The Thuranin star carrier, mothership, whatever you call it, then went through a series of jumps I lost track of, because some of them happened while I was asleep. Some people aboard the ship were trying to keep amateur records of all the ship's maneuvers; jumps, time between jumps, time and force of acceleration. Personally, I lost track after the second jump, and I figured we had qualified people keeping track for us. The loudspeakers woke us up around 0300 one night, when the ship was approaching the wormhole, and I wished I had more warning, because my bladder already was sending me warning signals. The idea of falling into a wormhole, having my atoms ripped apart and reassembled, or whatever it was that happened, had me scared. I was laying rigid in my bunk, waiting for the unknown, when the loudspeaker announced "Wormhole transition complete. Secure for normal space maneuvering." Damn. Not only did I not need to have worried about the wormhole passage, I didn't even realize when it happened. There were more jumps, more waiting between jumps, and lots of boredom. We exercised in shifts, using equipment brought from Earth, including treadmills and exercise bicycles. I liked running, but hated treadmills, it was so boring. Even competing with the guy on the treadmill next to me didn't help, after the first couple days. We played games on our tablets, and exercised, and read books and watched movies. Being aboard the ship was kind of what it must have been like for soldiers in WWII, crossing the Atlantic and Pacific in slow transport ships. Except, on a WWII transport ship, those guys had been able to go up on deck, get fresh air, and see the sun, and the horizon.

We had decent chow, and enough room to move around on the ship, except for the areas off-limits to humans. What we didn't have was anything to look out the window at, if there had been windows. And we didn't have any news from, or contact with, Earth. In Nigeria, I'd been able to get onto the internet, and send emails, and video chat with my folks and friends, at least most days. Here, we were out of contact until we came back, a long, long way. One thing we'd learned, is that not even the technologically superior Thuranin had faster than light communications, except for drones which carried messages by jumping. Kind of like a high-tech carrier pigeon.