Starplex

There was no flicker of expression on Jag’s face—not that Keith was good at decoding such things, anyway. Their altercation in the corridor an hour ago merited no comment, apparently. Of course not, thought Keith. Just business as usual for one of them.

He shook his head, and turned away. Thorald Magnor, at the helm station, was a giant human of about fifty, with a fiery red beard. At ExOps, the polychair had been retracted beneath the floor, and the console lowered on its slim legs to accommodate its current user. Rhombus, like all Ibs, resembled a stone wheelchair with a watermelon in the seat.

One of Keith’s monitors was already showing the report from CHAT—the Commonwealth Hyperspace Astrophysics Telescope—about the newly activated shortcut. The exit was in the Perseus Arm, some ninety thousand light-years from their current location. And that was all that was known about it, except that something had recently gone through this shortcut, activating it. What that something was, and where it had gone through the network, was anyone’s guess.

“All right, everyone,” said Keith. “We’ll start with a standard alpha-class probe. Thor, move us to within twenty klicks of the shortcut.”

“Give me two seconds, boss,” said Thor. Keith could simultaneously see Thor’s face in the miniature hologram, and the back of his real head at the station in front of his. His face was large and rough, his beard and hair long and wild. Keith had seen a Viking helmet on a shelf in Thor’s shipboard apartment once; it would have suited him. “We’ve got a probeship in the process of docking.”

A moment later, lights flashed on Rhombus’s sensor web. “I announce with pleasure that the Marc Garneau is secured in docking bay eight,” said a voice with a British accent in Keith’s ear. By convention, Waldahud voices were translated into English with old-fashioned New York accents, while the Ibs were assigned British ones—it made it easier to sort out who was speaking, since the translated voices all came from the same source, the listener’s cochlear implant.

“Okay, boss,” said Thor. “Here we go.” In front of him, Keith could see Thor’s large hands manipulating controls. About five minutes later, the stars stopped moving again. “As requested, boss,” said Thor. “Twenty thousand meters from the shortcut, on the button.”

“Thank you,” said Keith. “Rhombus, please launch the probe.”

Rhombus’s ropelike tentacles snapped across his console as if he were whipping it into submission. His sensor web flashed. “A pleasure to do so.”

A schematic of the probe appeared on one of Keith’s monitors: a silver cylinder, four meters long by one in diameter, its surface studded with scanners, sensors, camera lenses, and CCD plates. The probe had only thruster power and four clusters of conical attitude-control jets; a hyperdrive engine was far too expensive to risk, given that the probe might never come back.

The probe accelerated through a mass-driver tube in one of Starplex’s upper-habitat modules. As soon as the probe was out in space, the bridge staff could see the glow of its thrusters in the holographic sphere surrounding them. The probe rotated along its axis so that each of its instruments would be exposed to the entire panorama of the sky.

There was no visible target for the probe—at least, not yet. But its course had been computed so that it would enter the shortcut at the exact angle specified by CHAT. When it did so, the probe seemed to disappear, a tiny ring of violet fire swallowing it up.

“In friendship I observe that passage through the shortcut was normal,” reported Rhombus in his rich Oxford tones.

And now the waiting began. Each person showed tension in a different way. Lianne at InOps drummed her painted fingernails on the edge of her console. The lights on Rhombus’s web flashed randomly—not a coherent pictogram, but just a sign of mental agitation. Jag picked at his fur and slid his translucent dental plates across each other, making a faint chalk-on-slate sound. Keith got up and paced. Rissa busied herself organizing files on her computer. Only the unflappable Thorald Magnor seemed calm, swinging his giant feet onto his console, and leaning back in his chair, hands interlaced behind his orange mane.

But despite Thor’s appearance, there was reason for concern. Ten years ago, a boomerang launched from Tau Ceti had reached its target, a dormant shortcut near the M3-class star Tejat Posterior in the constellation Gemini. That boomerang never returned to Tau Ceti. Instead, at about the time it was supposed to come home, a smooth ball of metal shot out of the Rehbollo shortcut. Analysis determined that the ball was the remains of the probe after some process had briefly broken all molecular bonds in its construction.