Ashok went to the glass. “I bet we’d die trying anyway. These ships probably have automated defenses we can’t even imagine, so they’d probably shoot back. And remember, if they perceive us as a threat, they’d could just open a bridge right in the middle of the White Raven, and we’d be turned into meat and metal confetti.”

“Oh, hell,” Callie said. “The emergency systems. If we attack, they’ll just kill us and go… wherever. Maybe to that prison planet we saw, or maybe… who knows where.”

Ashok nodded. “Lantern and I were talking, though, about failsafes. You know how your personal teleporter won’t send you into a wall or whatever, and won’t open inside a person, or a building? The bridge generators on those ships don’t have those kind of safeguards. They’re meant to be used as weapons as well as transport. So we were thinking, what if we can convince all the generators on all those ships to open bridges all at once, with the other ends of the bridges distributed all over this whole station.”

“Whoa.” Callie looked at the hangar. She remembered the starfish ship being torn apart by a single portal opening inside it. Multiply that devastation by hundreds… “I think that would do some damage. Lantern, are you willing to help with that, given your whole non-interference stance?”

“The consequences would be disastrous if the Axiom realized that someone had deliberately destroyed this station, but there are hundreds of thousands of such stations throughout the galactic cluster, and there are sometimes malfunctions and accidents, after all these years. Occasionally a program malfunctions, and there is a disaster. I have taken the liberty of wiping the past few days of data from the station’s central system, so even if the wreckage were discovered, nothing would point to our involvement, and it would likely be ruled an accident. The station records indicate there are no members of the Axiom slumbering on this station who might wake or be alerted. This place is abandoned, and could be destroyed without much chance of discovery. I can break with doctrine in these circumstances.”

“Let’s do it,” Callie said. “We’ll get off the station, then set the whole fleet to blow. Can we do that with a timer or something?”