Until you boil like a lobster… she thought uneasily.

Water was a good conductor, four times better than air; you learned that by feel, flying in a freighter near the sun. So Claire had to let the rest of the ship go to hell, refrigerating just the water. Then Erma had to route some of the water into heat exchangers, letting it boil off to protect the rest.

Juggling for time. The laws of thermodynamics play no favorites.

Pumps are running hot now. Some approaching bearing failures.

Claire said evenly, taking a break from scanning screens and giving sotto-voce orders, “Not much we can do, is there?”

Rachel was strangely calm now. That made the plain, hard fear in her belly heavy, like a lump. Too many things to think about, all of them bad. The water could short out circuits, maybe? And as it boiled away, they had less shielding from the X-rays lancing up from below. Only a matter of time…

We are near now, almost hovering. Approaching, approaching… Alas, the magnetic antimatter traps are superconducting, as you recall. As temperature continues to rise, they will fail.

Pops and groans echoed through the floor and walls. Even floating in water, through a helmet meant for space, she could hear the loud chorus of stresses. She could still see the wall screens, blurred from the water.

“Okay, okay. Extend the magnetic grapplers. Down, into the arch,” Claire directed.

I fail to—

Claire grunted to Erma. “We’re going fishing. Not with a worm—for one.”

It was tough piloting at the bottom of a swimming pool, though, Rachel thought as Claire brought the ship down on its roaring pyre. Even through the water she could feel the rattling. Antimatter annihilated in its reaction chamber at a rate the chamber had never reached before, she saw. The ship groaned and strummed. The gravs were bad enough; now thermal expansion of the ship itself was straining every beam and rivet.

She watched Claire search downward, flipping between screens lit in different spectra. Seconds ticked away. Where? Where?

There it was. A dark sphere hung among the magnetic arch strands. Red streamers worked over it. Violet rays fanned out like bizarre hair, twisting, dancing in tufts along the curvature. Lightning weather. A hole into another place.

The red and blue shifts arise from the intense pseudo-gravitational forces that sustain it.

“So theory says. Not something I want to get my hands on.”

Except metaphorically.

Claire’s laugh was jumpy, dry. “No, magnetically.”

The ship roared hard as they approached. This would be a fly-swoop catch. Rachel felt the gravs gathering hard, pushing her down to the deck. “Have you ever… done an extraction… like—”

“This? Hell no!”

Claire ordered Erma to slip the Silver Metal Lugger down into the thicket of magnetic flux tubes. Vibration picked up, a jittery hum in the deck. Claire swam impatiently from one wall screen to the other, looking for the worm, judging distances.

Hell of a way to fly, Rachel thought.