"Oh, boy, here comes me trying to give a physics lecture to a bacterium. What you call wormholes are not physical objects, they are projections into the local spacetime. The projections hop around, just below the speed of light, in kind of a figure eight pattern that covers about a lightyear. A wormhole projection stays in one place for between roughly seventeen to ninety two minutes, then it closes and reappears at the next step along the path, which could be a quarter of a lightyear away. Wormholes follow a set pattern, over the course of a cycle, a wormhole will cover every location along the path, but there are millions of locations. My point is, there is no way the Kristang, or any other species currently in this galaxy, could prevent ships from using a wormhole; it's not practical to cover all those locations. My plan is to jump us close to where a wormhole is going to appear, and see if any other ships are waiting, I know exactly when a wormhole is going to shift to the next location. If it's clear, we wait for the wormhole to open, jump right in front of it, then go through."

"Huh." I had pictured wormholes as a sort a Stargate thing, a big ring hanging in space, with a glowing center. "That sounds like a good plan. And don't say of course it is. Why don't wormholes stay in one place?"

"Didn't you already answer that question? Because if a wormhole stays in one place, a species could control it, duh. Also, because the longer a wormhole is open, it takes exponentially more energy to sustain the connection. And a static wormhole would eventually create a local rupture in spacetime."

"Another good safety tip, then."

"An excellent safety tip. Probably not one you monkeys need to worry about, in case you're thinking of creating a wormhole out of mud and sticks."

"Shut up." Every time I was thinking Skippy was Ok, he said something to remind me that, deep down, he was an asshole.

After the jump away from the wormhole, I called a stand down for the entire crew, they were exhausted, and as Skippy said we were safe, we’d made enough jumps that it was extremely unlikely the Thuranin could find us now. Other than a person in the sickbay, who could nap on the floor there, and a duty officer in the command pilot couch, I wanted everyone to get a solid eight hours of sleep. We were tired, we were emotionally wrung out, and we all needed time to process everything that had happened during a very long and eventful day. For most of the crew, it had started when a Dodo dropped out of the sky onto their logistics base, and four humans came out and stunned the Ruhar. For Chang, Simms, Adams and me, it had started earlier, when we escaped from the Ruhar and stole the Dodo.