Chapter 4

  Dalex was pretty sure his enemy’s blunder meant there weren’t any humans or similar creatures in command. Anybody would be terrified of the {gravity vortex}. He certainly was. The fact that Seventh also hadn’t noticed it made it crystal clear why she needed Dalex around. This kind of strategic thinking was obvious. Any idiot would have known to stay away from the light-sucking void catastrophe.

  “Will this give us enough of an advantage to win?” Dalex asked.

  Seventh quickly analyzed the situation. “As long as they don’t cross its Schwarzschild radius, they can escape the black hole, but I think I can keep them penned inside the gravity well. We don’t have the resources to finish the unknown faction off, but they won’t be able to get past us.”

  “We’ll have the high ground,” Dalex said, catching on. “But it’s more of a stalemate than a victory.”

  Seventh nodded. “It would buy us time.” She walked around the map table to stand in front of him. “I will press the attack until they are trapped, but we will need more benefine to secure a victory.”

  “What does the {adamantine} do for us right now?”

  “It is necessary to construct new ships and reloads for our armaments. Thus, protocol allows me to make a strategic suggestion.”

  A suggestion? The choice of word made Dalex wonder. Between them, who was actually in charge? Did he have to take her suggestions? Did she have to follow his orders? He set the issue aside for another time.

  Seventh continued, “You and I will hold the unknown faction at the mouth of the blackhole while you and I board a stealth frigate and travel to the Earth-like planets to harvest more benefine.”

  “I think you mixed up your words there,” Dalex said.

  “I did not. My suggestion includes a cloning of your mind and body and of my artificial intelligence. The clones will stay here. You and I will get the benefine.”

  “I don’t think I want to be cloned,” Dalex said, seeing the advantages but also imagining nightmare scenarios where his other self but with a goatee plunged a dagger into his own heart. What would that do to his self-esteem?

  “You should have made that clear five seconds earlier,” Seventh said. She grabbed him by the wrist and dragged him off the bridge of the ship. She talked as they sped through a slick chrome hallway. “It is prudent that we leave as soon as possible.”

  “Did you already clone me?” Dalex asked.

  “I did it the moment this plan occurred to me,” Seventh said. “She is on her way to the bridge with my own cloned intelligence. They will take over pressing the unknown faction deeper into the black hole.”

  “SHE?”

  “An exact clone is undesirable, so certain minor changes are included.”

  “MINOR!?”

  Somehow, the sex of the clone was the most startling revelation today. That meant she probably didn’t have a goatee. Now he sort of wanted to meet her. But then he and Seventh walked through a gate in the middle of the hallway and dazzling lights blinded him for a fraction of a second. When he could see again, they were suddenly standing on raised platform at the back of what looked like the fuselage of a military cargo airplane. Jump seats lined the edges of an otherwise empty walkway.

  “I’m not going to get to meet my clone, am I?” Dalex asked.

  Seventh walked away toward the front of the cargo area and what seemed to be a small bridge with the helm. Without looking back, she said, “If we make it back here alive.”

  Dalex jogged after her, catching just as she settled down in a chair and took the helm, flipping switches to activate what Dalex now understood was an unarmed transport. Outside the bridge’s windscreen loomed one of the expansive aerodromes where the other vessels usually waited in drydock.

  “How much time do you think we have?” he asked.

  “I am unsure. Our odds of mission success will lower drastically if we do not depart in the next three minutes.” A vibration ran through the floor of the cockpit. The transport vessel suddenly thrummed with power. “Once we are away from the Expedition 7, I will recalculate our timeframe.”

  The aerodrome out the windscreen blurred as the transport heaved to and shot out of the E7 into the void. Seventh accelerated it to the speed of light. Dalex didn’t feel any change in motion, but the stars outside suddenly looked distorted. They didn’t zoom past like in the handful of sci-fi shows Dalex’s friends had convinced him to watch, but he did notice them slip an inch before Seventh slowed the transport back down.

  They zoomed at still-blistering sublight speeds toward a larger vessel floating in the inky void. The hull on the port side retracted, revealing another smaller aerodrome into which Seventh flew the transport. A small display next to the helm highlighted the new vessel as [stealth frigate 4]. Within a few minutes, they were standing on the bridge of the {voidstalker} and underway towards the habitable worlds.

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  “Are we making good time?” Dalex asked as he inspected his new digs. This {voidstalker} was dramatically smaller than the E7, but it was still a very large vessel, close in size to a smaller aircraft carrier from a modern Earth navy.

  “I am satisfied with our progress,” Seventh said, “and I can now calculate the time we have to harvest the necessary benefine to ensure victory upon our return. Twenty-five Earth years.”

  Dalex blinked at her for a few seconds. He fell into a nearby chair, the fatigue of so much disorientation catching up with him all at once.

  He looked up at her. “You’re sure you meant to say Earth years? Not some other world’s years where a year is like ten minutes?”

  Seventh shook her head. “I reported the timeframe correctly in a manner you would understand.”

  Dalex pinched the bridge of his nose and squinted. “What exactly was the rush, then?” He sat up and leaned forward. “Hold on, there’s no way our clones can hold out for twenty-five years.”

