Yes, Bell saw them, too. Now and again, the vortex would shift, sputter and flare like a solar furnace, giving a glimpse of an impossibly distant sidereal reality of clustered stars.

Orr said something, but it was lost in the rising static. He tried again: “You better arm those charges and get the hell out.”

Bell almost started laughing.

The charges? The RDX Comtac? Sure, they had lugged those metal boxes with them. Each about the size of a footlocker, they contained enough hybrid explosives to level three or four city blocks. But looking at that whirlpool, he knew they were not enough. Even a hydrogen bomb would have been useless against this.  It was just too far beyond earthly technology. This was like trying to extinguish a star with a firehose.

Around the spherical boundary, there was a bright white ring of agitated atoms and superhot plasma. Now and again, a seething jet of blue matter would come spitting out of the vortexual field and break apart into tiny indigo particles that would spin away through the water in roiling columns of bubbles. Bell figured those particles were hot as the guts of a star and if you got in the way, they’d burn right through you.

Javonivic tried to say something, but it was entirely broken up. But there had been desperation in the few words that Bell had heard that made him try to raise her. It was no good, though. He couldn’t raise the Neptune or the LSB now. There was nothing but a whining static on his headset and he had a pretty good idea that it had everything to do with the whirlpool.

“We’re moving,” Murphy said over the intercom.

It was true.

Maybe that’s what she had been trying to warn them about. Because without engaging the vertical or horizontal thrusters of the hardsuits, they should have been sinking. But they weren’t. They were held aloft in some kind of neutral buoyancy. And not only that, but they were very gradually moving towards the whirlpool itself.

It was sucking them in.

Like a real black hole, it was cycling in matter, energy, and even light. The exterior suit lights created a field of illumination around them, but the spots they had directed at the whirlpool itself were not acting like light beams normally did. Instead of striking a surface, reflecting off it or being absorbed by it, the beams were bending at right angles as they neared the mouth of the vortex. Bending and being broken up into prismatic rays and sucked deep into the whirlpool itself.

“Shit!” Bell said. “Shit!”

Warning lights and buzzers were ringing off in his Exosuit, telling him of impending damage to not only the communication systems, but life support and propulsion as well. Massive electromagnetic radiation leaking from the whirlpool was going to short the suit right out, seize up relays and fuse circuits and shut the onboard computers right down.