Timothy Zahn - Spinneret

"Well," Meredith said, letting out a breath he hadn't known he was holding. "I think we're here."

"Wherever 'here' is," Perez said, climbing stiffly out of his seat and coming forward to peer over Carmen's shoulder. "What was that scream just before the gravity jumped? It sounded like we were losing the whole tail section."

"I don't know." Carmen indicated a readout. "But the local-grav indicator went crazy right then."

"How crazy?" Hafner asked. "Like we'd skimmed the edge of a small black hole?"

"Is that what those two spots on the screen were?" Carmen asked.

"Two?" Hafner frowned.

"Wait a minute," Perez growled. "Are you saying we just flew through a black hole?"

"The course marker went between the two spots," Meredith told him, "so we probably didn't hit either one. Though why we had to get even that close, I don't know."

"Possibly the high gravity gradient's needed to trigger their star drive mechanism,"

Hafner suggested thoughtfully. "And if that's true, it would explain why there are so few jump points listed on the boat's map."

"It does?" Carmen frowned. " … Oh. There aren't going to be many systems with even a single black hole nearby, let alone a pair. So Astra was picked for the Spinneret for no better reason than its accessibility?"

"With maybe a minor point being its proximity to an asteroid belt. They may have brought down some of the bigger asteroids themselves." Hafner craned his head to see out the viewport. "Any idea where Spinnerhome is out there?"

"It doesn't show on the displays yet. But the boat seems to know where it's going."

"Then it may be confused," Perez said softly. "This isn't the Spinners' system."

Meredith spun to look at him. "What?"

Perez gestured toward the viewport. "The sun in the cavern is yellow."

For a long minute there was dead silence in the room. "Maybe it's a double star system," Loretta offered at last. "With a yellow star behind, where we can't see it."

"In that case we should be veering to go around the red one," Perez pointed out.

"Maybe we will, once we build up more speed," Carmen said.

"Maybe," Perez said darkly. "Maybe not."

Meredith broke the silence that followed. "There's no point in worrying about it now. We're all dog-tired; let's go aft and find somewhere to sleep. In a few hours we'll have a better idea what the boat's got in mind."

The main passenger section consisted of three airline-type cabins, each with twenty tall, thin chairs that flattened out into beds. By unspoken agreement they all stayed together, stretching out in the five beds closest to the forward door. One by one, with little conversation, they went to sleep.

Meredith was the first to wake, six hours later, and when he padded to the control room he found Carmen's hunch had been correct. The red sun, noticeably larger, was now sitting off their port bow, while the screen indicated a course that would come perilously close to the edge but clearly miss it. Bringing forward one of the supply boxes, he improvised a table and was setting out five field-ration breakfasts when the others drifted in.

"So Dr. Williams was right after all," Perez said grudgingly after surveying the situation. "Any sign of the other sun yet?"

"Not that I could see," Meredith said, waving Loretta to the seat beside him. He didn't blame the others for being cool toward her, but it was about time to put a stop to that nonsense. He was opening his mouth to do so when Perez suddenly yelped.

"Hey! What was that?"

"What?" Carmen asked, joining him.

"A flash of yellow near the middle of the sun," he said, pointing. "Just for a second."

"A solar flare?" Meredith ventured.

"Doesn't sound like it," Hafner grunted, struggling to get out of his seat. Loretta moved to help him. "Flares are hot spots, all right, but a yellow burst from a red sun seems pretty excessive. Whereabouts was it?"

"A little below the center—there! There goes another one!"

This one lasted several seconds before winking out as abruptly as it had appeared.

"That is damned odd," Meredith agreed uneasily. "Carmen, is there some way you can get spectrum or intensity data on those?"

Carmen was peering at the translator screen. "I don't know. I don't remember seeing anything tike that in the manual. Of course, I wasn't looking for it either."

"Dr. Williams, help her," Meredith ordered. "The rest of you keep an eye on the sun."

They counted twelve more of the brief flashes before Carmen and Loretta found a spectrometer program for the boat's sensors. It was, unfortunately, useless for their purposes, lacking any fine-directional capability.

"Could there be a ring of asteroids grazing the surface?" Perez suggested. "Maybe the flares occur when one of them impacts."

"They're still too short-lived for that," Hafner shook his head. "Besides, there's no real 'surface' to a star; just a steadily thinning atmosphere."

"Sure there's a surface," Perez retorted. "I can see it."

"You what?"

"Sure. Watch the edge—the stars disappear right behind it."

Closing one eye, Meredith held his hand up to cut out as much of the sun's glare as he could. Sure enough, the stars disappeared behind the edge with no preliminary dimming that he could detect. Shifting his gaze, he found himself looking into Hafner's eyes. "Are you thinking the same thing I am?" the geologist asked carefully.

Meredith's mouth felt a little dry. "It's impossible," he said. "The size alone—no, it can't possibly be."

"What can't be?" Carmen demanded.

Hafner waved at the viewport. "That's not a star," he said quietly. "It's a gigantic artifact. A sphere, enclosing the Spinner sun … and probably Spinnerhome, as well."

"It's called a Dyson sphere," Hafner explained, the dull throbbing in his head and leg forming an odd counterpoint to the giddy feeling of unreality seeping into his brain. After the Spinneret he'd thought he could handle anything. But this— "It was supposed to be a way for a civilization to trap all the energy from its sun.

Odds are that thing's made of sheets of cable material, supported by a framework of the cables themselves."

"I'll be damned," Meredith murmured. "That would explain what they needed a planetworth of cable for, wouldn't it?"

"Possibly," Carmen said slowly. "But it doesn't explain why they left the Spinneret running."

"We're back to them assuming they'd be coming back when they left," Hafner agreed. Something was gnawing at the back of his brain, something about that huge artifact that seemed wrong. But he couldn't place it. "I gather the boat's heading for a passage through the sphere. Colonel, you mentioned last night you brought a telescope along?"

"A small one, yes." Meredith turned away from the viewport. "Perez, give me a hand and we'll set it up in here."

The two men left, and Carmen and Loretta resumed their examination of the boat's manual. Easing into the seat beside Carmen, Hafner stretched out his leg and tried to nail down what was bothering him.

He hadn't succeeded by the time Meredith and Perez had the telescope set up between the two control panel seats … but an hour later, as Carmen was calling attention to a curious flattening of the sphere's limb, he got at least a piece of it.

"Best guess is that the sphere wasn't finished and that we're coming up on the uncompleted edge," Meredith was suggesting as Hafner limped over from the side viewport to the group huddled by the telescope.

"Seems silly to start a project that size and then not finish it," Carmen said.

"Their Congress must've cut the funding," Meredith said dryly, eliciting a snort from Perez.

"Or maybe they discovered it wasn't working," Hafner offered. "A superconductor like cable material would be great for collecting light and particle energies, but I'm not at all sure how you'd then turn the heat into something useful."