Starplex

Chapter VII

Jag and Rissa took an elevator up to the bridge, and soon the Waldahud was standing in front of the two rows of workstations, telling his colleagues of the fantastic discovery. “There’s a metaphor that’s been carried by the current for years,” he barked, “that visible matter is just froth on an inky ocean of dark matter. We knew the dark matter was there because of its gravitational effects, but we’ve never seen it until now. Those spheres out there, and the gravel fog between them, are made out of dark matter.”

Lianne let out a low whistle. Keith raised an eyebrow. He knew a bit about dark matter, of course. CalTech astronomer Fritz Zwicky had deduced its existence back in 1933, through observations of the galaxies in the Virgo Cluster. Those galaxies were rotating around each other so quickly that if the visible stars were the only major source of mass present, the whole thing should have flung apart long ago. Subsequent studies showed that almost every large structure in the universe—including our Milky Way galaxy—behave as if there were far more mass present than could be accounted for by the suns and any reasonable number of attendant planets. Some previously undetected matter, dubbed “dark matter” because it was apparently neither luminous nor highly reflective, accounted for over 90 percent of the gravity in the universe.

As usual, Thorald Magnor had his large feet up on his console, and his thick fingers interlaced behind his head, buried in his red hair. “I thought we’d already discovered what dark matter was,” he said.

“Only part of it,” said Jag, lifting two of his four hands. “We’ve long known that baryonic matter—matter made up of protons and neutrons—accounts for less than ten percent of the mass of the universe. In 2037, we discovered that the ubiquitous tau neutrino has a very slight mass—about seven electron volts worth. And we found that the muon neutrino also has a trifling mass, about three one-thousandths of an electron volt. Since these two types of neutrinos are so abundant, in total they account for about three or four times more mass than all the baryons do. But that still left us with as much as two thirds of the universe’s mass unaccounted for—until now.”

“What makes you think the stuff out there is dark matter?” Keith asked.

“Well,” said Jag, “it isn’t normal matter; that much is certain.” Although he was trying to hide it, Jag was holding on to the beveled edge of Thor’s console with one hand so that he wouldn’t drop down onto four legs. Starplex operated on a four-shift cycle as a concession to the Waldahudin, who came from a world with a short day, but Jag had been working overtime. “In early dark-matter studies, there were two candidates for the material composing it, named WIMPs and MACHOs by human astronomers—all of whom should have to swim in a river of urine, by the way. WIMPs are ‘weakly interacting massive particles’—you see the gibberish foisted upon us in search of these silly acronyms? Anyway, the tau and muon neutrinos turned out to be WIMPs.”

“And MACHOs?” asked Keith.

“ ‘Massive compact halo objects,’ ” said Jag. “The ‘halo’ is the sphere of dark matter that has a galaxy at its center. The ‘massive compact objects’ were thought to be billions of Jupiter-sized bodies not associated with any particular star—a fog of gaseous worlds through which the luminous material of the galaxy moves.”

Lianne was leaning forward, chin resting on her hand. “But if the universe really were permeated with—with MACHOs,” she asked, “wouldn’t we have detected them by now?”

Jag turned to her. “Even Jupiter-sized objects are puny on the cosmic scale. And since they’re nonluminous, the only way we would see them is if one wandered in front of a star we happened to be observing. Still, the effect would be minor: just a slight gravitational lensing of the star’s light, causing a temporary brightening. Such events have occasionally been seen; the oldest recorded observation of one was made by human astronomers in 1993. But even if space were lousy with MACHOs—enough so that they made up two thirds of all the mass in the universe—only one out of every five million stars you could observe at any given moment would likely be undergoing gravitational lensing due to one passing by.” He gestured toward the twinkling part of the starfield. “We only see gross effects here because we’re so close to the field of dark matter, and because the dark matter itself is transparent. We’re actually just seeing regular space dust, sprinkled throughout the dark-matter objects.”

Keith looked at Rissa, his eyebrows raised. She made no objection.

“Well,” said the director, “this certainly seems to be a major discovery, worthy of further—”

“Forgive the interruption,” said Rhombus, “but I’m detecting a tachyon pulse.” Rhombus rotated the starfield hologram surrounding the bridge to bring the shortcut front and center; the effect on Keith’s stomach was similar to what he experienced in a planetarium when the operator was trying to demonstrate that learning could be fun. Jag quickly took his seat on Keith’s left. The shortcut was a pinprick of green—the color of whatever was coming through it—surrounded by the usual ring of violet Soderstrom radiation.

