When they surfaced a second time and looked out at the night, it began to move. The stars themselves began to move. The entire sky looked as if it was being disrupted, wrapping itself around a black disk. A thousand stars were in motion, swirling in various directions. “Is that it?” It was Beth’s voice, almost a squeal over the allcomm.

Watching it on a large screen was simply not adequate, so everybody crowded onto the bridge to get the captain’s view. Derek for a long time remained quiet while everybody else commented on how crazy it was. Something was pulling the sky apart.

“Incredible,” said Wally.

Ken stared at it. “My God, how am I supposed to describe something like this?”

“Is that really what it does?” said Wally. “I never heard of anything like that before.”

Derek nodded. “Gravity distorts the light. And there’s a lot of gravity. The sky’s not really getting bent out of shape. It just looks that way.” He stopped to catch his breath. “It’s beautiful.”

It was not the descriptor Hutch would have chosen.

“How big is it?” asked Ken.

Derek smiled. “Hard to say. We don’t think of holes as being big. They contain a lot of mass. Take the sun and squeeze it down into a sphere about twenty kilometers wide, and you might be close.”

“You’re kidding. That’s all?”

“This keeps getting crazier,” said Beth.

“See those?” Derek indicated a constellation of stars off to starboard, which formed an almost perfect box, with an extremely bright pair on one side. “And over here.” He pointed to his left, where a similar box, stretched a bit more, hung in the sky.

“What the hell?” said Ken. “They look identical. Except the bright ones are on the other side.”

“There’s only one constellation. In an area like this, the black hole bends and twists light. The sky wraps itself around it. If there was a ship out there coming in our direction, we might see it in two different places. Or maybe, depending on circumstances, we’d be able to see ourselves.”

Beth just shook her head.

“That’s a little unnerving,” said Wally.

•  •  •

“I am sorry to interrupt,” said Barry, “but I’m concerned about an abundance of asteroids in the area. There is a substantial number, and they are moving at exceedingly high rates.”

“They’re in orbit,” said Derek.

“Where do you think they came from?” asked Ken.

“There wouldn’t be anything unusual about that. Black holes drag all kinds of stuff out of planetary systems.”

Ken pointed a finger at him. “That’s what got you looking for this. The rogue world in that other system.”

“Sure. I should have realized right from the beginning, with the markers disrupted and Calliope missing, there was no other explanation, unless you had the worst equipment in the world gathering the data.”