"THE SUN IS GROWING!"
"Impossible. Is it an illusion?"
"No! No! Also reading a reduction in mass! Seventy-one percent and dropping!"
A relatively small star system—only five planets. Two livable, one worth conquering.
Now, through some unimagined power, the sun was engaging in a practice heretofore reserved for balloons.
It was expanding. Dilating. It was growing.
"General, the planets! Same effect!"
"I'm standing next to you. Calm down when you speak. Is the speed of orbit increasing with reduction in mass?"
"Yes! And they're spinning faster and faster!"
"Stop shouting. No one else shout anymore. We will look at this and decide."
The crew of the Klingon patrol cruiser Jada swung to look at the rows of auxiliary monitors showing views of the five planets. Two of the planets, the two nearest the sun, were dilating too—blowing outward from their cores as if puffed up by breath. A second later, the other three puffed also. And all solar-system bodies and debris were racing faster around the sun with every passing second.
But the first two planets were not only blowing apart—they were charging out of their orbits like balls swung on strings that had been suddenly released. No longer held in a curve around the sun, they were launched on elongated orbits. The arc was widening—distorting.
In horror and shock, the crew and their general measured the impossible occurring around them. The sun, minutes ago as normal as any other, now had swollen to fill their main viewscreen. The screen mechanisms whirred to compensate for the blinding light that had flared too fast and set the crew to shielding their eyes.
It could not happen, but it was happening. Their general swung his squat, broad-chested body to the main screen when the light finally dimmed. The light still hurt his eyes but this was something he had to see for himself.
His voice was very quiet. "Are we falling toward it?"
"No!" the tactical officer punctuated, then remembered what the general had said about shouting. "Position stationary. But the ship—it—we … we …"
"Speak, man."
"Reading a reduction in registered mass for us as well! All other ships reporting the same!"
Suddenly the helmsman said, "Ship's speed is increasing, sir! But I have not done it!"
To their left, the tactical officer turned to the center of the bridge, stared at Captain Ruhl, and confirmed, "All five other ships reporting the same thing happening to them."
"Compensate." Ruhl was the newly assigned captain of this ship, a narrow-bodied individual with a missing tooth in front. When the general did not stop him, he gained confidence and snapped his fingers at his officers. "Keep the speed down."
"Trying," the helmsman uttered, but he was involved in a struggle. "Point four five of sublight … point five zero … still increasing …"
"Everything is speeding up," the tactical officer abridged, gasping as an animal does on the run.
Lack of inhibition about his own ignorance was Ruhl's only good trait, and in fact was the qualification that had gotten him this command. He had no ego at all. No problem turning to their elder and asking, "General Kellen, what should we do?"
Sensing the panic about to erupt around him, the general held out one hand for silence. Five ships to protect, a vaporizing solar system … they wanted answers from him. Solutions. He had none.
He would do as he always did in wild situations—he would become calmer than anything or anyone around him. He would lower his voice, contain his stance, raise his chin, and deliver a glacial demeanor. He had long ago discovered the best key to winning: When the situation becomes tense, become correspondingly calm. He could win over anyone that way. Being a Vulcan among Klingons, controlled and contemplative, would supersede any Klingon. Most Klingons despised Vulcans. That made his advantage even greater.
Now he was a general of the highest mark. Unexcitability had served him so well that it had become the mantle of his reputation. He rather enjoyed that.
Except in situations like this, when there was a panic but no thinking enemy to outthink. He could not out-calm a natural disaster. He found himself irritated by that, and by the blustering fear demonstrated around him.
Critical seconds ticked off as Kellen maneuvered his wide body toward the science officer.
"What is your name?" he asked.
"My—I—"
"His name is Karn," the helmsman blurted, anxious enough to interfere.
"Karn," Kellen repeated, "explain what you think is happening."
Pressing both hands to his head as if to hold in the flurry of details, Karn looked at his instruments, then back at the general. His mouth opened and closed several times before he found his voice.
"Mass," he began, "is failing to register on my instruments. Not the matter … just the mass!"
"The sky is falling and we seem also to be falling," Kellen said evenly. "Keep talking."
Frantic, Karn battled to control himself. He put his hands out between himself and his commanding officers and made shapes as if sculpting his words.
