they were here to meet decided to let them see it. This gate—this massive hole in the dark—was the source of gravity they were feeling. She was able to pull a timestamp off it, the thing was that big. And then all her analysis systems began to immediately scan the thing for information. It was very far away, her systems told her. Light years away. And that enormous distance between them and the gate was the only reason they could see the whole ring, standing up on edge, in the view screen.
It would take decades to get there under normal circumstances. Unless there was some kind of shuttle gate to get to the main gate. An interesting prospect, to be sure.
But Booty didn’t think that was the case. She wasn’t worried about crossing the distance either, because when she grabbed a second timestamp in order to determine how fast time was passing, she realized it wasn’t passing.
There was no time here.
Unless she and Draden turned back, they were going to reach this gate eventually and then go through it.
“Wow,” Draden said, leaning forward towards the massive view screen. And then he laughed. “I was starting to think I was crazy. I was starting to think something was wrong with me. But there it is. That’s it.”
This gate didn’t look like any other gate Booty had ever been through. Most gates looked like a hole in space with an electric-blue ring around it. The ring was the most interesting part of a gate. It moved and undulated with energy. It was kind of mesmerizing. And if you were stressed out, it was almost calming to look at a gate.
But this gate was not a hole in space and it wasn’t a simple ring.
It looked like a sea of yellow. A golden orb. Or…
“It looks like a sun,” Draden said.
Or yeah, Booty thought. Like a sun.
And like a sun, you didn’t want to look at this thing. It wasn’t that it was too bright, either. It was very luminous. But it didn’t bother her senses to look at it. Not like the light itself could damage her the way a sun could if she studied it for too long.
She didn’t want to look at it because seeing was knowing.
And she didn’t want to know this thing.
But even though she didn’t want to look at this thing, she did look at it. And she couldn’t take her sensors off it. She just couldn’t stop herself. The golden spherical sea in front of her had a sort of pull to it.
Gravity, Booty rationalized. That was all. It was just gravity. This thing was the weight they had been feeling.
At first glance it was nothing but light. Not sunlight and not the kind of light that emanated off some kind of artificial source, such as a lamp.
It wasn’t throwing out a glow from within, like a princess. It was… pulling in all the light around it like…
“Oh. Shit.”
“What?” Draden turned to look at her.
All of a sudden, Booty knew exactly what she was looking at. “That’s not a gate, Draden.”
He turned his attention back to the screen. “Looks like a gate. Do you think it’s a sun? But it’s clearly a ring. I don’t know. It just doesn’t look like any sun I’ve ever seen.”
“It’s not a sun,” Booty said.
Draden looked back at her. “Well, if it’s not a gate and it’s not a sun, then what the hell is it?”
“It’s a white hole.”
He scoffed a little. “OK. But those don’t technically exist.”
Booty knew that. White holes were the opposite of black holes. A black hole was nothing more than a hungry beast that ate light for dinner. It sucked photons into itself and, theoretically, spit the light out at some other, indeterminable destination. The white hole is the other side of a black hole.
“Fuckin’ A! It’s a wormhole,” Draden said, excited at this discovery. “It’s a wormhole. See, I was right! I think we can go through there and end up somewhere completely different. My suns, can you imagine? Do you think it goes to another galaxy, Boots? Or… holy fuck, it could go to another universe!”
He kept talking, but Booty tuned him out. Because the white hole was talking to her. Telling her things. Answering her questions. Filling in her gaps.
And she was remembering who she really was and why she was here.
“No,” Booty suddenly said. This can’t be how it ends. Can it?
“No?” Draden said. “Which part did I get wrong? And