“Is it a Commonwealth ship?” Keith asked.

“No,” said Rhombus. “There’s no transponder signal of any kind.” The green spot continued to grow. “Incredulous: that is bright”—PHANTOM’s stilted translation of the words that were flashing over Rhombus’s mantle. But the Ib was right. The shortcut was the brightest object in the sky exceeding even the A-class star Jag had spotted earlier.

“Let’s give it lots of room, whatever it is,” said Keith. “Thor, start backing us away.”

“Doing so.”

Keith looked to his left. “Jag, spectral analysis.”

The Waldahud read from one of his monitors. “Scanning. Hydrogen, helium, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, neon, magnesium, silicon, iron…”

“It looks pure green,” said Keith. “Could it be a laser?”

Jag turned his two right eyes to look at the director, while keeping his other two focused on his instruments. “No. There’s nothing coherent about that light.”

The fiery green pinprick was growing wider; it had become a fiercely bright circle several meters in diameter.

“How about a fusion exhaust?” asked Lianne. “Could it be a ship coming out of the shortcut tail first, as if it were decelerating?”

Jag consulted more readouts. “It certainly is a fusion signature,” he said. “But it would have to be a very powerful engine.”

Keith left his console and walked over to stand just behind Rhombus.

“Any chance of contacting that ship?”

One of Rhombus’s manipulatory ropes whipped out to touch a control. “Forgive me, but not on conventional radio. The thing is putting out an enormous amount of EMI. A hyperspace radio link might work, but there’s no way of knowing which quantized level they use for communication.”

“Start at the lowest and work your way up,” Keith said. “Standard prime-number sequences.”

Another flick of a rope. “Transmitting. But it would literally take forever to try every level.”

Keith turned around and faced Rissa. “Looks like you might get your first-contact opportunity after all.” He turned back to look at the shortcut. “Christ, that’s bright.” Every object on the bridge that wasn’t swathed in the hologram was bathed in green light now. Although no shadows fell on the invisible floor, the staff members were all casting harsh ones on the seating gallery behind the workstations.

“It’s even brighter than it looks,” said Jag. “The camera is filtering most of it.”

“What the hell could it be?” Keith asked, looking at Jag.

“Whatever it is,” said Jag, “it’s streaming out a lot of charged particles—could be a particle-beam weapon.” The green circle continued to expand. “Diameter is now one hundred and ten meters,” said Jag. “One fifty.” His barking grew softer, incredulous. “Two fifty. Five hundred. A full kilometer. Two kilometers.”

Keith turned back to the flaring image in the hologram. “Jesus,” he said, bringing an arm up to shield his eyes.

Slapping of ropes from Rhombus—an Ibese scream. “Profuse apologies,” he said a moment later as the display darkened somewhat. “The object is brighter than the automatic compensators are designed to deal with. I shall henceforth monitor the display directly.”

The green circle kept expanding at a great rate. Its edges were coruscating with violet Soderstrom discharges—a pyrotechnical halo around the vast green center. The central area still seemed to be a flat circle.

“Temperature is about twelve thousand Kelvin,” said Jag.

“That’s hot,” said Rissa. “What in God’s name is it?”

An alarm started sounding, warbling high and low.

“Radiation warning!” shouted Lianne. She wheeled to face Keith. “Recommended action: move Starplex.”

“Right,” Keith said, sprinting back to his command station. “Thor, pick up the pace. Put us another fifty thousand klicks from the shortcut.” He glanced at his astrogation readout. “Course two hundred and ten degrees by forty-five degrees. Use thrusters only; I don’t want to drop into hyperspace until we know what that thing is.”

“As you say, boss,” said Thor, hands flying over his instruments.

The apparent growth of the green circle slowed, but it was still getting larger; its expansion rate was exceeding Starplex’s maneuvering speed.

“I didn’t know a shortcut could open that wide,” said Rhombus. “Jag, just what exactly is coming through it?”

Both sets of Jag’s shoulders rose and fell. “Unknown. The spectral analysis is unusual—lots of heavy-element Fraunhofer absorption lines. It matches nothing in our database.” He paused. “If it’s a fusion exhaust, the ship must be gigantic.”

“It looks perfectly flat,” said Rissa. “How can it keep expanding as a circle?”