"Every moving thing possesses a certain amount of energy. How quickly it moves depends upon how much energy and how much mass. Velocity is mass versus energy. If the mass drops away but energy doesn't, velocity must increase. If one or the other is taken away or added, the nature makes it balance. Mass is slipping away, but the energy is still there. So everything is speeding up!"
His eyes were wild with confusion. The anchors of his life, the precepts of concrete science, were slipping their hold.
"How can mass be taken away?" Kellen asked him.
"I do not know that! But you see it happening!"
"I feel it happening. And when one of my girth becomes lighter, one notices."
Karn nodded, breathing as if he'd just come up through water. "If it reaches zero … if it reaches zero … Once the mass of all those planets and the sun hits zero—if there is only energy and no mass—everything will go to light speed! Every particle!"
"Like photons," Kellen considered. "Are you sure this will happen?"
Seeming frustrated that his general was content to discuss this theory—which was quickly manifesting itself as much more than theory—the sad scientist continued to lose color from his bronze face. "I am sure of nothing! This has never happened before! But I think it will happen!"
"Nothing in nature can go to light speed," the helmsman argued. "It makes no sense."
Karn cranked around. "Neither does the mass dropping!"
"So the planets explode," the helmsman said. "So what?"
"Idiot!" Karn slashed a hand toward him. "Don't you understand? We are all part of the existing universe!" He pointed frantically at the internal readouts. "Our mass is going away too. The moment it hits zero, every one of our molecules will move away from each other at the speed of light! The energy has to go somewhere!"
Ruhl squinted at him. "We explode too?"
Karn nodded so hard that his hair bounced up and down at the back of his neck. "At the speed of light!"
After a lifetime in space, Kellen understood immediately and paused as comprehension dawned on each of the others, blanching their faces one by one.
"Read out the mass falloff," he requested quietly.
Karn's gnarled face was chalky with fear as he stared into his instruments, but he took his general's example and tried to rein in his panic. "Forty percent now and still dropping, sir."
Ruhl glared at him. "Is it a weapon?"
Pressing a lock of neatly clipped hair away from the side of his face, Kellen ignored the question and snapped instead, "Go to battle mode. Deflectors up."
Ruhl pulled himself to the helm, rather than bothering to shift the responsibility to anyone else, and with one finger punched in the shields-up.
All at once a hand of nausea swept down upon them all, and they were released from their own weight. The deck slid away from their boots.
Loss of mass—loss of gravity!
As he grabbed clumsily for a handhold, Kellen called out over the noise, "Compensate. Compensate, you clumsy amateurs!"
"Trying, sir!"
"Trying, sir!"
"Compensating, sir!"
They were trying, he could see that. The helmsman fought with his controls while holding himself to his seat with his knotted legs. The ship raced through open space on a nonsensical course around the solar system, leading the other five ships in the fleet as they all struggled for control.
Planets blew to bits, no longer possessing mass enough, therefore gravity enough, to hold themselves together. Moons dislodged from their orbits, then also expanded as if inflated from inside. Asteroids bloated to dust, and the dust scattered.
Now only thick clouds of ejecta rushing far faster than ever nature intended, the freewheeling satellites continued to distend, continents shattering, oceans spraying out into space to become ice clouds. Like the pulsebeat of a superbeing, the sun dilated more and more, sending its incendiary kiss out to the rubble of planets it had moments ago nurtured. No longer bonded to each other, the sun's burning particles ballooned outward. The gassy inflation consumed the rubble of the first planet. Life on the planets was already destroyed. Millions of years to evolve, seconds to suffocate.
A sun—a huge thermonuclear fusion bomb held together by the natural magic of gravity. When the gravity goes, the bomb starts to explode.
From where he hovered over the helm, Kellen stared at the viewscreen and monitors, one after the other, slightly less familiar than those on his flagship, and he imagined what those life-forms must have felt just now. Terrible things. This nausea, the loss of weight. The ground falling from beneath their feet, the air gushing out of their lungs as the atmosphere flew outward as if torn away in a great sheet. The land around them crumbling, trees launching toward space, no longer rooted, for there was no more soil.
How advanced had they been? There hadn't been time to investigate. Had intelligence come to them yet? Did they have the sense to be afraid? To understand the last glimpses of each other as they vaulted toward open space, into a sky no longer blue?
