"i'd say there's a good possibility that there's a fleet of craft hiding inside or just past the dark-matter field."
Keith was about to speak again when Hek's desk intercom bleeped.
"Keith, Lianne here."
"Open. Yes?"
"I think you'll want to come to the bridge. A watson has arrived with word that the boomerang has returned from shortcut Rehbollo 376A."
"On my way. Summon Jag, too, please. Close." He looked at Hek.
"Good work. See if you can narrow down the source of the signals further. I'll have Thor take Starplex in a circular path around the dark-matter field, scanning for tachyon emissions, radiation, thruster glow, or any other signs of alien ships."
Keith strode onto the bridge, Rissa right behind him. They moved to their workstations. "Trigger watson playback," said Keith.
Lianne pushed a button, and a full-motion video message appeared in a framed-off section of the holographic bubble.
The image was of a Waldahud male with a silvery-gray hide. PHANTOM replaced the sound of the creature's barking with English words for the playback into Keith's ear implant, although, of course, they didn't fit the movements of the Waldahud's mouth.
"Greetings, Starplex." The status line at the bottom of the screen identified the speaker as Kayd Pelendo em-Hooth of the Rehbollo Center for Astrophysics. "The boomerang sent to the shortcut designated Rehbollo 376A has returned. I suspect you'll want to stay where you are, investigating the shortcut you're at now, since its appearance on the network is unexplained. However, we thought Jag and others would be interested in seeing the recordings made by the boomerang just before returning home. They are appended to this message. I think you will find them… interesting."
"Okay, Rhombus," said Keith. "Use the data from the boomerang to create a spherical holo display around us.
Show us what it saw."
"A pleasure to serve," said Rhombus. "Downloading now; the display will be ready in two minutes, forty seconds."
Lianne rubbed her hands together. "It never rains but it pours," she said, turning' around and grinning at Keith. "Yet another new sector of space opened up for exploration!"
Keith nodded. "It never ceases to amaze me." He got up from his chair, and paced a little, waiting for the hologram to be prepared.
"You know," he said absently, "my great-great-grandfather kept a diary.
Just before he died, he wrote about all the great advancements he'd seen in his lifetime: radio, the automobile, powered flight, spaceflight, lasers, computers, the discovery of DNA, and on and on." Lianne seemed rapt, although Keith was aware that he might be boring everyone else. To hell with them; rank hath its privileges, chief among them the right to ramble on.
"When I read that as a teenager, I figured I'd have nothing to write about for my own descendant when my life came to a close.
But then we invented hyperdrive and AI, and discovered the shortcut network, and extraterrestrial life, and learned to talk to dolphins, and I realized that-"
"Excuse me," said Rhombus, his lights flashing in the strobing pattern high species used to signal an interruption.
"the hologram is ready."
"Proceed," Keith said.
The bridge darkened as the image of Starplex's current surroundings was shut off, shrouding the room in featureless black. Then a new picture built up from left to right, scan line by scan line, washing over the bridge, until it seemed once again to be floating in space — the space of the newest sector to become accessible to the Commonwealth races.
Thor let out a long, low whistle.
Jag clicked his dental plates in disbelief.
Dominating the view, receding slowly, was another fiery green star, perhaps ten million kilometers from the shortcut point.
"I thought you said our green star was a freak," said Keith to Jag.
"That's the least of our worries," said Thor. He swung his feet off his console and turned to face Keith. "Our boomerang didn't activate that shortcut until it dived into it."
Keith looked at him blankly.
"And these pictures were taken before it did that."
Jag rose to his feet. "Ka-darg.t That means-"
"It means," said Keith, suddenly getting it, too, "that stars can emerge from dormant shortcuts. Christ, they could be popping out of all four billion portals throughout the Milky Way!"
Chapter X
That night, Keith was eating dinner alone. He loved to cook, but he also loved to have someone to cook for — and Rissa was working late this evening. She and Boxcar had finally had a breakthrough in their Hayflick-limit studies, or, at least, so it appeared. But they were having trouble replicating the results, and so she'd just had sandwiches sent up to her lab.
Keith sometimes wondered how he'd gotten the job as Starplex's head honcho. Oh, it made sense, of course. A sociologist was assumed to be good both at managing the miniature society aboard the ship and at dealing with any new civilizations they might encounter.
But right now, despite all that was going on, there was little for him to do beyond the administrative. Jag would continue his dark-matter studies, as well as trying to make sense of the onslaught of stars; Hek would try to further decode the potentially alien radio signals; Rissa would pursue her life-prolongation project. And Keith? Keith kept hoping a windmill somewhere would start tilting at him — kept hoping for something important to do.
He'd decided to dine in one of the Ib restaurants. Not for-the atmosphere, of course. With its almost billiard-ball-smooth surface, Flatland's landscapes, as depicted in the restaurant's holographic windows, were even less visually interesting than Rehbollo's; there was no doubt that when it came to interesting geography, Earth was the most beautiful of the homeworlds. But Ibese food was based on right-handed ammo acids; it was completely indigestible by the other three races.
This restaurant, though, offered a wide range of human fare — including a chicken stir-fry, which was exactly what Keith had been craving. The restaurant was inordinately crowded; the four eating establishments in the lower-habitat modules were still uninhabitable. But one of the other privileges of rank was always getting a table without a wait. A sleek, silver robot showed Keith to a booth in the back. A large gestalt plant arched over it, orange octagonal leaves roaming its body freely.
Keith told the server what he wanted, and then he spoke to the desktop viewer, asking for the latest issue of the New Yorker to be displayed.
The server returned with a glass of white wine, then rolled away.
Keith was settling into the lead fiction piece in the magazine when-Bleep. "Karendaughter to Lansing."
"Open. Yes, Lianne?"
"I've finished the engineering study on what to do about the irradiated lower decks. Can we get together so that I can give you my report?"
Keith swalloed once. Of course the report had to be dealt with right away; they needed to solve the overcrowding problem quickly. But where to meet Lianne? Gamma shift would be on the bridge now; no need to disturb them.
Keith's office would be the natural place, but… but… did he really trust himself to be alone with her?
Christ, this is stupid. "I'm in the Drive-Through, having dinner. Can you bring the report here?"
"Sure thing. On my way. Close."
Keith had a sip of wine. Maybe this was a mistake.
Maybe people would misconstrue, tell Rissa that he'd had a rendezvous in a booth with Lianne. Maybe — Lianne came in, escorted to his table by a robot. She sat down opposite him and smiled. Geez, she'd arrived quickly — almost as if she'd known where he was before calling, almost as if she'd planned to catch him alone at dinner…
Keith shook his head. Get real. "Hi, Lianne," he said.
"You've got a report for me?"
"That's right." She was dressed in a cyan suit, crisp and professional.