Starplex

Chapter III

A child’s blocks. That’s the image that had come to Keith Lansing’s mind two years ago, while watching Starplex’s components being assembled at the Rehbollo orbital shipyards. The giant ship was made up of just nine pieces, eight of which looked identical.

The largest piece was the central disk/shaft combination. The disk was 290 meters in diameter and 30 meters thick. The square shaft extended up and down from the center of the disk 90 meters in each direction, making Starplex a total of 210 meters tall. A parabolic radio/hyperspace-telescope dish was set into each of the shaft’s end caps.

The central disk actually consisted of three wide rings surrounding the shaft. First, stretching out to a radius of 95 meters was the vast space that would be filled with 686,000 cubic meters of salt water, forming the ocean deck. Second, twenty meters wide and ten decks thick, was the engineering torus. The final ring consisted of Starplex’s eight mammoth cargo holds and twenty docking bays, their space doors arrayed along the disk’s curving edge.

The other building blocks were the eight habitat modules. Each was a right-triangular prism, ninety meters tall, ninety meters wide at its base, and thirty meters thick. One module was attached to each of the four sides of the shaft that stuck out above the disk. These were mirrored by four more mated to the portion that protruded below. In profile the assembled ship resembled a diamond with a bar through it; seen from above, it was a circle with the interlocking habitats forming a cross in its center.

Each habitat module was divided into thirty decks. Any of the modules could be replaced to accommodate a new race or special equipment, or one could be left behind as a separate base for long-term explorations in a new sector.

In the year since the ship had been launched, Starplex’s missions had been uneventful. But now, at last, a real first-contact situation was at hand. Now, at last, all that the great ship had to offer would be put to the test.

A second, more sophisticated probe was sent through to the newly opened sector. It, too, detected the twinkling stars, and its hyperspace telescopes indicated a solar system’s worth of mass was present in the vicinity; to get more resolution of exactly how the mass was deployed would require much larger ’scopes, such as those that were set into either end of Starplex’s central shaft.

Keith next ordered a probeship with a human and an Ib from Jag’s staff to fly through to the other side and do a more complete reconnaissance. They didn’t actually travel into the source of the twinkling stars. There was no way to communicate in real time through a shortcut, so if they got in trouble it might be too late to help before Starplex realized it. But they did do full-spectrum EM scans, a complete-sky search for artificial radio signals, and so on. They returned to Starplex, reporting that there was no apparent danger on the other side, although the cause of the twinkling starscape remained as elusive as ever.

Keith waited until all data from the two probes and the crewed reconnaissance had been reviewed by each department. Finally, satisfied that it would represent a low risk, he ordered Thor to take Starplex itself through the shortcut into the newly opened sector of space.

People occasionally used the terms “wormhole” or “tunnel” as synonyms for shortcut, but that wasn’t correct. There was no intervening space between the shortcut entrance and the exit. They were like doors between rooms in a house with paper-thin walls: as you walked through, you were partly in one room and partly in another. As simple as that—except that the rooms were separated by many light-years.

The Commonwealth had slowly worked out how to navigate the shortcut network. In normal space, a dormant shortcut is a point. But in hyperspace, that point is surrounded by a rotating sphere of tachyons. The tachyons move along millions of polar orbital lines, all of which are equally spaced, except that one is missing on one side, its tachyon looping back in a hemispherical path. That narrow tachyon-free gap is known as “the zero meridian,” and it means you can treat the sphere of tachyons just like a planetary globe, with a coordinate system of longitude and latitude.

To travel through a shortcut, you set a straight-line path toward the point at the center of the sphere. As you approach that point, you pass through the sphere at a specific latitude and longitude. Those coordinates determine which other shortcut you will exit from: where in the galaxy you come out depends on the direction from which you approached the local shortcut.

Of course, to get the ball rolling, there had to be one shortcut on-line at the outset that was not associated with any race—otherwise there’d be no location for the first emerging civilization to travel to with their shortcut. The initial shortcut—Shortcut Prime—was clearly a freebie, given by the shortcut makers. It was located in the heart of the Milky Way galaxy, within sight of the central black hole. Earth’s initial explorations of that sector had found no native life there, of course; the galactic core was far too radioactive for that.

At the beginning of the Commonwealth, there were only four active shortcuts—Tau Ceti, Rehbollo, Flatland, and Shortcut Prime. As more shortcuts were activated, the acceptable approach angles for each possible exit became smaller. After a dozen shortcuts were on-line, it became clear that to return to the Tau Ceti shortcut, one had to pierce the tachyon sphere surrounding another shortcut at about 115 degrees east longitude and 40 degrees north latitude. On Earth, that’s close to Beijing, which gave rise to the “New Beijing” nickname for the colony on Silvanus, Tau Ceti’s fourth planet.

