“They’re transmitting,” Janice said. “But not toward us – some kind of tight-beam pulse, sent out toward the Oort Cloud.”

“Ship, did you activate the generator?”

“I didn’t – I was locked out of the system. I think… it activated itself.”

“That’s comforting,” Stephen said.

“Let’s get out of here, Drake–”

The ship lurched, hard, and the spreading wine-stain of the bridgehead grew notably larger.

“The bridge is pulling us toward it!” Drake said. “I’m trying to turn about, but it’s like swimming against a riptide.”

“Ashok, where does that bridge lead? To the station Elena found?”

“I have no idea, cap. I figured out how to access the generator’s history, which has a grand total of one entry, but I don’t know how to enter coordinates or even how the coordinate system works. If this is some kind of emergency protocol then I don’t know who to tell… oh shit we’re going in there aren’t we?”

The screens filled with wet-looking blackness. “We’re almost in,” the ship said.

“It looks like a normal bridgehead,” Ashok said. The inky shadow seemed to drift toward them, tendrils reaching out to surround the ship. “Let’s see if–”

The screens all went dead. “All sensors offline,” the ship said. “As per usual.”

“This is supposed to be happening?” Elena was still strapped firmly into her seat, but her hair drifted around her in the absence of gravity, as if she were underwater. There was a thready note of panic in her voice. She’d slept through her last journey by bridge.

“It lasts twenty-one seconds,” Callie said. “Usually. When you enter a bridgehead, there’s twenty-one seconds of dead time while you pass through… something. A place of darkness. The sensors go dead, but even if you look out the forward viewport, it’s just black–”

“Not this time, captain.” Drake’s voice trembled, agitation audible even on the PA. “This time it’s different.”

Callie launched herself toward the ladder leading to the nose of the ship. She grabbed the rung, stopped her forward momentum, then pushed down hard with her arms to launch herself up. She passed the level with the crew quarters and the galley, and sailed into the nose, the hatch sliding open when it sensed her approach. The trip took under ten seconds, but she was already too late: the view out the window had changed to distant stars and a large, dark planet mostly eclipsing a nearby star that looked like a red dwarf. They were in a solar system, but not one Callie recognized, and she had been to all twenty-nine colony systems, except the interdicted one, and even that one, she’d seen charts for.