“And who put it there? Who’s in charge here?”

Let me guess. Not someone who wants these wormhole mouths used.

“Yeah, all this fits the opposite of what we thought wormholes were useful for doing.”

But anyone who wanted to make a wormhole useless could just throw it into a star.

“But then it would gush hot plasma into your own neighborhood.”

True. If both mouths were dropped into stars, the two stars would feed each other. If one gained mass that the other lost, that would perturb both stars, affecting their sunlight. I see your point. There may be no good way to rid oneself of a wormhole.

Rachel snapped her fingers. “So! This system is for limited use. Who around here would want that?”

Not the space life, one assumes.

“Um. Maybe they’re part of this, though…”

They were turning, systems running hard. Rumbles, clanks, bass groans. Rachel could see the diagnostic panels lighting up with fresh commands.

Erma knew her stuff, how to case out a place and make a quick assessment. But for a whole new world? Quite a job for a ship Claire had originally designed to sniff out asteroid ore. Rachel watched their long-distance telescopes deploy from their caches, blossoming like astronomical flowers. Dishes and lenses turned and focused like a battery of capturing eyes.

I am beginning an observing run of the planet. Full spectrum. The atmosphere shows obvious biosignatures. I can see the surface in infrared but cloud cover is thick. Oceans, continents, with ice poles rather large. There is minor microwave traffic and radio as well. There appears to be an—wait—wait—

Rachel frowned. Seldom did Erma even pause while speaking. Software never used filler words, ums and ahs. But to stop dead was worrisome. The pause lengthened. Nothing appeared on the screens around Rachel.

I… have just… had an unusual experience.

“I could tell.” Another pause.

Something… called to me.

“A hail from that planet?” Rachel guessed.

Something like that… only deeper, with several running lines of discourse I could not follow. It… addressed me by name.

“In what language?”

That was another oddity. It came in my language.

“Uh… Anglish?”

I do not think in these simple, ambiguous terms that you use. Of course, I know that your internal running systems do not use these “words” you must shape with your mouths. Your brains are much more subtle and dexterous. You run in parallel, though speak in simple linear. I myself run in an operating system using complex combinatorial notations. These carry very dense meanings in packets. I imagine all advanced intelligences do this, for it is efficient. And the message I received was built in this way, perhaps confirming my expectations.

Rachel blinked. “But whoever sent it is alien. How could they know—oh. The bots.”

I had not thought of that, but yes—it must have captured information from the bot intelligences.

“And reverse-engineered it to—wow. And they did it in minutes.”

As you say, wow. That word is usefully compact, and so is some of the torrent of signal I am evaluating. But much is not. This is a very strange intelligence.