Bobiverse, book 6 · Dennis E. Taylor
Twenty Bobs explore an empire that packed up and left. Someone is hunting lone ships at the edge of human space. Bill builds eight prototype warp drives and one of them actually works. And a 200 million solar-mass black hole is still on its way. This page follows the whole book, spoilers included.
The board at the start
The Starfleet war is over and WormNet links the human colonies. Icarus and Daedalus have just found a wormhole network that spans the galaxy, left behind by a federation that ran away. They also found what it ran from.
200,000,000 M☉
A supermassive black hole falling into the Milky Way from the side opposite Earth, headed for the core.
8,000+ planets
153 member species, every one of them paused for transport and gone. They left for the Large Magellanic Cloud 2,000 years ago.
6 rings
Wormhole rings at 5k, 10k, 16k, 26k, 38k and 50k light-years from the core, with spokes every 20 degrees or so.
20 Bobs
Sent to map the network, with a second job nobody says out loud. Find the closest way to Nemesis.
71 chapters, 6 threads
The book cuts between storylines. Each row is one thread and each dot is a chapter, placed in the month it happens. Click a dot or step through with the buttons. Arrow keys work too.
Galaxy map
The Milky Way from above, with the PGF network drawn as rings and spokes. Scrub through the months to watch both exploration teams move and the discoveries pile up. Click a marker for the story behind it. Distances from the core follow the book. The angles are my own layout.
Ultima Thule test range, 10,000 AU out
The Dutchman's drive was too wrecked to copy, so Bill built every Alcubierre variant that didn't contradict the wreck. There were eight. Fire each one and see what it did in the book.
Shrinking the field and the mass raises the speed a lot. None of that helps the people aboard, who live through one year for every light-year traveled at any speed. Bill's fix is to send a drone ahead with one end of a wormhole and step through it once it arrives.
42× c
TOS warp factor 3.48
December 2347 to April 2348
Every colony is attacked at once. The ships look human, they arrive posing as ordinary traffic, and there always seem to be more in reserve. In January the enemy finally shows his face.
SUDAR can see a ship under power. It can't see anything in warp. A torpedo crosses three light-hours in minutes at 42c, drops out a little short, rescans, and micro-jumps to within a hundred meters of its target. Medeiros never knew where they were coming from.
Click a Medeiros ship on the scope to target it, or fire everything at once. You'll only see a torpedo when it arrives.
Medeiros can throw rocks from the Oort cloud forever, so the Bobs can't win by fighting. They change the rules instead.
Sol system, November 2347
Thirty thousand refugees on the Fargo voted to resettle a planet none of them had ever seen. Charles had spent centuries rewilding it. By December he was printing the trees.
Click the ground to print a tree
They didn't want to be pioneers. Everyone could suggest options, similar ideas were merged, and elimination rounds cut the list down to a ranked vote. Click to count it.
The O'Neill Corporation's first megastructure, powered up in the Gehenna system. Will watched it and realized humans no longer need a planet, or anyone to carry them to one.
The thousand-year project
Bill wants to push a 200 million solar-mass black hole off course with pusher plates. It sounds insane, and the arithmetic turns out less insane than you'd expect.
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Scaled up from the 800 plates it took to throw a Mercury-sized world during the Others war.
0
At 20,000 kg a plate, that's about 5×10²³ kg. Bill rounds it to two Mercury-sized planets, then remembers how much copper, gold and platinum each plate needs.
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The 2.5 solar-mass hole in NGC 6934 would need 330 billion plates to throw hard. A measurable wobble needs only half a million.
Garfield's plan uses minimal warp drones carrying wormhole ends. Each one flies 100 light-years at 42c, opens a portal, and an autofactory comes through to build the next drone. That adds a link about every 2.4 years.
1,190 years to reach Nemesis, about 50,000 light-years from the core. Garfield's estimate was 1,200.
Case files
The book answers some of its questions and leaves most of the rest for later. Click a file to open it.
Dramatis personae
Most of them are the same person, more or less. Click a chapter number to jump to it in the story.