He had to check the numbers three times. The calculations were correct for sure. The smaller sun of the M8 binary star system was going to collapse a few hours before or after the arrival of the Argo exploratory vessel at the limits of that system. He got up and ran down the corridor outside his office.
"Two billion years of life and we drop in at the end? What are the chances this could happen?" was asked almost at once by all team members.
"Incalculably small, but it happened. Give me your theories. It is too late to warn them now. They have already passed the range of conventional communications and we don't have enough energy to open a wormhole from this side. What do you think, Madeline?"
Madeline, a theoretical physicist responsible for FTL communications, did not give rise to much hope since the start of the conversation. And indeed, her answer was disappointing to the fact, or rather it did just that. Disappoint. "Professor, there is nothing we can do until they initiate contact from their side."
"I must interrupt," came William, the expert on matters of time and space, "but let's hope that the collapse happens sooner rather than later. I couldn't begin to fathom what a collapse with a working wormhole..."
There was an error in the professor's calculations. Argo, on her way to M8, passed near a dark matter protostar with a mass twelve thousand times greater than that of our sun. Its mass was enough to distort the observation of the space beyond it by three light hours for every parsec.
Argo, having reached M8, opened the wormhole drawing power from the magnetic field of the binary system and awaited the installation in orbit around Jupiter to receive the other end.
While Madeline was talking, the wormhole opened up in low Jupiter orbit, outside the controlled space, due to the error in the time differential.
As William was finishing his sentence, the collapse of the star had already begun and was spewing a gigantic volume of matter through the wormhole, capable of destroying our whole solar system.
