John Farno is playing with explosives.
Nuclear explosives.
It’s a booby trap on that Farno has figured out how to make work. And I’m pretty sure some physicist is going to school me on what I’m doing wrong, but it’s one of those things a guy trapped on a planet with only a cobbled-together omnipresent AI for company needs to do.
But I’m flipping back and forth between Farno now and his would-be rescuers. And they are discovering why humans abandoned warp drive as soon as they found out wormholes exist. And that they could be made. Why? Think about jump points in Babylon 5 and jump gates in Buck Rogers and other wormhole-based FTL schemes in space opera. Transit is almost instantaneous. The longest part is getting to a hypergate or to a point where you can make a wormhole.
I’ve laid a few more eggs, fleshed out Dakota since I don’t get to visit too many Compact worlds. I have an idea of writing about the different core worlds at some point, but it depends on how much interest there is in the series.