“I love a family meeting.” Ashok spun around in his chair, until Stephen reached out and firmly stopped the rotation. Drake and Janice were there too, sitting in their mobility device, a gyroscopic egg-shaped seat they seldom emerged from in the presence of others. They had their silver privacy screen down now, which suggested Drake was on the ascendant; he was more self-conscious about their physical appearance than Janice was.

“Everyone heard Elena’s story, right?” Callie asked. The ship’s computer recorded every word spoken in public areas of the ship as a matter of course, unless privacy was requested, and Callie had asked the crew to review the recordings or transcripts before the meeting.

“She’s crazy,” Janice said, voice emerging from a speaker set into the top of their chair. “Sorry. I know it’s not nice, and she’s been through a traumatic experience, and all that, but: clear-cut case of space madness. She probably murdered her crew and jettisoned them out the airlock.”

“She may not be insane,” Drake said. “It’s possible she’s simply lying. Maybe she’s from the Jovian Imperative, looking to get famous with a ridiculous story. She found a mothballed antique ship, welded some spikes onto it, and messed around with the navigational data. Remember that rock-jockey who said he’d discovered an antigravity generator, but it was all just lies and falsified data?”

“That bridge generator though.” Ashok made a buzzing sound that might have been meant as an appreciative whistle.

“You haven’t seen the thing generate a bridge,” Janice said. “It’s just a greasy black box playing tricks on the computer.”

“I’m not that easily tricked,” the computer objected, but they all ignored him.

“The stuff the box is made of is weird, I’ll grant you that,” Janice went on, “but it could be some industrial material cooked up in an R&D lab and abandoned because it’s too nasty-looking for commercial use.”

“Let’s address the possibilities,” Callie said. “What are the odds this is an elaborate hoax? Ashok, does her ship check out?”

“It’s a real goldilocks ship, and the stuff done to it matches the stuff she says was done to it. The hull is patched up with some unknown silvery-gray metal, and those bits of the ship were resistant to analysis from every sensor I pointed at them. Plus, like Shall says, he’s not that easy to trick. We’ve poked that alien cube real good, and it reacts the same way, consistently, throughout many thousands of iterative virtual environments. We’ve got the keys to the galaxy, cap. Let’s go for a spin.”

“Stephen? What’s your take on Elena? Do you think she’s trustworthy, or are we being scammed?”