Today there was an army for Tyr. It had been a few hundred thousand years since this had happened, and they didn’t arrive nearly so close as now. But gradually the encirclement began, a scattering of scouts to preserve the precious line of sight in Tyr’s borough. There was one advantage of the pit he lurked, and that was he could manage to see everything. Bursts of light surrounded the void creating a corona of color as the forces around him attempted to maintain formation. It was difficult to move, as they had to work hard lest they fall into the pit in which Tyr lurked. From the other side of the depression, another army emerged. They stared into the abyss that made up Tyr’s home, where he stared back with cold inert eyes. They would not look long, the other army soon circled around to face the opposition. Then fire began to exchange. Today there was a war on Tyr’s doorstep.
***
Around Sigurd there was chaos. He began donning his suit bit by bit, hearing shouting and people rapping at controls. They were in a massive ship, a hollowed out asteroid with engines that could have moved a world, provided you looked patiently and the world was maybe the size of mercury. Around them was a fleet of similar ships, some retrofitted colonizers, ice barges, a few actual warships still existed. Their plan wasn’t hard to figure out according to a nervous longshoreman sitting in an acceleration couch.
“It doesn’t have anything to do with our lasers hitting them milliseconds before they hit us, '' the longshoreman argued. “It’s the intimidation factor. We’ve got our backs pressed against a god damned black hole. Nobody dicks around with black holes, you'll get it chopped off.”
“And that makes it smart for us because…” Sigurd pried while eyeballing where his helmet went.
“...You see that’s where this plan really comes together,” the longshoreman explained after waiting for his brain to catch up with himself. “See we’re orbiting this thing stupidly fast, and if they want to really lay the hurt on us they’re got to aim all their lasers on us for a while right.
“Urh,” Sigurd shrugged while shuffling through lockers.
“Bingo, that means they have to get in close to hurt us, '' the longshoreman theorized with the flywheel spinning in his brain. “And we’re already on the other side of the black hole by that time. It would take hours for us to reemerge and by that time we’ll have bled off the excess heat or run away.”
“There we go,” Sigurd stated while picking his helmet out of a server rack.
“Exactly,” the longshoreman nodded.
“No, I have about four major problems with what you said,” Sigurd disputed.
“Name one.”
“Wouldn’t we heat up due to all the hawking radiation black holes give off?” Sigurd asked. “Just because it’s not giving off light doesn’t mean it isn’t giving crap that will kill us.”
The longshoreman paused mid counterpoint while his brain hurried up to think of something, “And that’ll just help obscure us, keep us off their sensors.”
“Right,” Sigurd murmured. “I’d better get to my post before the chief kills me.”
“Later.”
Sigurd assembled his suit as he walked. He kept everything on except for his glove and helm. Sig’s job was fairly simple, fix parts of the ship that failed as lasers began striking them. It was far less dramatic than he’d thought it would be. Instead of showers of sparks and debris, they were instead baked as if they were inside a pressure cooker. Gradually the heat would rise to inhuman levels and the ship's machinery would begin to fail as humans began to sweat blood. There’s no way of keeping cool, everything starting with the very superstructure began to burn.
Luckily they were too far away from each other to do any real damage so far. It was mostly dealing with burst pipes and shorted equipment as the ship began to contort. There was tension in the air and quickly people ceased speaking. The noise of battle began like a house settling at midnight, then the shrill noises and aches grew louder as time went on. It was maddening, people began to sweat, not from the growing heat but the unrelenting stress of the home around you crumbling. Combat that was coordinated mostly by a few individuals and automated tasks deep within the asteroid. The only purpose many of them served was to jump into action when artificial warfare failed. That was reality for Sigurd, as he already began hearing problems about ancient machinery beginning to fail on the portside.
