Then all hell broke loose.
The acceleration slammed her to the floor, despite the water. Below, she saw the vast vault of energy stored in the arch blow out and up, directly below them.
YOU HAVE MADE A SOLAR FLARE!
“And you thought I didn’t have a plan.”
Claire started to laugh. Slamming into a couch cut it off. She would have broken a shoulder, but the couch was water-logged and soft.
Now the worm was an asset. It repulsed matter, so the upjetting plume blew around it, around Silver Metal Lugger. Free of the flux tubes’ grip, the wormhole itself accelerated away from the Sun. All very helpful, Claire reflected, but she couldn’t enjoy the spectacle—the rattling, surging deck was trying to bounce her off the furniture.
What saved them in the end was their magnetic grapple. It deflected most of the solar flare protons around the ship. Pushed out at a speed of five hundred kilometers per second, they still barely survived baking. But they had the worm.
Still, the scientific officer was not pleased. He came aboard to make this quite clear. His face alone would have been enough.
“You’re surely not going to demand money for that?” He scowled and nodded toward where Silver Metal Lugger’s fields still hung onto the wormhole. Claire had to run a sea-blue plasma discharge behind it so she could see it at all. They were orbiting Mercury, negotiating.
Earthside, panels of experts were arguing with each other; she had heard plenty of it on tightbeam. A negative-mass wormhole would not fall, so it couldn’t knife through the Earth’s mantle and devour the core.
But a thin ship could fly straight into it, overcoming its gravitational repulsion—and come out where? Nobody knew. The worm wasn’t spewing mass, so its other end wasn’t buried in the middle of a star, or any place obviously dangerous. One of the half-dozen new theories squirting out on tightbeam held that maybe this was a multiply-connected wormhole, with many ends, of both positive and negative mass. In that case, plunging down it could take you to different destinations. A subway system for a galaxy; or a universe.
So: no threat, and plenty of possibilities. Interesting market prospects.
She shrugged. “Have your advocate talk to my advocate.”
“It’s a unique, natural resource—”
“And it’s mine.” She grinned. He was lean and muscular and the best man she had seen in weeks. Also the only man she had seen in weeks.
“I can have a team board you, y’know.” He towered over her, using the usual ominous male thing.
“I don’t think you’re that fast.”
“What’s speed got to do with it?”
“I can always turn off my grapplers.” She reached for a switch. “If it’s not mine, then I can just let everybody have it.”
“Why would you—no, don’t!”
It wasn’t the right switch, but he didn’t know that. “If I release it, the worm takes off—antigravity, sort of.”
He blinked. “We could catch it.”
“You couldn’t even find it. It’s dead black.” She tapped the switch, letting a malicious smile play on her lips.
“Please don’t.”
“I need to hear a number. An offer.”
His lips compressed until they paled. “The wormhole price, minus your fine?”
Her turn to blink. “What fine? I was on an approved flyby—”
“That solar flare wouldn’t have blown for a month. You did a real job on it—the whole magnetic arcade went up at once. People all the way out to the asteroids had to scramble for shelter.”
He looked at her steadily and she could not decide whether he was telling the truth. “So their costs—”
“Could run pretty high. Plus advocate fees.”
“Exactly.” He smiled, ever so slightly.
Erma was trying to tell her something but Claire turned the tiny voice far down, until it buzzed like an irritated insect.
She had endured weeks of a female personality sim in a nasty mood. Quite enough. She needed an antidote. This fellow had the wrong kind of politics, but to let that dictate everything was as dumb as politics itself. Her ship’s name was a joke, actually, about long, lonely voyages as an ore hauler. She’d had enough of that, too. And he was tall and muscular.
She smiled. “Touche. OK, it’s a done deal.”
He beamed. “I’ll get my team to work—”
“Still, I’d say you need to work on your negotiating skills. Too brassy.”
He frowned, but then gave her a grudging grin.
Subtlety had never been her strong suit. “Shall we discuss them—over dinner?”