  “During the battle, we slipped close enough to the black hole to experience significant time dilation effects,” Seventh explained. “Being that our forces and the unknown faction are still engaged inside its radius and are only moving closer to the center of its gravity well, those effects will increase. I expect our clones can continue to fight for twenty-four hours minimum, and a few days at most. That equates to a range of roughly twenty-five to seventy-five years in unaffected space.”

  She brought up a new map of the realm, this one smaller than what had been available on the bridge of the E7, but no less detailed. A dot for the {voidstalker} moved slowly toward the realm’s star. The seven habitable worlds rotated around that star. Dalex understood very little about the movement of the spheres, but it seemed like all the worlds were a little too close together.

  “In fact,” Seventh went on, “roughly fifteen years have passed in this system since we entered the black hole’s radius. I rushed our departure from the Expedition 7 in order to minimize the amount of time lost.”

  This is why Dalex preferred fantasy to science fiction. Time stuff hurt his brain. And even thought he knew he would almost never see his friends and family again, it still felt painful to know that they were all now fifteen years moved on in their lives. Dalex was becoming a distant memory.

  But, practically, he understood the gist of the situation. There would be plenty of time to track down what he needed to rescue his clone, assuming the {adamantine} harvesting process wasn’t unfathomably time-consuming.

  “How long to the closest habitable world?” he asked.

  “Six hours,” Seventh said. “I suggest you use this chance to sleep. I will wake you when we are close.”

  Dalex couldn’t agree more. Seventh gave him an item that would lead him to a room with a bathroom and a bed. On his way out of the bridge, he stopped at the door and looked back.

  “You know,” he said, “cloning us and rushing out of the {gravity vortex} was some pretty strategic thinking. Why could you mastermind that scheme but not my dumb plan to push the bad guys into a hole?”

  She did not turn away from the realm map. “I do not know. I am capable of formulating strategic plans in roughly fifty percent of situations. It seems the simpler solutions in particular elude me.”

  “Got it. You need the guy with the monkey brain to do the idiot work.” He saluted her as he walked out of the room. “I can work with that.”

  ***

  Five-and-a-half hours later, after a shower, a much-needed lengthy nap, and a surprisingly delicious continental breakfast from a tiny cafeteria, Dalex returned to the bridge to see a fast approaching blue and green marble on one of the {scrying tablets}. Seventh stayed on the bridge the entire time. She didn’t need sleep, neither did she need to eat. That seemed a little sad to Dalex, but what did he know about the joys of {constructhood}.

  The first question he asked upon walking onto the bridge was, “Where did the sausage and bacon come from? I imagine you could do the biscuits with some kind of {aquaculta} garden, but this doesn’t seem like the kind of environment where a {husbandry} skill would work.”

  “There are no animals on the ship. All human food is synthesized instantly from the amino acids for a particular meal.”

  “That’s actually possible?” Dalex asked, taking a seat next to her. “It tasted like the real deal.”

  “As I said, your Benefactors are a faster than light civilization. There is little that is not within their power.”

  Dalex knew enough about science to understand that breaking the light barrier was a big deal. But it was also clear the {far realmers} couldn’t do everything. Still, he wasn’t about to point that out.

  “Then finding this {adamantine} should be a cinch. Where do we look?”

  Seventh gave him a sideways glance. Did she look embarrassed? It was probably just his imagination.

  “Contrary to my previous explanation,” she said, “locating and harvesting benefine is a difficult process, even for your Benefactors. It took some time to verify this system had benefine reserves, and more time still to determine they could be found on each of the habitable planets. As of now, I can only confirm that the planet closest to the star has seems to hold the largest reserves. The planet which you can see on the view screen now is the farthest from the star and holds the smallest reserves.”

  “Why don’t we head straight for the treasure planet?” Dalex asked. “It seems like that would be easier.”

  “I cannot,” Seventh said. “There is an unknown phenomena preventing the [stealth frigate] from moving beyond the outer planet’s orbit.”

  Another thing the {far realmers} couldn’t do.

  Dalex asked, “Any idea what it is?”

  “None at all. It is quite perplexing. But the benefine reserves on Gaia BH-1-G are significant. Harvesting them will give me time to analyze the barrier and formulate a countermeasure.”

  Dalex hopped out of his chair to get a closer look at the {scrying tablet} monitoring the approaching world. It looked quite inviting. Seventh activated a second {scrying tablet} showing the view of multiple {aerial golems} launched ahead of the {voidstalker} to investigate the world from the surface.

  Dalex’s breath caught. His heart beat faster. A thrill ran up his spine.

  “That no good meanie,” he said, his voice almost worshipful.

  Through the {scrying tablets} Dalex saw lush green forests, great flying beasts, and mountains suspended in the air over continents and oceans. One {golem} bore witness to a great beam of light shooting into the sky from a massive, intelligently crafted object like a tuning fork. It appeared to be made of marble, though the {golem} wasn’t close enough to make out details through the obscuration of atmosphere. None of the people that might have made such an architectural wonder were visible on the {scrying tablets}, but they had to be somewhere down there.

  Seventh looked back at him, her expression uncharacteristically confused. “Explain. Who is the meanie?”

  “Jeremy,” Dalex said. “He lied to me. I really did get summoned to a fantasy world.”

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