Bite itself… “Say, somebody sent us a message last time we were in here. What was it?”

The message said, “Worms can eat their tails and so can you.”

“So… what does it mean?”

You are the pilot, madam. Plus Sir Fraq.

“Okay, turn us and accelerate opposite to our velocity.”

And how do I know our velocity? This is not a Newtonian space, with a fixed spacetime and—

“Do it! Go to low antimatter flux, then come about along the magnetic field, and go to max thrust.”

Erma made something like a sigh. The swerves and buffeting increased as they made a sluggish turn, as if working against molasses. Spacetime syrup! She felt rather than heard a sound like whump-whump-whump through her body. The ship vibrated so badly she had to hold her teeth clamped tight.

They poured on the antimatter, and the jarring eased off. Soon they were almost gliding, though she felt the centrifugal press all through her body. “This is working.”

At least you feel better. Your stress levels have fallen.

Something came looming out of the blackness. It glowed and soared, alive with amber light. The space around it shimmered with shooting traceries. Hard to see the shape of it…

“Damn, that looks like an alien craft.”

Perceptions are warped here.

“Hail it.”

A pause…

I have an answering echo.

“Maybe they can hear us. Send this: ‘Worms can eat their tails and so can you.’ That way we can—”

The other ship winked out, gone.

They swept on, through churning black. Odd speckles of rainbow light flashed by them. Rachel thought she could see snatches of starlit space in the middle of those, but it all went by with a deck-rattling hum, as though they were moving at high speed.

“Go to full flux.” Deep bass rumbling…

We are. The vector forces are acting to shear us along our main beam. We cannot sustain this level for—

They popped out into clear space. Stars shone brightly—familiar stars!

The ringhole spun away behind. It shimmered, ivory.

An observer ship hailed them.

“We’re back!”

And now we know who sent that message. You did.

Rachel stopped, openmouthed. Her whole body ached, and she said, “But how…”

Let the theorists do the thinking for a while.

4.

That turned out to be a good idea. Rachel was glad to leave the pencil-pushing hard thinking to people who worked at desks. As she had, once, a long while back….

Silver Metal Lugger had been gone thirty-one hours in local reference frame. As soon as they returned, she felt fatigue fall on her like a weight. On the other side of the ringhole, she had felt lively; now she could not stay awake to debrief them.

A gang of physicists was her audience, their expressions of awestruck attention varied by the occasional flickering leer (especially from Tall Guy, who was monitoring the proceedings). She got tired of the awestruck pretty quickly. For them, nothing matched the holiness and fascination of accurate and intricate detail of on-ship measurements.