Claire could now use her suit gloves as modified waldoes—magnetic graspers. Rachel watched her get the feel of the magnetic grapplers. Silky, smooth, the field lines slipped and swelled, like rubbery air.

Plasma storms blew by them. They came swooping by and Claire reached down, as if plunging her hands into a stretching, elastic vat. Fingers fumbled for the one jewel in all the dross.

“Feels like a prickly nugget. A stone with hair.” Given her experience working the ore megabuckets, Claire obviously knew the feel of locked-in magnetic dipoles. The worm had its own magnetic fields, too, Fraq had at last told them. Those were what had snared the worm here, in the spiderweb arch. A bit of luck, helping them find it—though descending into stellar hell was the price.

A lashing field whipped at her grip. In an instant, Claire lost the black pearl. In the blazing hot plasma, she could not see it.

She reached with rubbery fields, caught nothing.

Our antimatter bottles are in danger. Their superconducting magnets are close to going critical. They will fail within 17.4 minutes.

“Let me concentrate! No, wait—circulate water around them faster. Buy some time.”

But the remaining water is in your quarters.

Rachel felt a jolt. “This is all that’s left?” She peered around at the once-luxurious living room. Counting the bedroom, rec area, and kitchen—“How… long?”

Until your water begins to evaporate? Almost an hour.

“But when it runaway evaporates, it’s boiling.”

True. I am merely trying to remain factual.

“The emotional stuff’s left to me, huh?” Claire punched in commands on her suit board. In the torpid, warming water Rachel watched her fingers move like sausages.

Claire ordered bots out onto the hull to free up some servos that had jammed. They did their job, little boxy bodies lashed by plasma winds. Two blew away.

Claire reached down again. Searching. Where was the worm? Wispy flux tubes wrestled along Silver Metal Lugger’s hull. Claire peered into a red glare of superheated plasma. Hot, but tenuous. The real enemy was the photon storm streaming up from far below, searing even the silvery hull.

She still had worker-bots on the hull. Four had jets. She popped their anchors free. They plunged, fired jets, and she aimed them downward in a pattern.

“Follow trajectories,” she ordered Erma. Orange tracer lines appeared on the screens.

The bots swooped toward their deaths. One flicked to the side, a sharp nudge.

Claire cried out, “There’s the worm! We can’t see for all this damned plasma, but it shoved that bot away.”

Rachel thought, The negative mass wormhole pushes ordinary mass away, but the sun pulls it down. So Claire is using the bots to push on the worm. But a push makes a negative mass move toward the pusher, not away…. So, toward us…

Claire had learned the physics lessons better than Rachel. Now they were drawing the wormhole into the magnetic maw awaiting.

Downright ingenious. Piloting as a ballistic ballet, a pirouette with exotic mass.