***
Tyr was uneasy. He was used to witnessing conflict from across the expanse of time. Often when he witnessed warfare, the assaulting civilization had already stagnated to dust. Tyr felt the trickle of missed shots fold into his southern horizon. He saw the positions of ships and knew who’s shots would land and who’s shots would miss. A few glances at reflections, some tugs of gravity, and a mild dose of hawking radiation gave him a feel for who these were. They were small, understood electricity and radiation, and could barely shift the fabric of space. Mostly water nitrogen and carbons bound up in a complex metal shell. Nothing extraordinary, they were probably DNA based, a common life system that still hadn’t died out. Gradually he felt gravity strengthen between him and the battle. A ship had begun to fall towards him. He would fall for the rest of observable time. No one alive on board. No one to talk to. He held his disappointment at bay and continued to watch the warfront.
***
Sigurd knew he was going to die. Oh the ship was still together but he felt the heat reaching him. He wanted to take off his suit, but he knew that the heat was worse outside of it. Carefully he reached his arm inside and unscrewed a container resting near his chest cavity. The ice bottle would keep him sane for a bit longer, but it was starving off the end. He already saw several others around him turning pink and beginning to pass out. In the distance Sigurd was sure he head another compartment being sealed off. He hoped those behind it wouldn’t realize, maybe they’d escape the fight or they’d die in a microsecond before being vaporized from some distant artillery.
“All repairs needed along interior pumps,” several devices around Sigurd shrieked. “Prioritize the engine feeds and reactor, rove the main spindle if no problems found.”
“The hell?” Sigurd wondered.
That was nearly at the center of the ship, there was practically nothing there that could be damaged. At the moment they were sealing off the outer chambers of the ship and trying to ration collant. With a sigh he grabbed his helmet and toolbox before running up the staircases further inside. The stain and hiss of the ship collapsing around him began to get to his head. He noticed his sweat was beginning to get in his eyes as he rounded the corner.
“Dammit,” Sigurd thought. “We need to surrender if the radios still work.”
Further in the ship there were several people she had dragged themselves further inside hoping for fairer climate. It wasn’t much better further inside, a few navigators were splayed out across an unknown terminal, hoping to get rid of some of the heat enveloping them. Sigurd kept moving, he knew people could survive a while at this temperature as long as water wasn’t in short supply. But the water was heating up as well. There was a whistle from a nearby officer and the navigators returned to their posts. Sigurd kept walking. A few breakdowns begin to appear on his device and he decided to pick up the pace.
***
They were dying, quickly, efficiently and at the hands of their own people. By now seven of the original sixty ships had begun to fall. They took massive amounts of time to reach the edge of the shroud. Two of them contained life still attempting to eke out a bit more time before falling to the void. Tyr wanted them to succeed. He wasn’t sure why, or in what manner they could accomplish this. But they were inspirational in trying to avoid death for a few moments more. Maybe everything and everyone could understand that. Upon closer examination one of the ships contained a synthetic being of carbon gates and logic; it had been locked out of controls out of fear of it removing choices from the other ship’s life. Now with it’s crewmates dead, they had unexpectedly done the same to it. The other was a paranoid one. It had known things were failing and had begun to kill anyone who might take up more air or resources that it could use instead. It had found the most pleasant environment in the center of the ship and was attempting to think of a way out. The irony wasn’t lost on Tyr that he may have killed anyone with the ability to do so. So it goes. Though it had taken Tyr only a moment to understand that the creature’s language, diagnosing what the battle was about seemed fruitless. Most beings in either fleet seemed to possess different ideas about this. Ultimately he settled on the ideas of those in the command structures, which while still different at least narrowed the results.
“Hello,” Tyr said.
He bombarded areas of the falling ships until it resembled one of their languages. The paranoid man lashed out into the dark. There were no words, just incomplete thoughts and attacks with primitive tools.
“This one is past reasoning,” Tyr thought.
It was no problem, he would wait. The thing he always had left was time.
***
And then things got worse. Sigurd wasn’t sure how the door in front of him was on fire but it was managing it all the same.
“It’s metal,” He grumbled looking for a fire extinguisher. “Why, why the thing?”
