📖 Stories

Sam Coe is a contradiction that mostly works.

He's the kind of man who quotes frontier law and then solves problems with a rifle, who wears his principles like a work jacket — practical, a bit worn, never coming off. His daughter Cora is eight years old and has opinions about everything and is not wrong about most of them. She told me within twenty minutes of meeting me that my ship's paint job was a classic. I don't think she meant it as a compliment. I told her I couldn't change it because that's the Mantis's Ship. She seemed to decide that was an acceptable answer and moved on to having opinions about something else.

Akila City is the capital of the Freestar Collective, which means it is, by definition, the largest concentration of people in the settled systems who have decided that the UC can mind its own business. The walls are not symbolic — there are things outside them that will kill you, and the city has learned to live with that fact the way frontier settlements learn to live with most facts: practically, without making too much of it. Inside the walls it feels like a place that built itself up from the ground rather than down from a plan. I liked it immediately.

The maps Sam needed were locked in a GalBank vault — part of the legacy of Solomon Coe, Sam's ancestor and the founding figure of the Freestar Collective. A Ranger. The kind of man who has statues. Literally, in fact, he has one in the middle of Akila city. Sam had the family name and, apparently, a claim to what Solomon had left behind.

Unfortunately this very Galbank was being robbed by a gang when we arrived.

Fortunately, it was a bunch of two-bit Shaw Gang members who I was able to convince to stand down before they made things any worse, so we didn't have to bloody up the bank. I am genuinely unsure how I managed to do it, I was sweating bullets the whole time. Thankfully we spoke through a sort of doorbell system on the outside so the gang members couldn't see it.

Once that was over, what we found in the vault instead of the maps was a message from Jacob Coe, Sam's father: come say it to my face.

Jacob and Sam look nothing alike at first. Jacob wears the Coe name like a title — the vault, the legacy, the praise of everyone in the one city he never steps foot outside of. Sam wears a rifle and a work jacket and hasn't been home in years. You'd think they'd disagreed about everything and gone separate directions.

Standing there watching them go at it, I started to think it was the other way around. Jacob has the statue. Sam has the life — out on the frontier, solving problems with his hands and his principles, answering to nobody. Solomon Coe didn't build the Freestar Collective by sitting at home. He built it the way Sam lives: moving, deciding, not waiting for permission.

Jacob doesn't want to give Sam the maps because Sam left. Sam left because he didn't want to be the descendant of a great man. He wanted to be a man. The argument they were having sounded like it was about the maps, but the longer it went on the more I realized it wasn't about the maps.

I talked Jacob around eventually. He's not unreasonable — just certain, and certain men respond to having their expectations met far better than to a counter-argument. I told him the sooner we got the maps, the sooner Sam would be out of his hair. He handed over the maps like it was his idea.

Back out in the dusty air of Akila City, Sam spread the maps. Solomon Coe had noted a scanning anomaly on his first arrival — the kind of thing you log and come back to. That anomaly was almost certainly the artifact. It was also, as it turned out, the current location of the Shaw Gang's base of operations.

The Shaw gang had set up outside the walls, in the cave system where the artifact was buried. They weren't there for the artifact specifically — from what I could piece together, they'd stumbled into the location and decided to make it their base because the artifact's field kept the local wildlife away. Practical, in its way.

They had numbers. Guns, robots, turrets — the full setup of people who expected to be left alone and had made arrangements accordingly. Only Sam was with me. We didn't discuss a plan so much as read the same situation and arrive at the same approach.

It took a while to get through. The cave ran deep, deeper than I'd expected, and they'd had time to layer things properly. By the end of it the place was quiet and we were at the bottom, where the artifact sat embedded in the rock like it had been there since before anyone thought to build walls against the wildlife.

Shaw herself was waiting on the way out. She looked furious, but cautious. If she had JUST been furious, it's likely her dozen or so men would have opened fire the moment we walked out. But this was already over and the only remaining question was how it ended for her specifically. After some exchange of words, She let us pass.

Unfortunately, the Ashta that came to scout out this now artifact-less encampment were not so big on words. I helped Shaw take out the beasts, for which she was grateful, and we finally made our way back to the starport.

He was at the bar when we got back to the starport.

Same suit. Same stillness. I recognized him before I’d fully registered why, the way you recognize a feeling before you name it. I sat down a few seats away and he turned toward me, or did whatever the suited equivalent of turning toward someone is, and we picked up roughly where we’d left off in New Atlantis — as though the conversation had been paused rather than ended.

He said something that I’ve been chewing on since. That everyone, always, was trying to implement their own vision of how the world ought to be. The Freestar Collective wanted freedom — and would kill to protect it. The UC wanted order, and had built a military to enforce it. Constellation wanted knowledge — and sent people into danger to get it. The difference between the honest ones and the rest was just whether they admitted what they were actually doing. Most people dressed it up. Called it duty. Called it the greater good. The honest version was simpler: “I want this. I’m willing to use force to have it.”

I didn’t push back the way I had in New Atlantis. I wasn’t sure I disagreed.

He left before Sam found me.

Sam shook my hand when we got back to Akila. Not the both-hands shake Barrett does — one hand, firm, the way you shake hands with someone you've decided is worth shaking hands with. He said he wanted to come along.

Cora, from somewhere behind him, announced that she had already packed.

I told them both to get aboard the Razorleaf.

Walter Stroud was waiting at the Lodge when we got back from Akila.