When a ship touches the shortcut, the shortcut point expands—but only in two dimensions. It forms a hole in space perpendicular to the direction of the ship’s travel. The hole’s shape is the same as the cross-sectional profile of whatever part of the ship is passing through it. The opening is outlined in a violet ring of Soderstrom radiation, caused by tachyons spilling out around the edges and spontaneously translating into slower-than-light particles.

An observer looking at the shortcut from the front would see the ship disappearing into the violet-limned entrance. Looking from the back, he or she would only see a black void blocking the background stars; the void would have the same silhouette as the disappearing object.

Once the ship is all the way through, the shortcut loses its height and width, collapsing back down to nothingness—awaiting the next galactic traveler…

Thor sounded the pretransfer alarm, five successively louder electronic drumbeats. Keith touched keys, and his number-two monitor switched to a split-screen mode. One side displayed normal space, in which the shortcut was invisible; the other, a computer simulation based on hyperspace scans, showing the shortcut as a bright white point on a green background surrounded by a glowing orange sphere of field lines.

“All right,” said Keith. “Let’s do it.”

Thor operated controls. “As you say, boss.”

Starplex closed the twenty kilometers between itself and the shortcut, and then it touched the point. The shortcut expanded to accommodate the ship’s diamond-shaped profile, fiery purple lips matching the giant mothership’s shape. As Starplex passed through, the holographic bubble surrounding the bridge showed the two mismatched starfields, and the stormy discontinuity between them that moved from bow to stern as they completed their passage. As soon as the ship was all the way through, the shortcut shrank back down to nothingness.

And there they were, in the Perseus Arm—two thirds of the way across the galaxy, and tens of thousands of light-years from any of the homeworlds.

“Shortcut passage was normal,” said Thor. The tiny hologram of his face floating above the rim of Keith’s workstation was lined up with the back of Thor’s actual head, and the holographic mass of red hair blended into the real mane beyond, making his ax-blade features seem lost in a vast orange sea.

“Good work,” said Keith. “Let’s drop a marker buoy.”

Thor nodded and pushed some keys. Although the shortcut stood out in hyperspace, if Starplex’s hyper-radio equipment broke down, they’d have trouble finding it again. The buoy, broadcasting on normal EM frequencies and containing its own hyperscope, would be their beacon home in that case.

Jag got up and pointed out the twinkling stars again; they were quite easy to see. Thor rotated the holographic bubble so that they appeared front and center, instead of off behind the observation gallery.

Lianne Karendaughter was leaning forward at her workstation, a delicate hand supporting her chin. “So what’s causing the twinkling?” she said.

Behind her, Jag lifted all four shoulders in a Waldahud shrug. “It can’t be atmospheric disturbances, of course,” he said. “Spectrographs confirm that we’re in a space-normal vacuum. But something is in between our ship and the background stars—something that is at least partially opaque and shifting.”

“Perhaps a nonluminous nebula,” said Thor.

“Or, if I may be allowed a suggestion, perhaps just a tract of dust,” said Rhombus.

“I’d like to know how far away it is before I hazard a guess,” said Jag.

Keith nodded. “Thor, shoot a comm laser at—at whatever it is!”

Thor’s broad shoulders moved as he worked controls on either side of his workstation. “Firing.”

Three digital counters appeared floating in the holographic display. Each one incremented at a different rate, in the smallest standard units of each of the three homeworld’s time keeping systems. Keith watched the one counting seconds climb higher and higher.

“Reflected light received at seventy-two seconds,” said Thor. “Whatever is out there is pretty damn close—about eleven million klicks away.”

Jag was consulting his monitors. “Hyperspace telescope readings show that the obstructing material consists of a large amount of mass—a sixteen-multiple or more times the combined mass of all the planets in a typical solar system.”

“So it’s not spaceships,” said Rissa, disappointed.

Jag lifted his lower shoulders. “Probably not. There’s a small chance that we’re seeing a large number of vessels—a vast fleet of craft, whose individual movements are eclipsing background stars, and whose artificial gravity generators are making big dents in spacetime. But I doubt that.”

“Let’s close the distance by half, Thor,” said Keith. “Bring us in to about six million klicks from the periphery of the phenomenon. See if we can make out more detail.”

The little face and the big head behind it nodded in unison. “As you say, boss.”

As he brought the ship closer, Thor also rotated Starplex so that deck one was facing forward into its direction of movement. The ship’s thrusters could move the vessel in any direction, regardless of its orientation, but one of the twin radio telescopes was mounted in the center of that square deck, and four optical telescopes were mounted at the corners.

As they got closer, it became apparent that whatever was obscuring the background stars was reasonably solid and large. Stars were being eclipsed now with only a short period of fading out as they disappeared. But there wasn’t enough light to see clearly. The nearby A-class star was just too far away. So far, all that they could make out was a series of maddeningly vague shadows.