It already hurt to breathe in this corridor so he knew he had to think fast. If it got through to an oxygen pipe then he should make peace with any gods he could remember in the delirium. Some parts of his brain still worked and he found himself checking his device memory for the nearest fire extinguisher. It was on the other side of the door. It took him a few seconds of thinking of a way around before realizing he was in a hard suit. A minute later he pressurized his helmet and managed to kick the door down. A minute after that he was spraying down the collapsed door. The fire was out and Sigurd quickly began spraying himself with the fire extinguisher. Cool air was in short supply and whatever the extinguisher provided was a godsend.
“Allright what’s next.”
What was next were people who had taken similar ideas to Sigurd. There was a leak in one of the propellant tanks, but the material inside was cool and poison. There were roughly twenty people inside a room the size of a bus, above them drips of yellow and rust colored material began to drip off the ceiling down the walls and pool on the floor. The people here were nearly naked, with barely the energy to look in his direction as Sigurd stepped in. He flicked on his light, the floor was giving off a cloud of noxious vapor as whatever this material was evaporated filling the room with a hazy miasma. Upon closer look a few people had clothing over their faces for protection.
“Ok I need to seal this room up,” Sigurd announced. ”You guys really don’t want to be here.”
Several eyes responded with looks of defeat and hatred.
“I’m serious,” Sigurd responded. “I don't know what's in these tanks but they'll kill you.”
There was silence in response.
“Fine dammit.”
He filled the leak with an adhesive putty and managed to stop most of it. He opened another door to let the air circulate and suggested people move. A few did. There were four people who didn’t. One person took out a bolt gun and hesitantly aimed it at the ceiling.
“Please don’t.”
The man looked at Sigurd and back at the ceiling. He put down the gun. And aimed it under his jaw into his head. The wall was painted red then black with blood. One more person left the room after the gunfire. The two others were prodded along by Sigurd. They were either comatose or dead already from the fumes. He left the room and kept walking, his device signaled more breakdowns further ahead.
“So it goes,” Sigurd choked out before continuing on.
There were more dead bodies ahead. Mostly suicide although there were a few who suffered from deadly gas buildup. There was one person ahead who was doing calculations on the wall while Sigurd was checking a comm unit. Since they were the only two either had seen that weren't muttering how they were doomed or staring off into the void, he decided to say hello. She may have been cradling a fern and writing on the wall, but there was the sign of intelligence in her eyes.
“How much air do you have tanked,” She asked poking at the valve on his suit.
“What?”
“Air, how much? Most of these small tanks just have twenty minutes,” She said writing several numbers on the tank.
“Fifteen minutes I didn’t charge it,” Sigurd said, eyeballing his readout. “It’s pretty warm if your thinking about-”
“No, don't care about that, I gave that up.”
“Oh.”
“Ok so you're alive I see, so that makes…”
She returned to the wall where Sigurd could now see was covered in lines, equations , tallies and numbers. She erased two numbers and retallied them. Sigurd tried to keep track but wasn't sure what to look for.
“So-.”
“It’s the minutes of oxygen,” She responded without turning around.
“Oh,” Sigurd responded, getting a closer look. “Well that’s a pretty big number at least.”
“It hasn’t been divided by everyone left.”
“That’s…” Sigurd started unsure where to go with the thought. “Shouldn’t you be calculating this in life support?”
“That was closed off forty minutes ago.”
“Oh.”
“Yes, that's where the oxygen exchange plants were,” She explained. “That was your next question. Your question after that is if we have enough air to limp home provided the fight ends.”
“We do, right?”
“No.”
“...”
“If we tap into the propellant and reactor coolant as a source of air, and if only a few people are kept conscious or alive then maybe.” The Quartermaster messed up what she was writing and had to scratch out another line of figures. “It can be done if the battle ends soon. We can live.”
Sigurd wasn’t sure what to say. The worker inside him took over instead. “What can I do to help?”
“Just… I don’t know,” The quartermaster stopped writing for a minute. “Command isn’t telling me anything, I’m just sending them results and they just respond ‘continue’. You're a repairman, keep an eye on the air lines, if we lose those I don’t like what happens next.”
