Return

Constellation sent me back to Vectera.

Lin was the first piece of it. She was still at the outpost when we landed, shaken but functional — the kind of functional that's mostly willpower — and she walked me through what had happened. The Pirates returned. Barrett and Heller were taken. Barrett had managed to get a message back to the relay before they moved him, which was either quick thinking or recklessness or both, which sounds like Barrett.

I pulled the message. It had coordinates — not exactly where they were taking him, but at least their next destination of their grav jump. A trail to start with. Lin came aboard while I worked out the next step. She needed to get back to civilization eventually; for now she had somewhere to sit that wasn't an empty mining outpost.

The trail led to a moon. Heller was there, at a crashed ship — the ship both of them had been on, until Barrett shot the pilot. That was the breadcrumb: a deliberate crash, his call, the kind of decision that buys time for the person you leave behind and costs something for yourself. The pirates had picked Barrett up on a second ship and moved him. They'd left Heller at the wreck.

Barrett had managed to get another message out before they moved him — not back to the relay this time, directly to Heller. Updated coordinates. He was still sending.

I helped Heller aboard.

Muira had the ship ready. She looked at our two new passengers, looked at me, sighed, and went back to what she was doing.

The pirates were camped where the coordinates said they'd be. Their captain was a man named Matsura — Matsura the Grim, as it happened. It took a while and required making a convincing case that the math had shifted against him, but Matsura was, underneath the name and the posturing, a practical man. He stood down. We walked out with Barrett without anyone having to die for it.

Barrett, freed, shook my hand with both of his and said something about how he knew I'd come. He says things like that — with a certainty that reads as faith rather than calculation. I've learned not to argue with it. Muira watched this exchange, her face near expressionless as always. I wonder if she'll ever get easier to read.

We brought him home.

Sarah Morgan sent me up to the Eye to meet Vladimir Sall.

I'd heard the name. He runs Constellation's artifact tracking network from the station — the one who knows where things are before anyone else does, or at least claims to. What nobody had mentioned was that he's a former Crimson Fleet pirate, which I did not know at the time and honestly, even if I did it would not help me parse anything he said.

The first thing out of his mouth was something I didn't recognize as a meaningful sentence. "We've got a rook on deck." Clearly grammatical, more or less, but the overall meaning did not arrive. There was a pause. Then Muira, beside me, leaned over and whispered "It's pirate talk".

I thanked her.

Looking back at it now, I realize something odd: she didn't wait.

She didn't give me a beat to figure it out. She didn't watch me for confusion and then decide to help. She just translated, immediately, like it was already decided that I wouldn't know. Crimson Fleet jargon, I've since learned, is common enough that most people who've spent time in the settled systems would pick up at least the shape of it. It's not obscure. Someone like me, with my background, with the years I've supposedly lived — I should have context for it. The fact that Muira assumed I wouldn't, without hesitation, without even checking...

Regardless. He had coordinates for two more artifacts, and mentioned almost in passing that one of Constellation's people had gone quiet longer than he liked. He asked me to keep an eye out.

Her name was Andreja.

Muira stayed with the ship while I went in. The mine was empty at the perimeter, which was its own kind of information — places like this don't usually stay quiet. When I got inside I found out why. A woman was finishing a fight, two assailants down, unhurried about it. She turned the gun on me when she registered I was there. I talked her down, dropped Vladimir's name, and watched her decide whether to trust it. She did, eventually, which I think said more about her trust in Vladimir than anything.

She was guarded in the way that people are guarded when they've had good reasons to be for a long time. Pragmatic. Deliberate. There was something underneath that I couldn't quite read, which is unusual for me, and I noticed that I was still thinking about it on the walk back out with the artifact.

Something about that clicked.

She insisted on parting ways at the ship. Her choice, her terms — I got the sense those two things mattered to her more than most. I collected the last artifact Vladimir had flagged and returned to the Lodge, and when Andreja turned up shortly after and asked to come aboard, I said yes. Muira, I reasoned, would probably be relieved to spend more time on the ship and less in firefights. Probably.

Vladimir was actually at the Lodge in person for once. He had something for me: Anomalies, he said — signals much larger than anything the artifacts produced. He had coordinates. Andreja came with me this time, and we followed the signal out to a structure that I have had no adequate way to describe since.

The Temple.

The doors opened before I touched them. Inside, gravity simply... Vanished — not failed, not weakened... Vanished — and I was floating in a central chamber ringed with enormous spinning bands of metal or stone or something I had no frame of reference for. The air hummed and glowed. Small motes of light drifted through the space like slow sparks, and I moved through them without deciding to, and the rings accelerated in the center of the room, faster and faster, until they locked into a single perfect circle and went still.

I flew into it. I don't know why. It was the same feeling as the artifact — the sense of leaving, of being outside something vast and looking at it whole, of moving through symbols I almost recognized. Stars arranged into patterns. Something trying to communicate in a language I didn't have yet.

I came back standing outside the temple with Andreja. I felt different in a way I couldn't have explained to her even if I'd tried. I reached out a hand, and whatever had settled into me on Vectera — the thing I'd been carrying since the first artifact — rose up and out, and Andreja lifted off the ground. The rocks around us followed. She looked at her hands, and at the ground that was no longer beneath her feet, and when she landed she said the only thing that needed saying.

"We need to return to the Lodge."

I demonstrated it for the room when we got back. All of it — the power, the force, the localized unmaking of gravity in the space around me. People who explore for a living, who have seen most things the settled systems have to offer, went quiet in a way I hadn't seen from them before.

I still don't know what to make of any of this. But I'm starting to think that's not actually the important question. The important question is what I do with it.