Then a wormhole formed in the air just a few meters in front of them, breaching the tunnel from side to side. The walls cracked like a teacup hit with a hammer, and the air rushed out into the vacuum, hungry black on all sides. Callie caught a glimpse of spinning silver towers and fragments of metal and scores of spreading inkblots of darkness opening all around her, tendrils drifting like the fronds of strange abyssal jellyfish. Shall’s momentum was too great to avoid the wormhole, so they flew straight inside, on through the bridgehead.

Shall was trying to brake, which in practice meant thrusting in reverse, so their progress through the bridge was slow, far slower than even the stately plodding of the White Raven through the bridges; slow for a starship was still fast for a person. Individuals had flown through the twenty-nine established bridges before, in vacuum suits, but there was nothing to see inside them, because they were all lightless.

Not so here. There were lights here, rings of blinding white, spaced every few meters. In the White Raven those lights had whipped by. Here, they floated past languidly.

In between most of the glowing rings, the tunnel was made of a greasy-looking black substance, just like their bridge generator or Callie’s personal teleporter. (She briefly wondered what would happen if she triggered that here, in this place, and decided she didn’t want to find out as badly as she wanted to stay alive, and the two were probably incompatible.)

One of the rings of light was broken, stuttering and flashing, and she wondered if that was the case on every trip, and they’d just passed it too quickly to notice before. What did it mean, if the infrastructure here was failing, even in such a small way?

Beyond the malfunctioning ring of light, in the greasy black space before the next band of brightness, a portion of the tunnel looked different. The changed area was a segment of the curve that occupied perhaps forty-five of the available three-hundred-and-sixty degrees. Callie happened to be looking straight down at that segment, still clutched tight to Shall’s underside.

That one section of the tunnel looked like a window. There was something behind it: something dark, and slumped, and rounded. It was mostly in shadow, but it seemed to be gazing at her with a single fist-sized eye the blue of Cherenkov radiation. The eye appeared to track her movement, and she twisted her head to stare back, but then the window, if that’s what it was, slid closed.

Even though they were moving slowly, the trip took as long as it always did: twenty-one seconds. Bridge travel was entirely a matter of time, and not distance, it seemed.