perfidy

In flat spacetime, acceleration is mass over force. The larger the mass, the harder it is to effect a change in speed or direction. Change in velocity requires the application of force, a result of the transformation of energy into work. At the dawn of the space age, chemical energy converted into force by the simple expedient of burning provided the motive power for most every space vehicle. Since then, advancing science and the exigencies of war have led to a few refinements.

Baby has eighty nine seconds to lay some weapons grade confusion on the mind of her opponent. The best sort of confusion, she felt, is massive indeterminacy of location. Near the center of her, deft magnetic fingers stripped layer after molecule thin layer from a dense white brick of solid antihydrogen. Other magnetic fields, kept wandering normal matter from interfering with the ultimately reactive material. Out of containment, the wisps of antimatter moved purposefully toward annihilation.

In a bottle built of fields of force, matter meets antimatter. As each atom touches its mirror image, they merge and are consumed utterly, the only remnant being a stupendous amount of radiant energy. This same energy, used very like a rocket, propelled her, and the entire fleet from the crumbling moon across four years of space to here. But now, it would be used rather differently.

Energy is mass, mass energy. Dense enough fields of energy can warp the fabric of spacetime just as matter can. But energy is infinitely more malleable than its slower cousin. The energy released within that chamber, coaxed and wheedled by means of abstruse mathematics, spun and folded, stretched into a eleven dimensional cat's cradle of strung out quantum states. The process repeats, twice, four times, and by a recursive logic light is transformed into a distilled essence of gravity.

Autonomous intelligences monitor the growth in planck-sized slices of time, alternately feeding and starving the ravenous little monster. Baby begins to feel a twisting inside – flat spacetime develops a curve and she senses the slope as gravity. But this is an echo. The infant black hole, already more than a million tons in virtual weight, is already gone. In a second, the dimple in space time is ten thousand kilometers ahead of her, and more than a million times more massive.

This twisted skein of spacetime is a self-fulfilling prophecy, of sorts. It gathers in virtual particles from the quantum foam that is the stuff of which all other stuff made. It grips itself smaller, tighter, until its gravitational pull is that of a small world. The small dimple in space has become a deep but narrow well of gravitational force. Like a woman pulling in her skirt, the hole draws in space around it. But the exponentially growing pseudo gravity scrabbles at the flat space around it, and dragging it slower like a cat on ice. And as it slows, baby gets ready to surf.

Baby rides sloping spacetime to within a klick of the warp. As even the earliest space travelers knew, the closer in to a gravity well you get, the more energy you can extract from it. None of the early probes were able to pass so close to a planet, if for no other reason than the immense bulk of the planet was in the way. This close to a point mass, baby can effect dramatic delta-v.

This close, she sees a pale halo of coruscating blue light, as virtual particle pairs created on the event horizon are split forever – one sucked into the maw of the warp, the other released as energetic light. She steps uptime, and she can see that the light is brightening and flattening as the artificial black hole spin spins faster.

A single chirp from her drive, and she's in the box. Gravitational riptides feel like nausea as she is wrenched from the path that Newton's laws had laid down for her. She sings as she flies, and thoughtfully drops a few presents for oscar in her wake.

Nothing comes for free. She feels hungry. Thirteen percent of her antimatter reserve consumed in tricking the universe into letting her make a right turn in space. And nothing is free. That black hole is not the real black hole, as it is now belatedly discovering. As long as the cat's cradle can consume, it grows. The skein is limited in its ability to roll quantum energy into distortions in spacetime, and when that threshold is crossed, the skein begins to unwind.

Twenty seconds after she passed, the hole is unraveling. Gravitational fingers that had pinched the fabric of space weaken, and the holes apparent mass approaches that of a small asteroid. Fifteen seconds later, at the mass of a large mountain, another threshold is reached. Gravity too weak to contain the energy invested in its creation lets go completely. After a brief detour as a supermassive virtual object, the antimatter explosion that began, resumes.

A hundred small grey cylinders fall in formation toward a disk of eldritch blue. The blue winks out. Soundless fury in its place, the unbearable whiteness only the smallest and weakest portion of the energy released. Most of the energy is squeezed up toward the blue end of the spectrum - gamma and even more energetic rays. It turns out that the only thing more powerful than an antimatter explosion is to take an antimatter explosion, wad it up into a impossibly tight ball, and then let it explode.

Baby feels regret wasting a CRAM for a course change. The effect of a compressed radiation AM bomb on a large habitat is glorious to behold. But not entirely wasted. As the shock front of the explosion reaches the cylinders, energetic photons suffuse the long core at the center. With so powerful an explosion it is a matter of a fraction of a moment before they saturate, and the core lases. X-ray lasers are perhaps the most inefficient means of creating a beam of coherent light ever devised by man. But if you're lighting off a two point nine gigaton explosion anyway, energy is not your biggest problem.