“Firing up the disco ball!” Morley called out as a ring of perfectly reflective mirrors began to rotate at two million rpm. Two hundred and thirty meters away dozens of beams of coherent light skewered into the mirrors, striking them at a shallow angle that reflected the negative beam pulses half a degree away from their paired positives. The negatives were shunted down a cavity resonator and into the mouth of the wormhole. The nanoscale hole sucked in the lasers, as expected. It inflated, also as expected.

To this point everything had gone as predicted.

And then the process went native, swallowing the chamber that was meant to contain it, sucking in energy like Poe’s maelstrom and “spaghettifying” the very matter that had given it birth, stretching and eating the world all around. Inflation took place instantaneously, the gross tonnage of the Nagoya being drawn into the throat like taffy, snuffing out the lives of the only people who possessed any chance of reversing the process, or even explaining it.

Manning Pope died, smiling and unaware.

Pope’s wormhole, which should have stabilized at three microns in diameter, instead blew out into a swirling lens of elemental colors fifteen thousand meters across before dissipating just as quickly. In that brief period, however, it punched through the veil separating two universes.

HMAS MORETON BAY, 1235 HOURS, 15 JANUARY 2021

“Some people,” muttered Rachel Nguyen, “really get the shit end of the stick.”

She was staring at a flexipad image showing a CNN report out of the Indonesian Exclusion Zone. A woman’s yellowed eyes burned back at her from within a sunken, malnourished face, imploring her to do something, anything, to save her children from famine and disease. But she and they were almost certainly two years’ dead by now.

Rachel thumbed the corner of the screen, shutting down the link and pushing the thin pad across the scarred mess table, out of reach and beyond temptation. The lights in the mess flickered briefly, then returned to normal a few moments later.

She couldn’t justify putting off her thesis any longer. The boss had ordered her to catch some sleep but she just couldn’t, not with a deadline coming. So she drained the last of her coffee and considered hassling the cook for one of the muffins she could smell baking in the galley.

No, that would probably cost her ten minutes in conversation, and definitely an extra quarter hour in the gym. Cooky had a wicked way with a mixing spoon. Glancing up, she nodded to a lone sergeant a few tables away, who caught her eye as he savaged an impossibly large plate of sausages. Rachel quickly ducked her head back to her notes, breaking eye contact, but she needn’t have worried. The old soldier only had eyes for his food.

The mess lights guttered again. She had time to wonder why before the world turned black, and she disappeared forever.

USS KANDAHAR, 1235 HOURS, 15 JANUARY 2021