“Any radio signals?” asked Keith. As had become his habit, he’d shut off the hologram of Lianne’s head that by default hovered above the rim of his console. In the past, he’d found himself staring at it, and that was awkward with Rissa sitting right next to him.

“Nothing major,” she said. “Just wisps of milliwatt noise now and again near the twenty-one-centimeter line, but it’s all but lost against the cosmic microwave background.”

Keith looked to Jag, seated on his left. “Ideas?”

The Waldahud was growing frustrated as they got closer—his fur was standing up in tufts. “Well, an asteroid belt seems unlikely, especially this far from the nearest star. I suppose it could be material in the A’s Oort, but it seems much too dense for that.”

Starplex continued to move in. “Spectroscopy?” asked Keith.

“Whatever those objects are,” barked Jag, “they’re non-luminous. As for absorption of starlight from behind as it passes through the less opaque parts, the spectra I’m seeing is typical of interstellar dust, but there’s much less absorption going on than I’d expect.” He turned to face Keith. “There’s simply not enough light out here to see what’s going on. We should send up a fusion flare.”

“What if they are ships?” asked Keith. “Their crews might misconstrue it—think we’re launching an attack.”

“They are almost certainly not ships,” said Jag, curtly. “They are planet-sized bodies.”

Keith looked at Rissa, at the holographic Thor and Rhombus, and at the back of Lianne’s head, to see if any of them had any objections. “All right,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

Jag got up and walked over to stand beside Rhombus at the external-operations station. Keith found it funny watching them talk: Jag barking like an angry dog, and Rhombus replying in shimmering lights. Since they were just conversing among themselves, PHANTOM didn’t bother to translate their words for Keith, but Keith tried to listen in, just for the practice. Waldahudar was a difficult language for English speakers to follow, and it required a different grammatical mood depending on the gender of the speaker and the person being spoken to (males could only address females in a conditional/subjunctive way, for instance). On the other hand, specific nouns were avoided as much as possible in polite Waldahudar, lest disagreements over terminology ensue. Throughout the conversation, Jag leaned on Rhombus’s workstation for support; his medial limbs could be used for locomotion or manipulation, but Waldahudin didn’t like dropping down onto their rear four in the company of humans.

Finally, Jag and Rhombus had agreed on what characteristics the flare should have. Lianne at InOps issued an order that all windows on decks one through thirty be covered or turned opaque. She also drew the protective covers over sensitive external cameras and sensors.

When that was done, Rhombus launched the flare—a ball about two meters in diameter—out through a horizontal mass-driver tube that exited on the outer rim of the central disk. He let the flare get about twenty thousand klicks above the ship and then ignited it. The flare burned with the light of a miniature sun for eight seconds.

Of course, it took the light from that flare almost twenty seconds to reach the beginning of the phenomenon that was obscuring the background stars. It turned out that the phenomenon was roughly spherical, measuring some seven million kilometers in diameter, so it took twenty-four seconds—or three times the length of the light pulse—for the illumination to pass through it in a circular band. When it was done, Rhombus summed the various illuminated parts of the image to give a view of the whole thing as if it had been lit up simultaneously. In the all-encompassing hologram, the bridge crew could finally see what was out there.

There were dozens of gray-and-black spheres, each one so dark that the illuminated side was hardly much brighter than the unilluminated one. “Each of the spheres is roughly the size of the planet Jupiter,” said Thor, his head bent down, consulting a readout. “The smallest is 110,000 klicks wide; the largest, about 170,000. They’re clustered into a spherical volume seven million klicks wide, or about five times the diameter of Sol.”

The individual orbs looked a lot like black-and-white photographs of Jupiter, except that they didn’t have neat latitudinal bands of cloud. Rather, the clouds—or whatever it was that formed the visible surface markings—seemed to swirl in simple convection cells from equator to pole, the kind of pattern one might expect if the spheres had next to no rotation. In the intervening space between the world-sized spheres was a diaphanous fog of gas or particles that formed a translucent haze; doubtless this fog had been responsible for most of the twinkling effect they’d observed. The whole thing—spheres and surrounding fog—looked like assorted steel ball bearings rolling around in a pile of black silk stockings.

“How do they—” barked Jag, and Keith immediately knew what he was going to say. How could world-sized objects be packed so closely together? There were perhaps ten diameters between the closest of the objects, and fifteen or so between the ones that were least tightly packed. Keith couldn’t imagine any pattern of stable orbits that would keep them from collapsing together under their own gravitational attraction. If this was a natural grouping, it seemed unlikely that it could be an old one. Throwing some light on the subject had only made the mystery deeper.