Starplex

Chapter II

A new sector of space—and one that had opened unexpectedly.

Keith and Rissa hurried to the bridge, entering through the port-side door, which meant that Keith had to pass right by Lianne Karendaughter. Brilliant (a master’s in electrical engineering from MIT), beautiful (luscious Asian features, mounds of platinum hair pinned up by gold clips), and young, Lianne had joined Starplex just six weeks ago, after a distinguished term as chief engineer on a large commercial hyperliner. She smiled at Keith as he passed—a radiant smile, a supernova smile. Keith felt his stomach flutter.

Starplex’s bridge appeared to have no walls, floor, or ceiling. Instead, it was enveloped by a spherical hologram of the ship’s surroundings, its workstations seemingly floating amongst the stars. The actual room was rectangular, with a doorway built into each wall, but the doors were invisible, lost within the spacescape. When they split down the middle and slid aside, it was as though space were opening up, revealing the corridors beyond. Apparently suspended in midair—but really attached to the invisible walls just above the doors—were trios of glowing clocks in each homeworld’s time keeping system.

Keith and Rissa hurried to their workstations, looking as though they were running in space.

The bridge workstations were laid out in two rows of three, with the director’s position in the middle of the back row. The front row was constantly occupied. The rear stations were only used when necessary; Jag, Keith, and Rissa all had separate offices where they did most of their work. By default, one of Keith’s monitors showed a chart of who was currently authorized to use each bridge station. It was the standard alpha-shift team in the front row:

The InOps manager was responsible for all onboard activities, including engineering. On the opposite side of the room was her opposite number, the ExOps manager, who supervised the docking bays and missions conducted by the fifty-four assorted ships stored there. To Keith’s left was the station for Jag, head of physical sciences. To his right, again an opposite number: Rissa, head of life sciences.

Since most physics research was conducted aboard ship, it made sense that InOps was in front of the physics station.Lianne could swivel her chair around, or rotate the workstation on its turntable base, for face-to-face consultations with Jag. Likewise, most life-sciences work was done away from the mothership; Rhombus at ExOps could easily consult with Rissa (although being an Ib, Rhombus had 360-degree vision; he didn’t have to turn around to see her).

To make communication even easier, ten-centimeter-high real-time holograms of Lianne and Thor’s heads, plus a full body shot of Rhombus, normally floated above the rim of Jag, Keith, and Rissa’s consoles; those in the front row had holos of the back-row heads floating above their stations.

On each side of the room was a large pool covered by an antisplash forcefield; any of the workstations could have its functions transferred to a dolphin in either pool. Behind the workstations was a row of nine polychairs for observers.

Keith watched as Jag entered through the starboard door. The Waldahud moved across the starfield, squat bow legs carrying him in short steps, four arms stiff at his sides. Jag wore a couple of functional pieces of clothing, including a belt with storage pouches depending from it, and a band with a pocket on it around his upper left arm. The damned thing was practically naked except for his thick fur while Keith was freezing to death. The ship’s common areas were kept at fifteen degrees Celsius, equivalent to a hot summer’s noon on Rehbollo. Keith half expected to see his breath whenever he left his apartment.

As Jag sat down, the Waldahud’s monitor screens configured themselves to be twice as tall as they were wide. Jag could watch two of them simultaneously, one with his vertically stacked left pair of eyes, the other with his vertically stacked right pair. Like humans, Waldahudin had two-sided brains, but each of their hemispheres could process a separate stereoscopic image.

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.

The word “process” had been deliberately chosen for the public reports, but many believed that no natural activity could have done that, not even if the Tejat Posterior shortcut exit had been inside a star’s core. The hypothetical beings responsible were dubbed “Slammers,” because they’d apparently slammed the interstellar doorway in the Commonwealth’s collective face.

Additional hyperspace probes with heavy shielding had been sent toward Tejat Posterior (from launch points well away from any-of the Commonwealth homeworlds), but it would still be another two years before they arrived there. Until they did, the mystery of the Slammers remained unresolved—but there was always a fear that they might be lurking behind other shortcuts.

“With relief, I report a tachyon pulse,” announced Rhombus.

Keith let out his breath; he hadn’t been aware that he’d been holding it until then. The pulse meant something was coming through the shortcut; the probe was returning. They watched as the shortcut grew from an infinitesimal point to a meter in diameter, with a violet periphery. The cylindrical object popped through. Keith nodded slightly: the probe appeared undamaged. It maneuvered back toward Starplex under its own power, meaning its internal electronics were still intact, and slid down the launching tube into its berth. Umbilicals were attached to it, and its store of data was uploaded into PHANTOM, Starplex’s central computer.

“Let’s see it,” Keith said, and Rhombus complied, replacing the spherical hologram of space outside Starplex with what the probe had seen on the other side of the shortcut. At first, it just seemed to be more space, different constellations enveloping them. There were murmurs of disappointment. One always hoped that a spacecraft would be visible—a ship from whatever race had brought the shortcut on-line.

Jag got out of his chair, and walked around to stand in front of the two rows of workstations. He rotated on his hooves, looking at various parts of the hologram, then began interpreting what was visible for the rest of them. “Well,” said a translated Brooklyn accent overtop of his dog barks, “it looks like normal interstellar space. Just what you’d expect for the Perseus Arm—lots of blue stars, not too densely packed.” He stopped and pointed. “See that band of light? We’re on the inner edge of the Perseus Arm, looking back toward the Orion Arm. Neither Galath nor Hotspot would be visible from here, but we might be able to find Sol in a telescope.”

He began a circumnavigation of the bridge, his black hooves ticking against the invisible floor. “The only thing that looks bright enough to be a nearby main-sequence star is that one there.” He indicated a blue-white point that was indeed brighter than all the others. “Still, it shows no sign of a visible disk, so at a minimum we are several billion kilometers from it. Of course, we can use a couple of probes to do some long-base-line parallax tests to see how close it is as soon as we go through the shortcut; I don’t normally favor A-class stars for having habitable planets, but it seems as good a place as any to start looking for whoever activated this exit.”

“So you think it’s safe for us to go on through?” Keith asked.

The Waldahud turned to face him, and his left pair of eyes blinked. “There doesn’t appear to be any immediate danger,” he said. “I’ll want to review the rest of the probe’s data, but it looks just like, well, space.”

“Okay. In that case, let’s try—”

“Just a second,” said Jag, apparently catching sight of a part of the hologram over Keith’s shoulder. He walked toward the director, then continued on, past the seating gallery behind his station. “Just a second,” he said again. “Rhombus, how much real-time hologram is left?”

“I abase myself to admit we exhausted the real-time playback two minutes ago,” said the Ib at the ExOps console. “I’ve been looping the playback since then.”

Jag walked over to the bridge wall—which was something like taking a few steps toward a distant mountain in hopes that doing so would improve one’s view of it. He peered into the darkness. “That area there,” he said, circling his upper left arm to indicate a large portion of the starfield. “There is something unusual… Rhombus, speed up the playback. Ten times normal rate, and loop it continuously.”

“Done without rancor,” said Rhombus, ropes snapping.

“That can’t be,” said Thor, who had turned around to look as well. He half rose from his chair at the helm console.

“But it is,” said Jag.

“What is it?” asked Keith.

“You see it,” said Jag. “Look.”

“All I see is a bunch of stars twinkling.”

Jag lifted his upper shoulders, the Waldahud equivalent of a nod of assent. “Exactly. Just like a clear winter’s night back on your wondrous Earth, no doubt. Except,” he said, “that stars do not twinkle when seen from space.”