“The apparent expansion is caused by the opening up of the shortcut aperture,” said Jag. “They open at a finite speed, and, when touched by a flat surface, an aperture will take on a circular shape until the edges are reached.” He used his left eyes to glance at a readout. “The rate at which the aperture is opening is increasing, although at an uneven rate.”

The halo of violet, representing the edges of the portal, was just the faintest border around the vast circle, like a matte line around a spaceship model in an old-fashioned SF movie.

“How big is it now?” Keith asked.

Jag was evidently getting tired of answering that question. He touched keys on his console and a trio of color-coded rulers demarcated in different units formed a glowing three-quarters frame around the green circle. It now measured 450 kilometers in diameter.

“Radiation levels are increasing rapidly,” said Lianne.

“Thor, double our retreat speed,” Keith said. “Can our force screens handle this?”

Lianne was consulting a set of readouts. She shook her head. “Not if it gets much bigger.”

The warbling sound was continuing in the background. “Turn that damned alarm off,” Keith said. He looked at the Waldahud. “Jag?”

“It’s flat,” Jag said. “Like a wall of flame. Diameter is now over a thousand kilometers. Thirteen hundred… Seventeen hundred…”

The emerald light dominated the sky. The humans brought up hands to shield their eyes again.

Suddenly, a streamer of green fire shot out of the wall, like a neon whiplash against the night. It continued to stretch out until it had extended over fifty thousand kilometers from the shortcut.

“My God…” said Rissa.

“Tell me that’s not a weapon,” said Jag, rising to his feet, and standing with both sets of arms crossed behind his back. “We would have been incinerated if we hadn’t moved the ship.”

“Could it—could it be the Slammers?” asked Lianne.

The green streamer was now falling back toward the vast luminescent circle of the shortcut. As it did so, it broke up into fiery segments, each thousands of kilometers long.

“Thor, prepare to go into hyperdrive on my order,” Keith said.

“All stations, secure for hyperdrive,” said Lianne’s voice over the loudspeakers.

“Is it a forcefield of some kind?” asked Rissa.

“Unlikely,” said Jag.

“If that is a ship’s exhaust,” Keith said, “it must have the biggest goddamn ramscoop in history attached to the other end.”

“Diameter is eight thousand kilometers,” said Jag. He had already recalibrated the units on the scale bars twice. “Ten thousand…”

“Thor, thirty seconds to hyperdrive!”

“All stations, alert,” said Lianne. “Hyperdrive in twenty-five seconds, mark.”

Another tongue of green flame shot out of the widening circle.

“Hyperdrive in fifteen seconds, mark,” said Lianne.

“Sweet Jesus, it’s huge,” Rissa said, under her breath.

“Hyperdrive in five sec—hyperdrive initialization canceled! Automatic override!”

“What? Why?” Keith looked at the pair of computer eyes mounted on his workstation. “PHANTOM, what’s happening?”

“Gravity well is too steep for safe hyperspatial insertion,” replied the computer.

“Gravity well? We’re in open space!”

“Oh, Gods,” said Jag. “It’s big enough to curve spacetime.” He moved out from behind his console and jogged in front of the cluster of workstations. “Reduce display brightness by half.”

Rhombus’s ropes flicked. The view of the giant green circle dimmed, but it was still flaring, overexposed.

“Halve it again,” snapped Jag.

The view grew dimmer. Jag was trying to look at it, but it was still too bright for eyes that had evolved under a dim red sun. “Once more,” he said.

The view darkened further—and suddenly there was detail visible on the green surface: a granularity of lighter and darker shades…

“That’s not a ship,” said Jag, his own voice, audible beneath PHANTOM’s translation, the staccato barking of Waldahud astonishment. “It’s a star.”

“A green star?” said Rissa, amazed. “There’s no such thing.”

“Thor,” Keith snapped, “full thruster power—perpendicular course away from the shortcut. Move!”

The alarm began to warble again. “Level-two radiation warning!” shouted Lianne overtop of it.

“Force screens to maximum,” Keith snapped.

“Can’t do both, boss,” shouted Thor. “Full thrusters can’t be combined with maximum screens.”

“Priority to thrusters, then! Get us out of here!”

“If that’s a star,” said Rissa, “we’re way too close, aren’t we?” She looked at Jag, who said nothing. “Aren’t we?” she asked again.

Jag lifted his upper shoulders. “Way, way too close,” he said softly.

“If the radiation doesn’t fry us,” said Rissa, “the heat will.”

