The Great Galactic Score!

7

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."