Callie was fairly sure she’d take her strange vision of the blue eye in the tunnel to her doom, since she expected to emerge in the midst of cataclysm. They’d set each ship to open a wormhole in its immediate vicinity – call that point A – with the other end of the wormhole opening at another point in the station, ideally in places where the branching tunnels joined – call that point B. They’d passed through a point B, which meant they would emerge at a point A, back in the remains of the hangar, where hundreds of ships had just been torn apart. There would be flying debris, strange radiation, fragments of brain-spiders – who knew what hazards. Callie didn’t dare hit her teleport until she’d emerged fully from the bridge, and her finger was poised to do so, but would her reaction time be fast enough to spare her death by flying metal?

It was, but only because Shall protected her. The hull repair drone was pelted by debris immediately, and spun wildly around, but he flung out all his many manipulator arms and batted away the floating remnants of any ships that entered his vicinity. The right chunk of metal at the correct angle and velocity could have holed Callie like a bullet, but Shall took care of the bigger pieces, and she got lucky.

“Love you,” she said, and jumped.

“No sign of the captain.” Ashok’s voice crackled on the comms from the canoe, where he waited at Callie’s expected point of arrival.

“Where is she?” Elena was in the cockpit of the White Raven with Drake and Janice, watching out the viewport as the Axiom station was destroyed, her eyes straining for a speck she wouldn’t possibly be able to make out: one human, floating. She couldn’t even see the canoe. But she didn’t stop looking.

“Callie is ten seconds late, which means she either didn’t make it, or she jumped to the wrong place,” Janice said.

Elena didn’t answer. The station had come apart like… like… like nothing she had a comparison for. Wormholes had opened by their hundreds in one small region of space, and geysers and fountains of matter had blown out in all directions. Then corresponding hundreds of other wormholes had appeared at every junction and many of the straightaways of the vast interconnected anthill of the station. There were combustible and explosive things in many of those sections, judging by how utterly vaporized they were. There would be a debris field, and a large one, but not even the best forensic computer would be able to reconstruct what that mess of fragments had originally been.

They all stared at the silent majesty of the devastation, with a growing sense of corresponding personal loss that was no less devastating in its way.

Then something went “boop.”