When an installation prompts you to self-declare as “guest,” “steward,” or “instrument,” personnel are reminded that only one of these roles comes with presumptive rights and only one comes with presumptive obligations. “Instrument” entails neither; by selecting it, you agree that someone else may define your purpose without reference to your charter, training, or continued survival. Field personnel are not paid enough to be instruments, and the Commission is not insured for their attempts to prove otherwise.

  — MIC Frontier Transit, Access & Stewardship Manual, Rev. 3.4, §18.1 — Guest, Steward, Instrument

  ?

  We lit the gate like we actually meant it this time.

  “Guest profile simulated and ready,” Mercy said in my ear. “Routing nonfunctional test pulse now.”

  The ring sat in the center of the dome, quiet as a sculpture. The inner surface was the same polished not-quite-mirror, reflecting us with that faint half-second lag that made my hindbrain try to reboot.

  “Field behavior?” I asked.

  “Local curvature perturbation at ten to the minus eleven gee over a five-meter baseline,” she said. “Aperture plane forming. No throat.”

  “No throat?” Chloe asked.

  “Think of it as a door without a hallway,” Frankie said in my helmet. “The hinge is moving. The space on the other side hasn’t committed yet.”

  “Helpful,” Trevor muttered.

  The test pulse bled off, leaving the ring looking like itself again: wrong reflection, wrong gravity, wrong everything.

  “Stress on the vacuum core?” I said.

  “Point zero zero three percent of its current available differential,” Mercy said. “Elastic response only. No plastic deformation in the cages.”

  “So it noticed,” I said, “but it didn’t mind.”

  “That is one way to phrase it,” she said.

  We all stood there for a moment listening to the quiet hum of alien metal and the tiny tick of our own suit systems.

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s knock and see who answers.”

  The sacrificial drone waited by the plinth: a little crab of sensors and articulated legs, every joint overbuilt. I’d printed reinforcement struts for it on the walk over, because sometimes paranoia and engineering are the same thing.

  “Final checks,” I said. “Mercy?”

  “Locomotion nominal. Power at ninety-eight percent. Q-Nexus channel live. Tether line attached.” A thin, glittering thread of smart fiber ran from the drone’s spine back to a spool bracketed to the plinth. “Environmental sensors calibrated.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Guest mode, low flux. Open the door.”

  The ring’s inner surface shivered.

  Glyphs along its edge lit up in triplets—Martian-ish curls, Venusian knots, Veloran spikes—tracing the same “guest stands at threshold” refrain Chloe had been muttering in her sleep.

  The inner skin of the ring bowed inward, as if the space it framed were trying to be farther away than the space it occupied.

  “Metric curvature increasing,” Mercy said quietly. “No throat yet. Holding at thirty percent of simulated flux.”

  “Drone,” I said. “Go make history.”

  It scuttled up the ramp like it had somewhere better to be and stepped through the aperture.

  One moment it was there; the next the tether line just went through the space where the drone used to be.

  Everything in my HUD blanked where its telemetry should have been.

  “Uh,” Trevor said.

  “Wait,” Chloe said.

  We waited.

  One second. Two.

  Then the feed popped back in: grainy, low-bit-rate at first while the link negotiated whatever the hell “over there” was.

  Rock. Dark, pitted, not our deck. Open space above it—no ceiling within the drone’s immediate field of view. Off in the distance, barely visible even with gain cranked to migraine levels, something like a web of light.

  “Environmental readings,” Mercy said. “Pressure ninety-seven kilopascals. Oxygen twenty-one percent. Nitrogen seventy-seven. Trace gases include argon, helium, residual carbon dioxide, several fluorinated ligands at parts-per-billion. Temperature twenty-two degrees. External gravity point nine six gee. No immediate aerosols at corrosive concentrations.”

  “So not hell,” Chloe breathed.

  “Not our hell,” Frankie said. “New hell. User-friendly hell. With zoning.”

  I realized my shoulders had gone up around my ears and made myself drop them.

  “It’s near the surface,” Mercy said. “Sky radiance and magnetic field profile match Venus, but with significant anomalies.”

  Trevor swallowed.

  “This is a formal note,” he said, “that we have now lost the ability to claim this is all happening in simulations.”

  “Door to not-hell,” Frankie said. “I’m so proud of us.”