Instruments on the bridge chattered and screamed for attention, reading out the disaster on molecular levels and striving to compensate for the changes pouring in through the sensors.
He heard the sound of his men's panic throbbing in his head, calling for him—Kellen! Kellen! Kellen!—but he couldn't respond or turn from the hypnotic destruction on the screens. Certainly what he heard was only his sanity calling to him in the midst of madness. For the first time in his life he honestly did not know what to do.
He wasn't even on his own ship, with his own science officer.
"Hail the Qul," he said steadily. "I want to speak to my own science officer."
"Yes, General!" the shuddering helm officer choked. Abruptly he looked at Ruhl, frightened that he might have overstepped his post by not waiting for the ship's commander to relay the order, but Ruhl nodded and the contact was made. "Go ahead, sir."
Kellen drew himself closer to the communications link. "This is Kellen. I wish to speak to Aragor."
"We can't find him, sir."
"You can't find him?"
"Not … presently."
"Find him anyway."
"Yes, Commander. Stand by."
"Give me a view of the fleet," Kellen ordered as he waited.
The tactical officer jumped to the necessary monitor. The screen flickered, but came on, showing all five other ships, greenish white hulls drenched in solar flush. Their bottle-shaped forms jerked unevenly through space on Qul's beam, and clearly they too were having problems keeping their speed from increasing out of control. None of them knew how to fight against this.
"General Kellen, this is Aragor! Are you there?"
Kellen twisted back toward the comm unit, and almost made another full twist around—he was losing his grip on the deck. Losing mass. "Of course I am here. What's happening to us?"
"Our instruments are reading a reduction in mass! It seems to be continuing—I cannot explain it. Artificial gravity is—!"
"I want a way to protect ourselves from it. Think of something."
"We must keep our mass!" Karn shouted from behind him. "Some part of it—a fraction of it! We must not go to zero!"
"He is right, General. We might be able to shield ourselves from the effect." Aragor's voice bubbled through the communications system, stressed and gaspy.
"With what?" Kellen asked.
"With … shields. If we divert all possible power, we might be able to stall the effect—"
"Do it. All fleet science stations and helms tie in with Karn and Aragor. Match what they do. Aragor, do it."
"Yes, General."
Karn flinched, then said, "Yes, General."
The tactical officer panted, "Mass at twenty percent and dropping!"
"Triple shields." Aragor's voice funneled through the communications system, no longer directed at Kellen, but at the science stations on all six ships. "Sending the deflector formula through now. All systems accept and confirm."
Karn and the tactical officer worked frantically at the controls while bracing themselves in place against seat backs and other crewmen.
"Ten percent and dropping …"
"Outside mass reading is separating from inner reading." Karn's voice shuddered with a ring of success.
"All stations report inner mass reading. . . ."
Solar matter continued to fly outward through the system, cooking the planetary refuse, bombarding the fleet's shields and tormenting the crews with the garish noises of primitive assault.
Kellen hadn't been weightless since his first training missions, yet the sensation was familiar, one of those things the physical body never quite forgets. He recognized the bizarre release of his internal organs from their own weight, the light-headedness, the loss of equilibrium, and fought to ignore those distractions. No control over gravity—without it they dared not go to warp speed. That meant they were trapped fighting to stay at sublight against an effect that would ultimately drive them to light speed, in the midst of a slaughtered solar system about to go nova down to the last particle.
"Outer reading, five percent … inner reading, five point one percent …"
As he listened to Karn's voice, Kellen paused to think. Decrease in mass causing increase in velocity … mass shrinking, but with the same amount of propellant energy. As they fell apart the outer planets were moving faster and faster, whipping around their expanding sun. Such a sight! If he died seeing this, certainly there were worse deaths.
"Outer reading, two percent … inner reading, two point zero four … zero three … zero two …"
Rubble from the decimated planets and space debris rattled against the hull of the ship and caused an awful percussion from bulkhead to bulkhead. The bridge crew clamped their hands over their ears, and so let go of their handholds and free-floated, bumping into each other in midair.
Soon they were all tumbling.
"Outer mass at one percent!"
"Inner, one point zero five!"
