7

The nature of wormholes and, indeed, wormhole travel was, perhaps, not the most scientifically well researched. Or understood. In fact, after finding the very first wormhole drive, in a derelict alien spaceship hundreds of years before, the DWAIt Corporation, after losing several hundred space marines while clearing away a particularly nasty infestation of blood-sucking alien creatures, simply copied the drive and found that it worked.

They had no idea how it worked. It simply worked. They had no idea how navigation using wormholes worked. It simply worked. This, of course, became a closely guarded secret that the DWAIt Corporation protected ruthlessly. So ruthlessly that several wars were fought in order to release the information about wormhole drives to the general galactic public. After the dust had settled, the DWAIt Corporation had become the sole rulers of a number of planetary systems and everybody had settled down to simply buy the wormhole drives, the galaxy fell into the kind of peace that involved petty litigation that had, after hundreds of years, kept the court system so busy, entire planets and whole generations of lawyer families were subsumed into the legal battles.

It was a well-known fact that forcing an emergency wormhole jump could have serious ramifications. Wormholes collapsing mid-flight. Wormholes opening up in the cores of stars. Wormholes transcending the limits of space-time, causing ships to arrive before they set off, in the same location where they had attempted to travel from and merging two ships into one. Sometimes that resulted in catastrophic, and vomit-inducing splicing of ships, people and whatnot, inevitably ending in explosive circumstances. Other times, it resulted in two ships, sitting side-by-side and confusing everyone as to which ship and crew were the real, or original ones.

Demi, Captain Friss and Lap had got off lightly. Zapasnoy, the name Friss called this found (stolen) Gal-Navy corvette, had landed so far outside the confines of the galaxy that it took several weeks and a number of controlled wormhole jumps to even come close to returning to the galaxy and continue their attempts at pulling off the greatest heist the universe would ever see. Or, at least, that was how Friss described it. To hear him speak, and, over the last few weeks, Friss had spoken a lot, they would become immortal in their infamy. Demi thought he was full of it.

"No. No! Look, let me explain it again." Demi reconstructed the complicated tower, glaring at Lap. "You take a block from somewhere in the tower. You try not to knock it over and then you place that block on top. Then it's my turn. We do that until the tower falls. It's one of the most simple games in the universe!"

Lap's flat head bobbed forward and back before reaching out a flat hand, taking a block from the top of the Repli-wood tower and placing it to the side. They rustled in that smug, self-important way that had started to annoy Demi. Friss already annoyed her, but finding that the friendly, approachable, unintelligible Planeian now annoyed her said a lot about being stuck in a ship with them.

With a sigh, she took the block back and returned it where Lap had taken it from. Tongue lolling from the corner of her mouth, Demi took great care to tap and wiggle and tease and slide a block from the tower, near the bottom. The tower trembled. She almost had it. Then Lap prodded the tower, causing the entire structure to fall, littering the table with blocks. Again. The Planeian laughed and Demi considered slapping his flat face, but she had seen the destruction Lap had caused in the bar. He hadn't even used a blaster.

"It's the three-dee aspect. He doesn't get it. Planeians are a very literal species. You're better off playing tic-tac-toe." Friss laid his entire arm at the edge of the table and swept everything on to the floor. Including Demi's coffee cup. He slapped a large sheet of Repli-paper onto the surface. "Right. I've made the nav calculations and we can reach the galaxy in two more jumps. Frankly, I'm pretty certain the wormhole drive is sentient and thought sending us thousands of lightyears outside the galaxy was its idea of fun. We'd never have had this with Lodka."

Upon speaking the name of his organic ship, Friss gained a dreamy, nostalgic and, frankly, disturbingly frustrated look upon his face. Lap nudged the captain and Friss shook his head, glancing at Demi and Lap. He didn't even look embarrassed but, then again, Demi had seen the man walking around naked for a week. Embarrassment was not something Friss had a complete grasp of. Or any grasp. Friss tapped the sheet of Repli-paper and Demi failed to understand any of it.

"That's just a bunch of random numbers. It means nothing ... wait." Demi turned the sheet around, her eyes flickering over the numbers, finger tracing down the list. "This pattern. It's a security code. The entire thing, front and back, is one long security code and it's ... it's incomplete. What is this a code for? It's incredibly complex."

