They had nudged and probed and somehow added angular momentum to it. Accidentally they’d transformed the entire spacetime around what had been, apparently, a somewhat predictable—though negative mass—wormhole.

Not that anybody knew what routine was for wormholes. After all, they only had one—this whirling dervish that had already eaten many probes, spitting nothing back out. True, the astro guys had negated the negative-mass aspect of it, with those mass-slugging probes. They just brute-forced it with tons of junk mass. Simple, and it worked. But then came the spin.

We need to go closer, to resolve the possible entrances.

Rachel thought, Trouble. Maybe too much.

She had gotten here by what she thought of as the doctorate degree in Death Through Small Doses. She had trained hard at piloting, while doing all the Library work she could, too. She came through her missions around asteroids, then in the outreaches of the wormhole itself. Along the way she had ruptured her liver, her spleen, and one of her kidneys; collapsed her lower intestine; crushed two vertebrae; acquired first-degree burns on her face and head; and, for extra, had gotten hard-hammered, leaving her concussed and with temporary losses of vision and hearing.

But she got rebuilt by the magical tech of this age. Hurt?—plenty. Fun?—even more. She wasn’t just a Librarian now. More like an overeducated, seat-of-her-pants pilot. With a plausible life-span measured in centuries, you took your chances as they came.

The medicos had made bets about her surviving, five times. She took the odds through a secondary agent, Claire, and won—with damn good odds, too.

Then, too, she had seen a fellow crew-gal’s dying breaths making her sparkle in the vacuum.

Maybe too much? Rachel pondered. Considering my life, only too much was enough.

Enough medical memory, her internal nag said. Focus.

Along the axis of the dervish was a shimmering orange lump that apparently held some other sort of exotic matter. The lump looked to be spinning, too.

Rachel had been warned many times not to touch that lump, or else. Previous probes had, and got broken down into elementary particles, pronto—and not particularly nice ones, at that. Quark-gluon plasmas had a well-deserved nasty reputation.

“There are basically two ways in, right, Erma? North and south poles of this general relativistic merry-go-round. But stay away from that axis.”

Erma was a daily updated Artilect but the schoolmarm voice stayed the same. True. I think our own spin matters, too. The earlier probes tried varying angular momenta and a few managed to send back coherent signals… for a while.

“Sure, for maybe ten precious seconds. I was kinda counting on my shoot-and-scoot strategy taking about that much time. Our contract says just make some readings and come on home. Didn’t one probe get back out?”

If one counts granules of carbon, yes.

“From a ceramic ship?”

Yes, not promising.

Fraq had an aversion to talking to software, didn’t trust minds without bodies, so Rachel was surprised when he said, “I do not favor trying to do so similar a strategy.”