*
It took a long time before he could bring himself to gaze again at the sight of the Milky Way; and then he did so with a kind of anguished fascination, imagining that he might locate the sun, lost in that sea of light—or even identify the portion of the spiral in which the sun lay. It was impossible, of course. He knew that Earth’s sun lay in the Orion spiral arm of the galaxy, but even that was impossible to identify from this perspective.
When he drew his gaze back in to focus on the nearer structure—now a hard-edged shadow cutting across most of the breadth of the galaxy—he realized with a start that it seemed closer than it had been just minutes ago. Was Neptune Explorer moving toward it? The silhouette angle seemed different. He turned to check the sensor array, then remembered that Charlie had burned the sensors out pointing them at the sun.
*Wait.*
He felt the daughter-stones sparkling in his wrists.
*Look outside.*
Frowning, he peered out the window, shifting his gaze along the length of the mysterious object. He felt a flicker in the back of his mind, and realized that the stones were making calculations, steering by his eyesight. /Are we still threading space?/ he whispered.
Neptune Crossing Page 79
