“Neither am I.” Joshua’s hands moved over his controls. “I’m going to open up a jump-point. Hang on.”

Facing forward and staring out at the winking docking lights of Starbase 32, Bat-Levi braced herself. What would crossing the threshold of a jump-point feel like? Bat-Levi didn’t know. She’d never been through an actual wormhole, though they’d done simulator runs of gravimetric distortions to warp bubbles caused by an intermix imbalance. Then the effect had been as violent as it was spectacular: a sensation of tripping and the ship lurching then careening through space, out of control. Now she expected the same. Maybe something just as violent, like being thrown from her seat, or a jolt, a quiver running through the ship and shivering up her legs. Something.

Only there was nothing. One moment, she was staring at the gray and blue top that was Starbase 32. The next, she wasn’t.

Space crinkled. Not a fold exactly, but the stars suddenly puckered into a cone. There was not the usual smearing of stars into rainbows that she associated with warp drive. The stars simply glimmered, winked. Flashed off. She felt a slight jerk, but the feeling was more internal than external, as if her body had pushed through a pane of clear, semi-liquid gelatin. And then Starbase 32 was gone. So were the stars.

“Joshua?” Bat-Levi had to say his name twice because her throat was so dry. “Where?”

Her brother’s body was still as death. “We’re inside.”

“Inside,” she said the word as if she didn’t understand it. This hadn’t been on the simulations. “You mean, inside a rift?”

Joshua pulled his face around, his eyes bright with excitement. “We’re inside a jump tunnel.”

My God.“Are we moving?”

“The computer says so. How’s our influx?”

“Vacuum energy influx is constant,” said Bat-Levi, grateful for something to do. “So is our jump bubble. But where are we…?”

“Going? Haven’t a clue. I programmed in a five second jump, so we ought to be coming out soon.”

“But the stars,” Bat-Levi began, and then her eyes widened. “Joshua.”

Joshua’s head snapped forward. The stars were back. Starbase 32 wasn’t.

Bat-Levi released a breath she hadn’t known she held. “Where are we?”

“Computer says…” Jason’s fingers scurried over his console. “Computer says that we’re twelve-point-five-seven parsecs distant from our previous position.”

“Oh, my God,” said Bat-Levi. Her eyes darted to her instruments. The generator flux was reading steady, the dimensional rift bubble over the ship stable. “That was it?”

Joshua was laughing now. “You were expecting something else?”

“Well, yes,”she said, but she was smiling. “You did it, Jock-o.”

“Yeah,” said Joshua, finger-combing his hair again and again, “yeah. We did.” He let out a sudden whoop. “By God, Darya! By God!”

They grinned at one another like maniacs for a full thirty seconds before Bat-Levi said, “Hey, can you get us back?”

“Hey,” said Joshua, still smiling as he plotted their return and re-initiated, “after that, a piece of cake. A piece of…”

Suddenly, the ship lurched, as if some huge foot had kicked them from behind. Bat-Levi slammed forward, her hand shooting out to keep her face from smacking into her console. Her gaze raked over her controls. “Joshua, the pod’s magnetic containment field…”

“It’s breaking down. I see it.” Joshua’s fingers flew over his command console. “Hang on, hang on. Shutting down.”

Damn, I didn’t check the field; I didn’t double-check it!Bat-Levi felt another lurch. Heard a low groan of metal and then the computer chattering a warning about hull structural integrity. “I read pockets of subspace opening up, Joshua! Off the port quarter, same place I picked up that instability before! And now there’s a second pocket, off the starboard bow!”

“We’re not shutting down. I’m taking the computer off-line, switching to manual…negative. Generator’s still on-line. Damn it, the intake’s frozen!”

“Now abeam to starboard, another pocket,” said Bat-Levi, her voice shrill.

A split-second later, the computer chimed in. “Warning: subspace variance at point-seven…”

“Shut up!” Bat-Levi jabbed the audio off. “Joshua, that pocket’s increasing in size exponentially! And there are two more, one off the starboard quarter, one dead astern!”

“I see them, I see them. It’s an energy surge in the particle stream, siphoning off vacuum energy at unequal rates. That means adjacent branes are collapsing, because of electromagnetic pressure on the opposite side of the energy sink. Darya,” Joshua spared her a quick glance, “are you sureyou adjusted those grids?”

“Yes, yes, of course, I’m sure!” She’d told him, she’d toldhim. “I did the best I could. I told you, they weren’t stable, and I’ve been twiddling with them…”

She broke off. Get a hold of yourself.She had to think. They didn’t have much time. The ship yawed drunkenly, and her seat spun around, almost throwing her to the deck. She heard a long, low grinding sound and knew that stress on the hull was increasing.

Think.Bat-Levi’s brain clicked into overdrive. As more pockets of subspace opened around the ship, the ship itself would continue to linearly accelerate, but at different rates and in different directions. Just like a starship that had lost one or both of its nacelles: Parts of the ship would travel at different rates, with pieces of the ship slipping past others, or going off in entirely new directions.

If they couldn’t shut down the generator, they would break apart.

On a starship, in a runaway, there was only one option. Jettison the core and worry about how you got home later.

The Lionshuddered. Spun to port. An alarm sounded; their inertial dampers were failing.

“Joshua, we have to blow the pod,” she said urgently, trying not to think what a sudden explosive influx of energy would do to the surrounding spacetime. “We haveto!”

“Darya, I know, I know, but…”

The blood iced in her veins as she read his look. “Oh, no.” Quickly, she scanned her readouts. “Oh, no, no, no, no…”

“The explosive bolts are frozen,” said Joshua. His face was white as salt. “No way to blow them automatically.”

The ship rocked as if slapped by a giant hand. Bat-Levi thought fast. There were pockets of subspace opening all around them, which meant that the generator was still siphoning vacuum energy. If she could just get a stable jump-point, re-initialize the computer and have it reverse course and get back, or closerto Starbase 32, they could abandon ship.

Her fingers were a blur over her console. “I’m re-routing auxiliary power to the generator.”

“Darya, no! You’re going to increase…”

“Don’t you see? It’s the only way,” she said, not bothering to turn around. She punched in their return coordinates. “If I just reopen a jump point where we had before…”

There was high metallic scream. A sensation of something ripping apart, like a piece of cloth pulled in opposite directions at its weakest point. “There goes the hull, there goes the hull!” Joshua shouted.

“Hang on, hang on!” Bat-Levi grabbed her console with both hands. “Jump point opening… now!”

This time, she saw it: a jagged hole in space that dilated, gaped like a huge mouth…and then sucked them in.

Suddenly, she couldn’t breathe. She tried taking a breath and couldn’t. Her chest felt as if she were flattening, elongating; her heart slowing, her limbs spooling out like long threads…

Passing through a dimensional shift.Her brain was sluggish, ticking through the problem like the old gears of a grandfather’s clock. The ship must be caught in different dimensions; that was why her body felt like putty, and was this what it felt like to exist in a two-dimensional plane…?

And then it was as if her mind, held in place by some invisible tether, snapped back into her body. She was aware that her lungs burned, and she inhaled a lungful of air and let it out in a moan.