Elsewhere, someone has been told to maybe work on a problem a bit harder.

Lieutenant Kyrell would like to request the assistance of someone that is knowledgeable in jump technology and wormholes. She has some readings to analyze, and is certain there's more at play than just hyperspace, here.

Lieutenant Tzirakis is more than happy to assist Lieutenant Kyrell with her analysis!

Excellent! Okay so here are the readings - these ones here are perfectly normal for hyperspace, and then they hit the anomaly right here, and the readings get really strange. Very briefly, too, like a sort of flare. The rest after that is kind of weird, but not as incredibly bizarre as that one point where hyperspace turned purple. Can he figure out anything about why it turned purple?

After some peering at the data, he gets a 5-space physicist in to consult. The physicist confirms: there is definitely something wormhole-like going on here. They are all incredibly lucky they arrived in this galaxy as a collection of contiguous objects instead of as a smear of exotic radiation across the cosmos. Also, was the purple a perceptual distortion or actually recorded on the sensors?

Actually recorded, things definitely went purple, here's the footage. There were some people that had perceptual distortions if that's relevant, which Kyrell expects it will be.

Yes, minor perceptual distortions when transiting wormholes are fairly normal and strong ones indicate jump pilot potential. The physicist has no explanation for why things went purple but she is intensely interested in figuring it out. Lieutenant Tzirakis goes over the data with them both and asks Lieutenant Kyrell a lot of questions about what hyperspace is exactly.

She is sort of lacking a hyperspace physicist of her own to really consult here, but she's passably knowledgeable in it, and where she isn't there are entries on it in the databanks.

It's another dimension that's coextensive with realspace; each point in realspace is associated with a unique point in hyperspace. In hyperspace it's possible to go many times the speed of light, but similar to how realspace doesn't allow things to go faster than the speed of light, hyperspace doesn't allow things to go slower than it. As such, corrections are really not a thing one can do while in hyperspace if one wants to live. It's really less like its own dimension and more like a higher level of the one they have. Large objects, like planets and stars, leave impressions in hyperspace from their gravitational pull, colloquially called 'mass shadows,' and can pull ships out of hyperspace and right into whatever caused the mass shadow.

...that's fascinating and they are both fascinated. (It transpires that they are cousins and this is how Lieutenant Tzirakis got his hands on a 5-space physicist on such short notice.)

Lieutenant Tzirakis proposes a slightly insane theory to go with this slightly insane event: wormholes and 5-space and gravity are all intimately connected phenomena, right? Well, what if a wormhole somehow got 'close' enough to cast - not a mass shadow exactly, because wormholes don't have mass in the conventional sense, but some near equivalent - and pulled the fleet into itself? There remains the problem of explaining how the fleet survived this experience intact. It is really very inexplicable how the fleet survived this experience intact.

His physicist cousin thinks his slightly insane theory is the most plausible explanation she can think of, although she wants to run several more checks on this data and read everything there is to read about hyperspace before she comes to any firm conclusions.

This is all so fascinating!

Lieutenant Kyrell thinks this slightly insane theory also is the most plausible explanation, but thinks there must have been something going on to cause the fleet to survive this experience intact. Because, see, they didn't go into hyperspace as a unit, each separate ship went into hyperspace on its own. They were nearly synchronized with their timing, but even half a second of delay means the ships were light years apart.

Yes, that does strongly imply that there's some kind of stable phenomenon going on here, although it's possible that it was only 'open' for a short time window and has since 'closed'... is there any chance of getting someone on the other side to try to throw a bunch of unmanned drones through on the exact course they took, to see where and whether they turn up?

There is a chance, yes! Kyrell can go arrange those things to happen, but it'll take some time to be arranged.

That's all right. They can poke the data and think about their theories in the meantime.

Yes, they can.

... Also Kyrell and Tzirakis can have drinks together, when they're both off work. If he'd like to.

...

After a few seconds of stunned silence, yes he would!

She looks forward to it.

While Callida is in the middle of a 'we are likely only going to get one shipment from the other galaxy so it had better be a good one' blitz, that doesn't mean things that are less time sensitive should be entirely ignored. What says the latest report on kolto?

The latest report on kolto says: it will definitely be longer than six months before they have working kolto production, but it doesn't yet look actually impossible, just very very difficult. Also, they keep isolating these genetic samples from impurities in the kolto, does anyone know what species they belong to?

....

Do the samples match this extremely carefully preserved sample Dr. Gelrath just so happens to have for completely innocuous reasons, that he absolutely did not do questionably moral things for?

...Yes. Yes they do. Thank you, Dr. Gelrath, this will be immensely helpful to the project.

Good, good. He wishes them luck.

Callida is just not going to ask about any of that.

Her eight days are almost up. She should probably be on Barrayar now - is that manor still open or is there another place to put her?

The manor is still open! She is welcome to use it again.

She'll stay there, then.

Unless anyone comes to visit, she'll just keep trying to sort through biological samples they might want and how retrievable they might be.

Cordelia sends her a message letting her know that she's welcome to have dinner with the Vorkosigans again while she's on the planet, but she shouldn't feel obliged if she's busy.

... Yeah, okay. It's been a little over a month, and she has been doing nothing but work. It's important and not unenjoyable work, but she sort of hasn't had a break in a while. Dinner sounds good.