Rachel took his stiffly delivered advice seriously. In her immersion-work environment, touch controls gave her an abstract distance from the wormring. It was hovering in space, held in magnetic clamps a hundred meters away from them. Whorls of wrenched spacetime slammed into their metallic ship’s skin, rattling her teeth and, as seen on the screens, spraying a yellow-white froth of gravitational turbulence around them. River-rafting white-water spacetime, yeah.

Perhaps the theoretical view would help.

“Donuts are donuts, Erma. Let’s just stick our nose in, real quick.”

There is your neglected homework, hence… And all this, because of tricky accountants.

2.

The Loonie lawyer guys with briefcases had gotten to her before she had even unpacked.

Rachel had counted on some ribald bar cruising to rub away the memory of their drawn-out worm training. Simulations, even physio ones, got old, real fast. Claire had helped get her into the field, and their mutual fame had helped a lot. Fraq had gone off on “diplomatic” missions, then returned to do parallel training, so the years had gone by fast.

Fraq moved through all the Prefects, Noughts, and sundry Library folk like a panther through geese. He and his flock had mastered “interviews” with the Library’s Messages, comparing this information with their own experience of wormhole passage. The Ythri ship’s transit had been fast, tens of seconds of hard turbulence. There were fragmented Messages about the wormholes, but little hard physics. Maybe the ancient societies kept such secrets?

Rachel was ready to get into the foam shower and run the water a shameful hour or two. To feel really human again, in a fluffy bathrobe. To yammer at somebody other than Erma—and then they rang her door chimes, which played a Bach opening. Third Brandenburg, ah. So she didn’t answer. The shower beckoned—

They came right on in, anyway.

“Hey! I’m renting this ’partment.”

The taller of them didn’t even blink. “We could put you on a perfectly legal formal secure-lock right now.”

“The last guy who tried that ended up nearly getting frozen.” Though that was a boast she’d got from Claire, not from experience.

The short one, apparently fond of his food, said smugly. “We checked. You didn’t prong him at all, just threatened to.”

So they had confused Claire with her. Good; she liked people who didn’t do their homework right, i.e., suckers. The whole who-owns-the-wormhole feud had lingered far too long, and was now spawning mutants like these guys.

Rachel jutted her chin out. “I could make an exception in your case.”

She smiled slowly, slit-eyeing the fat guy—who blinked nervously and took a step backward despite himself. She chided herself for taking on such an easy mark, but hell, she needed a little recreation. It would be fun to deck these two, yes. In Luna grav she was adept, and she could tell these guys were recent bumblers from Earthside, as their every move advertised. And it would be a stimulating boost to the cardiovascular system that had spent too much time in centri-g.