The theory, of course, was that the Scythin were extradimensional. Captain Arrohauk had captured the closest thing to any evidence of this on her scopes with the formation of the Arusne Supervoid and the concurrent disappearance of the Timelance. The Chime was the device – or so it went – that made it all possible by somehow drawing the dimensions together, at which point the Timelance could slip across.

The consequence of this was the creation of an artificial void – a vacancy in space with no stars or matter. It would make a cold spot many tens of millions or billions of gilleys wide. No one knew exactly how large a void – Arusne had only been one gilley – but there were plenty of others in the observable universe with which to compare. Some were big enough to swallow not just a galaxy, but entire superclusters. Thousands, even millions of galaxies, all at once in a single moment. Every time the Timelance crossed from one dimension to another was a passive act of galacticide. But it was powerless to do so without the Chime.

Now it was her galaxy under threat – the tiny bit of Universe that contained everything Naecia had ever known or loved. And its survival hinged on the Chime’s whereabouts remaining safely buried within the brain of an affable but clueless Earth man long enough for her and her compatriots to find him, erase his mind, and kill him, just to be sure.

There was no telling what weaponry the Timelance had, assuming they could even find the ship. Attacking it head-on was out of the question. If things ended up going bad, they could always fire the dilaceration cannons as a final resort, but better to try another tack first before picking fights with spaceships of unknown capability.

She would wait for a successful test of the Switch before proposing her plan.

Naecia worked nonstop until she’d used up every bit of the caridianite. Completed, the Switch was an odd-looking contraption, a black box with a golden crown. Festooned in the highly conductive wire, the machine’s processors would theoretically be able to scan and catalogue every particle of the ship, down to the motes of dust that traveled through the nav system’s holographic projections.

She brought it online, then transferred the processors to the ship’s power. The screen on the side flicked on. “Let’s see if this thing can see us,” she said, initiating the machine’s cataloguing function from a connected data pad. The lights flickered.

“Did the lights just go off?” asked Oush.

“Yes, Oush. Good observation,” said Aptat. “Naecia: did your little machine just pull enough power to interrupt the flow of energy from the reactor?”

“A quintillion superpositional bits will do that,” she answered. “Here, look.”