  “Reel it back,” I said.

  The tether twitched as the drone obediently reversed, backing into the aperture like a cat changing its mind about a doorway. It came out on our side with a faint pop in the air, legs scraping on the alien deck.

  Everything in the dome went silent again.

  “Drone shows no immediate structural harm,” Mercy said. “No ablation, no exotic residues. Internal systems nominal.”

  “Okay,” I said. My mouth was dry. “So it’s definitely a teleporter.”

  “Transit gate,” Chloe corrected automatically. “We don’t know if it tunnels a pre-existing adjacency or—”

  “Teleporter,” I repeated. “We can argue topology later.”

  Trevor let out a slow breath.

  “We are not,” he said carefully, “walking through that thing today.”

  “Obviously,” I said.

  “Obviously,” Chloe echoed.

  We all kept staring at it anyway.

  ?

  The argument about who went first was interrupted by a ten-inch egg with tentacles.

  “—we send at least three more drones before a human—” Trevor was saying.

  “—and we need a better sample kit printed, and—” Chloe started.

  Something moved.

  Or didn’t.

  The air in front of the plinth… thickened, for lack of a better word. There was no flash, no flare from the ring, no pop of displaced air. Just: no object, and then object.

  It hovered about chest-height off the deck. An ovoid pod of metal, its shell broken into irregular plates like someone had tiled it in bronze scalemail. Bands and round ports set into the plates glowed a hot, steady amber from within. A single large circular “eye” sat off-center on the upper curve, rimmed in metal, the light in it brighter and focused, already turned toward us.

  From its lower half spilled a fringe of narrow tendrils, each ending in a small rounded tip that glowed the same amber as the ports. The tentacles hung, then slowly flexed, drinking the silence, sifting the atmosphere.

  “That,” Frankie said, “is not local flavor.”

  The dome’s tech was smooth, continuous, everything curves and blended joints and glyph lines so fine you needed magnification to be sure they weren’t just art. This thing was all seams and cutouts and deliberate edges, like it had been grown by a machine that liked contrast.

  “It wasn’t there a second ago,” Trevor said tightly.

  “No change in gate metric,” Mercy said in my ear. “No detectable aperture elsewhere in the dome. No obvious mass flow.”

  “So it either rode in on a channel we can’t see,” Chloe said, “or it was already here and just decloaked.”

  “Votes for neither,” Frankie said. “Anyone?”

  The egg rotated with eerie smoothness until the big eye-port was directly facing me. The tentacles curled under it, then spread slightly, and it drifted closer.

  “Mercy,” I said quietly. “How is it flying?”

  “Local field gradients,” she said. “I am detecting a compact multipole arrangement of something that presents as a weak effective negative mass at sub-millimeter scales.”

  “Effective what now?” Frankie said.

  “It’s pushing against spacetime curvature as if its inertial mass were inverted,” Mercy said, almost annoyed. “But the magnitude is too small for any conventional negative-mass condensate. It’s… odd.”

  “Comforting,” Trevor said. “That’s very comforting.”

  The drone—our new friend—stopped at my eye level. The big port irised wider. A beam of amber light slid out and swept slowly across my helmet.

  “Do not move,” Mercy said. “I am analyzing.”

  “Wasn’t planning on it,” I said through my teeth.

  The beam tracked down: shoulders, chest, the tools on my harness, the faint glow of the Rift implant buried under my sternum.

  “Scanning across radio, microwave, terahertz, infrared,” Mercy narrated. “Polarization patterns changing in real time. It is interrogating your suit materials and internal electronics.”

  “Can it read my thoughts?” I muttered.

  “If it can,” Frankie said, “we owe it an apology.”

  The beam flicked off me and slid sideways to Chloe. It walked across her suit, lingering on her neural patch, on the data spines plugged into the back of her helmet.

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  Chloe held perfectly still, only her eyes tracking in my HUD.

  “Feels rude,” she said softly.

  Then it was Trevor’s turn. The beam paused on his Governance badge as if considering jurisdiction, then ticked down his torso. It hovered very briefly on the sidearm he’d insisted on bringing.

  “Note that it has not yet disassembled anything,” Trevor said, very precisely.

  “Thank you, Governance,” Frankie said. “That’s very reassuring. How do you feel about scalpel-free exams?”

