“No reason it should,” Fraq said mildly. “We anchored our beeper, our finder signal-giver, in a secure orbit—though at a safe distance.” He gave a birdy flutter. “That seems so long ago….”

“Yeah, years. It must be hard to glue onto spacetime,” Rachel said. How do you clip anything to a wormhole? The Ythri weren’t giving away all their secrets, no. She was distracted as she banked and turned against the roiling hot hydrogen. “I wonder what happened to that damn ring-wormhole thing.”

It may be in a stabilized orbit, a balance of its gravitational forces against this hydrogen wind.

“So it’s back there. Uh… somewhere.”

They gradually came about and steadied. She took them abroad the gale and worked toward lesser gas densities. Blue streamers fell behind. The ruddy fog-mist paled. They gradually emerged into fairly open space. The stars reappeared, gleaming reassuringly. But still in strange constellations.

Rachel saw the bright sun from an angle now, sighting back along the misty edge of the plume. The eroding giant planet was a round nub against the glaring yellow-white solar disk. But outward from them, telescoped in, hung a two-mooned world in crescent. Creamy blue-white. Earthlike!

No recognizable constellations, in a sky somehow brighter, with more stars—and yes, a globular cluster hovering like an ivory flower between two bright stars. Closer in toward galactic center?

“Any idea where we are? Can you find galactic reference points?”

I am trying, but none of the local stars are known to me. We are a long way from Earth.

“Keep trying. We may have to walk home.”

Another solar system. A long way from Earth. A thrill ran through her, and she whispered commands to Erma to take scans of it all. Otherwise she was speechless, adrift, fears dropping away. Somehow she had thought of this as just another gig. Now the immensity of the ideas Erma went on about, Fraq’s ancient history, the biz deals of Tall Guy—all those were mere details, clues, chatter. This was real.

Something hit them. Hard. The ship rattled.

“What the—”

A large soft mass struck us astern.

“Soft?”

It did little damage but conveyed momentum.

Nothing in Earth’s space was soft. Not even comets. “Distance scan.”

I track many small objects. Nearby, approaching.

The screen filled with shapes. A fried-egg jellyfish swooped at them, then attached to their skin. Drifting with spines out, here came a warty cucumber. There were amber pencils in flight, their rear tubes snorting out blue burning gas. Something like an ivory solar sail came at them, reeling its huge sheets in along spars.

“This is crazy.”

Disturbing, yes. These cannot be machines—at least, not of metal and ceramics, run by computers. They are… alive.

Rachel eyed the many shapes with wonder. Gravity imposed simple geometries—cylinders, boxes, spheres. Here were effortless fresh designs: spokes and beams, rhomboids, fat curves. Rough skins and prickly shells, rubbery rods, slick mirrors—apparently all varieties of the same twirling creatures. “Feeding off that hydrogen, you figure?”

Fraq said slowly, working side-issue controls, “I will get our bots on our skin. Assess the damage. See if they can deal with these living things, too.”