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By Root 453 0

of the cause of the Big Crush; the Imperial weapons research facility on Taspan II had been entirely outside their concern. In those days, they hadn’t even known what humans were; they’d never had experience of noncrystal-based life-forms. The Big Crush itself had been no disaster for them; on the contrary, the planet’s destruction had simply scattered its crust into a vast cloud, with orders of magnitude more surface area to absorb the energy of the star. For the Melters, the Big Crush had been an all-too-brief Golden Age; their culture/mind had blossomed throughout the system, celebrating their accession to Paradise.

For these particular Melters, the Golden Age of Paradise had come to an abrupt and catastrophic end, as the chunks of their shattered home planet had drifted across the orbit of Mindor. Captured by its gravity, they had fallen to its surface in each and every rock storm, and soon found that their new home was less a home than a prison. An oubliette.

A cosmic extermination camp.

Many, many individual Melters had been lost as their rocks had burned away in the atmosphere, and the radiation-absorbing qualities of the vaporized meltmassif screened the survivors from Taspan’s life-giving rays. The survivors were slowly dying of energy asphyxiation.

They were drowning in the Dark.

Each rockfall brought new Melters into Mindor’s lethal gloom, and every meteor that burned away deepened the shadow that was killing them.

That shadow also cut them off from the rest of the Melter community out among the asteroids; they simply did not have the power to drive a signal very far into the planet’s atmosphere. All they could do was wait, struggling to survive, and try to comfort the new victims falling into this planetary prison every day.

Comfort was what the Melters had originally sought from humans, as well; the human nervous system produced a tiny trickle of energy in the general wavelength of the Meltermind, which drew Melters to humans the way a glow rod attracted cave moths.

Cave moths, Luke thought. Perhaps that was what had happened to him at the cave … something in the meltmassif had been stealing light from inside him …

When these organic life-forms, these tiny flickering candle flames of warmth and light in the permanent midnight that was Mindor, had started shooting Melters with stun blasts that randomized the microcrystalline structure of meltmassif, the Melters had begun sequestering them in self-defense. There had never been malice in their attacks at all; they didn’t even understand that their captives were dying—they were unclear on the whole concept of organic death. It wasn’t murder, or war, or even violence, because they really didn’t comprehend any of those concepts, either. Their campaign against humanity had been, to them, merely pest control.

As all this information filtered through his consciousness, Luke at last became aware that the stellar cluster of which he was the center was itself moving, rolling through the Dark as though in orbit around some vastly more massive gravity source, something so huge and dark that it could be seen only by its effect on the stars of the Melters in his cluster. One by one they were peeled from his cluster, stripped away to spiral into decaying orbits around the inescapable void until one by one they flared with a last brief burst of light as they slipped over some invisible event horizon and vanished forever.

An event horizon of the Dark, consuming the last of the light in his universe …

Oh, he thought. I get it. It’s a black hole.

Some kind of metaphor for how Blackhole—how appropriate that old code name seemed now—was controlling the Melters, he figured; Blackhole must be luring them down somehow, cutting them off from each other so their only source of light was what he chose to feed them …

Even thinking about it seemed to increase the imaginary black hole’s gravity gradient; he found himself drifting closer and closer to the event horizon, gathering speed as his spiral orbit tightened, more and more of the stars around him falling away, some to vanish