She tried to imagine a mouth some meters across sucking away at a star, dumping its hot masses somewhere in deep space. For a wormhole to do that, it had to be held together with exotic material, some kind of matter that had “negative average energy density”—and to be born in the Blossoming. It threaded wormholes, stem to stern. Great construction material, if you could get it. And now, just maybe, they could….

Memories… Rachel thought furiously through the ticking seconds. Shock waves sang through the ship’s frame like the voices of angels. She mused, How the first music resonated through the viscous substrate of the early universe, before vagrant protons and electrons recombined….

So wormholes could both kill living beings, and make us gods. Humanity had to know, the beanpole Scientific Officer had said. Rachel had responded, “So be it,” So here it was, the full, virulent glory of hydrogen fusion working its gaudy violences….

The ship strummed. Claire had said she never went in for the austere metal boxes most ore haulers and freighters were. Hers was a rough business, with hefty wads of cash involved. Profit margin was low, sometimes negative—which was how she’d come to be in hock to Isataku for so much. Toting megatons of mass across the gravity gradients was long, slow work. Might as well go in style seemed to be her mantra.

Claire’s ship, Silver Metal Lugger, had high-reflecting Fresnel coatings, ordered when she had made a killing on commodity markets for ore. That helped keep the ship cool, so she didn’t burn herself crawling down inspection conduits. The added mass of her deep-pile carpeting, tinkling waterfall, and pool table was inconsequential. So was the water liner around the living quarters, which now was busily saving their lives. More, the ship could shed heat by venting the boiled-off water that filled the ship’s enormous mass holds. Nobody had used such a freighter craft to skim the sun before. First time, maybe last… Rachel mused.

They had two hours left, tops—skimming like a flat stone over the solar corona. Silver Metal Lugger’s skin shimmered with blow-off melt, feeding from their water hulls. Rachel watched the quick, sure actions, admiring. Claire fired the ship’s mixmotor. Antimatter came streaming out of its magneto-traps and struck the reaction mass, and holy hell broke loose. The drive chamber focused the snarling, annihilating mass into a thrust throat, and the silvery ship arced into a new, tight orbit.

A killing orbit, if they held to it more than a few hours.

I am pumping more water into your baffles.

“Good idea. Getting crispy in here.”

Silver Metal Lugger was already as silvered as technology allowed, rejecting all but a tiny fraction of the sun’s glare in multilayered skins. Top-of-the-line.

Still, it needed the slag shield blocking the sun from them. Without that chunk of asteroid mass shadowing them, it would take over ten hours to make Silver Metal Lugger as hot as the blaring light booming up at them at six thousand degrees. To get through even two hours exposed to that, they would have to boil off most of the water reserve, bought at steep Mercury Base prices. Rachel listened thoughtfully to it gurgle through the walls.