I shook my head. “Maybe the shell of novas hid it, if it’s there at all. Maybe it even caused the chain reaction. Sucking gas and dust and stars for fifteen billion years, maybe its mass passed some kind of threshold and boom. Maybe you’d even find it if you processed the recordings I took. They’re proprietary, Ander. Get them from General Products.”

“Well, but they’re gone.” But he had that smirk again. “Where did you go after that?”

“Earth. After the galactic core, what else could measure up?”

Ander laughed.

Five teams were fighting over two prey turtles that glowed intermittently among thrashing bodies. The crowd was standing, yelling their heads off. And Ander pulled a flat portable out of his backpurse, ten inches by ten inches by a quarter inch thick, and opened it in my lap. He tapped rapidly.

A picture stood above my lap. Five blue-white points rotated against a black background. They pulled apart, growing slowly brighter, coming toward me. Suddenly they blossomed into blue and white globes; the starscape wheeled; the spheres went murky red and began to recede. Ander tapped, and the picture froze.

Tiny suns circled four of the globes. The fifth glowed of itself, as if the continents of a world had caught fire. Flying planets! And nobody around us was looking at anything but the miniature war beyond the glass.

Ander said, “The puppeteers are still in known space. Receding at relativistic speeds, and they took their planets with them.” He snapped his portable shut. “Five worlds all about the same size, orbiting in a pentagon around each other. Do the math yourself. You’ll find that you can put a sun at the center, or not, and the orbits are stable either way. They understand tides just fine, Beowulf. That’s what they hid from you.”

My mind lurched. Cowards or not, peaceable or not, I could see how the traditionally paranoid ARM might react to so much sheer brute power. “What are they like? Oxygen worlds? Natural or terraformed? How—”

“Sigmund says we’ve dropped cameras in their path, not too close. The system goes flying by at point eight lights. We haven’t learned much. Free oxygen, liquid water, fusion light sources redder than Sol, and we don’t know why the odd one looks so odd. There’s nothing else in the system, no asteroids, no cometary halo, just chains of spacecraft moving between the five worlds.”

“Where are they going?”

“Straight north along the galactic axis.”

“That’s what I did, coming back from the Core. Get clear of occupied space and then turn…turning five planets could be a bitch.”

“Well, there’s nothing but empty space where they’re going.”

“Maybe that’s what they want.”