And there they were, in the Perseus Arm — two thirds of the way across the galaxy, and tens of thousands of light-years from any of the homeworlds.

"Shortcut passage was normal," said Thor. The tiny holegram of his face floating above the rim of Keith's workstation was lined up with the back of Thor's actual head, and the holographic mass of red hair blended into the real mane beyond, making his ax-blade features seem lost in a vast orange sea.

"Good work," said Keith. "Let's drop a marker buoy."

Thor nodded and pushed some keys. Although the shortcut stood out in hyperspace, if Starplex's hyper-radio equipment broke down, they'd have trouble finding it again.

The buoy, broadcasting on normal EM frequencies and containing its own hyperscope, would be their beacon home in that case.

Jag got up and pointed out the twinkling stars again; they were quite easy to see. Thor rotated the holographic bubble so that they appeared front and center, instead of off behind the observation gallery.

Lianne Karendaughter was leaning forward at her workstation, a delicate hand supporting her chin. "So what's causing the twinkling?" she said.

Behind her, Jag lifted all four shoulders in a Waldahud shrug. "It can't be atmospheric disturbances, of course," he said. "Spectrographs confirm that we're in a space-normal vacuum. But something is in between our ship and the background stars — something that is at least partially opaque and shifting."

"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."