  The light stayed the same steady inquisitive amber throughout, no change in intensity. Curious, not aggressive.

  And then it turned back to me, dropped a few centimeters, and the eye leveled directly at the pendant hanging against my suit.

  At Frankie.

  The beam snapped to a tight violet-white. Hard and narrow. My HUD dimmed instantly, but afterimages still clawed across my vision.

  “Whoa,” Frankie said—and for a moment his voice shattered. “Who—who—whoaaa—”

  Not a stutter. A stack. Echoes folding through each other, time-tilted and wrong. “Wait—feel—don’t—” came out over itself in three different cadences, scrambled and looping.

  “Back off!” Chloe snapped, already moving.

  I caught her wrist.

  “Don’t,” Frankie gasped. His voice bent in real time, warping from bass to soprano and back again. “Wait—gut feeling—let it finish—”

  Gut feeling, I thought. Frankie doesn’t have a gut.

  The beam kept painting the pendant, casting sharp shadows that twisted in directions they shouldn’t. I felt no heat, no pull—just a rising static pressure, like a storm that hadn’t decided which way to break.

  Then it softened. Just like that. The light dimmed. The color bled back to amber. Frankie’s voice snapped back into a single track.

  “Okay,” he said unsteadily. “That was… a thing.”

  The eye turned away from me, drifting on like it had satisfied some inscrutable checklist.

  There was a moment—sharp, clear—where I opened my mouth to ask what the hell that was.

  Instead:

  “That upper band—how’s it even attached?”

  “Right?” Frankie said, catching the shift without blinking. “The whole shell geometry is wrong in this gorgeous, cursed way. It’s like someone let a magnetic field hallucinate an egg.”

  I leaned in, studying the plate seams, the recessed glow ports, the surface texture you could feel with your eyes. The other thought—the weirdness, the feeling of being redirected—drifted backward like a forgotten dream.

  “Mercy,” Chloe said, voice a little too bright. “Tell me you’re getting good data off this thing.”

  “I am,” Mercy said. “And I do not like any of it.”

  ?

  “What don’t you like?” I asked.

  “Several things,” she said crisply. “Starting with your brains.”

  “Excuse me?” Trevor said.

  “In the last eight hundred milliseconds,” she said, “I registered correlated anomalies in your cortical activity.”

  My HUD flicked up a side panel: three traces, three different brain-wave patterns, all showing a sharp deflection at the exact moment Frankie had said “gut feeling.” Chloe’s EEG spiked in a particular gamma band. My own showed a short-lived burst of synchronization between regions that normally only talked like that when I was drilling down into a problem. Trevor’s profile—never as carefully instrumented as ours—still showed a hiccup.

  “And Frankie?” Chloe asked.

  “Equivalent disturbance in his predictive model graph,” Mercy said. “Short-term integration layers shunted into a pattern I have not previously observed.”

  “So we all got weird at the same time,” I said. My mouth felt like cotton. “And then… stopped being weird.”

  “And then immediately redirected attention to something safe,” Mercy said. “You, specifically, shifted focus from ‘what did it just do to Frankie’ to ‘how are those plates attached’ in less than twenty milliseconds. That is not your usual curiosity profile.”

  I swallowed.

  “Okay,” I said. “What about the device itself?”

  “Analyzing,” she said.

  In the time it took me to blink, she’d spun up six more diagnostic panes.

  “Spectroscopy first,” she said. “Surface composition.”

  A spectrum unfolded, jagged peaks and valleys across energy ranges.

  “The primary lattice is an alloy of transition metals,” she said, “but the isotopic ratios are wrong for anything formed in this solar system. I see abundances of titanium-44, nickel-59, and a long-lived molybdenum isotope that would have decayed out of any normal planetary formation scenario billions of years ago unless constantly replenished.”

  “So not local rock,” Frankie said.

  “Density,” Mercy went on, “is incompatible with its observed mechanical response. Under the scan pressure, the plates flexed as if their Young’s modulus were two orders of magnitude higher than any metal that mass could support without collapsing into a different phase. Electron band structure suggests a topological conductor with quantized surface states I have never seen in any MIC lab results.”

  “Translation,” Trevor said weakly.

  “It should either be brittle and heavy, or flexible and light,” Mercy said. “It is neither. It is both.”

  We stared at the thing. It hung there, pulsing gently, smug as hell.

