Another collaboration between myself (the writing) and 
In my initial contact with Dr. Shaaka iMaru, I realized something about him that three captains – my husband, Captain M.A. Kirk of Kirk and Dixon Shipping, his business partner Captain Rufus Dixon, and my fleet mentor, retired Captain Benjamin Banneker – had all realized in their own ways. Mine came simply as an understanding by means of being a quarter-Vulcan and thus a mild telepath: the man would not simply be summoned because he was just not the kind of being who would be summoned.
My old mentor, who had come on to the white hole project I was working on as a consultant, finally said it all aloud.
“Now we know Uppaaimarn has been spoken in the galaxy all this time, and that people going to the Academy with me had Uppaaimarn grandparents and so are at least as much Uppaaimarn as you are Vulcan, Admiral. So, can we just understand and accept that Dr. iMaru is at least part Uppaaimarn?”
The staggering implications of that were what kept anyone from asking Dr. iMaru to his face, but my meeting with him was also when we found out that at least being as much Uppaaimarn as I was Vulcan also made Dr. iMaru at least mildly telepathic … but in a way that was well past what the universal translator could help with.
Uppaaimarn was a mindset as well as a language. The language Mr. Oahuapedal of Kirk, Dixon, and Oahuapedal Solutions had rediscovered by taking all known words and loan words and putting them into an algorithm to match them with all known recordings of speech – and thus, he had been able to approximate Uppaaimarn language closely enough to make a universal translator be able to work with it. That had led to the discovery of recordings of spoken Uppaaimarn, and the reality that they had not left the galaxy or even the home quadrant they once had shared with humanity – as Capt. Banneker said, there were Uppaaimarn-Human matches certainly still alive in the galaxy, dating from long after they had been forced from their homeworld.
All that said and discovered: there would be no reading Dr. Shaaka iMaru's mind, although he was at least as telepathic as I was – and yet, that led to another discovery. He had not gotten his knowledge of Uppaaimarn things through study; he was the leading expert because they were his things.
This led to the next realization: it had been disclosed to Capt. Dixon that he had been able to find the key to the Uppaaimar Warp-Canal because he had been chosen to find it. The Uppaaimar had unfinished business with friends of theirs, and although they had chosen not to directly intervene in person (meaning, they were still alive, somewhere in the Local Group if not in the Milky Way proper), they had chosen Capt. Dixon to be the Key Bearer of the Uppaaimar, and thus take that key to where it was needed to solve problems, everywhere in their home quadrant.
But just back up for a moment. The Local Group of galaxies is a space more vast than I can convey to you – but, by means of Uppaaimarn technology, they just folded any two pieces of space-time together and were there. They did not even think about light-years or warp drive; the concept did not exist for them.
And this also was why I did not plan to ask Dr. iMaru the pressing question. The Uppaaimar homeworld had been reopened to archaeology, and slowly the younger human and humanoid civilizations were learning. No need to rush things when the whole order of life in the galaxy would be completely destroyed in the effort to jump a gap humanity was not ready to cross.
In the interim time between talking with Dr. iMaru initially and meeting him at our chosen rendezvous point, the fleet scientists I was working with presented me with something more along the lines of the mystery we were charged to figure out.
“The good news is, the anomaly is not a white hole in the classically Einsteinian sense of the term, Admiral,” said Commander Guilliaume. “Given the track it would have had to travel through the galaxy to approach Pramerania, there is no evidence of the deformation of the star systems that it would have passed in route since observation of the galaxy began in the Sumerian period of human development. We also have cross-referenced all available records from our consortium allies; no such evidence emerges.”
“The bad news is, we have no way of knowing how something like this just winked into existence, and there is no telling how the deploying of an energy field with the characteristics of a small white hole would even take place. On this imagery, we can see better what is happening.
“So, when you strip out that level of detail, this is what you see at the edge:
“Basically, these are anti-gravity anti-cyclones, on a scale that makes planetary storms look minuscule,” said Commander Guilliaume. “Each of those would make Jupiter's Red Spot look like a autumn eddy of winds on a leaf-colored sidewalk.”
“And if that's not naturally occurring,” I said, “someone made it. Have you recalibrated the track of the anomaly for just what it is?”
“There is no track, Admiral. This thing materialized 25 light-years from the Prameranian system, and has been slowly moving in that direction ever since.”
Slowly is relative in the 23rd century – that means sublight speed. Light is the fastest natural energy moving, and anything slower than that is slow because of the great distances there are to travel in space. Commander Guilliaume's written report showed that the anomaly was moving just below light speed, but, in the process, was pushing even light away and from around it – light could not move fast enough to enter it.
“So, it's a model white hole,” I said. “A toy white hole that someone we will have to meet soon enough might have been playing with near Pramerania.”
I have five children, and at that time, three of them were still small. Give those little Kirks the power to build something like that, and they could and would do it, and then get distracted by something else, and run off and leave it running. That's what happens when the top scientist in the galaxy marries one of the galaxy's best though yet unrecognized counterparts in the field, because Marcus Aurelius Kirk Jr was unorthodox (a Kirk, after all) but sound in his science and powerful in his practice when put to it.
Of course, that was the most benign possibility. The thing could also be a weapon, presuming somebody hated the Prameranians enough to want to nudge their planet out of orbit over say, 25 years of time.
Upon looking at the enlarged detail of the model white hole, I thought again of my pendant – it had since been put with the fleet's evidence, so I sent for that, a glass bowl, and some chalkdust.
“It doesn't always have to be complicated,” I said to those around me as I put the pendant down in the chalkdust and put the bowl over it. “We can't see it, but I have my sensor just recording the motion and sending it to the computer, with an order to display beside the motion we see at the edge of the anomaly.”
Sure enough, the chalk scattered and outlined the flow around the pendant in a familiar way...
“Whoever built that,” said Commander Guilliaume, “built your pendant too, Admiral.”
A model of a model of a white hole!
I thought carefully about this. The shopkeeper hadn't lied; she hadn't said she had made the pendant. She also believed what she had been told, and, from the surface of Pramerania, the anomaly had been hidden behind the sun during the day and thus not visible at night either for some time because of the angle of its approach to the system.
Why the clandestine approach, though? Ostensibly it was because Pramerania did not acknowledge the male admirals of the fleet … but there were female captains and commanders enough for the job I was doing. Why not a formal request for help?
And that jogged my memory about the other thing about Pramerania; it was, in general, a sublight speed culture, roughly on par with Earth in the early 21st century. Only the elite had access to warp speed travel, so it was not like the general population could go look for themselves. Not that even the fleet had given the order to go do that, and not that any captain or commander could eventually give that order in the face of something the scope of a white hole.
It would indeed take a full fleet admiral to give that type of order.
I also recognized then that the danger to Pramerania, and my fleet colleagues, was coming from more places than one.
I resisted the urge to go talk to the shopkeeper again for that same reason. I could always pull out the fleet resources assigned to the matter. She was an everyday Prameranian who might have risked her life getting a message to me. I would not put her in further danger to figure out something the evidence was flowing fast enough for me to work out on my own.