"Divert impulse power to the shields!"
"Outer at one point zero one percent—"
The drone of numbers began to buzz in Kellen's mind. How long had it been? The effect of gravity suspension couldn't travel faster than light … that would affect things. The pull of the sun had been suspended long enough to release the inner planets from their orbits, but it would take four or five light-hours for that effect to reach the decimated outer planets. For now they were just clogs of shattered ejecta crashing along in their regular orbits. When the suspension of the sun's gravitational pull reached them, they would free-fall out of orbit as the inner planets had. If the effect lasted more than a few minutes—if the mass reached zero—the sun would never recover. The system would be gone forever, just dust particles racing through space in all directions.
If it did stop, the velocity would drop and there would be a primordial system again, as there was five billion years ago. The whole configuration of this area of space would be forever changed.
"Inner mass at one-sixtieth of one percent!" Karn was hovering near the port auxiliary monitors and tipped entirely onto his head in order to read the mass change. "Mass outside of our shields is zero, sir! Zero!"
Between the "zz" and the "o" of his last word, the planets of this solar system, now hardly more than loosely grouped areas of rocky debris, seemed to vaporize before them, molecules flashing in a million directions. All but the sun was decimated. The sun itself, too big to move far, expanded to unthinkable size now at the speed of light, well off their scales and engulfing all their screens. The shapes of the other five ships on the auxiliary monitors were only glazed silhouettes—
And suddenly there were only four other ships.
"The Shukar!" Ruhl shouted. "General!"
Kellen stared at the brightening screens until his eyes watered. The Shukar, blown into warp in a billion bits. An explosion so fast as to be virtual vaporization. Molecules suddenly radiating away from each other at the speed of light. They had failed to hold mass.
"Inner mass, one one-hundredth of one percent!" Karn whimpered, shielding his eyes with both hands as he hovered upside down. "One one-hundred-twentieth—we can't hold it!"
"Feed all weapons power to the shields."
Aragor was fighting to keep control, but Kellen knew him and heard the tremors in his voice. They barely had any mass at all, in practical terms it was nothing, but in physics the difference between something and nothing was a universe of difference. They were managing to remain intact while everything exploded around them, but the power drain was fabulous. Seconds were slipping away.
The planets were gone. The sun was still expanding. In a few more minutes—
Suddenly a great hand swatted Kellen toward the deck. His arms and legs flew upward, and he hit the deck on his considerable stomach. Ruhl landed on top of him, stunning them both. Confused by the sensation of their own weight, the bridge crewmen rolled about momentarily, searching for equilibrium. Was down once again down?
Kellen put his palms on the deck and heaved upward, pressing with his shoulder blades. For a moment he felt like a bird-of-prey in battle poise, wings down, shoulders tensed, knuckles in.
Ruhl rolled off and was dumped to the deck at Kellen's heels. Kellen pressed down his need to vomit and clawed toward the helm. "Status of gravitational forces system-wide!"
The crew shuffled dizzily to the shelf of readouts on the starboard side. Ruhl's reddish hair had come loose and was hanging in his face like a ragged mop. He was still trying to do too much himself. Promoted too quickly, it seemed. Not used to delegating responsibility. Sometimes promotions happened that way when a family was too well connected. He would learn.
"All readings returning to normal, sir!" Karn called. He swung around to look at the forward monitor.
Kellen did the same, as did everyone. The sun would tell.
Before their eyes the swollen, overextended mass of solar matter was drawing inward toward its core again, shrinking with a terrible violence to its normal size—but some of the solar matter flung off during the loss of mass was too far away to be pulled back and spun outward in all directions.
Now shorn of any life or growth, with the bits of living bodies crushed amid the rubble, the planetary material was bashed to primordial rubbish, thrown away at light speed, and all bets were off. The sun would have to gather itself, then slowly begin once again nipping at deep space to draw bodies to orbit it. The eons had begun again.
"Aragor," he said. "Aragor, are you there?"
The long silence was unfriendly. Had the same tragedy happened to Qul as to Shukar? He began to look from screen to screen.
"Aragor, sir," the comm system rasped. "The … sun has moved several millions of miles … recoalesced because of its size once gravity and mass returned … It is no longer actually a sun, but a hot cloud of gas beginning to act again as nature intended. . . . The planets are gone. . . ."