  She flipped to a scattering pattern.

  “The EM scattering profile implies features below the angstrom scale,” she said. “Sub-atomic structuring in the lattice. We do not have fabrication capabilities to arrange nuclei like this. It’s as if someone is using vacuum fluctuations for a substrate.”

  “Neat,” Frankie whispered.

  “Field interactions,” Mercy continued. “External EM coupling is minimal. It does not present a normal conductive or dielectric response. Instead, I’m detecting tiny fluctuations in local spacetime curvature around the tendril tips—tidal fingerprints without corresponding mass distributions. The nearest analogy would be effective negative mass behavior in a Casimir-engineered cavity, but the sign is wrong and the magnitude is absurd.”

  “Meaning?” I asked.

  “Meaning,” she said, “it appears to be leaning on spacetime, but not in any way our current gauge bosons can account for. Whatever control fields it’s using do not map cleanly onto photons, W and Z bosons, gluons, gravitons, or any composite thereof. I can see the effects. I cannot see the carrier.”

  Chloe whistled softly over the channel.

  “That’s…” she began.

  “Orthogonal,” Mercy said flatly. “I have compared its signatures to the dome materials, the gate, the vacuum core, human and MIC tech, and every anomaly in my archives. The closest match is… nothing. It is as alien to this facility as this facility is to you.”

  In the corner of my vision, a timer ticked quietly from zero: the time since the drone had appeared. Two point three seconds. Mercy had done all that in less than half of one.

  “Say that again,” Trevor said.

  “We are standing inside the first confirmed non-human installation in history,” Mercy said, “and something even more foreign has just wandered in.”

  Something foreign has insinuated itself into our first alien facility, she might as well have stamped across my HUD.

  “The device is not consistent with any local infrastructure,” she said. “Its materials and field signatures are—”

  The world went red.

  ?

  The drone’s lights snapped from steady amber to a violent, rotating crimson that turned the dome into a pulsing wound. The big eye’s glow flared, and the smaller ports along its shell joined in, patterns cycling so fast they smeared.

  For a fraction of a second, it was in two places.

  I don’t mean “it moved fast.” I mean I saw it hovering by the console and hovering three meters closer to Mercy’s avatar at the same time, the images offset in my vision like bad VR lag. Then the two copies collapsed into one and that one hung directly in front of Mercy’s borrowed face.

  She froze mid-word.

  “—incon—”

  No blink. No subtle tracking movements. No tiny posture corrections. Just instant waxwork.

  My HUD threw errors: Q-Nexus link to Mercy: lost. Round-trip latency to shipboard core: unmeasurable. Control channel: degraded. The little status bar that had always lived at the edge of my vision—MERCY, a calm green line—drained to flat gray.

  My ears popped painfully as my implant snapped off the entangled channel and dumped all traffic to the older, slower radio fallback. The comm audio thumped, then came back with a different timbre, like someone had put a wall between us and the ship.

  “Mercy?” I said.

  No response.

  The drone’s new light crawled over her like oil: a deep, almost black-red interference pattern, bands sliding across her skin and jacket in three dimensions. The tendril tips lifted, each one tracing tiny arcs in the air around her torso, weaving a cage I couldn’t quite see.

  “Mercy!” Chloe snapped.

  Nothing.

  In the background, the dome’s hum hiccupped. The live feeds from our survey drones flickered, dropped to gray, came back with half their metadata missing. The camp printer in the distance gave a sickly whine and went still.

  “Xander,” Frankie said tightly. His voice was normal again but the edges were too sharp. “My Q-Nexus graph just—”

  The channel filled with static.

  Not white noise. Not a carrier dropout. Something denser, like a thousand random waveforms being added together on purpose. Data entropy spiked; my implant flashed a warning and quietly shut down its entangled control path before it got cooked.

  Every Q-Nexus node on the platform lit up in my HUD a heartbeat later, then went dark one by one.

  Avatar. Printers. Shuttle. Gate instrumentation.

  Mercy’s presence, the constant low-level awareness of the ship in the back of my head, dropped out. The line marker that always sat there on my mental dashboard winked to that same faint gray that meant “we’re talking at light-speed over a noisy classical channel and she is very far away.”

