It's magic involving murdering living things, Valdis; he's not super worried about the semantics.

"Alright, well, what do you think it did, exactly? I get not wanting someone to mess around with your powers," on account of their potential to go wrong on an apocalyptic scale, "but why not tell her what you know, if you have a hunch about what's going on? A ship full of people getting sucked into a dimensional rift for a decade... I think we should be pooling as much information as we can."