Random observations, coming as Aragor thought of them. He was deeply shaken.
"Everything has stopped," the science officer continued before Kellen has a chance to encourage him on. "The velocity must have been reduced to its previous levels somehow as the mass returned. . . . It must have something to do with natural conservation of energy. . . . Energy has to come from somewhere … it cannot just appear. . . . As long as we maintained the slightest mass, we remained … intact …"
He was searching for words. Saying what they were all thinking—that these things cannot happen, but they just had. Where had the energy come from that had caused this?
"What stopped the effect, Aragor?" Kellen prodded.
More silence came back at him. He glanced at Karn, who stared at him, waiting for Aragor to bear the weight.
'Nature stopped it."
Another stretch of silence.
Kellen could sense Aragor thinking and thinking.
"Mass … energy … and velocity are all related. When mass was taken away, nature balanced with more velocity, all the way to light speed. When the mass suddenly returned, velocity of the matter substantially decreased."
"But velocity is only measured relative to other things," Kellen broke in. "It decreased relative to what?"
They were all staring at him now. He felt the tense stares of men on the other ships too. They were all waiting for him and his science officer to find the answer.
"I do not know." Aragor sounded whipped. He hadn't wanted to say that. "I could be completely wrong. I see it, I can describe it … but I cannot explain it."
"Sir!" Ruhl gasped, moving on shaky legs back toward his own command chair to where Kellen stood near the helm. "Could it have been a weapon?"
"If it was theirs," Kellen said, "they have destroyed themselves with it. If it was someone else's, then we have a new war on our hands."
Ruhl came to hunch beside him over the shuddering helm. "Starfleet?"
Kellen did not respond. There were some things even a Klingon preferred not to guess.
Starfleet. Their old enemy. His oldest. Certainly those people were capable of developing a mass-blanking weapon, but he wondered if Starfleet would use such a thing. Yes, but not without provocation, and there had been none lately.
Kellen knew that, because he had asked to do some provoking and been turned down.
The solar system remained in chaos. As the sun broiled fiercely during its reintegration, alone in space now.
Nothing left to conquer. Had the predator been starved by the prey's self-immolation?
If not a weapon, then what?
He turned to Ruhl, and found himself about to speak to a shag of reddish hair, and it threw him off for a moment. He shook his own combed locks as if in example.
"Ruhl, at least get your hair out of your face when I speak to you."
Pawing his hair out of his face, Ruhl caught part of his long mustache on a fingernail and ended up with one hand caught near his ear. He shook it loose, embarrassed, wondering if he had just been given an order or only a suggestion, and muttered, "Yes … yes, sir."
Rather than appease him with acknowledgment, Kellen said "Assess damage in the fleet and make a full sensor scan of the area."
Ruhl's small eyes grew wide. "What shall we scan for?"
"Whatever you find."
"Yes, Commander. . . ."
"Karn," Kellen began, and turned to face the startled science officer of this ship, so Karn would not look bad in the eyes of his own crewmates. "Was the suspension limited to this solar system? How far did it reach?"
Karn struggled to avoid thanking the general for his attention, and poured himself into the readouts. "Long-range sensors suggest it reached at least sixteen light-days."
"Dispatch immediate reports of all this to the Empire."
"Yes, General."
"General," Ruhl interrupted, "we should tell them the Uri Taug star system is now devoid of life. Otherwise they'll wonder why we failed to conquer."
Kellen held a hand toward the godlike ruin on the screens. "We'll tell them we did conquer. After all, the system is ours now. What's left of it."
"Sir!"
Both Kellen and Ruhl turned toward Karn. "Yes?"
"Sir … sir!"
Kellen swatted the young man's arm. "We are both here. Say something!"
"A … a … change!"
The baffled science officer stepped aside with forgivable gratitude as Kellen pressed toward the science station and Ruhl pushed in after him.
In the middle distance, reading only a light-year away, a core of turbulence had opened up on their screens. On each screen it looked different, for each screen picked up different elements—spectra, energy, spatial disruption. Not a swirl, but not a crack, yet still it moved. Like a piece of woman's fabric strung in space and waved by a giant hand, it taunted them.
Squinting, Kellen wondered aloud, "What is that?"