“Right,” Sigurd eyeballed his device to see the problems piling up further ahead.
“Farewell.”
“Bye.”
The quartermaster gripped her small plant and continued to write figures on the wall. Sigurd continued deeper into the ship. Behind him he heard a blast door close, he kept moving. The ship around him was dying, he could feel it. But he was uncertain what more he could do. He continued to move and Tyr watched him from afar as he watched all beings. Sigurd continued into the interior of the ship, completing small repairs as he went. Watching the lights flicker and heat grow as more and more of the ship failed. His device told him to move ever inwards, Sigurd obeyed.
***
Tyr witnessed more ships fall. Many of them shattered with low survivors. Both sides were losing, but the group rotating him were poised to lose first. Few would accept him as real while they fell. Some conversation appeared to be happening to silicon beings, but they were primitive and constrained in what they could converse in. An unexpected feeling centered him on the largest ship orbiting him. It was going on in higher dimensions that they seemed to have some access to.
***
Sigurd kept moving until he was in the center of the ship. There were quartermasters, a warp technician, several officers acused of bootlicking, a chef who was the captain’s great nephew and several dozen repair technicians from every discipline. They were in the officer’s mess in the interior of the ship. Ahead of them was a single door guarded by two marines. The orders updated once he reached the room.
“Standby?” someone asked, eyeballing their device.
“I have sh## to do,” another person grumbled. “I’m pretty sure Q deck is on fire right now.”
The warp technician was visibly recoiling from something Sigurd noticed. After craning his neck, Sigurd noticed the earphones, and that he was adjusting the volume on his device. He read the numbers and gestured to the other disgruntled workers nearby. The Warp technician took out his earphones and showed the others.
“I I-It’s pretty bad,” he whimpered. “Not sure w-wwhat gas is leaking in there.”
Sigurd listened in, far in the distance Tyr began to listen as well.
“Nearly all mandatory personnel are acquired, I’ve already made plans to redirect life support to isolated senior officers as well.” the scratchy voice of the captain briefed.
“Are the enemy ships in position?”
“Oh yes,” The captain revealed. “They’ve taken the bait and have decided to move in close. They worry we’ll escape and limp home as soon as we’re past the horizon.”
“We’ve lost half the fleet,” the warpmaster exclaimed. “Every deck of this ship is full of dead people.”
“And we’re about to win,” The captain sneered. “There was no chance of us getting out of this without losses in the low thousands. But we will survive, even if it’s just one ship we will make it out.”
“We should have activated it sooner,” the fire control officer squeaked. “We’ve lost too many on this ship alone.”
“We had to lure them closer to the event horizon, otherwise it would have burnt out,” the captain stated. “In less than ten minutes we’ll be outside the friendly fire range. We only need to endure till then.”
“Can the ship even survive the way back?” the fire control officer pried.
“Crew may need to make hasty repairs, selective compartment seals, shutdown of nonvital systems, jettisoning extraneous crew members after they do their duty,” The chief quartermaster said. “I want you to bear in mind I want to be on that list if it comes to it.”
“Understood,” The Captain said. “Warp master is the device ready to activate.”
“Five minutes at current v-v-velocity,” He stuttered. “Captain, may I be on that list too?”
“I… I’ll consider it,” the captain ventured. “Your contributions are valuable El.”
Sigurd listened and wasn't sure what to make of it. Around him were expressions of terror
Tyr’s eyes pried deeper onto the ship, seeing the device the organics claimed as their salvation. It wasn’t difficult to see. He was reminded of something from an older era. He watched a group of primatived who lived inside a large cylinder evolving a primitive society for another primative’s study. To peer deeper into the universe they had mined through the cylinder wall into the vacuum beyond. Within minutes the primates had their answers and were out of the artificial atmosphere. Their entire civilization crumbled in a moment. These humans had a similar idea, only operating at higher dimensions. Before Sigurd had time to form a single word, Tyr had assessed the situation and began carrying out the solution.
