"One hundred and ninety people are still below the ocean deck," said Lianne.

"Will we make it?" Keith asked her.

"I'm not-"

"Red light on thruster number six," shouted Thor. "It's overheating."

"Great," Keith said. "Do you need to take it off-line?"

"Not yet," said Thor. "I'm injecting repair nanotechs into its intercoolers; they may be able to correct the problem."

"The green star's equator is about to pass through the shortcut," said Jag.

A portion of the holographic display changed to a schematic representation of what was happening. At the left was the bulging hemisphere of the part of the star that had already protruded from the shortcut. The shortcut itself was seen from the side as a vertical line. Behind that, and receding away from it, was the diamond-shaped profile of Starplex. As the equator passed out of the shortcut, the hole the shortcut made in space started shrinking, and photons and charged particles from the star began spilling backward. The edges of the radiation backwash were like the hands of a clock starting at noon and six and converging toward three o'clock.

Thor pushed Starplex as hard as he could. Keith could see constellations of yellow warning indicators lighting up on the pilot's panel… The ship continued to climb out of the star's gravity well, its escape tunnel narrowing as the shortcut shrank in size.

"Lansing!" shouted Jag. "The dark-matter field is moving — moving away from the star."

"Could it be because of that repulsive force you mentioned?"

Jag moved both sets of shoulders. "It's not the kind of effect I'd predict, but-"

"Lower-deck evacuation now complete," said Lianne, swinging around to face the director.

"Even so," said Thor, "we're going to take one hell of a lot radiation kick when that backwash hits us."

Finally, the star finished emerging, and the shortcut disappeared. At that point, Thor switched all power from the engines to the force screens, trying to deflect as much of the incoming radiation as possible. Starplex continued to travel under momentum. The radiation alarm began to warble again.

"Are we far enough away?" Keith asked. Thor was too busy with the controls to answer. "Are we far enough away?" he asked again.

Jag did some calculations. "I think so," he said, "but only because we're using the ocean deck as shielding. Otherwise, we would all have taken a lethal dose."

"All right," Keith said. "Let's continue on until we're at a safe distance. Lianne, draw up a new duty roster that makes minimal use of cetaceans, and put any nonessential dolphins into medical hibernation until we can replace the water on the ocean deck. At the rate the star is receding from the shortcut, it'll be days before we can approach the portal safely." He paused, then: "Good work, everyone. Rhombus, what's the status of our docking bays?"

"They should still be usable. Their walls are heavily shielded against radiation leakage, in case a ship crashes or explodes in them."

"Good," said Keith. "Thor, let me know when we're an acceptable distance from that star." He turned to the Waldahud. "Jag, you should go have a close look at it. I want to know exactly where it came from and why it's here."

Chapter VIII

It had taken a long time for humans to decipher dolphin speech. When they finally did so, delphinese names turned out to be sonargrams of individual dolphins, with their most unusual physical characteristics exaggerated. It was no surprise, then, that the only form of human art dolphins really enjoyed was political cartooning.

One of Starplexs' best probeship pilots was a dolphin whose English name was Longbottle — a poor substitute for the song of trills and clicks that painted a caricature of him for his kinfolk, emphasizing his mighty snout.

Longbottle's favorite probeship was the Rum Runner, a bronze wedge twenty meters long and ten wide. A water tank ran down the ship's axis.

To the left and right were separate air-filled habitats that joined at the rear in a U-shape with an airlock between them. The port side was normally kept to human standards; the starboard was set to cooler Waldahud conditions.

To pilot the vessel, Longbottle let small free-floating sensor drones clamp onto his flukes and pectoral fins. The ship had hundreds of attitude-control jets that allowed it to move in direct approximation of the dolphin's own movements in his tank. Such a technique was extraordinarily wasteful of fuel — so much so that the Waldahudin had refused to bid on the contract to build these vessels — but it provided incredible maneuverability and, according to Long-bottle, was an absolute joy to fly.

Although the Rum Runner could operate away from Starplex for weeks at a time, on this mission it would be gone for less than a day, and the crew would consist of just Longbottle and Jag.

The Rum Runner was normally stored in docking bay seven, one of five that had locks leading through the engineering torus to the ocean deck.

The ship was clamped to the.deck's wall, and three access tubes at shallow angles entered its rooftop hatches.

Once Longbottle and Jag were aboard, the segmented docking-bay door moved up into the roofi Longbottle was famous for his theatrical launches. He zoomed the ship out of the bay, then rolled and arched in his tank, taking the Rum Runner on a breathtaking warm-up flight past all the docking-bay doors, swinging in a great circle around the central disk.

He then rolled to one side in his tank, and the ship made a wide arc — looking for all the world as though it were banking in the vacuum of space.

Jag was getting impatient, but Longbottle, like all dolphins, was oblivious to that. He did a series of turns and flips in his tank, and the ship responded in kind. The gravity plates under Jag's compartment compensated completely for the movements, but in his water-filled tube, Longbottle could feel the ship as if it were an extension of his own body.

Finally, when he'd had enough fun, Longbottle set off on a wildly curving path — again, wasteful of energy, but so much more interesting than the straight lines and precise arcs of normal celestial mechanics.

The green star dominated the sky, even though its surface was now thirty million kilometers distant. The Rum Runner had much better force screens and physical shielding than did Starplex itself; it could make a very close passage.

Under Longbottle's fanciful guidance, the ship dived in, skimming the vast orb from just 100,000 kilometers above its photosphere. Scoops on the ship's leading edge sucked in samples of stellar atmosphere.

"Greenness of this star a baffiement to me," said Long-bottle, through the hydrophone in his tank. Like most dolphins, Longbottle could approximate the sounds of both English and Waldahudar (although with mangled syntax — there was no such thing as appropriate word order in cetacean grammar). The computer simply processed those sounds to make them intelligible; it would only switch over to translation mode if a dolphin was actually speaking in delphinese.

Jag grunted. "I'm puzzled, too. Its surface temperature is twelve thousand degrees. The fardint thing should be blue or white, not green.

The spectral analysis doesn't make 'any sense either. I've never seen such high concentrations of heavy elements in a star."

"Damaged perhaps by passage through shortcut?" asked Longbottle, twisting in his tank so that the ship would roll slowly around its axis.

Even with extra shielding, it wasn't safe to keep the same side facing the star.

Jag grunted again. "I suppose that's possible. Most of the star's chromosphere and corona were probably scraped off during passage through the shortcut. The shortcut's lips clamped down on the photosphere, stripping away the rarefied gas above. Still, all previous tests have shown zero structural change in objects passing through a shortcut. Of course, nothing this big has ever gone through one before."