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outside cameras on Channel Seventeen.”
    “Comm: Channel Seventeen.” Terza’s soft voice came to Martinez’ ears from the nearest acceleration couch.
    Martinez was already on the correct channel, his head filled with the stars as viewed from the Kayenta as it passed the final moments of its twenty-day acceleration out of the Laredo system. The virtual cap he wore to project the image onto his visual centers was lighter than the Fleet issue, which required earphones and microphone pickups, and he sensed other differences as well: the depth of field was subtly different, a bit flatter, perhaps because the civilian rig required less precision.
    The stars were thrown like a great wash of diamonds across the midnight backdrop, silent and steady and grand. They were the home stars under which Martinez had spent the first half of his life, and his mind naturally sought the familiar, comforting constellations in their well-known places. Laredo’s own star, this far out, was hardly brighter than other bright stars. The software had been instructed to blot out Kayenta ’s brilliant tail so as to avoid losing the stars by contrast, and the result was a flickering, disturbing negative blot occupying one part of the display, a void of absolute darkness that seemed to pursue the ship.
    Martinez and Terza were in Kayenta’s main lounge, the softly-scented center of the yacht’s social life. Shon-dan, an astronomer from the Imperial University of Zarafan who had come aboard as Marcella’s guest, was about to show the reason why an astronomical observatory had been placed on Chee Station, and why she had spent months journeying here.
    “Ten seconds,” Shon-dan said. “Eight. Five.”
    Kayenta was traveling too fast for Martinez to see the wormhole station as the ship flashed past, or the wormhole itself, the inverted bowl-of-stars that was their destination. The transition itself was instantaneous, and the star field changed at the same instant.
    A vast, lush globe of stars suddenly blazed across Martinez’ perceptions, occupying at least a third of the sky, the stars so packed together they seemed nearly as dense as glittering grains of sand stretched along an ocean shore. Martinez felt himself take an involuntary breath, and he heard Terza’s gasp. The closer Martinez looked, the more stars he saw. There seemed to be vague clouds and structures within the globe, each made up of more and more brilliants, but Martinez couldn’t tell whether the clouds actually existed or were the results of his own mind trying to create order in this vast, burning randomness, seeking the familiar just as it had sought out constellations in Laredo’s sky.
    Gazing into the vast star-globe was like drifting deeper and deeper into a endless sea, past complex, ill-defined shoals that on closer inspection were made up of millions of coral structures, while the structures themselves, looked at with greater care, were found to be composed of tiny limestone shells, and the shells themselves, on examination, each held tiny specks of life, a kind of infinite regression that baffled the senses.
    “Now you see why we’ve built the observatory.” Shon-dan’s voice, floating into Martinez’ perceptions, was quietly triumphant. “Of all the wormholes in the empire, this one leads to a system that’s closest to the center of a galaxy. This is our best chance to observe how a galactic core is structured. From here we can directly observe the effects on nearby stars of the supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s center.”
    With an effort of will Martinez shifted his attention away from the glowing globe to the rest of the starry envelope that surrounded Kayenta. By comparison with Laredo the entire sky was packed with stars, with an opalescent strip that marked the galaxy’s disk spiraling out into endless space. The Chee system was actually within the galactic core, though on its periphery, and stars on all sides were near and burning bright.