Severin would like to have commanded a probe through a newly discovered wormhole, but his real reason for joining the Exploration Service was because of his aunt, a commander who could guarantee him quick promotion. The pay was good and he could save money easily, since he had no expenses during his four-month stretches in the station. It was a good service, small and efficient, and everyone based at Seizho knew and liked each other.
Severin didn’t know how he felt about the service being militarized and annexed to the Fleet for the duration of the emergency. He reckoned he could live with it if he didn’t have to take too many idiotic orders from a clutch of useless Peers.
Most wormholes, those strange remnants left over from the formation of the universe, were spherical, presenting the familiar inverted-starscape-in-a-goldfish-bowl appearance that was the standard illustration in elementary texts. Other wormholes were tetrahedral or octahedral or cylindrical. Protipanu 2 was the only torus-shaped wormhole, with a hole in the middle, that was actually in use. The famous yachtsman Minh had once repeatedly dived his yacht through the hole in the center, threading it like a giant buttonhole. Severin enjoyed looking through the broad windows of his command center at the strange sight, the weird hoop of another system’s stars floating in space. He took a kind of pride in it, in being custodian of the most unique wormhole in the empire.
Still, now that there was an emergency, Severin found himself chafing to do his bit. In the old days, the Exploration Service would have been foremost in any action against rebels. So whenCorona’s signal told him that the Naxids were on their way and how long it would be before they arrived, he called a meeting of his staff.
“I think we should strike at the enemy,” he said. “I think we should do something worthy of the traditions of the Service.”
“Such as?” Warrant Officer/Second Gruust was skeptical.
Severin offered Gruust a bite of the spicy garlic sausage he’d been snacking on when the message came.
“I think we should move the wormhole,” he said.
Part of the task of the wormhole station was to keep the wormhole stable. Wormholes could be destabilized over time if more mass went in one direction through the hole than the other, a problem that hardly existed when all that passed through them was solar wind and the odd bit of cosmic dust. Ships, however, were another problem. If more ships passed through the wormhole in one direction, then the wormhole could deform, drift away, or even collapse.
Fortunately for the stability of the empire, the remedy was simple: you simply had to chuck enough matter in the other direction to reestablish balance. Each wormhole station was equipped with a mass driver that could fire colossal steel-jacketed chunks of asteroid material through the hole and into orbit around the other system’s star, where they could be retrieved if necessary and fired the other way. The projectiles were so massive that the driver didn’t move them very fast, but speed was hardly necessary—only a degree of timing was required, so that a ship heading for the wormhole didn’t meet a rock going the other way.
“Move the wormhole?” Gruust asked. “Can we do that?”
“I expect we can.”
Gruust chewed meditatively on garlic sausage. “That would really wreck their schedule. They miss the wormhole, there aren’t any planets out there to swing around. It would take them months to decelerate and return.”
Severin was already on to the next step. “Why don’t you and the others get the lifeboat packed and I’ll warm up the coils?”
The exams Severin had passed to earn his rank had featured a lot of wormhole theory, and he put it to use now. He began firing his heavy, slow-moving bowling balls toward the great torus, and only then started calculating where they would have to hit in order to skate the wormhole across the sky. He figured the first few shots would destabilize the wormhole only slightly and make the rest of his task easier.
Once he had his effects calculated and knew where to aim, he began a regular barrage, firing one bolt after another. Only then did he communicate with his superiors in the Seizho system to ask permission for what he was doing.
It took four hours for the Seizho brass to respond, categorically forbidding Severin to destabilize the wormhole. By then, he’d hurled hundreds of thousands of tons of dense matter through the torus, and had begun to detect motion.
The odor of garlic preceded Gruust into the command center. “Lifeboat’s ready,” he reported. He gazed out the huge plate windows of the mass driver as another giant bolt shot off the rails and toward the eerie, hoop-shaped entity in the far distance.
“Why don’t you look after the drivers for a while,” Severin said. “I want to make sure my personal stuff is on the lifeboat.”
The lifeboat wasn’t as cramped as its name might have suggested: it was designed to keep an entire station’s crew comfortable for the journey to and from the station, a journey that might take a month or more. There was a fully stocked kitchen and exercise facilities, and a library of videos, books, music, and other entertainments.
Severin added a stock of insulated clothing, thermal blankets, and warm socks, then returned to the command center.
“The wormhole’s moving,” Gruust said.
“I know.”
By the time Severin had fired off all his ammunition, the wormhole had moved seven diameters on a diagonal course from the plane of the ecliptic, and the messages from his superiors, who were detecting the huge freight-train-sized bolts flying into their system, were growing frantic. Eventually their messages trailed away: with the wormhole moving, the communications lasers were no longer in alignment.
Severin and his crew had a last meal in the station, noodles in a tomato sauce made fiery by dried chiles, washed down by a dark, toasty beer that one of the crew had made with barley he’d brought onto the station.
The Exploration Service traditionally compensated for their loneliness by eating well.
“You know,” Severin said, “I’m beginning to think we shouldn’t leave the Protipanu system.”
“If we stay here,” Gruust said, “they’ll just take us prisoner.”
“I don’t want to stayhere, ” said Severin. “Not in the station. I thought we’d take the lifeboat and grapple it to one of those big chunks of rubble orbiting past. That way we could keep the enemy under observation, and if the Fleet returns, we can give them the information. And if the rebels leave, we can just reoccupy the station.”
“You’re talkingmonths, ” someone said.
There was some discussion of this. Severin didn’t want to live for three or four months with a crew who resented the orders that put them there. But in the end he had his way, and without pulling rank: the others were used to spending time together in isolated situations, and agreed that wrecking enemy plans was worth the extra discomfort and time.
“It’s going to be cold, unfortunately,” Severin said. “To avoid detection, I’m going to have to power as little of the ship as possible.”
“We should get the thermal blankets aboard,” someone said.
“I already have.”
There was a moment of silence. “Well, at least we’ll have a big pay packet waiting when we return,” Gruust said hopefully.
They moved six months’ food supplies into the lifeboat and cast off. Severin already had chosen his rock, an iron asteroid called 302948745AF—the smaller lumps of rock and metal in the Protipanu system were well charted, since they were all potential supplies of reserve ammunition for the mass drivers.