No matter how much he thought about it, it didn’t get any clearer. And he had nobody to talk it over with. He certainly wasn’t about to discuss this with Nilis, whom he was starting to think was part of the problem. He wished Torec were here.

At lights out he slept as long as he could. But all too soon the morning came.

On the sixth day there was to be a briefing on the revitalized Ghosts’ gravastar technology.

Nilis insisted that Pirius come out of the corvette and join him.

As the two of them followed Draq, Mara, and the other Plutinos through the grubby corridors of the compound at Christy, the Commissary was actually humming. For Nilis, Pirius supposed, a day of lectures and earnest academic discussion was a day in paradise.

“We’re here to assess this material for its weapons potential, Ensign,” Nilis said sternly. “I suggest you put aside your prejudices and do your duty.”

Prejudices? “Yes, sir,” Pirius said coldly.

Mara walked beside Pirius, but she ignored him. She hadn’t said a word to him since his hostile reaction to the Ghost.

They were led to the most spacious dome of the complex. It was a chilly, cavernous place. Chairs and couches had been set in the middle of the hall, an island of furniture in a sea of empty floor. A relic of a failed colony, its surface tarnished to a golden hue by cosmic rays, this dome was far too big for the small modern population. Ancient bots hovered uncertainly, offering unappetizing-looking food and drink.

And Pirius could see a Ghost drifting over the ice just outside the dome, obscured by the tint of the aged dome wall. Perhaps it was the one who called itself the Sink Ambassador. He wished with all his heart that it would go away.

Draq climbed a little podium. Self-importantly, he began to outline the new idea of a “gravastar”: based on an ancient human theory, developed by a colony of Silver Ghosts here on Pluto-Charon, discovered by Nilis in his hasty trawls of the Olympus Archive, and identified as having the potential to be useful for Project Prime Radiant. “Everybody knows what a black hole is,” Draq began. “But everybody is wrong. . . .”

Draq spoke too quickly, made too many weak jokes, and used too many technical phrases Pirius didn’t recognize at all, such as “Mazur-Mottola solutions” and “negative energy density” and “an interior de Sitter condensate phase matched to an exterior Schwarzschild geometry.” But he had a lot of Virtual schematics, immense displays that filled up much of this huge dome’s volume. The special effects were spectacular and entertaining, and Draq, beneath his gaudy creations, gestured like a showman.

A black hole came about if a lump of matter collapsed so far that its surface gravity increased to the point where you would need to travel at lightspeed to escape it. It had happened during the fiery instants after the Big Bang, and could occur nowadays when a giant star imploded. Within its “event horizon,” the surface of no return, still the implosion continued.