Starplex

Keith remembered reading about Borman, Lovell, and Anders, the Apollo 8 astronauts who had circled the moon over Christmas of 1968, reading passages from Genesis back to the people on Earth. They had been the first human beings to get far enough from the homeworld so that they could cup it in an outstretched hand. Maybe more than any other single event, that view, that perspective, that image, had marked childhood’s end for humanity—the realization that all their world was one tiny ball floating against the night.

And now, thought Keith, maybe—just maybe—this image was the one that marked the beginning of middle age: a still frame that would become the frontispiece of volume two of humanity’s biography. It wasn’t just Earth that was tiny, insignificant, and fragile. Keith lifted his hand and reached out toward the hologram, cupping the island of stars in his fingers. He sat silently for a long moment, then lowered his hand, and allowed his eyes to wander over the overwhelming dark emptiness that spread out in all directions. His gaze happened to pass over Jag—who was doing exactly what Keith had done a moment ago, using one of his hands to cup the Milky Way.

“Excuse me, Keith,” said Lianne, the first words spoken by anyone on the bridge for several minutes. Her voice was soft, subdued, the way one would talk in a cathedral. “The electrical system is repaired. We can launch that probe anytime you like.”

Keith nodded slowly. “Thank you,” be said, his voice wistful. He looked once more at the young Milky Way floating in the darkness, and then said softly, “Rhombus, let’s have a look at what’s going on back home.”

Chapter XX

“Launching probe,” said Rhombus.

In the holo bubble, Keith could see the silver-and-green cylinder moving away from the ship, illuminated by a tracking searchlight on Starplex’s hull. It looked out of place against the fuzzy splotches of distant galaxies. Soon the probe touched the shortcut and disappeared.

“The run should only take about five minutes,” said Rhombus.

Keith nodded, trying to contain himself. He didn’t know which he wanted more: to have the probe report that it had detected Rissa’s transponder—meaning the Rumrunner was at least still intact—or for it to report nothing, meaning the probeship might have made it through the shortcut to safety.

Time passed, and Keith’s nervousness grew. A watched pot never boils, but…

He looked up at the trio of clocks floating in space above the hidden port-side door. “How long has it been?”

“Seven minutes,” said Rhombus.

“Shouldn’t your probe be back by now?”

Lights moved up the Ib’s web.

“Then where the hell—”

“Tachyon pulse!” announced Rhombus. “Here it comes.”

“Don’t wait until it’s docked,” said Keith. “Download the data by radio and display it.”

“Doing so with delight,” said Rhombus. “Here we go.”

The probe’s scan was low resolution, and video, rather than holographic. A part of the all-encompassing bubble was framed off in blue, and playback of the flatscreen images the probe had recorded began to appear.

“What the—?” said Keith. “Rhombus, did you use the correct angle of approach?”

“Yes—to within a fraction of a degree.”

Jag said a Waldahudar swear word. By default, PHANTOM didn’t translate profanity, but Keith felt like swearing himself. “That’s not where we came from,” he said.

Jag’s fur was motionless. “No,” he said. The image in the screen showed tightly packed red stars. “At a guess, I’d say it’s not even anywhere in the Milky Way. That looks like the inside of a globular cluster. There are dozens associated with CGC 1008, so it might even be one of those.”

“Which means…”

“Which means,” said Thor, lifting his hands from the helm console, “that we can’t go home. We don’t have the correct address.”

“The latitude/longitude coordinate system must not work the same way over such great distances,” said Lianne.

Keith’s voice was small. “Even at full hyperdrive—”

Jag snorted. “Even at full hyperdrive, to cover six billion light-years would take two hundred and seventy million years.”

“All right,” said Keith. “We’ll try sending probes through in a search pattern. Rhombus, start by piercing the tachyon sphere around the shortcut at the north pole, then work your way down, trying again at every five degrees of latitude and five degrees of longitude. Maybe, if we’re really lucky, we’ll see something we recognize in the scans they bring back.”

Rhombus began launching probes, but it soon became apparent that they were all going to either the globular cluster, or to another region of space where the sky was dominated by a ring-shaped nebula.

“From the point of view of this shortcut,” said Rhombus, “there are only two other active shortcuts. I suppose that means we’re lucky our initial probe came back to us—it only had a one-in-two chance of doing so.”