The hull trembled again, much more noticeably this time, snapping her attention back to her instruments. Back into false-space? Why? It didn’t feel like that, though she knew there were scores of different faster-than-light techniques and she was not really used to the one employed by Classroom. No, she was seeing directly, not by relay. Solid matter—meteoroid? It was hard to believe that any spacecraft could not handle such an incident without attracting the attention of the passengers, though in a system as young as Arc’s must be there were no doubt lots of unaccreted particles. Her fingers played over her console, shifting from simple visual imaging to build a tridimensional model of the space around the craft for a kilometer radius.

There was matter, of course—the Eta Carinae region is rich in nebulosity; but material at a density measured in atoms, or even billions of atoms, per liter does not jolt several million tons of spacecraft. The matter was unusually rich in heavy atoms, since it had cycled through more generations of star formation than even Molly’s part of space; but this seemed irrelevant, too.

There was energy. Arc was still hundreds of astronomical units away, and its companion even farther, but both radiated fiercely in their appropriate spectral ranges. None of Molly’s fellow students would have dreamed of exposing themselves to the flux outside the hull—she herself would have been uneasy about the X-ray component. Still, there seemed nothing to account for the ship’s behavior.

She frowned in thought for a moment, then flicked off her screen and removed her face from the viewing mask. Beside her, Joe made a gesture indicating that he was aware of her motion and willing to converse, though he kept his front eyes at his monitor.