Although cushioned in artificial gravity and a stable internal environment, they could all slightly feel what was going on, and for the longest time nobody breathed.
At just the precise vanishing point of the original trajectory, and just as the ship reached the mathematical point it had represented, a hole opened up, a hole in space and time. It had no elegant look, no sense of symmetry, nor did it give off the sensation of brute force, although it certainly had that. It looked in fact like a ghostly, twisting plasma of something indefinable, some sort of plasma that was unlike anything in the known universe, and which throbbed and swirled.
The captain took her best data and punched right into the center of the throbbing mass, which slowly enveloped the ship. At that moment the ship seemed to sway in all directions at once, and it took some fast experimenting to keep it solid, as it now appeared to be riding dead center through a ghostly translucent tube.
Most instrumentation was now useless, but enough was known about the energy properties of a wormhole to allow at least a calculation of the amount of subjective time they would be inside and during which the captain would have to be constantly in control.
There was no need to add power now, beyond positioning; the hole simply ignored things like thrust and mass and did its own things according to its own dimly understood extra-universe rules.
The main engines cut off and the internal buffered living environment stabilized. Everything was suddenly unnaturally quiet and even more disconcertingly still.
An Li unbuckled herself from her bed, sat up, opened a small box on a nightstand near it and removed a Styngan cigarette and an elegant lighter with a stylized rat embossed on its side. She pressed the stud, and the top element glowed. She brought it up to the cigarette.
For some reason, it took her several tries before her hand would obey enough to get the heat where she wanted it to go.
She finally got the thing lit, but just sat there, staring at the blank bulkhead, barely puffing on it, allowing her nerve to come back and her heart to slow down.
Everybody, she thought, needed at least one bad habit, if only for moments like these.
And there would be several days more to go with things probably getting worse for everybody. Days and days with nothing to do, but also nothing more to learn. They didn’t have anything new, no data on what was at the other end. But it was going to be bedlam and constant tension and work once they broke out, from the very moment they broke out, assuming all went well.
And she was right. By the time they got the warning that it was only a matter of hours left, they were through all the diversions and all the drugs and cyber entertainment aboard and were starting at each other’s throats. That, though, would change the moment things started to happen. It was already happening as they began to think of the job ahead.
The captain, though, was quite pleased. “We managed to get in, we’ve had no incidents, and we’re in excellent condition,” she assured them. “I was afraid that others would try following us in; that’s a good way to destabilize the interior of a wild hole and cause all sorts of nastiness. We had a few followers, early on, but if anyone was present to tell our course, speed, and match us going in, it wasn’t clear on any of my sensors.”
“Do they really need that?” Randi Queson asked her. “I mean, if they have a surveyor unit in the area and just register us—course, speed, which hole—they don’t have to risk any destabilization or detection, do they?”
“Perhaps not, but it’s not that easy. Without the data Sanders had downloaded into me, I do not see how they could determine the pattern and pick the correct hole and appearance with sufficient time to get through. And if we get back, we’re going to own the destination.”
“Do you think you can hold us together on the way out?” Lucky Cross asked her. “I always suspected that it was that that tore ships apart. Got to be a fuckin’ monster to keep a hole like that re-forming over and over. Those forces and the inevitable debris field have got to be Hell itself.”
“Who can answer that sort of hypothetical?” the captain mused. “I don’t know. I think so. The ships that returned as beaten-up wrecks appeared to be victims of the wormhole itself, and the one that didn’t showed no apparent outward damage, although its data banks were fried. If that happens to me, then you will have to take it through. I am confident that this ship can do it, with or without me, if need be. In the meantime, I’m going to ask that you be strapped into the emergency bridge in the C&C while we emerge, just in case, and that everyone else be firmly fixed in their bunks. I will transfer holograms of the C&C board to every cabin so that you can see what we see and are facing. If we get clear, I will unlock and extend the visual camera, which has so far been useless to us. Fair enough.”
Cross sighed. “I guess.” She didn’t see how the hell she was going to fly this thing if the captain couldn’t, though.
“All hands,” the captain announced throughout the ship. “If you have not eaten, I suggest you do it now, then secure everything loose throughout the ship. At the fifteen-minute mark I will sound an alarm indicating that you are to go to your assigned places and strap in. I will then cue you up until we emerge. At that point, deduction suggests that there may be some periods of brief power fluctuations, weightlessness, and/or severe movement of the ship beyond the abilities of the inner core to compensate. Just hang on until Lucky or I tell you it’s safe to move about.”
“Aye, aye, ma’am,” Sark grumbled. “Me, I don’t care what happens by this point, just so long as it’s something.”
Nobody ate a meal, although a couple of them drank a little bit and nibbled on some energy bars, mostly to settle nerves. There was a lot of loose stuff to pick up and store, but they all knew they’d miss some of it anyway. Nobody was really thinking of anything but the end of the trip that everyone else had spun stories and legends about, and many had died trying to get to and from. And there wasn’t one damned thing they could do except wait for it.
At fifteen minutes, the emergency alarm sounded and the captain said, “All hands to rough-condition stations and strap in.”
Everybody except Cross went for their quarters with one last look around to make sure they weren’t forgetting the obvious. Lucky headed down and aft to C&C, only to find Eyegor waiting for her there.
“You better find a way to hold on or you’re going to get smashed against this equipment,” she told the robot.
“I will use internal energy beams to secure myself to the bulkhead,” Eyegor told her. “I have determined that nothing critical runs through it, so I should not disrupt anything. I must be here and active to record this historic event.”
Lucky Cross sat in the command chair and belted herself in, then reclined, triggering two command panels next to her right and left hands and activating voice control. It would have no effect unless the captain were cut off from the controls, but if that happened she would have complete command of the ship in nanoseconds. It was the last thing she wanted, nor was she trained for it, but she was the best qualified of the group if it came to that.
“Comm check,” she said in as cool a voice as she could manage.
“Comm check aye,” responded a more mechanical-sounding version of the captain’s voice from the panel in front of her.