Rachel sprang into action. She had laser cannons on either end of Silver Metal Lugger. Cutters and slammers, depending on pulse length, useful in handling brute matter. They came online in a moment, and she patched in the seek-and-fire software. All this was by the drill—but she was still too late.

The bullet-thing was so fast the utility bots never had a chance. Bots were made to patch and fill, not fend and fight. Within a few moments the entire bot crew had spun away into oblivion.

Rachel watched in silence. There was nothing more she could do. Another hull crew would get tossed, too, and she had skimpy reserves for maintenance.

Erma said nothing. They went after a few of the bots, but amid the swarming skyline they were hard to find on radar. They managed to salvage two, whose carapaces were crumpled in by impact.

Odd. The attacker seems to have lifted out the command module in each.

“Studying us, I guess.” Rachel frowned.

Silver Metal Lugger drifted for a while, and the swarm of living spacecraft simply glided past, as if on patrol—pencils, sails, puffy spheres of malevolent orange. But cautious. None tried to enter the ship through hull ports.

I suggest we get a clear view of that distant planet.

“I want to find the ringhole. I learned that in high school—at a party in a strange place, always find the exits first.”

To extend your metaphor, we were not invited to this party at all. The locals seem to be making that point.

“Let’s shed them. Accelerate away, take some good long scans of that planet. Then dodge back into the hydrogen column and search it for the ringhole.”

Seems plausible. I am accelerating.

Fraq said sternly, feathers rippling, “I wish we return the ringhole, if we find it, to the simple, spherical shape.”

“De-spin it?” Rachel frowned. “By chunking mass in, with angular momentum?”

“We have formally so agreed.”

Fraq was right, Earthside and Luna had a treaty—which was why they were here. But—” That’s a pretty damn tall order, when we’re just trying to stay alive.”

Fraq rustled his feathers, showing bright-red hues. Anger. “Bloodpride so demands, at the cusp point of action.”

Rachel was getting a bit tired of the Ythri always falling back on their species/tribal thing. But now wasn’t the time to argue that. She floored their acceleration, hard.

The swarm outside started to fall behind as she accelerated away. They could trim sails and muster more sunlight, maybe even ride the vagrant hydrogen winds, but Silver Metal Lugger outran them in roaring minutes.

“While we’re getting set up—that is, while you are—let’s think on this. Why is the ringhole down in that gas column?”

Fraq just frowned, his feathers tight-bunched, but Erma responded promptly.

I suppose because it got caught there. Much as we found its other end in a wildly unlikely place, though stable, atop a coronal loop. These are not places anyone designing a wormhole transit system would want it.