“Thor, can’t you get any more speed?” Keith said.

“No can do, boss. The local gravity well is steepening rapidly.”

“Would we do better to abandon the mothership?” asked Lianne. “Perhaps our smaller ships could escape more easily?

“Forgive me, but no,” said Rhombus. “Beside the fact that we don’t have enough auxiliary vessels to evacuate everyone, only a few of them are outfitted with shielding for close approaches to stars.”

Lianne had her head tilted to one side; listening to private communications over her ear implant. “Director, we have panicked messages coming in from all over the ship.”

“Standard radiation precautions,” snapped Keith.

“Those will be inadequate,” said Jag softly as he moved back to his workstation.

Keith looked over at Rissa. One of her monitors was displaying plans for Starplex, showing the two mutually perpendicular diamonds intersecting the wide central disk. “What happens,” she said, turning to him, “if we rotate Starplex so that the ocean deck is at a right angle to our line of travel?”

“What difference will that make?” asked Keith.

“We could use the seawater as radiation shielding. The ocean is filled to a depth of twenty-five meters. That’s a lot of insulation.”

Lights on Rhombus’s web winked on and off. “It would certainly help—everyone who isn’t on or below the ocean deck, that is.”

Lianne spoke up. “We’ll all be fried unless we do something.”

Keith nodded. “Thor, rotate Starplex as described.”

“ACS jets firing.”

“Lianne, devise a plan to evacuate all personnel from decks thirty-one through seventy.” She nodded.

“PHANTOM, intercom now!”

“Intercom on,” said PHANTOM.

“Everyone—quickly. This is Director Lansing. Following instructions from Internal-Ops Manager Karendaughter, evacuate decks thirty-one through seventy. Get out of the engineering torus, out of the docking bays, out of the cargo holds, and out of all four lower-habitat modules. Everyone move into the upper-habitat modules. All dolphins—either get out of the ocean deck altogether, or swim up to the surface of the ocean and stay there. Everyone, move in an orderly fashion—but move! PHANTOM, end, translate, and loop.”

In the holo display, the surface of the star was bulging out of the circular shortcut opening. “The shortcut-aperture expansion rate is increasing rapidly,” said Jag. “It seemed to take a while to get going, probably because the star was essentially flat at first, but now that the surface is showing curvature, the thing is opening more quickly. Diameter is now one hundred and ten thousand kilometers.”

“Radiation is increasing rapidly as more of the surface comes through,” said Lianne. “And if it shoots another prominence in our direction, we’ll be cinderized.”

“Evacuation status,” snapped Keith.

Lianne pushed buttons and twenty-four square images appeared, replacing part of the starscape bubble. Each showed a different view through PHANTOM’s eyes, and the scenes kept shifting, cycling through the computer’s various cameras.

A corridor—level fifty-eight, according to the superimposed status line: six Ibs rapidly rolling forward.

An intersection: three human women in track suits hurrying toward the camera from one direction, and two Waldahudin and a human male rushing in from the other direction.

The zero-g part of the central shaft: people using the handholds to shoot themselves upward.

A vertical water tube, with three dolphins swimming up it.

An elevator car, with a Waldahud holding the door open with one arm and urging passengers in with the other three.

Another elevator car, containing an Ib surrounded by a dozen humans.

“Even with everyone above the ocean deck,” said Lianne, “I don’t think we’re going to have enough radiation-shielding.”

“Wait!” said Thor. “What about going behind the shortcut?”

“Eh?” said Rhombus—or, at least, that’s the sound PHANTOM gave to the little ripple of lights that passed over his mantle.

“The shortcut’s a circular hole,” said Thor, looking over his shoulder at Keith. “The star is emerging from it. The rear part of the shortcut is a flat, empty circle—a black void in the shape of whatever’s passing through it. If we’re behind the shortcut, we’ll be protected—at least for a while.”

Jag slapped all four of his hands against his console. “He’s right!”

Keith nodded. “Do it, Thor. Alter course to put us in the lee of the shortcut, keeping the bottom of the ocean deck facing the emerging star.”

“Executing,” said Thor. “But it’ll take a while to get there.” In the spherical holo display encompassing the bridge, the brilliant circular profile of the star slowly became a green dome as Thor maneuvered the ship.

“Talldorsal to Lansing!” A high-pitched dolphin voice over the intercom, with splashing in the background.

“Open. Lansing here.”

“Thor’s not moving in a line straight the ship. We’re getting tides on the ocean deck.”

