Chapter 2 NADINE
Black holes were never meant to be observed this closely.
Every model said the same thing: event horizons were limits, not invitations.
You could orbit them, measure them, map their influence, but you did not approach them.
Not without consequences. Not without losing something you could never quantify.
And yet, here I was. On Emperor Daryus' flagship, with him only a few cabins down.
I never thought I'd be this close to royalty, let alone space royalty.
The powerful kind. As emperor of the Pandraxians, he wielded influence over half the universe.
No matter how strong you were, though, everything was dwarfed when in proximity to the black hole, or what the Pandraxians called the Dark Abyss.
They spoke the name with reverence and restraint, as if sound itself might attract its attention.
To me, it was a singularity with irregular behavior, a gravitational anomaly that refused to obey the rules it should have been bound by. Which made it irresistible.
From the moment our science teacher mentioned black holes in school, I had been drawn to them.
Maybe because I felt they were as inexplicable as I was, at least until I got older and met others like me.
Nerdy, drawn to math and logic rather than princesses and unicorns.
Nobody in my family ever understood that desire, or me, for that matter.
They tried, in the way people try when they already think something is wrong and are humoring you anyway.
They didn't understand why I couldn't just watch a movie.
Why I had to pause it, rewind it, frown at the screen, and say things like, That doesn't make sense, or No, he would never catch up to her at that speed.
They heard criticism where I felt curiosity.
To them, it was nitpicking. To me, it was the fun part.
I didn't want to know who the hero kissed at the end.
I wanted to know how the engine worked. Why the explosion propagated the way it did.
Why a chase scene that violated basic kinematics was considered thrilling and not laughable.
I remember ruining a family movie night once by asking—honestly, innocently—how everyone in a Star Wars film was breathing the same air.
No tanks. No filters. Same gravity everywhere, no matter the planet.
My uncle laughed and told me, It's just a movie, Nadine.
That sentence followed me for years. It wasn't just a movie.
It was a system. A set of rules someone had invented and then broken without explanation.
That mattered to me. It always had. If the universe—real or fictional—was going to behave in a certain way, I wanted to understand why.
Or at the very least, I wanted it to be consistent.
That tendency didn't win me many friends.
The other kids wanted magic. I wanted mechanics.
They wanted fairytales and destiny and happily-ever-afters.
I wanted to know how the dragon flew without collapsing under its own mass, or how the castle stayed standing on a cliff with no visible support.
When I pointed these things out, I was told I was overthinking. Too serious. No fun.
So I stopped pointing them out.
I learned early that there was a correct way to exist around people: smile at the right moments, laugh when they laughed, keep the questions that mattered to me folded away where no one else could trip over them.
At home, I was the odd one out. At school, I was the quiet one with her nose in a book, more interested in equations than conversations.
I didn't really make friends, not with my family, not with the other kids. Not because I didn't want to, but because it always felt like we were speaking slightly different languages, close enough to sound familiar, but never close enough to truly connect.
Black holes were different.
A black hole wouldn't care if I were strange.
It wouldn't care if I asked uncomfortable questions.
It wouldn't promise answers wrapped in comforting lies.
It simply existed, terrifying, elegant, bound by rules so extreme they felt like defiance itself.
An object so dense that even light obeyed it.
A place where the universe admitted that there were limits to what could be known.
Maybe that was why I loved it so much. It didn't pretend to make sense to everyone.
Now I stood on the observation deck of a starship, boots braced against the faint hum of the ship's stabilizers, and I felt that same familiar itch behind my eyes. The same one I used to get when a movie refused to play by its own rules.
Only this time, the questions weren't hypothetical.
Gravity was different here. Not dramatically—not enough to send bodies drifting helplessly into the air—but just enough to register in my muscles, a subtle reminder that standard was a convenience, not a universal truth.
I'd learned that already. There were worlds where walking felt like wading through syrup, others where every step carried a buoyant lightness that made humans laugh like children the first time they jumped.
And yes, there were filters. Tanks. Atmospheric processors built into clothing, into architecture, sometimes into biology itself.
Species that breathed methane, ammonia, and other compounds humans would classify as immediately lethal.
The universe hadn't ignored the problem of incompatible environments the way Star Wars had.
It had just solved it inelegantly.
That realization should have soothed me.
It should have closed a loop that had been left irritatingly open since childhood.
Instead, it only made everything more complicated.
Because once the universe admitted to having rules—real ones, layered ones, messy and conditional ones—it also admitted that I could, in theory, understand them.
So, standing here, staring out at the black hole, that knowledge pressed on my mind until it almost hurt.
Beyond the reinforced viewport, space curved inward on itself, light bent into long, strained arcs as if even photons hesitated before surrendering.
The boundary was visible, not as a line, not as an edge, but as a wrongness.
A place where intuition failed, and mathematics had to step in and apologize for being inadequate.
The event horizon. A limit. A promise. A warning.
Every model I knew insisted the same thing: you could approach it, measure its influence, and map its distortions, but you could never observe what lay beyond. Information did not return. Causality broke down. Time itself became a variable instead of a constant.
And yet, here I was. Closer than I had ever allowed myself to imagine.
It played tricks on my perception. My eyes insisted that the darkness was pulling at me, while my instruments calmly reported stable position, compensated vectors, and manageable shear.
My mind trusted the readouts. My body did not.
This was exactly what it had felt like as a child, sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, wondering why fictional starships could bank like fighter jets in a vacuum.
The same dissonance. The same quiet refusal to accept because it just does as an answer.
The difference was that now, nobody was telling me to stop asking.
The Pandraxians didn't flinch when I questioned assumptions. Their engineers argued back, not emotionally, not defensively, but with equations and counterexamples. They didn't need the universe to feel comfortable. They needed it to be predictable. Or at least quantifiable.
I wrapped my arms loosely across my chest to anchor myself. This was where I had always wanted to be. Not on a spaceship. Not in the middle of a war. Not even among the stars themselves. At the boundary. At the place where the universe admitted it didn't fully understand itself yet.
The black hole didn't offer answers. It offered constraints. And within those constraints—within warped spacetime, stretched causality, and incomplete equations—I felt something I hadn't felt since before the invasion.
Purpose.
If the universe had rules, I would find them. If it had exceptions, I would catalog those too. And if this abyss thought it could exist without logic, then it hadn't met me properly yet.
I turned my gaze back toward the black nothingness, broken only by dots shining with varying intensity, and for a moment, I thought of the night sky over Nevada, the way the Milky Way used to spill across it before the Cryons came.
I wondered if those stars still looked the same from Earth, or if loss altered perspective everywhere, not just here.
"Telemetry stable," a Pandraxian technician announced behind me.
Stable was a generous word. I adjusted the projection slate hovering in front of me, my eyes flicking across the immense streams of data, gravitational shear, temporal drift, mass variance. The numbers shouldn't have been possible. They violated half a dozen laws of physics I'd built my career on.
"This isn't a standard black hole," I murmured.
No one contradicted me this time. After our initial meet-up, I had stopped being an enigma to them.
They had become more accepting of me as an anomaly in my own right.
They were getting used to my different level of education, no longer laughing at some of my assumptions just because I hadn't studied the same way they did.
They noticed how hard I tried to catch up with the incredible technology the Pandraxians and the GTU—Galactic Treaty Union—had to offer.
In the beginning, there had been rumors that I was only here because I was the Emperor's new pet. Because I was human like his wife. I didn't confront them because, honestly, I was worried they were right. But over my time here, they—and I —have come to recognize the value I bring to the team.