Ashok glanced at Lantern, and Lantern fluttered her tentacles. Ashok said, “Sorry, cap, it’s not that easy. It’s not like there are no safeguards in place here. The Axiom weren’t stupid. The station has ways of protecting itself. There’s a… Lantern says it’s like a force field that prevents the bridge generators from opening up in here, for obvious reasons. There’s a way to override the field, but you have to physically break a connection way down in the guts of the station. It’s a pretty crucial part of the infrastructure, too, so there are automated systems in place to repair it. We can’t take those systems offline, they’re too integral, so you pretty much have to break the connection, disable the field, and then trigger the ships to set off the portal apocalypse before the repair-bots can undo the damage.”

“So it’s your basic suicide mission.” Callie nodded. “We’ll send someone who’s not alive, then. We’ll get Shall in his repair drone to go down there–”

More head-shakes. Uzoma spoke this time. “The only way to access the relevant area is to squeeze through one of the same tunnels you took to reach Elena. Too small for your drone. We considered commandeering one of the station bots.” They inclined their head toward the quiescent wireframe polyhedrons. “They’re adaptable in terms of shape. But they’re also physically incapable of damaging the ship’s critical systems.” A shrug. “Safeguards.”

“Could I cut the cable and then teleport out?” Callie tapped the device on her wrist.

“Maybe?” Ashok said. “The range on the teleporter is limited, and the station is big, and the connection we need to break is inconveniently located. If you teleported from that spot, out to max range, you wouldn’t get clear of the explosion. Well, not explosion. What would you call it, Uzoma?”

“A series of violent disruptions of space time.”

“Right, that,” Ashok said.

Callie shrugged. “So I cut the cable, set off the portals, crawl out of the tunnel fast, run faster, and then teleport out to max range. Is that possible?”

Ashok hmmed. “Possibly. It’s hard to tell how fast things would happen. Would the wormholes interact with each other, and if so, will that interaction have a dampening effect, or an amplifying one? We’re eyeballing this, guesstimates all around, but maybe you could do it in time. If you were really fast. Like an athlete. And lucky. Like a… lucky athlete.”

“I’ll do it,” Lantern said. “My life is forfeit anyway. You have already condemned me to death, and this way I would die in service to a greater good.”