Another collaboration between myself (the writing) and 
My husband, Marcus Aurelius Kirk Jr, is one of those husbands who will look over another woman doing well and say, “No, you are NOT out here trying to outdress my wife! No, ma'am!”
Not that he says that, but he went out and started shopping after we got home from Princess Bazelle's coronation … I got new bracelets …
… bangle bracelets ...
… and two fabulous wrap-around skirts …
But we were most intrigued by the free gift of the pendant that you see above … it matched with every outfit, and, it added amazing movement to anything I wore.
One day it dawned on us that the pendant was adding movement – I was standing still , but my blouse was still blowing around, and my husband was enjoying the glimpses down my cleavage until we noticed how odd it was.
My husband went and got the sensor to check.
“Nothing harmful … it's just like a wind, but from what that thing is made of, it ought not to be able to do that.”
I took the pendant off.
“The shopkeeper gave you this for free?”
“Yes – you buy so much, they throw in a free pendant, and I dropped a grip over there … our anniversary is coming up, and you're one of the finest women in the galaxy, so you know I have to brag!”
“So, they know I am an admiral?”
“The admiral! The most beautiful one in the galaxy – and the best if you ask me!”
I restrained a sigh … my husband's boyish exuberance refused to die, and I adored him for it, but he hadn't even lived as long as I had been in the fleet … people didn't drop things to him for me because I was the most beautiful (although I was). I was also the fleet's highest-ranking science officer – in that sense, I was the very best.
“Let's just go back to this shop,” I said. “I promise I will not ask about what else you have on order.”
So, we went back to the shop – it was busy, but the closed sign went up immediately as the little girl at the door ran yelling – “Mamma! You were right! It's the admiral! She came!”
My husband tensed up a little, but I put my hand on his arm.
“There is no threat,” I said. “There is hope and fear here, but no threat to either of us.”
He put his weapon on stun anyway, but just walked in with me and was as surprised as I was when the shopkeeper ran, almost tripping over her loose-fitting robes, and fell down at my feet.
“Admiral Triefield – help us, please! Save us!” she cried.
Being mistaken for Jesus Christ is a bit disturbing if you are an humble type of old admiral … and, it was only going to get worse.
The shopkeeper was from Pramerania, a matrilineal society – she had reached out to me because I was the highest-ranking woman in the fleet. To her, there were no other admirals worth speaking of; she had not approached me directly but through my consort because she put me at the level of her queen. She also did not have the language to completely describe what she was trying to convey with the pendant about what was going on near her star system, and, little wonder once she showed me actual imagery from her homeworld:
You would have to be Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein, or have studied them very closely, to even be able to comprehend the data that went with that.
Captain M.A. Kirk is every inch the scientist that I am, and so he turned pale as I turned green.
My little pendant that was the free gift had a mildly repellent force to it, a little force field that pushed light objects from around it.
That was a tiny, tiny miniature of what the anomaly predicted by Newton and Einstein was doing to all space-time around it, and what it would do to Pramerania's star system as it passed through.
We had 20 years to solve the problem, but that wasn't going to be anywhere near enough. Make it 20 million years with all known human and human-led consortium resources that were known to that point in the 23rd century, and that woudn't be enough.
It's one thing if a star in your vicinity collapses into a massive black hole. It retains much of its old gravity, and its orbit through the galaxy. Anything that survives the supernova itself will generally be shepherded back into orbit – and, worlds had recently been discovered orbiting massive black holes, getting enough light and heat from their lit-up event horizons and jets to survive:
But the important thing to understand – the light from a black hole's event horizon is all the matter around it being seen for the last time, compressed together by the massive gravitational forces and orbiting at near light speed before being pulled in. The jets are often caused by rotation of the black hole – some of the material is flung out like a slingshot.
A white hole, however, is a completely different kind of creature – a repellent force with the power of a black hole turned inside out – nothing can enter, and everything around it is pushed away.
Never mind the problems of figuring out how the thing could have formed – there was no science to even begin to cope with that. Matter/antimatter we had just come to understand in the 22nd century. Gravity/anti-gravity? No way.
Not that the problem of a white hole on the loose that would destroy each and every star system it so much as approached was any more solvable – if, of course, this was what it was.
“You figure somebody should have noticed this before now, unless it was just created,” said Mark to me about it.
“Oh, I imagine we would have seen that,” I said. “It seems silly to talk about the white hole that snuck up on us, but … .”
The scientists of Pramerania were credited with the discovery of what for the time was simply referred to as the anomaly, and I pulled together the team of fleet scientists that would work with them to study the matter from there.
There was just one problem – an inconvenience.
“Pramerania will not grant the fleet access to the planet unless I lead the team personally,” I said to Mark.
“Isn't that a commander/captainish type of job?” he said.
“Yes, as a full fleet admiral it's not my type of job, but diplomatic concerns … it is a matrilineal society,” I said. “I get the feeling we haven't been told everything yet, either.”
“So do I,” Mark said. “My grandfather was that kind of scientist known as a farmer, and he said once that 'If you are seeing things that ain't so, it ain't so what you're seeing.' ”
“Therein lies the problem,” I said. “I've talked to scientists across the consortium, and even among our galactic rivals just to see what has interested them in terms of observation. There is no way a white hole could have formed that near to Pramerania without everybody in this quadrant noticing that, and there is also no way that such a phenomenon could have occurred and just been leisurely easing its way from anywhere in the Local Group of galaxies without anyone observing something about it.”
“And yet, it is there,” I said, “which may also just mean that everything we think we know about this thing ain't so – oh, hang on, Dix is calling.”
Captain Rufus Dixon was my husband's business partner, and he had a doozy of an idea.
“Everything we know about what you're working on is from Newton's time,” he said to me, “but remember: we know the Uppaaimar were here before then, and they were not daunted by a lot of the things that we were.”
“Can you get in touch with Dr. iMaru?” I said. “I mean I know he is probably at work on the Uppaaimar homeworld, but any light he could shed on whether the Uppaaimar or any of their equally ancient peer civilizations had seen this thing coming would be helpful.”
“I'll find out,” he said.