Section 31_ Rogue - Andy Mangels [84]
“Mon Dieu,” La Forge heard the captain say, apparently to no one in particular.
La Forge, Data, and stellar cartography specialist Ranul Keru stood on the raised central dais of the cavernous, three-story Stellar Cartography room. Captain Picard and all of the senior officers stood beside the dais, along with Batanides, Zweller, Commander Roget, and Lieutenant Hawk.
Picard gazed briefly at each of the three officers on the dais. “What definitive information can you tell us about the phenomenon out there?” The captain’s voice echoed slightly in the oversize domed chamber.
“Based on our probe’s sensor telemetry,” the engineer said, “the object at the center of those cloaked structures is a subspace singularity.”
“The first one, in fact, ever discovered,” Keru said.
Batanides’s eyebrows rose inquisitively. “Would you explain that a bit for the benefit of those of us who aren’t physicists or engineers, Commander?”
“It’ll be easier if we show you, Admiral,” Keru said as he touched a control surface atop the dais’ wide, swooping handrail. Everyone looked upward as an enormous holographic representation of the turbulent singularity-the roiling fireball at the center of the hexagonal Romulan array-suddenly appeared in midair, filling half of the map room’s arch-ceilinged display space. As La Forge studied the spectacular image, he felt his fatigue draining away. Pure, adrenaline-fueled wonder took its place.
“What you are seeing,” Data said, “is the singularity’s event horizon, the boundary past which all infalling matter or energy-in this case, the solar wind from the Chiarosan star-becomes crushed to infinite density at the object’s center. That region is invisible, since even light cannot escape it. The turbulent band of exterior material which you can see is located on the event horizon’s periphery, where the object’s powerful gravitational field is accelerating it into various forms of lethal hard radiation, such as delta particles and berthold rays.”
La Forge saw Hawk and Keru exchange a worried glance. “How can a network of cloaking devices contain radiation as powerful as that?” Hawk said.
Keru shrugged, prompting La Forge to respond to Hawk’s question. “It can’t. The innermost sections of the Romulan facility seem to be doing that. The cloaking network’s function is to keep the whole thing invisible and subspace-silent, along with a large volume of the surrounding space.”
“In fact,” Data said, “the entire apparatus may have been here for decades. Sensor telemetry shows that it orbits the Chiarosan star at a mean distance of about 800 million kilometers, about 650 million kilometers farther out, on average, than the orbit of Chiaros IV. Given the turbulent atmosphere on that planet, it is unlikely that the Chiarosans ever would have discovered it on their own.”
“Strange,” Batanides said blandly. “It looks like the event horizon of a typical, garden-variety black hole to me. Albeit a bit more spectacular.”
“It’s very similar, Admiral, but there’s one critical difference,” La Forge said. “The object’s singularity-that is, its point of infinite compression-lies in subspace instead of in normal space. For the moment, that’s where most of its effects are confined.”
“However,” Data added, “local space-time curvature measurements show that the object’s tremendous gravitational field has been steadily weakening the boundary between normal space and subspace, perhaps for billions of years.”
“And now it finally has the potential to have serious effects on normal space,” Keru added.
Zweller