The Last Horizon by Anthony Hartig Read Free Book Online

wormhole. The pipe. It’s the only way to get to Nexus in the allotted time.”
    “This is a small detail that my employer seems to have neglected to tell me.”
    “And who would that be, Scotty?”
    “Nevermind.”
    “You don’t work for Kurlie, do you?”
    “No personal questions, okay Nikki?”
    “He told me you were an envoy for the product.”
    “I’ve got business at Nexus. So tell me, Nikki, has anyone else ever been through this wormhole?”
    “Only three people as far as I know.”
    “Let me guess-- you and Max...”
    “Me, Max,” I sighed, “a nd another pilot who was a close friend of ours. His name was John Tudor.”
    “Was?”
    “It happened over a year and a half ago,” I frowned, “it was Johnny’s first and only time. He and Max went into the pipe during a joint run for Kurlie. They were hauling weapons and heading for the Bakkus system.”
    “Go on.” Scotty urged quietly.
    “Max told me that they just entered Event Horizon when he lost communication with John. He looked out the canopy just in time to see his ship blow apart. Totally dusted, and I mean atomized.”
    “Jesus.”
    “Not sure if you believe me, Scotty?” I smiled. “The one thing that Max’s old ship had in common with the Zephyr was the magnetic hyper-drive cores. Johnny’s ship, the Switchback, had nuclear powered cores. We think that may be the reason we’ve been able to pass through the Pipe in one piece; it may have to do with the magnetic fields generated by our ships and their reaction with the natural fields in the Pipe.” 
    “I may have read a story or two about these, but like I’ve said, all theory. I’ve seen articles with models and illustrations of an Einstein-Rosen bridge outside our galaxy, and they were always followed by a wall of text filled with speculation, but that’s it. I never paid too much attention to that science.”
    “Nobody ever does. Not even the military. Besides, there’s always more to it than academic articles. All it takes is that one person willing to take a closer look. That one person willing to take that extra step.”
    “Who went in first, you or Max?”
    “I did.”
    “How...”
    “Look, it’s not like I woke up one morning and decided it would be pretty cool to enter a wormhole just to see what happens.” I declared impatiently. “I found it by accident. I was making a run two years ago. Hauling weapons and heading for Polaris when I was ambushed by a bandit vessel.
    They cut into my frequency and threatened to blow me out of space unless I allowed them to board my ship and hijack it. This happened in the vicinity of an asteroid belt called Ceres Vesta near Tal-Seti. I changed course and ducked into the belt in an effort to lose them. I played cat and mouse with them for hours in that field until they finally scoped the Zephyr and launched a couple of anti-grav warheads.
    The missiles had a target lock on me and closed-in fast. Then I saw it on my monitor. This void. For all the debris floating around in space leaving some kind of readable signature in its trek, there was something ahead of me that was clear. Something that had no trace. Turns out the Ceres Vesta asteroid belt is really an accretion disc rotating around a wormhole--a quasar, and I had gotten too close and was pulled into its jet.
    The Zephyr’s gravity and magnetic sensors were going crazy the whole time. Off the register. I raised the canopy’s heat shield to get a visual and there it was--total blackness, and yet I was accelerating toward it incredibly fast. I was caught in the Event Horizon.
    Meanwhile the sensors were going wild and the consoles were flashing red. Everything indicated missile impact on the Zephyrs fuselage but nothing happened. I should have been blown apart. Dead. Then everything stopped and went silent. Total silence. The cockpit was blacked-out and the Zephyr was drifting in darkness. The G-locks within the ship quit working and things were floating around me...pens,