She spoke through another device, this one a small silver circular grille, that seemed embedded just below her largest eyes: the simulated voicebox Liars used to talk to humans. “The device can only be used once every three-point-eight-seven hours. It has a slightly faster recharge time than the bridge generator on your ship.”

“How does it work?” Callie strapped the teleporter onto her own arm – there was some chance it was a trick or a bomb or something, but she thought the odds were low. She wasn’t the only person on the ship with a gun, after all, and Lantern seemed to value her own life.

Lantern, resigned, showed her how the sides of the cube responded to touch, and how to input relative direction and distance for desired travel, and how to activate it, when it was recharged. “I’ll test this in a few hours, and it had better work the way you claim,” Callie said.

“I do not lie.”

Callie grunted, and then stared at the thing on her wrist with dawning horror. “Wait. Could you… could this – is it a weapon? The way the bridge generator opened a portal in the middle of your ship and tore it apart, could you do the same thing with this? To a ship? Or a person?”

Lantern waved her tentacles in apparent agitation. “No. That would be monstrous. There are failsafes in place. We had no idea your generator would activate an emergency protocol and tear us apart. We never would have tried to fire on you if we’d suspected. I told you, such devices are forbidden among our people, and our lore about their functions must be incomplete. Or else when the Axiom ruled, there was never a threat sufficient to make that emergency protocol activate.”

Callie nodded. The Liar’s story was a bunch of implausibilities wrapped around a handful of outright impossibilities, but Callie had a wormhole generator in her ship, and another one on her wrist, so it was time to take the impossible seriously. “Ashok, take our prisoner to the machine shop. Don’t let her touch anything unless it’s absolutely necessary. See if she can give you any useful information about the generator. She lives as long as she’s more use to us alive than satisfying to me dead.”

“Will do, cap.” Ashok held out his prosthetic hand and, after a moment, Lantern wrapped one tentacle around it. The cyborg clumped out of the medical bay with Lantern drifting along in microgravity behind him, looking like a bizarre novelty balloon.

Callie floated in a corner of the infirmary and looked at Stephen and Elena in turn. “What do we think about all that?”