“Goodbye.”
Most of the ships were gone. None of the humans or silicon beings had time to process what had happened. Their Ships centered on their warp cores had been reduced in dimensions. Just for a moment. The complex structures that made them up had ceased.to exist. Now they lay flat, Some attempt had been made to have them swing back into shape, however like a bouncing ball they didn’t seem to have the same energy on the way back. On the edges of all beings there were still two dimension strands of matter now having to make new connections as proteins transmuted into simpler molecules. Then it was just a matter of hiding the evidence.
“I’m sorry.”
With another sweep, gravitational force began to increase and the ships began to fall towards him. Tyr waited until they were to the point of no return before relaxing his grip. It was only then that he relaxed. And surveyed the damage of who was left.
“What?” Sigurd questioned.
His ears were popping, letting him know the air pressure was changing fast. He threw on his helmet. And within ten seconds saw people gasping for air. Once person near him mouthed for Sigurd to give him the suit, though he expired before the demand was complete.
“Greeting humans, I am Tyr,” A voice shrieked out of nowhere. “You are Sigurd, forgive me if I mispronounce it. I have never heard the word spoken aloud before.”
“What?”
Sigurd began walking around the dead bodies. Then the gravity failed and he had to push off the bodies to get away from them.
“There is no cause for alarm, everything that you could change will not matter,” Tyr said. “You also are one of the few survivors in any ship. You will not find others anywhere nearby.”
“Who are you?”
“I am Tyr.”
“WHO is Tyr?”
“A fictitious and injured god born from an early universe society,” Tyr explained. “It is also the closest translation I can provide for you based on the cultural data in the ship your dying in.”
“I am-,” Sigurd thought. “I am not dying.”
“You are,” Tyr responded. “Do not fight it, you do not have the time, knowledge, or tools to prevent it. I suggest we move past that.”
“Where are you?”
“I exist in the center of the black hole you are accelerating towards,” Tyr explained. “Your next answer is I am reaching out to you through moving dark matter, vibrating the metal around you until it forms words. The opposite is how I hear you.”
At this point Sigurd had delved further into the ship and uncovered many disoriented things. Several of the walls were warped and large sections were simply flat metal with space on one side and the ship on the other. Large swaths of people were boiling away into the atmosphere. It seemed as though half the ship was gone. Before him the Black hole loomed. The tiny specks of the ships began to drift towards it’s center.
“Let me go,” Sigurd said. “If you can do all this.” He gestured faint of breath. “Then you should be able to release your grasp on the ship, or what’s left of it.”
“I could,” Tyr started. “But I will not. Based on what I’ve seen recently your people won’t be around much longer. I could suspend you until another vessel passes. But that may be pointless or destructive on multiple fronts for both of us.”
“What!” Sigurd shouted. “You have the power, let me go!”
“For an example that would hurt you,” Tyr said. “You are at war with another faction, should they find you, they would extract what they could and kill you. Should you claim my influence, they may do this faster.”
“You could do whatever you want,” he shouted. “You could make whoever you want ruler of the galaxy.”
“I am no gardener, certainly not one who favors one strain over the other while winter draws near,” The entity said. “You are simply the current in a long line of visitors to a patient observer.”
Sigurd started to shout but then he felt something change. It took several minutes to uncover what was happening. But the accretion disc of the black hole stopped. The creaking of the metal around him was still, and he could not hear Tyr’s words. He shouted for anything to hear him but nothing responded. Then he felt something else. Cosmic rays began to fill his eyesight turning his vision blue and white. Sigurd wasn’t sure what to do, he felt very small. Gradually his air began to run out. And while he tried to remain still, he was left alone with his thoughts. He wasn’t sure why, but he thought something else was nearby. He wondered if it and Tyr were talking but as he tried to still his lungs a strange thought entered him. Tyr trying to remain quiet reminded him of himself trying to hold his breath whenever anything dangerous was nearby.
“What can hide inside a blackhole?”
“What does it hide from?”