"That is the last known security code for the impound yard at Imblibdor 5." Friss looked around for a chair, couldn't find one, and settled for sitting on Demi's knee. "I've had my guy watching out for it and this just came through over the DWAIt Mega-Com."

"Mega-Com? So, you've been in communication with the galaxy for weeks, while we've sat here doing ... this?" She waved her hand in the vague direction of the Repli-wood blocks littering the floor. "I could have been watching my favourite show!"

Not only that, but Demi knew she could have piggy-backed off the Mega-Com signal and connected to Gal-Net. With another glance at the long, long, long stream of numbers upon the large Repli-paper sheet, she would need all the resources she could get to even begin to crack the encryption on the locks to the impound yard. There was a pattern, a barely noticeable, infinitesimally small pattern, but she needed Gal-Net to begin to make sense of it.

Mega-Com, like the wormhole drive, was a wholly owned technology of DWAIt Corp and, like the wormhole drive, no-one really knew how it worked. It simply did and, again like the wormhole drive, it was far easier to copy the technology than it was to understand it. DWAIt Corp had a large number of technologies like that and, so long as they worked, didn't care whether they understood why it worked. They still made money from the technologies. Understanding was not relevant to the bottom-line.

"Anyway, you crunch those numbers and I'll see if there's a bunk that's not an absolute mess I can sleep in. It's late." Friss ruffled Demi's hair as he rose from sitting on her knee. "You kids don't stay up too late. As soon as the drive recharges, we jump home! Brilliant!"

Demi had tried cleaning up the ship. The ship, Zapasnoy, had one of the most efficient recycling systems she had ever encountered. So efficient that the amount of materials it couldn't recycle weren't worth listing. Even so, by the time Demi had spent a week moving from cabin to cabin, cleaning, tidying, recycling, Friss had reoccupied each now-clean cabin in turn and reduced it back to its original mess within the space of a night. Demi, eventually, gave up, keeping the brig as her own personal space. The brig and the kitchen. Friss was no longer allowed in either room under pain of death and she wasn't even close to kidding about that.

Lap had started bending over, picking up one Repli-wood block at a time. In the process, their two-dimensional body would appear and disappear. One second, Demi could see the crisp, white, flat body, the next, Lap would turn to the side, only a ripple in the air letting Demi know that the Planeian had not left the room.

She watched as Lap placed each retrieved block back onto the surface of the table, laying them out side-by-side, a flat representation of the tower that Demi had tried to teach the Planeian to play with and adjust. The poor thing simply could not understand the three-dimensional nature of the Repli-wood tower block, despite living in a three-dimensional universe. It didn't click because it was so alien to their sensibilities.

Like that pattern within the numbers. A tiny pattern, so easily missed, but there. A number this large, taking up two sides of a large sheet of Repli-paper and still incomplete, having a tiny repetitive pattern meant little. She needed more. She needed a far more clear understanding of the code. Like Lap and the three-dimensional game, she needed to look at the pattern a different way.

"Lap, how do you process what you see?" She didn't expect a response that she could understand. Lap rustled and crinkled to her, but she asked the question more for her own benefit than theirs. "On Planeia, you observe the universe from a strictly two-dimensional perspective, I don't know how that could possibly work, but it does. So, taking that into account, it stands to reason that three-dimensional objects would seem odd to you. As three-dimensional rationalities don't work in a multi-dimensional universe. Dear god!"

Demi whipped the large sheet of Repli-paper out from under the Repli-wood blocks, that Lap had arranged in some pattern that they found pleasing, without disturbing a single one. She paused, considering putting the paper back on to the table and trying to replicate the trick, but she felt too excited about what she had discovered.

She ran through the shop, searching each cabin as she passed, holding her nose at the ones Friss had desecrated the most. It could wait until the morning, she supposed, but she wanted to explain herself before it collapsed into competing theorems that clashed and dribbled and merged with each other, becoming something completely different and not at all coherent or helpful. She needed to speak it to someone for it to make sense and lock it within her own mind.

"I think I know why the impound yard locks are so hard to crack." Out of breath, Demi collapsed against the doorframe, trying not to touch anything. Especially seeing as she wasn't wearing thick gloves. "What do you know about ancient physics?"

Friss swiped away the holo-photo of something that looked vaguely pear-shaped and pulled up his pants. Still not in the slightest embarrassed, he swung his legs over the side of the bunk and frowned toward Demi. Of course he knew nothing about ancient physics. Demi didn't know why she bothered asking.