  “Decoherence noise just spiked through the roof,” Frankie said over the fallback radio link. He sounded like someone holding onto the railing of a sinking ship and pretending it was fine. “We’re talking maximal. Borrowed a page from a malicious quantum optics lab.”

  “Explain,” Trevor snapped.

  “Imagine you have a room full of synchronized metronomes,” Frankie said quickly. “Q-Nexus is the part where they all tick in step because they’re sharing a platform. That thing—” He jerked my head toward the egg with his tone. “—just kicked the platform. Hard. On purpose. And then sprayed sand on it.”

  The dome shuddered around us.

  Support ribs I hadn’t even realized were there groaned overhead. Somewhere beneath the deck, something heavy shifted, making my teeth buzz.

  “Containment field perturbations,” Chloe said, reading off her own feed. “The core’s cages are losing active damping.”

  The drone kept pulsing, little red shockwaves rippling out from it like ripples in a pond. Each pulse came with another stab of that structured static in my comms and a new flurry of error messages from anything that relied on entanglement.

  My suit felt suddenly very dumb and very alone.

  “Is it aiming at us?” I asked.

  “Field is tuned to Q-linked systems,” Frankie said. “You’re all bags of water and carbon. It doesn’t care.”

  “For now,” Trevor added under his breath.

  Mercy’s avatar stood motionless in the middle of the storm, eyes wide, pupils fixed. The device didn’t even look at the rest of us anymore. We were background.

  “Mercy-ship is still operational,” Frankie said, confirmation packets dribbling in. “She’s just… blind and deaf in this radius.”

  “So,” I said, forcing myself to breathe. “We’re on a platform whose smart systems are going offline, sitting on top of a planet-scale stress shell interface, next to a vacuum battery, with an unknown hostile that hates our comms tech.”

  “And our exit is that gate,” Chloe said.

  We all turned to look at it.

  The inner surface was quiescent again. The glyphs glowed faintly, waiting.

  “Okay,” I said. “New plan.”

  ?

  “Gate first,” I said. “Platform later.”

  “You mean ‘platform never,’” Frankie said. “We are not fixing this, Xander. We are running away from it and filing a strongly worded memo.”

  Chloe moved to the console, hands already sketching over the alien triplets just shy of contact.

  “Mercy left cached field profiles,” she said. Transparent overlays swam up in my HUD: the guest-mode power curve, safe draw envelope, recommended ramp rate. “We can still operate in analog. The core has mechanical safeties.”

  “Mechanical,” Trevor repeated. “You are saying those cages have moving parts.”

  “Yes,” Chloe said. “Big, heavy, inertia-rich moving parts that would love to fail without active stabilization. So let’s not give them a reason.”

  Another pulse from the egg rolled through us. The camp printer in the distance gave up entirely, its status lights dying. My implant threw another decoherence warning and angrily stayed in classical mode.

  “Telemetry from the away drone?” I asked. “Our friend on the other side.”

  “Still alive,” Frankie said. “Breathable air, gravity in the ‘won’t kill you’ range, no immediate lava. Also: something very big and very neat showing up on its horizon, which we can argue about when we’re not about to experience catastrophic platform uninstallation.”

  The deck under my boots trembled again, a slow, deep vibration that had nothing to do with our own machines. The connection between dome and stress shell, whatever complex alignment of fields and supports it used, was starting to sag without Mercy’s active monitoring.

  Thin cracks radiated out from the plinth base, hairline fractures in the floor’s otherwise surgical smoothness.

  “We don’t have the damping for a core failure,” Chloe said quietly. “If those cages go asymmetric, they’re going to dump a lot of very angry geometry into this chamber.”

  “Options?” Trevor said.

  “One,” Frankie said. “We die here when the vacuum core sneezes and the drone records it for whoever built it. Two, we light the gate in guest mode, dump as little as possible from the core, and hope the endpoint is still safe. Three, we attempt to manually separate this dome from the stress shell while under fire from a quantum malware egg.”

  “Two,” Trevor said immediately.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I like two.”

  ?

  We moved.

  “Chloe,” I said. “You’re on runes. Keep it in the guest envelope. No overdraw.”

  “On it.”

  “Frankie,” I said. “Give me structural stress in real time and tell me when the core cages hit ‘about to become shrapnel.’”

  “I’m already telling you,” he said. “But sure, I’ll shout louder.”

