Book 5: Chapter 8: Wormholes
Icarus
September 2320
Alien System
My drone floated a half kilometer away from the wormhole, watching while a smaller drone drifted toward the object at minimum thrust. The obvious move was to send something through, but that didn’t mean we were going to be standing right there, waiting to get blown up. Dae and I had set up station-keeping a hundred kilometers away from each wormhole. He had a drone watching the other wormhole, to see if my drone came back through in one piece or as a shower of free quarks.
My theory was that the drone would come out of the destination wormhole with the same inertial vector as it went in with on this end. Whether it would acquire the orbital velocity of the destination was an unknown. We’d calculated the exit vector for both cases, and Dae was ready.
Finally, the drone entered the wormhole. From my point of view, it just continued on through, still easily visible against the slightly skewed starfield of the far side.
“Looks like it survived,” I said. “You want to pick it up?”
“Uh, it’s not here, Icky. Nothing came through.”
“What? I can see it clearly. It’s on your side. It’s right—” I stopped abruptly. “Hey, uh, Dae. How about you position your drone in line of sight with mine. We should be able to visually confirm the connection.”