“Of course, Captain Machedo.” The computer didn’t sound amused, or even annoyed, which Callie found even more infuriating. “Elena?” he said. “Just head out to the corridor and take a left.”

“I’ll talk to you soon.” Callie tried to give Elena a reassuring smile. “You seem pretty smart and funny already, so I can’t wait to hear you after the holes in your memory get filled in.”

The biologist chuckled and departed with a little wave, only stumbling a little as she got used to the gravity level.

Callie went to the machine shop to see what Ashok wanted. He squatted beside a work table so the surface was just at his eye level – or the level of all the accumulated lenses where his eyes should have been, anyway. She stood beside him, looking down at the object on the table: a cube about half a meter wide on each side, made of some greasy-looking black substance, with a single input port shaped like a crescent moon on top. The thing Ashok had discovered hooked up in the Anjou’s engine room, and found so bizarre he’d carefully detached it and brought it along for further study. “What am I looking at, Ashok?”

“I have no idea.” Ashok usually confronted technological problems with glee, but he seemed subdued now, as if he’d met his match. “Most of the changes to the Anjou were cosmetic and basically pointless, curlicues of wiring that went nowhere and did nothing, external engine parts that weren’t even hooked up to anything – but this thing was wired into the ship’s propulsion and navigation systems, and it was definitely doing something. I can’t see what’s going on inside the box, not with any of the equipment here–” he tapped the array of lenses on his face “–or with the ship’s sensors. Every diagnostic particle and wave I throw at this thing just gets absorbed. I don’t even know what material the box is made of. It looks almost gooey, doesn’t it, like it was dipped in axle grease? Seems like it would leave smears on your clothes if you brushed up against it. But it’s hard as iron and smooth to the touch.” He tapped the cube with one of the fingers on his non-prosthetic hand to demonstrate, rubbing his fingertips together afterward with a shrug. “That greasy look is some kind of purely optical effect, and I can’t figure it out. Anyway. If the navigational data on the Anjou is accurate, this box somehow allowed the ship to travel about fifty light years in twenty-one seconds.”

“Exactly twenty-one seconds?”

Ashok nodded. “The same length of time it takes to traverse a wormhole from one end to the other.”