  “Trevor,” I said. “Override me if I start doing anything that violates some Contingency you care about.”

  “I reserve the right,” he said, voice tight.

  Another red pulse from the egg washed over us. The shuttle down in the corner of my HUD threw a fit and rebooted itself into some minimal firmware safety mode. Its Q-Nexus uplink died with a sad little icon.

  “Mercy?” I tried one more time.

  A faint reply came back over the slow channel, round-tripped from orbit, laggy as hell.

  “—nder. I’ve lost entanglement to everything in your local volume. I am seeing a decoherence bubble centered on your position. It is spreading slowly. You need to move.”

  “We noticed,” I said. “We’re lighting the gate.”

  “Use analog controls only,” she said. “I cannot stabilize the core. Do not attempt anything beyond guest profile or you risk—”

  The rest dissolved into static as another pulse hit.

  “Guest profile it is,” Chloe said.

  She laid her fingers gently over the familiar triplet cluster on the console: the glyphs we’d been translating as guest, steward, instrument. She touched the first.

  “Stands at the threshold,” she muttered, eyes on the symbols.

  The console responded with a cascade of light. The glyph lines brightened, flowed across the surface like water, then sank.

  Deep in the dome, something woke.

  The vacuum core’s hum built from background to a bone-felt thrumming. My HUD showed the power curve climbing inside the narrow green band Mercy had left us.

  “Energy draw at zero point zero zero two seven percent of remaining differential,” Frankie said. “Cage stress within predicted range. For now.”

  The ring’s inner surface darkened again.

  Lines of light crawled up its inner edge, glyphs firing in sequence like alien neurons. The polished surface bowed inward, as if the inside of the ring were trying to be somewhere else entirely.

  “Metric curvature,” Chloe read, eyes flicking. “Same as before. No throat yet. We’re still on the hinge.”

  “Give it a little more,” I said.

  “Every time you say that,” Trevor muttered, “my teeth hurt.”

  The gate shuddered, then smoothed. The space inside it took on that wrong, syrupy appearance, light from our side bending just a bit too far, just a bit too slow.

  The dome groaned again, a long structural complaint.

  “Crack propagation in the plinth,” Frankie said. “Deck stress approaching design limits. Whatever the design was.”

  “Okay,” I said. ““That’s enough. Drone—go. Shoo!” I waved it off like dismissing a bad puppy.

  Our scout unit scuttled forward again, tether trailing. It hesitated at the edge of the aperture like it remembered having been a hero once already.

  “Go,” I said.

  It vanished, the tether line quivering like a severed nerve.

  Telemetry came back almost immediately this time: no blackout, just a smooth transition. The same rock, the same breathable air, the same faint lattice structure on the horizon.

  “Endpoint is stable,” Frankie said. “Or at least not on fire yet.”

  The deck shook harder. A hairline crack snaked out from one of the core’s support pylons, glowing faintly as stress concentrated.

  “Recommendation,” Frankie added. “Stop admiring and start leaving.”

  ?

  “Printer first,” I said. “Then us.”

  “The printer is heavy,” Trevor said.

  “So is dying without tools,” I said. “Chloe?”

  She nodded, already sprinting toward the camp printer. The unit had locked up under the egg’s decoherence bombs, but mechanically it was fine—just a big box of actuators and feedstock with a lot of dumb mass.

  “Help me,” she grunted.

  We wedged our shoulders under it and tipped. The casters complained, but they moved. Alien deck or not, friction still worked.

  “Trevor,” I said over my shoulder. “Grab anything we absolutely can’t print again in under an hour.”

  “Governance would like to point out that that list includes ‘the ship,’” he said.

  “Ship’s not here,” I said. “So.”

  He muttered something about engineers under his breath, then jogged to the lockers to yank out the three most expensive, irreplaceable diagnostics tools he could see and sling them into a bag.

  Another pulse washed over us. The egg kept station over Mercy’s frozen avatar, tendrils moving in tiny, intricate patterns. The red interference light had sunk under her skin now, crawling like subdermal lightning.

  “Frankie?” I said.

  “Core cage sigma approaching ninety percent of failure,” he said. His voice had lost a lot of its usual flippancy. “We are in the part of the curve marked ‘no longer fun.’”

  “Can she still print a new body?” Chloe asked, nodding at Mercy’s slack face as we shoved the printer toward the gate.

