"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 planetssized 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 roedial limbs could be used for locomotion or manipulation, but Waldahu-din 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.
Chapter IV