“Lianne?” Keith said, and the twenty-four views of the evacuation all changed to different angles on the ocean. Seawater was sloshing up to the holographic ceiling on the port side, real waves touching fake clouds, forcing all the dolphins to the starboard so that they could breathe.

“Damn,” said Thor. “Hadn’t thought about that. I’ll rotate the ship around its axis as we move. With luck, I should be able to keep all the forces balanced. Sorry!”

As Starplex continued to move, the bulging dome of the green star became progressively eclipsed by the featureless black circular backside of the shortcut. And then, at last, the green disappeared; Starplex was in the shortcut’s lee. The only evidence for the emerging star was the emerald cast on the dark-matter field beyond it. Even the ring of Soderstrom radiation was invisible back here; it, after all, was caused by tachyons spilling out of the shortcut, heading in the opposite direction. The black circle continued to grow, though, blotting out more and more background stars. Its diameter was now 800,000 kilometers.

“Can you extrapolate how big the star is going to get, based on the curvature we observed on the other side?” Keith asked Jag.

“It’s not yet halfway through,” Jag replied, “and it’s oblate from high-speed rotation. Best guess? One-point-five million kilometers.”

“Thor, any chance of the hyperdrive?” Keith asked.

Thor spoke into the hologram of Keith floating above his console rim. “Not yet. We’d have to be at least seventy million klicks from the star’s center before space would be flat enough to engage it. I estimate we’ll reach that distance in eleven hours.”

“Hours. How long till the star’s equator passes through the shortcut?”

“Perhaps five minutes,” said Jag.

“Evacuation status?”

“One hundred and ninety people are still below the ocean deck,” said Lianne.

“Will we make it?” Keith asked her.

“I’m not—”

“Red light on thruster number six,” shouted Thor. “It’s overheating.”

“Great,” Keith said. “Do you need to take it off-line?”

“Not yet,” said Thor. “I’m injecting repair nanotechs into its intercoolers; they may be able to correct the problem.”

“The green star’s equator is about to pass through the shortcut,” said Jag.

A portion of the holographic display changed to a schematic representation of what was happening. At the left was the bulging hemisphere of the part of the star that had already protruded from the shortcut. The shortcut itself was seen from the side as a vertical line. Behind that, and receding away from it, was the diamond-shaped profile of Starplex. As the equator passed out of the shortcut, the hole the shortcut made in space started shrinking, and photons and charged particles from the star began spilling backward. The edges of the radiation backwash were like the hands of a clock starting at noon and six and converging toward three o’clock.

Thor pushed Starplex as hard as he could. Keith could see constellations of yellow warning indicators lighting up on the pilot’s panel… The ship continued to climb out of the star’s gravity well, its escape tunnel narrowing as the shortcut shrank in size.

“Lansing!” shouted Jag. “The dark-matter field is moving—moving away from the star.”

“Could it be because of that repulsive force you mentioned?”

Jag moved both sets of shoulders. “It’s not the kind of effect I’d predict, but—”

“Lower-deck evacuation now complete,” said Lianne, swinging around to face the director.

“Even so,” said Thor, “we’re going to take one hell of a lot radiation kick when that backwash hits us.”

Finally, the star finished emerging, and the shortcut disappeared. At that point, Thor switched all power from the engines to the force screens, trying to deflect as much of the incoming radiation as possible. Starplex continued to travel under momentum. The radiation alarm began to warble again.

“Are we far enough away?” Keith asked. Thor was too busy with the controls to answer. “Are we far enough away?” he asked again.

Jag did some calculations. “I think so,” he said, “but only because we’re using the ocean deck as shielding. Otherwise, we would all have taken a lethal dose.”

“All right,” Keith said. “Let’s continue on until we’re at a safe distance. Lianne, draw up a new duty roster that makes minimal use of cetaceans, and put any nonessential dolphins into medical hibernation until we can replace the water on the ocean deck. At the rate the star is receding from the shortcut, it’ll be days before we can approach the portal safely.” He paused, then: “Good work, everyone. Rhombus, what’s the status of our docking bays?”

“They should still be usable. Their walls are heavily shielded against radiation leakage, in case a ship crashes or explodes in them.”

“Good,” said Keith. “Thor, let me know when we’re an acceptable distance from that star.” He turned to the Waldahud. “Jag, you should go have a close look at it. I want to know exactly where it came from and why it’s here.”