“How’re the cameras?” They watched a bot tightening a mount on one of the exterior imaging arrays. Earthside had talked the SolWatch Institute out of those instruments, in the rush to make the ship ready.

All are calibrated and zoned. We shall have only 33.8 seconds of viewing time.

“Need time over the target. Crossing the entire loop will take 125.7 seconds,” Claire said.

“Grabbing time, pretty damn narrow,” Rachel whispered to Fraq.

“True, but needed. Can resolve the coder we left in the Worm perimeter?” Fraq looked expectantly at Claire.

“Not yet,” the pilot barked. “Got it to respond on that hundred gigahertz band, though. It’s active.”

Rachel smiled. This high-wire act had a chance, then, but a narrow one.

Fraq just frowned.

Claire said, voice tight, “Erma, just be ready to shed the shield. Then I pour on the positrons. Up and out. It’s getting warm in here.”

I detect no change in your ambient 26.3 centigrade.

Rachel watched a blister the size of Europe rise among wispy plumes of white-hot incandescence. Constant boiling fury. She whispered to Fraq, “So maybe my imagination’s working too hard. Just let’s shoot the Worm the data, grab it, and run, okay?”

Being Fraq, the alien merely nodded.

2

The great magnetic arch towered above the long, slow curve of the sun.

A bowlegged giant, minus the trunk.

Claire had shaped their orbit to bring them swooping in a few klicks above the uppermost strand of it. Red flowered within the arch: hydrogen plasma, heated by the currents that made the magnetic fields. A pressure cooker thousands of klicks long.

It had stood here for months and might last years. Or blow open in the next minute. Predicting when arches would belch out solar flares was big scientific business, the most closely watched weather report in the solar system. A flare could crisp suited workers as far out as the asteroid belt.

SolWatch watched them all. That’s how they’d found the worm.

The flux tubes swelled. Claire called, “Got an image yet?”

I should have, but there is excess light from the site.

“Big surprise. There’s nothing but excess here.”

The satellite survey reported that the target is several hundred meters in size. Yet I cannot find it.

“Damn!” Claire rippled through the image menu, flashing up scenes in different spectra.

Rachel studied the flux tubes. To catch a wormhole… She followed some tight magnetic tubes from the peak of the arch, winding down to the thickening at its feet, anchored in the sun’s seethe. Had the worm fallen back down? It could slide along those magnetic strands, thunk into the thick, cooler plasma sea. Then it could wander all the way to the core of the star, eating as it went. That was the real reason Lunaside was hustling to “study” the worm. Fear.

“Where is it?” Claire demanded.

Still no target. The region at the top of the arch is emitting too much light. No theory accounts for this—