The only things that really caught her attention were a few comments on the local social network reporting a mass exodus of Liars from Meditreme Station. There were only a hundred or so Liars on the station anyway, most from the same clan or family or tribe, and almost all of them seemed in a sudden hurry to leave, taking off on their own ships or buying passage on others. She thought of the screaming Liar in the hangar, and her guts clenched. They’d brought that artifact onto the station, and the Liars had fled. Even accounting for the basic weird unpredictability of the species, that was too close to cause and effect to ignore. She needed to call Ashok and tell him to stick that box inside an unmanned probe and set it on a course for the sun–

Her handheld suddenly buzzed with an urgent emergency notification, blanking out her screen, and Ashok’s unlovely face appeared. “Captain, this – sorry, I’m just – I did the thing, with the emulation, the simulation, I plugged in the cube–”

Elena suddenly groaned and tried to sit up, falling back before she made it halfway. Had the buzzer awakened her?

Callie rose from the stool, but Elena would keep: the other issue was more potentially existential. “Slow down, Ashok. What is it?” He must have figured it out, whatever deadly secret the cube held, and now he was breaking the bad news that they were all poisoned or irradiated or about to be swallowed by a miniature black hole–

He took a deep breath. “Captain. This device we found on the Anjou… I think… it seems to be a bridge generator.”

She frowned. “That little black box can activate a bridge? It’s like a thousand times smaller than the activator they have at the Jupiter bridgehead. That validates our theory about the Anjou finding an undiscovered bridgehead out there in space somewhere. If we can figure out where, that could be valuable information. I still don’t see how the Anjou made it out of the Jovian bridgehead on this side without detection and ended up floating out here with the ice clods, unless there’s some kind of stealth technology–”

“Cap!” Ashok said – shouted, really. “You don’t understand. Listen. This device isn’t a bridge activator. It doesn’t provide access to existing wormholes. It creates new ones.”

Callie tried to make sense of that, but her mind resisted. Nobody could make a wormhole, any more than you could make a star. You found a bridge; you opened one; you traversed one. There was no “making.” The bridges had already been made, millions of years ago, either by the Liars or some long-dead race of ancient alien geniuses. “You’re going to have to take me through this at a slow walk, Ashok.”