Like a black tennis ball in blue-white surf, it bobbed and tossed on magnetic turbulence. Nothing was falling into it, she could see. Plasma streamers arced along the flux tubes, shying away. The negative spacetime curvature repulsed matter—and would shove Silver Metal Lugger’s hull away, too.

But magnetic fields have no mass.

Most people found magnetic forces mysterious, but to pilots and engineers who worked with them, they were just big, strong ribbons that needed shaping. Like rubber bands, they stretched, storing energy—then snapped back when released. Unbreakable, almost.

In routine work, Silver Metal Lugger grabbed enormous ore buckets with those magnetic fingers. The buckets came arcing up from Mercury, flung out by electromagnetic slingshots. Claire’s trickiest job was playing catcher, with a magnetic mitt.

Now she had to snag a bucket of warped spacetime. And quick.

Their jet wash blurred the wormhole’s ebony curves as they came zooming in on full brake.

We cannot remain here long. Internal temperature will rise at 19.3 degrees per minute, if my countermeasures falter. This arch is heated by waves, plasma arcs, by everything.

Rachel said, “That can’t be right. I’m still comfortable.”

Because I am allowing water to evaporate, taking the bulk of the thermal flux away. For a while. Not long.

Claire bit her lip “Keep an eye on it.”

Probable mass capture from this wormhole, I estimate, is small. I judge from its dynamics in the magnetic grip of the arch. That is why it can be magnetically held—very little gravitational force, though the sun’s grav is fierce. The worm has been taking on mass from the sun. That cancels the negative mass it earned by belching out Fraq’s ship—over a million tons. Now the net mass of this worm is tiny.

“Hey, great!” Rachel said. Erma, the Artilect accountant… The screen images were moving fast now as they came swooping into the arch, pushing plasma and fields out of the way. “That’ll do the trick.”

Do you wish me to calculate the probability of remaining alive?

Rachel was astonished that an Artilect had the freedom to be so snarky. That said something about the pilot….

Claire’s mouth twisted; she didn’t want to ask what that number was. She spat, “Just keep us dropping in close enough to grapple.”

From the all spectrum screens Rachel could see the arch’s flux tubes pushed upward against their ship. The wormhole lay just ahead, to the left. Claire extended the ship’s magnetic fields, firing the booster generators, pumping current into the millions of induction loops that circled the hull. Silver Metal Lugger was one big circuit, wired like a slinky toy, coils wrapped around the cylindrical axis. Helical elements added in the grasping extensions.

More antimatter spat into the chambers. The ship’s multipolar fields bulged forth. Feed out the line…

They fought their way down as magnetic feelers extended, groping. Claire barked fast commands and Erma switched linkages, interfaced software, all in a twinkling. Good worker, but spotty as a personality sim, Rachel thought.