  “Yes,” Frankie said. “Assuming the ship’s fabs still work and the egg doesn’t decide to start mailing decoherence bombs at orbit. Which, for the record, I am not betting against.”

  “Then why—” Trevor began.

  He cut himself off.

  We both knew the question. Why bother? Why risk it? Why drag a four-hundred-kilo chassis through a potentially unstable spacetime throat when the mind it housed was elsewhere?

  Because you don’t leave your people in the blast radius. That was it. That was the whole stupid, irrational, unprofitable answer.

  I didn’t say it. I didn’t need to.

  Trevor took three long strides through the shaking dome and lifted Mercy’s avatar like she weighed nothing, hauling her up into an undignified fireman’s carry over his shoulders. For a man whose idea of rebellion was late paperwork, it was the single most reckless thing I’d seen him do.

  “Governance,” Frankie said softly. “Did you just steal company property from an active hazard zone without a requisition form?”

  “Shut up, Frankie,” Trevor said, staggering slightly under the weight. “Everybody move.”

  ?

  We muscled the printer up onto the plinth. The gate’s inner skin flexed, warping our reflections into funhouse ghosts. The glyphs around the rim pulsed harder, as if the whole structure were getting impatient.

  Behind us, the vacuum core let out a sound I never wanted to hear again: a deep, resonant crack, like stone shearing under impossible load.

  “Cage one just went non-linear,” Frankie said. “Stress redistribution. We’re at ninety-eight percent of predicted safe envelope. After this it’s just prayers and forensic reports.”

  “Chloe,” I said. “Hold the gate. No more power than this. If it starts to slip, we go anyway.”

  “Got it,” she said through clenched teeth.

  Her fingers danced over the alien console, nudging the guest profile in three parallel scripts, coaxing the system like a nervous animal.

  “We’re still within tolerance,” she said. “The hinge is stable.”

  The deck lurched.

  A section of wall near the core split, a jagged seam of darkness opening for a nauseating instant before the stress shell outside slammed it shut again. The whole dome rang like a bell.

  “New recommendation,” Frankie said. “We skip the big dramatic goodbyes.”

  Chloe and I grabbed the sides of the printer. Together, we shoved.

  For an instant the unit hung half-in, half-out of the aperture, its frame shimmering as if the universe were trying to decide which side it belonged on. Then something in the gate’s logic clicked and it slid through, vanishing from the world with a tiny sound like a breath being taken.

  “Printer is through,” Frankie confirmed from the other side. “Still intact. No spontaneous inside-out.”

  “Go,” I said.

  Chloe went next, boots thudding up the plinth ramp. She paused at the edge just long enough to give me a wild, exhilarated grin.

  “Guest stands at threshold,” she said again—and this time, I heard the conviction in it—then stepped into nothing.

  She disappeared.

  “Trevor!” I shouted.

  He stumbled up the ramp with Mercy’s limp body over his shoulder, jaw set, eyes wide.

  “Leave her,” Frankie said sharply. “Trevor, we can print—”

  Trevor adjusted his grip. Somewhere behind the protocols and training, something in him had already decided: if she broke, it would be with us, not behind us.

  “No,” he said.

  It wasn’t loud. It didn’t need to be.

  He hauled Mercy’s avatar up to the inner edge of the ring, squared his shoulders one last time, and stepped forward. For a horrible moment, both of them seemed to smear, their outlines stretched. Then they were simply gone.

  The egg pulsed again.

  The shockwave hit like a physical slap. The plinth cracked under my boots, lines spreading out in a spiderweb. The ring’s inner surface spasmed, its smooth wrongness distorting into sharp, chaotic ripples.

  “Core cages just blew past their limits,” Frankie yelled. “We are now in the part of the graph labeled ‘do not be here.’”

  “Come on,” I whispered to the gate, because apparently I talk to alien doors now.

  The glyphs flared, one last burst of triplet light.

  I ran.

  The last thing I saw of the dome as I hit the aperture was the egg’s red glow flaring so bright it washed out my HUD, the vacuum core’s cradle buckling in on itself, and a hairline crack in the floor racing straight toward the plinth like an underline on our bad decisions.

  Then the world turned inside out, and there was nothing but the taste of static and the feel of my own momentum.

  And then there was somewhere else.