Starplex

And now humans and Waldahudin had both cupped the galaxy in their hands. A galaxy that Keith, and surely others, would live to see rotate around its axis time and again.

There would be peace between the races. He would make sure of that. After all, what better job was there for a middle child with billions of years to spend?

Keith’s travel pod touched the shortcut, the purple halo passed over the spherical hull, and he emerged back near the green star.

Starplex was up ahead, a giant silver-and-copper diamond against the starry backdrop. Keith could see that docking bay seven’s space door was open, and the bronze wedge of the Rumrunner was in the process of landing—meaning Jag and Longbottle must be returning with news of their search for the darmat baby. Heart pounding, Keith activated his pod’s preprogrammed docking sequence.

* * *

Keith hurried to the bridge. Although he’d only been gone a short time, he felt a need to hug Rissa, who happened to be there using her console even though it was delta shift. He held her tight for several seconds, feeling the warmth of her. Wineglass politely rolled away from the director’s workstation in case Keith wished to use it, but Keith motioned for the Ib to return to it, and Keith took a chair in the seating gallery at the back of the room.

No sooner had he done so than the forward bridge door opened and Jag waddled in. “The baby is trapped,” he barked as he made his way over to the physics station, which was currently unoccupied. “It’s stuck in close orbit around a star that emerged from the same shortcut the baby did.”

“Did you call out to by radio?” asked Rissa. “Any response?”

“None,” said Jag, “but the star is a real noisemaker. Our message might have been lost going in, or the reply might have been lost coming out.”

“It would be like trying to hear a whisper during a hurricane,” said Keith, shaking his head. “All but impossible.”

“Especially,” said Longbottle, popping up in the starboard pool on the bridge, “if the darmat is dead.”

Keith looked at the dolphin’s face, then nodded. “That’s a good point. How do we tell if something like that is still alive?

Rissa frowned. “None of us would survive five seconds close to a star without a lot of shielding or heavy-duty force screens. The baby is naked.”

“It’s worse than that,” said Jag. “The thing is black. Although the luster-quark matter is transparent to electromagnetic radiation, the regular-matter dust that permeates it is not reflecting any appreciable amount of the star’s light and heat. The child may be cooking itself.”

“So what do we do?” asked Keith.

“First,” said Jag, “we should get it into the shade—build a reflective foil parasol that could be jockeyed in between the darmat and the star.”

“Can our nanotech lab do that here?” asked Keith. “Ordinarily, I’d have New Beijing build such a thing and shunt it through the Tau Ceti shortcut to us, but I saw the mess they were in when I popped back for my meeting.”

There was a young Native American sitting at InOps. “I’d have to check with Lianne to be sure,” he said, “but I suspect we can pull it off. It won’t be easy, though. The parasol will have to be over a hundred thousand klicks wide. Even at just one molecule of thickness, that’s still a lot of material.”

“Get to work on it,” said Keith. “How long?”

“Six hours if we’re lucky,” said the man. “Twelve if we’re not.”

“But even if we shield the baby, then what?” asked Rissa. “It’s still trapped.”

Keith looked at Jag. “Could we use the parasol as a solar sail, and let the solar wind blow it away from the star?”

Jag snorted. “Ten to the thirty-seventh kilos? Not a chance.”

“Okay, okay—what about this?” said Keith. “What if we protect the baby with some sort of force shield, and then detonate the star, so that it goes nova, and—”

Jag was barking in a staccato pattern—Waldahud laughter. “Your imagination is unbridled, Lansing. Oh, there has been some theoretical work on controlled nova reactions—I’ve been exploring that area a bit myself—but there’s no shield we could build that would protect the baby from a star going nova only forty million kilometers away.”

Keith was not to be deterred. “Okay, try this: Suppose we force the new star back through the shortcut. When it passes through the shortcut, its gravitational pull will disappear, and the baby goes free.”

“The star is moving away from the shortcut, not toward it,” said Jag. “We cannot move the shortcut at all, and if we had the power to turn a star around, we would also have the power to skim a Jupiter-sized object out of a close orbit around the star. But we don’t.” Jag looked around the room. “Any more bright ideas?”

“Yes,” said Keith, after a moment. He looked directly at Jag. “Yes, indeed!”

* * *