In one of our cargo bays was a ‘magic bean stalk’, an Elder wormhole controller module we had stolen from a Kristang asteroid research base during our first mission. Skippy could use it to shut down a wormhole, which is how the Thuranin and Kristang no longer had access to Earth. He had discovered that he could also use it to temporarily change which distant wormhole a nearby wormhole connected to. That had been my idea, by the way. Being able to temporarily change local wormhole connections saved the Merry Band of Pirates a tremendous amount of time, because we could use a single wormhole to
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