The Camel’s Eye was rumored to have been constructed by the mad pirate captain, Lauro Baliek, in the earliest days of the settlement. The story goes that he appropriated most of the resources that were meant to start the new colony on Absalom III to build the gate. Of course every new colony was supplied with the hardware to make a basic jump gate, but Baliek’s vision was somewhat more grand.
Not far from the edge of Absalom’s system was a peculiar anomaly. A white hole and a black hole trapped in a mutually destructive dance were only a week away using the standard starship engines of the time. Most colonists would consider marking such a thing as a hazard. And then, let it fade into obscurity as a warning on a map point. Baliek saw it not as a navigation nuisance but as an opportunity.
There was a spot, the balance point between black and white. At one point, the waves of mutually assured destruction canceled each other out into an empty null. Silent, if not peaceful. In that void in the tempest, Baliek would construct the galaxy’s best jump gate.
His astroengineers told him that it shouldn’t be done. Even if everything went perfectly and the assembled gate held, who would use it? Only the most skilled pilots with the most carefully plotted courses could ever hope to fly the narrow corridors between the tangentials that would rip ships to atomic sludge.
Baliek reasoned that the completed gate would be held in a sort of stasis in the null zone. Powered by local energy and shielded from almost everything in the universe by its malevolent neighboring phenomena, it could potentially last for a billion years. And because of the incredible energy available to power it, the gate could be a multi-gate. With a table of codes, a ship could go anywhere, to any known gate constructed.
That puzzle, of course, piqued the astroengineers interest and hubris. The problem with most gates was they were at best, stable wormholes. A shortcut between two points. To build an infinite gate would change everything. They would go down in history as builders of a new age. Baliek may have been a mad despot, but he was a mad despot who knew how to get people to do what he wanted.
The colony on Absalom III didn’t make it past its third year. Robbed of the equipment needed to exploit the wealth of the planet, the settlers fell into a primitive existence only slightly above that of medieval serfdom. Baliek collected what little raw ore the colonists managed to produce and took tithes from their crops. Before long, the settlers were starving, sick, and very tired of the steel grip of Governor Baliek, as he styled himself in those days.
The Unified Planetary Commission, upon receiving the distress signal, sent a ship to evacuate the remaining settlers. Fortunately for the UPC ship Reliant, Baliek needed all the parts for the planetary defense system for his gate. Though the colony ship had armament, the bridge crew mutinied and refused to fire upon their only chance to escape the clutches of Mad Baliek.
Negotiations were tense. Eventually, all the settlers and most of the remaining ship crew made it to the Reliant. The Mad Baliek steered his purloined colony ship to his new gate. His equally mad daughter of a pilot threaded the needle of the Camel’s Eye. Their ship vanished into the “everywhere” gate.
There were no explosions, no debris. No sign that anything went wrong. Or right. Mad Baliek and his skeleton crew were never heard from again. Did they exit at a known gate and fly away? Were they torn to bits so small that their demise couldn’t be properly observed? Are they in an alternate universe now?
Budding pilots whisper the story of the Camel’s Eye to each other in the dark at training camp. It’s still out there, they say. There’s nothing in the records about a colony expedition to Absalom, but we all know how spotty records are from the period before the United Planetary Authority took charge. It is suspicious that no one is allowed to fly out that way. It’s one of the few patches of interdicted space in the known galaxy.
Every ten years or so, an expeditionary force goes out to map the area and check on the state of the com buoys that mark off the forbidden zone. The pilots who fly these missions don’t talk about it, even if you get them really drunk.
They’ll say there is no Camel’s Eye. But you can see the reflection of it in theirs, haunting them. They’ve seen something, measured themselves against it, and have come up short.
Nobody’s brave enough to fly those tangents. Even so, some say that somebody does. Sometimes pirate ships will come out of a gate from “nowhere”. Is it Mad Baliek’s offspring, pillaging the universe from some other dimension?
Or is it simply that modern pirates have found some way to jam jump gate security systems, the better to launch their attacks?
If you dig deep enough into the galactic survey data, you can see good images of the Camel’s Eye. It exists, it most certainly does. And as Mad Baliek’s engineers predicted, it lies outside of regular spacetime, preserved in cosmic amber. If you flip through enough images, you might find some in which it looks like the gate is engaged.
Whether it’s digital artifacts or pirates, it’s better not to draw attention to your find to the archivists, or gods forbid, the authorities. What happens in the Camel’s Eye stays in the Camel’s Eye. Or, as the official channels insist, Nothing Is There.
Remember that and you’ll be fine. And for your own well-being, don’t think too much about the Camel’s Eye.
