“My God,” Reynaud said quietly. He leaned back once more and shook his head. “I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, Jordin, but I never really expected us to find it. It just seemed so unlikely after all these years.”

“It’s been a bear,” Kare agreed, “and I can see at least half a dozen monographs coming out of the hunt for it—probably more. You know the original theoretical math was always highly ambiguous, and it’s only been in the last fifteen or twenty T-years that we’ve had Warshawskies sensitive enough to collect the observational data we needed to confirm it. And we’ve pushed the boundaries of wormhole theory further than anyone else has done in at least a century, in the process. But it’s out there, and for the first time, I’m completely confident we’re going to find it.”

“Have you mentioned this to anyone else?” Reynaud asked.

“Hardly!” Kare snorted harshly. “After the way those publicity flack idiots went running to the media the last time around?”

“They were just a mite premature,” Reynaud conceded.

“A ‘mite’?” Kare stared at him incredulously. “They had me sounding like some egotistical, self-seeking crank ready to proclaim he’d discovered the Secrets of the Universe! It took me almost a full T-year to get the record straightened out, and half the delegates to last year’s Astrophysics Conference at the Royal Society still seemed to think I was the one who’d written those asinine press releases!”

Reynaud started to say something else, then changed his mind. He could hardly tell Kare he was wrong when he was convinced the physicist was exactly right. That was the main reason Reynaud objected so strenuously to the government’s involvement in RMAIA. The work itself was important, even vital, and the funding level required for the dozen or so research ships, not to mention the lab and computer time, certainly left it with a price tag very few private concerns could have afforded. But the entire thing was one huge PR opportunity as far as the current Government was concerned. That was the entire reason they’d created the agency in the first place instead of simply increasing the funding for the Astro Control’s Survey Command, which had been quietly pursuing the same research for decades. The RMAIA had been launched with huge fanfare as one of the “long overdue peaceful initiatives” which had been delayed by the war against Haven, but the reality was just a little different from the shiny facade the Government worked so hard to project.

Nothing could have made the calculating reality behind the “peaceful initiative” more obvious than the blatant way the politicos scrambled to make political capital off of the work of the project’s scientific staff. Official spokespeople who “forgot” to clear their copy with Kare or Reynaud were bad enough, but at least they could be thumped on for their sins. The project’s political overlords, like High Ridge and Lady Descroix, were another matter entirely, and they were the ones who’d really infuriated Kare.