She let out a long breath. “Oh, goody.”

“Our offer is quite generous.”

“They always are.” She was busy looking at his hands. Long fingers, too…

“Cosmo Corp has asked if you are interested in another expedition.”

“Let me guess. Another wormhole has turned up, stuck in a solar coronal arch? And Cosmo needs somebody to go fetch it. Just like last time.”

Another cold, calculating smile. Why did she like guys like this? Okay, it had been a long time, and technology could only do so much for the lonely gal.

But still—

“No, alas. Though I might say I thought that an admirably brave and daring act. I heard someone made a three-D about it.”

“In case you’re wondering, I spent that money, too.”

His veneer slipped a bit, but he recovered in an eye-blink. “I’m sure, in a worthy cause.”

“Yeah, very worthy. Spent it all on me. What’s the deal?”

Tall Guy looked a bit rushed, as though he liked a lot of foreplay before getting down to business. Well, so did she, but a different kind of business than this character meant.

“It is the same wormhole. But it has changed.”

“Escaped?”

“No, it is secured in hyperstrong magnetic fields in free space, held in high Lunar orbit. But Cosmo Corp’s experiments to expand its mouth, and thus to bring interstellar travel to mankind, have—”

“Wait, how did Cosmo get the worm?”

“Uh, they exerted stock override options on the holding company consortium that by interplanetary rights had further—”

“Skip the jargon. They bought it?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“I always mind my manners when I speak. What’s up?”

Tall Guy was now ignoring Fat Guy, who had found a seat on the other side of the ’partment living room. Rachel stayed standing. With guys, who routinely used height to intimidate women, it was just about her only advantage here.

“I am not a technical person.” Tall Guy collapsed the glaring account ledger and arched an eyebrow at her.

Damn! Even that got her moist. She really had to get out of here, go bar-hopping, blow off two years’ worth of steam—

“But the wormhole you captured has… changed, I do know that. Cosmo Corp was attempting to expand its, ah, mouth size. This is a delicate operation, apparently. I am unsure precisely what the difficulty was, but in making the wormhole mouth large enough to accommodate a substantial ship—such as yours, for example—they somehow added angular momentum to the wormhole. It became another sort of wormhole entirely.”

Rachel said cautiously, “What sort?” Why am I hearing about this so late? Somebody’s hiding the news….

“One with enough rotation to change the very nature of the spacetime geometry, I gather.” Tall Guy shrugged, as if altering wormholes was something like the weather. What could one do, after all? Yawn.

“Hey, Claire and me, we’re contract haulers. We grabbed that wormhole off its perch on the top of a magnetic arch, dragged it back to Earthside. That’s what I know, period.”