Ishikawa charged the manifold capacitor and pondered its wormhole sustainment controls. The Necrogorgons used prime numbers where other races would use orders of magnitude. They asserted that easy calculations caused their brains to overheat due to insufficient load, so they did everything the hard way. Thus there were 13 dentrons in a tendron, 17 tendrons in a dendron, etc. How kilometers fit into all this he wasn’t entirely certain.

Two impacts shook the tender. The Finite State Machine had fired grappling magnets and was reeling them in.

“He’s in,” Pitcher reported. There was no time left to plot a chord. Ishikawa hit the big red button.

A light-distorting sphere bloomed above the warp manifold. A pillar of metallic hydrogen shot out of it, smashing into the cruiser. All three ships lurched toward the wormhole, which was now a shortcut to what passed for Jupiter’s surface. Everything loose on board the tender, and a few things that weren’t, crashed into the starboard bulkhead.