Matt had been paging through his notebook. “It’s a bit like riding a time machine.”

“As close as we’ll get.”

JIM WAS INVALUABLE. He was always ready to play bridge or produce a show. Matt especially enjoyed Government Issue, which portrayed the misadventures of three female interns in a hopelessly corrupt and incompetent Washington. Jon had seen it before, a few episodes, but he grew to enjoy it more than anything else they watched, not because of the assorted buffooneries, or even because of the nubile young women. It was rather because, for reasons he could not understand, it didn’t seem quite so far as everything else.

So the weeks passed, and the final days dwindled away. And at last they were ready to make their jump into the Mordecai Zone. Matt sealed the viewports and the hatches against the radiation and told him they had three minutes.

  LIBRARY ENTRY

We range the day

And mount the sun.

We soar past the rim of the world,

And know not caution nor fear.

But too soon the night comes.

—Sigma Hotel Book

chapter 33

TWENTY-EIGHT THOUSAND LIGHT-YEARS from Earth.

Jon was looking at the navigation screen when they made the jump. He had become accustomed to the mild tingling sensation in his toes and fingertips when the ship moved from one state to the other. He felt it now and started breathing again when the stars blinked on. They provided a spectacular light show, as always, and it appeared as suddenly as if someone had thrown a switch.

The night was ablaze, with stars that were points of light and others so close he could make out disks. Still others were radiant smears, trapped in clouds of gas and dust. Brilliant jets and light-years-long streaks of glowing gas arced across the sky. In their immediate rear lay a cloud filled with hot red stars. If you lived here, on a terrestrial world, it would never get dark. He decided at that moment on the title of his autobiography: 28,000 Light-Years from Earth. Except that twenty-eight didn’t work. Round it off. Make it thirty. 30,000 Light-Years from Earth: The Jon Silvestri Story. Yeah. He liked that. It had a ring to it.

They sealed the viewports, so the only external views now were by way of the displays.

Matt had been worried about jumping in so close. “It’s too goddam much,” he’d said before punching the button. Jon had felt the same way, too much radiation here. Despite the assurances of the people who’d put on the shielding, he wasn’t comfortable. The estimates regarding how much protection they needed had been just that: estimates. They’d built in a 50 percent safety factor, but out here that might not mean much. A sudden explosion somewhere, a flare, almost any kind of eruption might fry them before they knew they were in trouble.

“Jim.” Matt didn’t even bother to release his restraints. “How do the radiation levels look?”

“Shielding is adequate.”

“Good. Recharge.”

“Commencing.”

Matt wanted to be ready to clear out if necessary.

“Which way’s the core?” asked Jon.

A cursor appeared on-screen, marking the position of the McAdams. And an arrow: “Approximately sixty light-years. That way.” Into the swirl of dust and stars.

“Do you see any unusual activity out there, Jim?” Specifically, were there any omegas?

“Negative,” said Jim. “It is a crowded area, but I see nothing we need be concerned about.”

Jon took a deep breath. “We’re really here,” he said. Only sixty light-years from Sag A*. The monster at the heart of the galaxy. A black hole three million times as massive as the sun. Dead ahead.

Sixty light-years seemed suddenly close. Just up in the next block.

“The diameter of the Sag A* event horizon,” said Jim, “is estimated at 7.7 million kilometers.”

Matt took a deep breath. Shook his head. “You know, Jon, I’d love to get close enough to see it.”

“We wouldn’t survive, Matt.”

“I know.”

Nevertheless, it was something Jon would have liked to see. “Sounds like a project for an AI flight.”

They both glanced toward the AI’s mode lamp. It brightened. “Don’t expect me to volunteer,” Jim said.

Matt grinned. “Jim, I’m disappointed in you.”

“I’ll try to live with your disappointment, Matthew. The area is lethal. Jets, radiation, antimatter, gamma rays. Get close in, and the interstellar medium is filled with highly ionized iron. Not a place for anyone to travel. Especially not an advanced entity.”

Matt could not take his eyes from the screen. “It doesn’t look like a real sky out there,” he said. “It’s too crowded.”

“Yes.” It was a sight that left Jon breathless. Blue-white suns off to one side; in another direction, a cloud filled with stars probably just being born. Another cloud with jagged flashes, seemingly frozen, until he saw that they were moving, crawling through the cloud at light speed.

They could see hundreds of clouds, large and small, scattered across an area several light-years deep and about thirty light-years wide. They were elongated, tubular, accusing fingers pointed at the central black hole that held them locked in their orbits.

JON USED THE VR capabilities of the common room to re-create the clouds, and he spent the next few hours seated in his chair, wandering among them. He’d never considered himself one of those sense-of-wonder types, idiots whose jaws dropped at the sight of a waterfall or a passing comet. But this was different. The sheer power and enormity of the Mordecai took his breath away. He was adrift near a luminous fountain when Matt broke in to tell him they’d located the Preston.

“You okay?” asked Hutch, referring to whether the shields were holding.

Both ships were, fortunately, doing well.

“I have some news,” she said. “We’ve spotted three omegas.”

The Mordecai Zone was an area of indefinite size. Their only real hope of finding the source had been to locate some omegas and run the vectors backward. That raised the issue of how common omegas were. Nobody had any real idea. Estimates ranged from a staggered production rate of fifty or so per year, to several thousand. But it was all guesswork.

Jon took a last look at the fountain, a golden stream arching through the night, bending and swirling as if the quality of light itself were different here. Then he shut it down and went onto the bridge. “Hi, Hutch,” he said, “welcome to the Cauldron.”

“Hello, Jon. Must be heaven out there for a physicist.”

“What do the omegas look like?”

“Unfortunately, they’re running together. All going in the same direction. Sorry.”

A couple of omegas on different routes would have allowed them to track backward until they intersected. And there, voilà, they would find the factory. The boiler room. The manufacturer. Whatever the hell it was.

“They’re in a vee-shape,” Hutch continued, “one in front, the others angled back at about twenty degrees. The entire formation is two and a fraction light-years across. The two trailing clouds are identical ranges from the lead.”

She relayed images, and Jim put them on-screen. They simply looked like hazy stars.

“They do love their math,” said Jon.

“They’re moving at escape velocity, in the same general direction as everything else here.”

Matt tried to get a clearer picture. “Can you give us a better mag?” he said.