Rachel made herself use her flat, factual voice. “Stats show these were nonrandom, four sigmas out from any bell curve odds.”

“They… group… at different times. How far into the past are we now?”

“Six million years.”

He frowned, pursed his lips. “I have never seen this before.”

“Astronomers study star dynamics. This is about the hunkered-down planets, or the ones destroyed, orbiting those stars.”

The Prefect gave her a sour smile. “So this is another example of the perils of specialization.”

“Um, yessir.” Let the idea percolate….

The Prefect bit. “Which means…?”

“The endangered worlds were near each other, millions of years ago. Whatever attacked them—killing some societies entirely, scaring others so much they still remember it, guard against it—came at them when they were close to each other.” She paused. Let him figure it out….

“Whatever menace does this…” The Prefect let his puzzled sentence trail off.

“Wormholes lie somewhere in those intersecting orbits.”

The Prefect stiffened. “We know of no wormholes!”

“Right. Except the one we infer the Ythri came through. No more, yes. But… Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, as some philosopher said.”

A furious head-shake. “But—where could wormholes come from? We know they’re impossible to build—”

“The Big Bang? We know it was chaotic. Maybe some survived that era. Got trapped in the galaxy when it formed up later. They go coasting around, just as the stars do.”

He blinked, always a good sign. “So when a wormhole mouth gets near a group of stars…”

“Something comes through it. Someone—some thing—that found a wormhole mouth. Y’know, theory says wormholes aren’t simple one-way pipes. They can branch, like subways in spacetime. So some terrible thing comes through, attacks inhabited planets.”

The Prefect looked puzzled. Maybe this was coming too fast? Explain, girl. Go technical.

“We—well, I—saw it in the planets around dwarfs, because there are more of them. Better statistics, the pattern shows up.”

She let that sink in while the Prefect watched the galaxy grind into its past. More green dots swooped along their blithe paths, nearing each other, coasting on, apart… the waltz of eternity, Newton meets Mozart, on and on through thousands of millennia, down through the echoing halls of vast, lost time. But ever eternity casts shadows, if you know where to look.

The Prefect was a quick study. His sharp, piercing eyes darted among the bee swarm of stars, mouth now compressed, lips white with pressure. “What are the odds that there’s one near us?”

This she had not thought about—another wormhole than the one she thought the Ythri came through? This Prefect did not know the Ythri wormhole was an accepted theory, now. Matters were moving fast, and secrets got kept. “Given the number of dwarfs nearby… um, pretty good.”

He smiled, an unusual event. “This is utterly new. When you found the ancient tragedies, I was impressed. If you were wondering, only one in several thousand Trainees catches on to that fact—that secret, I should say.”