And one after another, the slow, laden freighters of the merchants and the fast, sharp fighters of their mercenaries went in. Even on the screen in the aerospace port, with the news-child’s prattling commentary jamming the silence, the sight remained awesome and uncanny: ship after ship vanishing in a flash of blue light, as if annihilated. The same thought must have struck Andrea. ‘What happened to the law of mass-energy conservation?’ she asked. ‘Did it just go away, with those ships?’ Malley leaned over from the bench beside me. ‘Good point,’ he said, jabbing his pipe-stem, like a lecturer’s pointer, at the screen. ‘The answer is that the mass of the wormhole at this end increases, and at the other end decreases, by the same amount as has gone through.’ We were sitting, with Reid and Dee, in the same quiet area of the port where Boris and Jaime had waited. I watched the screen with silent satisfaction as our fighters took up positions around the wormhole and deployed a scatter of attitude-control booster drones which clamped themselves around its perimeter.
