Starplex

The Waldahud was growing frustrated as they got closer—his fur was standing up in tufts. “Well, an asteroid belt seems unlikely, especially this far from the nearest star. I suppose it could be material in the A’s Oort, but it seems much too dense for that.”

Starplex continued to move in. “Spectroscopy?” asked Keith.

“Whatever those objects are,” barked Jag, “they’re non-luminous. As for absorption of starlight from behind as it passes through the less opaque parts, the spectra I’m seeing is typical of interstellar dust, but there’s much less absorption going on than I’d expect.” He turned to face Keith. “There’s simply not enough light out here to see what’s going on. We should send up a fusion flare.”

“What if they are ships?” asked Keith. “Their crews might misconstrue it—think we’re launching an attack.”

“They are almost certainly not ships,” said Jag, curtly. “They are planet-sized bodies.”

Keith looked at Rissa, at the holographic Thor and Rhombus, and at the back of Lianne’s head, to see if any of them had any objections. “All right,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

Jag got up and walked over to stand beside Rhombus at the external-operations station. Keith found it funny watching them talk: Jag barking like an angry dog, and Rhombus replying in shimmering lights. Since they were just conversing among themselves, PHANTOM didn’t bother to translate their words for Keith, but Keith tried to listen in, just for the practice. Waldahudar was a difficult language for English speakers to follow, and it required a different grammatical mood depending on the gender of the speaker and the person being spoken to (males could only address females in a conditional/subjunctive way, for instance). On the other hand, specific nouns were avoided as much as possible in polite Waldahudar, lest disagreements over terminology ensue. Throughout the conversation, Jag leaned on Rhombus’s workstation for support; his medial limbs could be used for locomotion or manipulation, but Waldahudin didn’t like dropping down onto their rear four in the company of humans.

Finally, Jag and Rhombus had agreed on what characteristics the flare should have. Lianne at InOps issued an order that all windows on decks one through thirty be covered or turned opaque. She also drew the protective covers over sensitive external cameras and sensors.

When that was done, Rhombus launched the flare—a ball about two meters in diameter—out through a horizontal mass-driver tube that exited on the outer rim of the central disk. He let the flare get about twenty thousand klicks above the ship and then ignited it. The flare burned with the light of a miniature sun for eight seconds.

Of course, it took the light from that flare almost twenty seconds to reach the beginning of the phenomenon that was obscuring the background stars. It turned out that the phenomenon was roughly spherical, measuring some seven million kilometers in diameter, so it took twenty-four seconds—or three times the length of the light pulse—for the illumination to pass through it in a circular band. When it was done, Rhombus summed the various illuminated parts of the image to give a view of the whole thing as if it had been lit up simultaneously. In the all-encompassing hologram, the bridge crew could finally see what was out there.

There were dozens of gray-and-black spheres, each one so dark that the illuminated side was hardly much brighter than the unilluminated one. “Each of the spheres is roughly the size of the planet Jupiter,” said Thor, his head bent down, consulting a readout. “The smallest is 110,000 klicks wide; the largest, about 170,000. They’re clustered into a spherical volume seven million klicks wide, or about five times the diameter of Sol.”

The individual orbs looked a lot like black-and-white photographs of Jupiter, except that they didn’t have neat latitudinal bands of cloud. Rather, the clouds—or whatever it was that formed the visible surface markings—seemed to swirl in simple convection cells from equator to pole, the kind of pattern one might expect if the spheres had next to no rotation. In the intervening space between the world-sized spheres was a diaphanous fog of gas or particles that formed a translucent haze; doubtless this fog had been responsible for most of the twinkling effect they’d observed. The whole thing—spheres and surrounding fog—looked like assorted steel ball bearings rolling around in a pile of black silk stockings.