“Normally you can see the accretion disk around a black hole,” said Jag, “but there’s nothing out here to be pulled into it.” He paused. “My guess is that it’s an ancient black hole—it would have needed billions of years to get out here. I suspect it’s the remains of a binary star system. When the larger component went supernova, it could have caused an asymmetric kick which propelled the resulting black hole out of its home galaxy.”
“But what would have activated this shortcut?” asked Lianne.
Jag lifted all four shoulders. “The hole would pull in any matter that wanders by. Something that was being sucked in by it probably fell through the shortcut instead.” Jag tried to sound jaunty, but it was clear even he was staggered by it all. “We’re actually pretty lucky—shortcuts in intergalactic space are probably as rare as mud without footprints.”
Keith turned to Thor. He made an effort to keep his voice calm, controlled. He was the director; no matter how much Starplex usually behaved like a research lab rather than a sailing vessel, he knew all eyes would be on him, looking for strength. “How soon can we go back through the shortcut” he asked. “How soon can we go get the Rumrunner?”
“We’ve still got major electrical problems,” said Lianne. “I wouldn’t want to move the ship until those are stabilized—and I’ll need at least three hours for that.”
“Three hours!” said Keith. “But—”
“I try to cut it down,” said Lianne.
“What about sending a probeship through to help Rissa and Longbottle?” asked Keith.
The room was silent for a moment. Rhombus rolled over to the command workstation, and touched Keith’s forearm lightly with one of his manipulator ropes. “My friend,” he said, PHANTOM translating the low intensity of his lights as whispering, “you can’t do that. You can’t put another ship in danger.”
I’m the director, thought Keith. I can do what I damn well please. He shook his head, trying to get control. If anything had happened to Rissa…
“You’re right,” he said at last. “Thanks.” He turned to Jag, and felt his heart rate increasing. “I should put you back under house arrest, you…”
“ ‘Pig,’ ” said Jag, his underlying bark an excellent mimicking of the English word. “Go ahead and say it.”
“My wife is out there somewhere—possibly dying. Longbottle, too. What the hell were you trying to accomplish?”
“I admit nothing.”
“The damage to this ship will cost billions to repair. The Commonwealth will bring charges against you, you can be sure of that—”
“You will never be able to prove that my request to move Starplex had anything to do with the subsequent events. You can revile me all you wish, human, but even your unenlightened courts require proof to substantiate a charge. The dark-matter being I wanted to examine did indeed have an unusual hyperspace footprint; any astronomer will verify that. And it was indeed invisible from Starplex’s vantage point before the move—”
“You said that darmat was about to reproduce. It hasn’t done a thing.”
“You are spoiled by being a sociologist, Lansing. In the hard sciences, we occasionally have to face the reality that some of our theories will actually be disproven.”
“It was a ruse—”
“It was an experiment. Suggesting anything else is conjecture; persist publicly in it, and I shall bring defamation charges against you.”
“You bastard. If Rissa dies—”
“If Dr. Cervantes dies, I will mourn. I wish her no ill. But for all we know, she and Longbottle have maneuvered through the shortcut to safety. It is my compatriots who have died today, not yours.”
Lianne spoke softly from her console. “He’s right, Keith. We’ve lost equipment, and we’ve got several people who are injured. But no one from Starplex is dead.”
“Except possibly Rissa and Longbottle,” snapped Keith. He took a deep breath, trying to calm himself. “It’s all about money, isn’t it, Jag? Of all the Commonwealth homeworlds, Rehbollo’s economy took the biggest hit when interstellar commerce opened up. You guys never build two things the same—”
“To do so is an affront to the God of Artisans—”
“To do so is efficient, and your factories and workers were not. So you tried to goose the government coffers. Even disassembled for parts, Starplex would be worth trillions—lots of glory in that. And if war erupted over its seizure, well, nothing like a little war to give the economy a boost, eh?”
“No sane being wants war,” said Jag.
“PHANTOM,” snapped Keith, “Jag is again under house arrest.”
“Acknowledged.”
“It may please the punitive in you to do that,” barked Jag. “But this is still a science vessel, and we are the first Commonwealth beings ever to be in intergalactic space. We should determine our exact location—and I am the most qualified person to undertake that task. Rescind the arrest order, shut up and leave me alone, and I shall try to figure out where we are.”
“Boss,” said Thor gently, “he’s right, you know. Let him help.”
Keith fumed for a few moments longer, then nodded curtly. But when he did nothing further, Thor spoke into the air. “PHANTOM,” he said. “Cancel house arrest on Jag.”
“Cancellation requires authorization from Director Lansing.”
Keith exhaled noisily. “Do it—but, PHANTOM, monitor every command he issues. If any of them seem unrelated to determining our location, notify me at once.”
“Acknowledged. House arrest ended.”
Keith looked at Thor. “What’s our current heading?”
Thor consulted his instruments. “We’re still on a modified version of the parabolic course we used to slingshot around the green star. Obviously, the path changed when we ceased to be under that star’s gravitational influence, so—”
“Magnor,” said Jag, interrupting. “I need you to rotate the ship in a Gaf Wayfarer pattern; we are missing one hyperscope array, but I need a parallactic full-sky hyperspace scan.”
Thor tapped some keys. The holographic bubble around the bridge began a complex series of rotations, but because the bubble was empty save for a few indistinct smudges of white, the tilting and turning didn’t cause vertigo. The pilot looked at Keith again. “As for getting home, the shortcut exit behind us shows in hyperspace just like every other one I’ve ever seen, complete with zero meridian. Assuming the damned things still work the same way over millions of light-years, once Lianne gets our full electrical system back on-line, I should be able to put us back at any active shortcut you specify.”
“Good” said Keith. “Lianne, how badly damaged were we in the battle?”
“Decks fifty-four through seventy are flooded,” she said, into a hologram of Keith’s head, “and everything from deck forty-one down has some water damage. Also, all decks below the central disk took a heavy hit of radiation as we careened around the green star; I advise declaring the entire lower half uninhabitable.” She paused. “The Starplex 2 team is going to be pissed off with us—we’ve now fried both sets of lower-habitat modules.”
“What about our shields?”
“Our forcefield emitters were all overloaded, but I’ve already got my engineers working on repairs; we should have minimal screens within an hour. In a way, it’s good we came out in intergalactic space. The chances of running into a micrometeoroid out here are slim.”
“What about the damage done when Gawst carved out our number-two generator?”
“My teams have put temporary bulkheads in place around the hole where it was removed,” said Lianne. “That should hold until we get back to a spacedock.”