The imperial forces returned fire, sending forth a dazzling cascade into pitch-black space. First, Yang’s fleet hurled sheaves of light at the enemy. Both sides were forced to engage head-on.Īt 2100 hours that same day, they were in range. Neisebach’s opinion was sound in its persuasiveness. “Putting the danger zone at their rear limits our trajectories of attack. Moreover, it had assumed a convex formation with the black hole at its rear.Īs Steinmetz inclined his head slightly to one side, chief of staff Vice Admiral Neisebach dispelled his commander’s doubts.
“Then I’m assuming we shouldn’t get any closer than one billion kilometers?”Īccording to the operator, Yang’s fleet was precisely toeing that one billion–kilometer line. Its Schwarzschild radius is about nine kilometers, but its mass is sixty quadrillion tons to the ten billionth power, and the danger-zone radius is estimated to be, at most, 3,200 light-seconds, or 960,000,000 kilometers.” “We’ve confirmed the existence of a black hole. The reason for this was obvious from the data captured on Phezzan. Midway between the Raighar and Tripura star systems, it was far removed from any known shipping routes. But the location of his discovery was problematic. This was, unbeknownst to Steinmetz, because Yang had wanted to be noticed. On March 1, Steinmetz discovered the Yang fleet much sooner than he’d expected.