"Some kind of … storm?" Ruhl sounded compelled to invent an answer.
"A storm with good timing? I doubt that."
"Then what do you think?"
"I think we're seeing the cause of what he have just felt." Kellen straightened and reacted briefly to a sharp pain in his left shoulder from their experience. "I should be on my own flagship for whatever is coming. Continue to monitor that phenomenon. Remain at battle configuration."
"Yes, sir," Ruhl said.
"Aragor, are you still standing by?"
"Yes, General!"
"Are you reading this phenomenon?"
"I … see it, sir."
That was Aragor's way of admitting to Kellen that he hadn't a clue what the waving veil was.
Using the confusion of the moment to shade the fact that he didn't feel like walking all the way to the transporter room, Kellen plucked his handheld communicator from its holster and snapped it open.
"Pick up my coordinates and beam me back directly to the bridge immediately. We will find out what did this. If it is an accident, we will explain it. If it is a weapon, we will own it. Activate transporter beams now."
"Transporter officer, energize beams. Bring the general directly to the bridge."
Aboard the Border Fleet flagship Qul, Science Officer Aragor drew a long breath of relief that soon General Kellen would be back aboard and would take command during this strange time. Though he tried to appear supremely Klingon in front of the bridge crew, Aragor was frightened. The impossible had just happened before his eyes, and his whole body was still quaking. Had the mass drop continued a few more seconds, they would have become part of an uncontrolled whirl of hyperlight.
A drop in mass! Unthinkable! It couldn't possibly happen naturally.
The general would figure it out. He would find the answers. The two of them would piece together the data, and Kellen would decide what happened. Kellen was the smartest warrior in the universe.
The whine of transporter energy chewed at Aragor's ears, and he turned toward the open area of the bridge to which Kellen was being beamed. Seconds now.
A pillar of expanding lights appeared, many bands, bringing the disassembled atoms of their commander across the emptiness of space, to be reconstructed here. The pillar coalesced into shoulders draped with fabric, a broad torso clad in stiff metallic fiber. For a moment there was a short clean-cut beard and bronze hair trimmed above the shoulder. A thin mustache, as if stenciled on.
Then, the wide pillar of light began to fade. The whine rose to a scream. The lights thinned out.
"What is this!" Aragor struck the communications pad. "Transporter officer! What are you doing?"
There was no response. Before him, General Kellen's partially formed face frowned as if sensing the transportation going wrong. His right hand turned slightly outward from his robe, toward Aragor, and the fingers opened in beckoning.
"Transporter!" Aragor called. "Bring him in!"
"Trying," the comm buzzed. "There is interference, sir!"
"Fight for him!" Aragor waved the other bridge personnel back, away from the pillar of sparkling light, so no one else's physical presence would attract any of the particles trying so desperately to reassemble.
What was happening? The transporter should easily be able to do this. Ship-to-ship transportation at this distance was nothing. Nothing!
The pillar of lights surged once as if succeeding, but then suddenly sizzled completely away. The dim bridge lighting seemed somehow much dimmer now.
Aragor swung around to glare at the main screen, which showed a picture of the fleet ships. "Ruhl! Do you have him?"
"Not here," the other captain's voice came back, high with tension. "We do not have him!"
"Where is he? Where is he?" With the heel of his hand Aragor struck the intraship unit. "Transporter! Where is he!"
His transporter officer's voice was thready, shocked. "Sir, the beams … they went into that twisting form out there. I do not understand how it could happen—he was drawn in, as if magnetized!"
Aragor jumped to his science station, where he was met by the tactical officer, and together they stared into the science readout screen.
More of the impossible—the transporter beams, presented in an image of chittering energy, looped like the tail of a running animal, then were swallowed by the phenomenon out there.
As they stood together and watched the screen, a form began to take shape, emerge from the gash in open space. A solid form. A vessel … a ship …
"Taken," the tactical officer murmured. "Absorbed!"
With both hands Aragor gripped the rubber rim of the monitor. "I want him back, Vagh. . . ."
He plunged to the helm, hammered the controls until the main viewer switched to a sheet of black space incised by the waving valence of new energy.
He stared into the vision. His wail rattled the bones of his crewmates.
"I want my general back!"