Giants of light and hellfire swirled around Blair like lightning bugs caught in a twister. She couldn’t rely on her vision at these speeds; relativity caused the universe to warp and flux around her little cocoon of spacetime in ways that weren’t only unnatural to her earthborn eyes, but unnatural even to nature. Outside of her tiny ship’s shockfield, space itself flattened into infinite bulging lines that only took on the dim reds or brilliant silvers of extreme Doppler shifting. Luckily her eyes were not all she had to rely on.
The thick biotronic fluid that cradled her frail water-based body also connected her directly to the Nightheart, and it to her. But connected wasn’t a strong enough word—your hand isn’t connected to you, it is you. And so it was with Blair and the Nightheart. It was her body, her sensory organs, her physical presence in the outside world, and she was its mind.
And right now, Blair’s mind was completely focused on a single task: reach the core.
Holistically speaking, she was already deep within the region defined as the galactic core, but she was racing to its raging heart as fast as her negative-matter-powered body could go. There was so little time left—only precious few seconds, objectively—but still so much to accomplish. There were hypergiants to blow apart like dandelions and neutron stars to shatter like porcelain. There were cosmic strings that needed knotting and tachyon storms that needed provoking. But most of all, there was a singularity that needed rescue from a bottomless well. She would wrench it from its dark shell and use it for that noblest of endeavors: to start all over again.
Fresh young stars shot by as tubular particle strings, bending agreeably to her will.
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