Starplex

“On my way. Summon Jag, too, please. Close.” He looked at Hek. “Good work. See if you can narrow down the source of the signals further. I’ll have Thor take Starplex in a circular path around the dark-matter field, scanning for tachyon emissions, radiation, thruster glow, or any other signs of alien ships.”

* * *

Keith strode onto the bridge, Rissa right behind him. They moved to their workstations. “Trigger watson playback,” said Keith.

Lianne pushed a button, and a full-motion video message appeared in a framed-off section of the holographic bubble. The image was of a Waldahud male with a silvery-gray hide. PHANTOM replaced the sound of the creature’s barking with English words for the playback into Keith’s ear implant, although, of course, they didn’t fit the movements of the Waldahud’s mouth. “Greetings, Starplex.” The status line at the bottom of the screen identified the speaker as Kayd Pelendo em-Hooth of the Rehbollo Center for Astrophysics. “The boomerang sent to the shortcut designated Rehbollo 376A has returned. I suspect you’ll want to stay where you are, investigating the shortcut you’re at now, since its appearance on the network is unexplained. However, we thought Jag and others would be interested in seeing the recordings made by the boomerang just before returning home. They are appended to this message. I think you will find them… interesting.”

“Okay, Rhombus,” said Keith. “Use the data from the boomerang to create a spherical holo display around us. Show us what it saw.”

“A pleasure to serve,” said Rhombus. “Downloading now; the display will be ready in two minutes, forty seconds.”

Lianne rubbed her hands together. “It never rains but it pours,” she said, turning around and grinning at Keith. “Yet another new sector of space opened up for exploration!”

Keith nodded. “It never ceases to amaze me.” He got up from his chair, and paced a little, waiting for the hologram to be prepared. “You know,” he said absently, “my great-great-grandfather kept a diary. Just before he died, he wrote about all the great advancements he’d seen in his lifetime: radio, the automobile, powered flight, spaceflight, lasers, computers, the discovery of DNA, and on and on.” Lianne seemed rapt, although Keith was aware that he might be boring everyone else. To hell with them; rank had its privileges, chief among them the right to ramble on. “When I read that as a teenager, I figured I’d have nothing to write about for my own descendant when my life came to a close. But then we invented hyperdrive and AI, and discovered the shortcut network, and extraterrestrial life, and learned to talk to dolphins, and I realized that—”

“Excuse me,” said Rhombus, his lights flashing in the strobing pattern high species used to signal an interruption, “the hologram is ready.”

“Proceed,” Keith said.

The bridge darkened as the image of Starplex’s current surroundings was shut off, shrouding the room in featureless black. Then a new picture built up from left to right, scan line by scan line, washing over the bridge, until it seemed once again to be floating in space—the space of the newest sector to become accessible to the Commonwealth races.

Thor let out a long, low whistle.

Jag clicked his dental plates in disbelief.

Dominating the view, receding slowly, was another fiery green star, perhaps ten million kilometers from the shortcut point.

“I thought you said our green star was a freak,” said Keith to Jag.

“That’s the least of our worries,” said Thor. He swung his feet off his console and turned to face Keith. “Our boomerang didn’t activate that shortcut until it dived into it.”

Keith looked at him blankly.

“And these pictures were taken before it did that.”

Jag rose to his feet. “Ka-dargt. That means—”

“It means,” said Keith, suddenly getting it, too, “that stars can emerge from dormant shortcuts. Christ, they could be popping out of all four billion portals throughout the Milky Way!”

Chapter X

That night, Keith was eating dinner alone. He loved to cook, but he also loved to have someone to cook for—and Rissa was working late this evening. She and Boxcar had finally had a breakthrough in their Hayflick-limit studies, or, at least, so it appeared. But they were having trouble replicating the results, and so she’d just had sandwiches sent up to her lab.

Keith sometimes wondered how he’d gotten the job as Starplex’s head honcho. Oh, it made sense, of course. A sociologist was assumed to be good both at managing the miniature society aboard the ship and at dealing with any new civilizations they might encounter.