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.
“That’s max. We could go over and look at them, I suppose. But I don’t see the point.”
“Are we sure they’re omegas?”
“Yes. We’ve got matching spectra.”
A cursor appeared behind the one in the center. It tracked backward across open space, passed through a series of clouds, and finally vanished in the general chaos. “It originated somewhere along there,” said Hutch. “It can’t go too much deeper.”
“Why not?” asked Matt.
“The numbers don’t work. Whatever we’re looking for, it’s no further than about fifty-seven light-years from the core. That’s where we are now.”
“So the source is somewhere along this arc?”
“Yes. I’d say so.”
“How long’s the arc?”
“Five and a half light-years.”
“That could take a while.”
“Not necessarily. Most of the area’s open space.”
“Okay,” said Matt. “How do we want to do this?”
“Stay together,” she said. “We simply start poking around. Look for more omegas. Or anything else out of the way.”
“How do we inspect a dust cloud?” asked Jon.
“Scanners.”
“But some of these things are millions of kilometers deep. You’re not going to be able to see very far into that.”
“It’s all we have, Jon. Other than going in with the ships to see whether we bump into something.”
“Okay. I see what you mean.”
“Look, I can’t give you any specifics about this. We’ll be hunting for anything out of the ordinary. Unusual energy signatures. Artificial radio transmissions. Too much carbon. I don’t know—”
Matt nodded. “We’ll know it when we see it.”
“That’s exactly right, Matthew.”
“Okay, Preston, let’s go look at some dust clouds.”