system, that our ship’s clocks are not synchronized between them anymore. Their settings now differ depending on their locations around the ship. Those differences are infinitesimal but are still unprecedented. Basically, the atomic clocks incorporated into our systems near the stern now show a time slower by a few microseconds than the time shown by the clocks situated near the bow. This is, according to my analysis, the result of our passage near that uncharted black hole. As we were trying to escape it, our bow was subjected to a slightly less strong gravity pull than our stern. As you must know from your knowledge in
74
basic relativistic physics, time is affected by gravity. In this case, the gravity pull of that black hole affected our atomic clocks by slowing down our clocks near our stern. In turn, this may explain why our star charts do not correspond anymore to our present astronomical observations.’
‘’How so?’ asked Tina, starting to have a bad feeling about this.
‘’The only explanation linking those two anomalies is time. You know that, when you use printed maps on Earth in conjunction with a magnetic compass, you must take into account the date of those maps and then add or subtract the difference in magnetic pole displacement between the date of the map and the date on which you use that map. Well, in the case of our star charts, their recorded locations correspond to the locations of those stars as known in the year 2337. What we now see around us are stars as they were located in a different time. To put it bluntly, this close brush with the black hole made us travel back in time, Tina.’
75
CHAPTER 6 – WHEN ARE WE?
Time and date unknown
