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Level 12 Complete

“God, I hate this part.”

Brent wiped at the sweat on his brow and silently cursed his luck. Back on Garra, returned by the skin of his teeth from his last freelance position on an outer rim pirate vessel, Brent made a promise to himself never to take such a dangerous job again.

On paper, this gig looked perfect – a small ship on a courier mission. The Captain deceptively reasonable, well dressed in the Core style, slim fitted trouser, simple shirt, dark colored, natural fibers, indicating wealth, and a brown blazer without a collar or buttons.

Captain Mayfly offered a good pay, but not suspiciously good, and a clear, straightforward objective. Brent examined the ship, a slightly retrofitted Pulsar X3. Her guts looked sound, her pods looked new, and his bunk even had a full bed. The captain wouldn’t disclose the content of the package they would be bringing – only said it needed to go to an outlying planet without even a name yet, just a series of letters and numbers. But that wasn’t so strange.

All and all Brent thought it an eminently straight forward, if slightly boring job. And it should have been exactly that, it was actually, slightly boring, until Mayfly set a new and seemingly nonsense course for the outskirts of an asteroid belt, at which point Brent immediately and completely cursed his luck.

There were only three reasons a ship might go to an asteroid belt:

1. To mine resources or water – but they were not a mining ship and water was in excellent supply.

2. To avoid detection – except they were flying “full flair” with all their transponders blaring.

3. To collect an asteroid – which was, upon inquiry by Brent, exactly what Mayfly intended to do.

There are only two uses for a collected asteroid. The first is to drag that asteroid to a planet or moon filled with people you hate and send it careening towards the surface. This was a last resort, even in times of war, because if the asteroid hit home, that planet wasn’t going to be much use to anyone anymore. Anyway, there was no reason to believe that Mayfly was a psychopath intent on starting a galactic war.

The second reason you would collect an asteroid – the only reason on a courier mission – would be to use it as a mass sacrifice, literally sacrificial mass, while attempting to accelerate around a black hole.

Brent’s forehead was wet almost immediately after wiping off the sweat there. “Captain, I really have a bad feeling about this.” His palms were sweaty, and a churning sense of doom roiled his guts.

Mayfly just looked down at his displays stoically. “Don’t worry, son, I’ve done it many times before.”

Brent found that unlikely. A Mass Dump was a profoundly dangerous maneuver, wherein you pilot a ship right up to a spinning black hole, right before the event horizon, and at just precisely the correct moment, you dump an asteroid into the monster. The immense draw of that asteroid towards the singularity propels your ship outwards from the black hole at an equal rate in the opposite direction.

The Mass Drop was an essential tool for military fleets, with their high end organic A.I.s, processing every micron and sub-millisecond action to perfection. It was not something small courier ships did with regularity, and the stories of ill-prepared pilots and idiots teenagers in skimmers trying to Mass Drop, only to end up spaghettified in a singularity, were too numerous to count.

But now it was too late to think about all that, the asteroid was locked onto the underside of the ship and the Captain had moved them into the swirling area of spacetime just outside the event horizon of a moderately massive black hole the locals called Ivin.

“T-minus 30 seconds. Brent, prime the explosive bolts.” Mayfly, his name never sounding more foreboding to Brent’s ear, was preturnaturally calm.

Brent primed the explosive bolts again – he had already primed them once in secret as a test before it was do or die time – and the bolt indicators lit up green. “Primed.” Brent’s voice sounded weak and distant even to himself.

The next twenty five seconds passed interminably slow, like someone had filled the cabin with nitrous oxide in secret and sent Brent into a noxious haze of disassociation, each second passing like a full day. Outside the front view screen there was a wash of astounding color, the effervescent storm of energies circling the drain in an inexorable death spiral, each mote waiting their turn to enter the singularity.

“10 seconds. On my mark.”

How can you be so calm!? Brent wanted to scream. But there was no time for that – the moment of truth was fast approaching.

“5, 4”

Brent’s hand hovered over the button for the explosives, a bead of sweat at the tip of his finger.

“3, 2, 1, Mar…”

The ship shuddered violently just as Brent hit the button. Outside the viewscreen a medium sized rock could be seen careening away from the ship, but it was not the asteroid. It was another rock, some random angel of doom come to fuck everything up.

Brent stared down in abject horror at the display in front of him and saw that their orientation was incorrect by almost 180 degrees. He looked up again and saw a different rock, much faster, shrinking into the distance, away from the ship. The asteroid, going in the wrong direction.

“No.” Brent understood almost immediately – they had been hit by a piece of debris at the worst possible moment, spun around, and ended up firing the asteroid while the top of the ship faced the singularity.

“Oh God.”

Equal and opposite reactions. They had just turned the ship itself into a Mass Drop for the asteroid, which now careened safely away from the singularity.

Captain Mayfly was speechless, sitting back in his comfortable seat as the inertial dampeners worked overtime to prevent them from being crushed by the immense acceleration.

Brent was about to reach out to throttle the man when thing went…different. the far back end of the cockpit began to expand weirdly, farther and farther away, while the front viewscreen remained roughly the same.

Brent raised a hand to punch at the Captain when his left pinky finger, curled into a fist, began to stretch, then his other fingers followed, then his forearm and elbow.

“Oh shit.”

The sound of the words elongated and echoed in a higher pitch. The Captain turned to Brent remorsefully, just as his sad eyes turned into slits and then meter long lines, everything racing, stretching, toward nowhere.

The last thing Brent thought was how strange it was that it didn’t hurt a bit.

---

Blackness.

There were no lights, nothing at all. Brent tried to speak, but his voice did not work. He tried to move but could not be sure he had a body to command. He knew only that he was Brent, so he waited for either a second or an eternity, until at last something appeared in front of him. A string of absolutely bizarre words that made about as little sense as his continued existence. They were glowing some distance ahead of him in the nothingness.

Congratulations On Completing Level 12 – Continue y/n

Brent would have stared wide eyed at the words – he might even have been doing so, in some sense, there in the nothing – but he was not sure he had ‘eyes’ exactly. Brent tried to reach out for the “y”, but apparently intending to reach out toward it was enough because it highlighted and the words disappeared.

A small dot of light took the place of the words, infinitely distant but growing in size. So bright, so far. Brent felt himself more now, the warmth of his body, the strange safety of wherever it was he was. He was loathe to leave – he almost regretted pressing the “y”.

Now the light was very close and wide and it hurt his eyes – his eyes which barely seemed to work. He could feel cold from the portal of light – it was a bizarre sensation.

What is happening to me? Brent thought, as he passed, head first, through the wet cavity, into a world of screams and yells and chaos. A woman screaming in pain, a man consoling her as best he could, doctors and nurses barking commands, cleaning, carrying, squeezing something up his nose. It was all too much, and so Brent joined in with his own high pitched cry.

The last thing Brent heard before he disappeared into his new circumstances, as he’s done a dozen times before, was a woman’s voice.

“Congratulations, you have a new baby girl”

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