Starplex

The Rumrunner was normally stored in docking bay seven, one of five that had locks leading through the engineering torus to the ocean deck. The ship was clamped to the deck’s wall, and three access tubes at shallow angles entered its rooftop hatches.

Once Longbottle and Jag were aboard, the segmented docking-bay door moved up into the roof. Longbottle was famous for his theatrical launches. He zoomed the ship out of the bay, then rolled and arched in his tank, taking the Rumrunner on a breathtaking warm-up flight past all the docking-bay doors, swinging in a great circle around the central disk. He then rolled to one side in his tank, and the ship made a wide arc—looking for all the world as though it were banking in the vacuum of space.

Jag was getting impatient, but Longbottle, like all dolphins, was oblivious to that. He did a series of turns and flips in his tank, and the ship responded in kind. The gravity plates under Jag’s compartment compensated completely for the movements, but in his water-filled tube, Longbottle could feel the ship as if it were an extension of his own body.

Finally, when he’d had enough fun, Longbottle set off on a wildly curving path—again, wasteful of energy, but so much more interesting than the straight lines and precise arcs of normal celestial mechanics. The green star dominated the sky, even though its surface was now thirty million kilometers distant. The Rumrunner had much better force screens and physical shielding than did Starplex itself; it could make a very close passage. Under Longbottle’s fanciful guidance, the ship dived in, skimming the vast orb from just 100,000 kilometers above its photosphere. Scoops on the ship’s leading edge sucked in samples of stellar atmosphere.

“Greenness of this star a bafflement to me,” said Longbottle, through the hydrophone in his tank. Like most dolphins, Longbottle could approximate the sounds of both English and Waldahudar (although with mangled syntax—there was no such thing as appropriate word order in cetacean grammar). The computer simply processed those sounds to make them intelligible; it would only switch over to translation mode if a dolphin was actually speaking in delphinese.

Jag grunted. “I’m puzzled, too. Its surface temperature is twelve thousand degrees. The fardint thing should be blue or white, not green. The spectral analysis doesn’t make any sense either. I’ve never seen such high concentrations of heavy elements in a star.”

“Damaged perhaps by passage through shortcut?” asked Longbottle, twisting in his tank so that the ship would roll slowly around its axis. Even with extra shielding, it wasn’t safe to keep the same side facing the star.

Jag grunted again. “I suppose that’s possible. Most of the star’s chromosphere and corona were probably scraped off during passage through the shortcut. The shortcut’s lips clamped down on the photosphere, stripping away the rarefied gas above. Still, all previous tests have shown zero structural change in objects passing through a shortcut. Of course, nothing this big has ever gone through one before.”

The Rumrunner’s viewscreens were filled to the edges with flaming green; the physical windows had all turned opaque. “Take us in once around the star’s equator,” said Jag, “then do a polar loop. It’s possible that the star’s structure isn’t uniform. Before I get too worked up over these absorption lines, I want to be sure the spectra are the same all over.”

It took almost five hours at one one-thousandth of lightspeed to complete the five-million-kilometer sweep around the equator, and another five to do the loop from pole to pole. Longbottle kept the Rumrunner corkscrewing all the while. Jag’s eyes were glued to his scanning equipment, watching the dark vertical absorption lines. He kept muttering to himself, “Silt in the water, silt in the water”—the truth remained hidden.

Jag had no trouble measuring the star’s mass from its footprint in hyperspace; it was somewhat heavier than he’d expected. Except for the color, the star’s surface was fairly typical, consisting of tightly packed beads of light and dark caused by convection cells in the photosphere. It even had sunspots, but unlike those of other stars, these were’all connected in dumbbell shapes. It was, without doubt, a star—but it was also unlike any star Jag had ever seen before.

Finally, the flybys were complete. “Ready home to go?” asked Longbottle.

Jag lifted all four arms in a gesture of resignation. “Yes.”

“Mystery solved?”

“No. A star like this should simply not exist.”

The Rumrunner swept back toward Starplex, Jag muttering over his data for the entire journey.

* * *

Keith lay in bed next to his wife, unable to sleep. He looked over at Rissa’s form in the darkness, watched the thin sheet covering her rise and fall in time with her breathing.