As you say.

Was there an irritated sniff after the words? No matter—Erma obliged.

Fraq said, “It is worse… worse than I imagined.”

Me too, Rachel thought but kept quiet. Wonders galore, dangerous as hell…

There were several theorists’ terms for the wobbly object hovering on her screens: wormring, ringhole. This wormring looked like a blurry reddish donut. It spun in a frenzied halo of skating brilliance.

A grav-magnetic hurricane, she thought.

Sullen red snakes coiled around its skin. Lightning forked yellow and blue down the northern donut pole, but didn’t come out on the other side, seen from this angle. The same fizzing flashes worked like sullen lightning around the southern hole, too, but there was no answer to the north. Somewhere along that axis lay trouble. Big bad twisted-geometric trouble aplenty. And that’s where they had to go.

“What’s the best trajectory, in theory?” Fraq asked in his singsong way, but the tone carried irritation, too.

There is no adequate theory. The best mathematics says there are several entrances, but they all involve acquiring considerable angular momentum.

Rachel said, “Yeah, but there’s got to be a best educated guess—”

I do have the latest numerical simulations, just arrived from Earthside.

“Oh, good. I always feel better after a nice refreshing computer simulation.”

It is best to address our safety without stressful sarcasm.

“Sarcasm is just one more service we offer here at Silver Metal Lover Salvage and Loan.”

Sarcasm is stressful.

“Stressful for who?”

For us all. Erma managed to put a prissy tone into even dry discussions.

“Do I look like a people person?”

You look anxious.

“I thought you understood rhetorical questions.”

You are stalling for time.

So Erma was now a psychologist…. “Damn right I am. Look at that wormring on the mass detector.”

Fraq did his copilot tricks and Erma did hers. All virtual images that popped up on the screens had a glossy sheen to them that even Erma’s super-teraprocessor couldn’t erase. They looked too good to be real. Pristine geometries snarled and knotted into surf around the spinning donut. Whorls of spacetime spun away and radiated grav waves in angry red hisses. Not a comfy place, no.

“Does that look safe to you?”

I would point out that I am backed up to Luna every hour by laser link.

“Yeah, you’re immortal as long as I pay your computer fees.”

I can find other work—

Rachel smiled. Erma didn’t often get into a sentence without already knowing how it would turn out. Maybe her conversational program was competing with the huge sensor net strung around Silver Metal Lugger’s hull. A riot of digits, tribal software squabbling for running time. They were measuring everything possible as the ship gingerly edged closer to the whirling wormring.

“You were saying…?”

I was merely distracted. And I do have a high opinion of this enterprise. I do not like our probabilities if we hang nearby this strange object, however.

Could software also get jumpy? Erma hadn’t seemed so last time, years back, when they had snagged this same wormhole. After that, the astro guys had started tinkering with it, trying to expand it so a ship of Silver Metal Lugger’s size, not merely Fraq’s slimship, could pass through—and they literally screwed it up.