Dark Beneath the Moon by Sherry D. Ramsey

water-going-down-the-drain effect.
    As we moved past the terminal point, the wormhole seemed like any other. The inside is actually quite a pretty place. All that radiation pouring into the wormhole gets blueshifted to high frequencies and reacts with the Krasnikov matter to hold the wormhole open. The result is a breathtaking swirl of constantly moving colour, like a hundred rainbows spinning down a drain.
    We’d made only the first skip, skimming the wormhole’s inner surface, when Viss’s voice came over the ship’s comm. “Might have some trouble here, Captain.”
    “What kind of trouble?”
    “You want to go to a private channel?”
    “No, go ahead. If we’re in trouble, everyone needs to know.”
    “Some kind of cosmic ray is penetrating the shields and affecting the skip drive,” Viss said in his no-nonsense way. “I don’t know if it will destabilize the drive or not.”
    “Starting a scan,” Yuskeya said, not waiting for me to give the order.
    “Rei, how does it feel so far?” I asked. She was the one who’d know soonest if anything was going wrong with the skips.
    “No problem yet,” she said steadily. “Are these something we should worry about from a medical point of view?”
    “I don’t think so,” Yuskeya answered before Viss could, if he would have had an answer at all. As the resident medic, she was best suited to know, anyway.
    I realized that I’d sat forward in my chair and had gripped the arms with a white-knuckle intensity. I forced myself to sit still and try to relax. No crew functions well if their captain appears rattled, and if Rei wasn’t worried, I shouldn’t be yet.
    The destabilization of the skip drive would be dangerous, to put it mildly. The skip field and the Krasnikov generation keep the wormhole open while the ship skips through. If the skip field failed, it might cause the wormhole to collapse around the ship, and I can’t really describe what would happen at that point because I don’t know. We’d be killed, for certain; the shields would fail from the sheer strength of the forces inside a collapsing wormhole, and without the shields, the X-rays and gamma rays would fry us in an instant.
    That part, we don’t talk about with the passengers. But it was too late to try and keep any secrets from Cerevare now. I glanced over at her, but her lupine face was composed and still.
    “Anyone else notice these grey lines?” Hirin asked suddenly. “I’ve been trying to gather data on them but I don’t know if I’m actually getting anything. They seem familiar, somehow . . .”
    I’d noticed them peripherally, a series of grey streaks that ran lengthwise down the sides of the wormhole, like striations in rock or muscle. The colours swirled past them, leaving them visible and unmoving on the wormhole walls. Now I paid more attention to them. Hirin was right. “Yes, I’ve definitely seen something like them before. But I can’t recall–”
    Hirin snapped his fingers. “The wormhole into Tau Ceti. We didn’t make that run all that often, but I’m sure that’s where I’ve seen them before.”
    I nodded. The Tau Ceti system had only one inhabited planet, Quma, and only one wormhole entry, from Eta Cassiopeia. Being a “dead-end” run, we hadn’t travelled it as part of our regular route in the days we’d been running the Tane Ikai together. But the wormhole did have these same grey striations. They’d never seemed to have any impact on how the wormhole functioned, so I’d forgotten about them.
    “Not getting much,” Hirin said. “We’d need specialized scanners built to gather data inside wormholes. Too much input, so our normal scanners are overwhelmed.”
    “We’ll ask the Protectorate smart boys about it when we get there,” I told him. “Rei, Viss, Yuskeya, how are we doing? Anything else strange? Talk to me.” We’d made about four skips now; the number in any wormhole was variable.
    “Still holding,” Rei reported. “Ship feels a little