This time, Ayla was the only person aboard.
It was an ordinary science ship, operating entirely on autopilot... Its systems had been configured to detonate immediately if conditions matched those at the time the previous ship disappeared.
As she approached the exit point, the sensors instantly flooded with an enormous volume of striking data.
Once again, space warped, and gravity unfolded spacetime. Ayla calmly read out the data, which matched the telemetry exactly.
Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Unfortunately, by the time someone realized something different was about to happen, it was already too late.
Ayla's mind began to warp. Now, she was no longer reporting the data: she had begun predicting it. She read out one value after another, but none matched the sensor telemetry.
At first, the telemetry readings did not match her predictions, but that lasted only a few seconds before they aligned perfectly.
In other words, Ayla had perfectly predicted what would happen next.
Just as the monitoring team reported that the interval between her predictions and the actual readings was steadily increasing, the sensors detected an energy surge.
The data matched exactly what Yu Guixing had observed at the time. Then the ship detonated.
A ball of flame erupted among the stars, then quickly vanished into the darkness of Faranis.
Whatever Ayla had encountered there, we would never know the truth.
The horizon signal never appeared again. Perhaps the Research Team could find something in the wreckage.
Xi Yan had anticipated this, but he still grieved the loss of such an innocent science officer.
But the research could not stop. Mother Worm was still waiting for them inside the black hole. She loved humanity so deeply that her gravity sought to hold humanity tightly in her embrace.
Those who became science officers were, after