Page 52 of The Interstellar Rake's Irresistible Kiss
She blinked inconfusion, and she was peripherally aware of the armored alien at her side shifting restlessly. Well, maybe he didn’t want to hear this villain-splaining, but the longer she kept Blackworm talking, the longer before she found herself in a life pod launched into the singularity.
“If you think you’ll find love in a black hole, why don’t you dive in?” she suggested.
His lips quirked, and for asplit second, she caught a glimpse of the Thorkon elegance and charm in his lean, austere face. “I’m not seeking love in the black hole,” he said, with a note of infinite patience in his voice. “I’m trying to lure it out.”
“Nothing comes out of the black hole,” she said, striving to match his tone. “I don’t know much about space, but I do know that.”
He gestured, and after an almost imperceptiblehesitation, the armored alien hauled her forward. It was everything she could do not to pull back; if this big, mean alien in all his armor with his big blaster didn’t want to get closer to Blackworm, neither did she.
Or maybe armor boy just didn’t like the stomach-churning hologram any more than she did.
Blackworm gestured again, his gloved finger following the hypnotic vortex of light andmatter eddying down the black hole. “The universe is vast,” Blackworm mused. “So cold and empty. And yet this is all there is.” He gestured, closing his fist and contracting the holographic view so that the black hole became just another point of nothingness in a huge sea of black punctuated by small pools of color: swirls of spiral galaxies, clouds of nebular gas, feathery streamers of interstellarwinds.
Trixie gurgled. “Can you…not do that?”
“That is indeed my wish. To make the universe less cold and empty. Because I know there is more.”
Now her head was spinning as bad as her stomach, but rather than puke, she spewed her rage at him. “The universe had a few more innocent souls in it until you dumped them in a black hole!”
Blackworm stiffened, as did the armored alien next to her,and she wondered if she’d gone too far. Well, if she had, it was their fault for hauling her halfway across the galaxies.
“I did not speak to the others because I thought they shared my purpose,” he said quietly. “And yet I failed. So I am explaining to you in the hopes that your acquiescence will lead to a different outcome.”
“My acqui— No.” She wrenched her arm out of her guard’s grip. “No,I’m not your willing victim and I’m not consenting to you sending me into a black hole. There won’t be any different outcomes because nothing. Comes. Out. Of a black hole.”
“It’s not a black hole,” he said. “It’s a wormhole.”
She hesitated. As much as she didn’t know about black holes, she knew even less about wormholes. Weren’t those just a science fiction thing? Of course, she’d been abductedby aliens, so maybe she should read more science fiction.
Into her doubtful silence, Blackworm continued, “However, the passage doesn’t lead to another equally cold, empty part of this cold, empty universe.”
Before, she’d wanted to keep him talking to delay the inevitable. Now she was reluctantly intrigued. “Are you saying…there’s an exit to the wormhole? Are the other women alive?”
He paused,his dark eyes glinting in the small remaining lights of the astral map. “I do not know. But I sent them not as victims, rather as emissaries.”
God, if he had to villain-splain, did he have to make her tractor beam out every clue? “Emissaries to where? To who?”
“To the other side.”
Frustration churned in her with more sick confusion and fury than the event horizon. “You just said it didn’t goanywhere else in the universe, and the universe is all there is.”
He shook his head. “The other side of everything: the void. Where the gods live.”
It seemed to her that the wheel of the universe stilled as she stared at him. “The void. Where the gods live. That’s death!” She took a stomping step toward him—not with any intent, just because she couldn’t stop herself—but armor boy yanked herback.
Blackworm didn’t seem impressed by her outrage. “And what the gods took, they can give back. I’ve done the calculations.”
If not for armor boy, she would’ve smacked him. His right to be delusional ended with those women. “You can’t bring someone back from the dead.”
Shoot, she’d just said she needed to read more sci fi. What if zombies were as real as aliens?
Blackworm turned to theastral map and gestured again, zooming back to the area of space around the singularity. He stalked around the hologram, his jaw clenched so hard that the lights glinted off the skin tightened over bone. “Scientists on your Earth don’t understand much about these cosmic phenomena,” he said. “They theorize that black holes are not the perfect abysses they seem, that blackbody radiation escapes thevicinity.”
Oh, how she wished she was escaping this vicinity…
“But how could anything escape a black hole?” he mused. He glanced over his shoulder at her with an arch look that told her he was about to answer. “They speculate that irresistible quantum forces on the verge of the event horizon actually split reality into particles and virtual particles. Even as the particles disappear and becomeone with the singularity, the virtual particles break free. They stay in this universe.”
He paused, still staring at her, and the simulated eerie dying light of the black hole shone in his fanatical eyes. Was he waiting for her to understand?
