The hairs on Captain Matthews's arms stood up whenever he gave the order to gatejump.

He sort of understood the whole universe split into corporeal and incorporeal halves thing. Sort of.

And he sort of got how data was sent through the incorporeal part—the realm of imaginary numbers, they called it—because it wasn't like data had a physical form, exactly.

But he never quite understood how a ship with real people and real things could slip into this imaginary number realm and speed through a hyperspace column like a thought through a mind.

It was damned near sorcery.