I'd seen him around — between board meetings and funding conversations he is always at the Lodge. He caught me before I'd made it to the common room and invited me to join him on a trip to Neon. He was planning a soiree, he said. A gathering. A social occasion among friends, with perhaps some light conversation about a certain item of mutual interest.

He said it with the absolute straightfaced ease of a man who has been conducting transactions by other names his entire career and has gotten very good at it. I told him I'd come. I was curious about the man more than the soiree.

We docked at Neon and I bought a ship before we'd even left the starport.

The Razorleaf had been fine. The Razorleaf had been more than fine — she'd gotten us out of situations that should have ended differently, and I'm not ungrateful for that. But we were six people now, counting Cora, and six people on a ship built for two is a specific kind of misery that compounds daily. I'd been squirreling away credits for a while, more than I'd realized, and the Naginata was sitting at the dock like she'd been waiting.

Large. Serious. Built for a real operation rather than a pair of people and their luggage. I paid for her without quite deciding to and then decided to afterward. The Razorleaf would find a dock somewhere. The Naginata was ours now.

Then I walked into Neon proper and understood why Walter had chosen it.

The city is built on a platform above a toxic ocean, which tells you something about the founding philosophy. Ryujin Industries built it and runs most of it — corporate law, corporate security, corporate interests threading through everything. But Ryujin isn't the only power. Administrator Benjamin Bayou runs the rest, in the way that certain figures run things in places where the law is too corrupt to stop them and too useful to remove. Between the two of them, Neon is less a city than an arrangement — every corridor, every smile from every person who works here is a line in somebody's ledger.

It is not safe. The lights make it easy to mistake. The lights are very good. But people disappear in Neon, and Neon Security looks the other direction because that's part of the job description, and the ocean below is toxic, and the city knows all of this and keeps the lights on anyway. That's the pitch: come spend your money somewhere nobody asks where it came from.

Walter moved through it like a man who had done the math on every room before entering. He took us to the Stroud-Eklund corporate offices — his company, co-owned with his wife — and that was where I first understood the two of them.

Issa Eklund already knew.

Walter hadn't told her about the meetup. That was clear from the shape of the conversation — the way he approached the subject of the company's discretionary fund was, well... discrete. The way she received it was as though she were already six steps ahead of the introduction. She knew about the artifact. She knew about the seller. She'd probably worked out the location before he'd finished the sentence.

They are adversarial in the way of two people who are very much in love and have found that keeping each other sharp is the best use of the energy. She hadn't heard about the meeting from Walter — she'd hacked his accounts. The calendar, the correspondence, the location. All of it, likely before we'd even left the Lodge in New Atlantis. This is not a secret between them. Walter knows she does it. She knows he knows. They've been doing this to each other for years, and I got the impression that for them it amounts to the same thing as affection.

I introduced myself properly when we arrived. She had a genuine smile on as she received the introduction, going so far as to ask Walter where he'd met his delightful new friend. It was clear that part of her success in business was in her information gathering, and the other part was in making people around her feel at ease. She was a formidable woman indeed. She approved the funds without drama, and by the end of the conversation she was looking at me with something that I'd almost call warmth — which caught me off guard, given the context. Issa Eklund is a genuinely pleasant woman. Almost unnervingly so, for someone who'd just admitted to reverse-engineering her husband's private correspondence.

I don't know why that was the moment it hit me. Maybe the intimacy of it — two people who know each other well enough to weaponize that knowledge and choose to anyway, because being known is the point. I stood there watching them and thought about my wife with the particular sharpness that only comes when you've been not thinking about someone for too long. What she'd make of Neon. What she'd make of all of it. What she'd make of me, standing in a corporate office on a platform above a toxic ocean eight light years from anywhere she'd ever heard of, trying to recover an alien artifact for a faction of explorers while wearing a dead vigilante's reputation.

Andreja was beside me. I was more aware of it than I wanted to be.

I left it where it was. I've been doing that a lot.

While Walter finished with Issa, The pair sent me back into Neon to work.

The seller's name didn't take long to find. He'd been let go from Slayton Industries recently — laid off, with the kind of abruptness that leaves a person with grievances and access they probably should have lost sooner. He'd walked out with an artifact his former employer didn't know they had, which meant he'd known exactly what it was worth and exactly how little time he'd have before someone came looking.

Desperate people are often easier to deal with when you have the upper hand in strength, But far less predictable overall.

The Astral Lounge was the other item on the list. It's the kind of venue that sells experiences as its primary product — they have a drug, Aurora, that is illegal to produce anywhere but Neon, and illegal to purchase anywhere but the Astral Lounge. I found the right person and made the right impression and walked away with VIP access at a number that suggested they'd wanted to say yes anyway. The meeting room Walter had in mind was accessible, sightlines manageable, exits where I'd want them. I scouted the whole thing in the time it would have taken most people to find the entrance.

When I got back, Walter and Issa were finishing a conversation I hadn't heard the start of. Issa looked at me once and then at Walter.

"I'll be following this little operation," she said, "just in case."

It wasn't a threat. But it wasn't entirely reassuring either. She said it like someone who had already identified three ways the evening could go wrong and wanted us to know she'd identified them.

We went to the Lounge.

The seller arrived with the posture of a man who had decided, somewhere between accepting the meeting and walking through the door, that he was in a stronger position than he'd originally thought. He opened by asking for double.

I'd scouted the room. I'd learned his situation. I knew exactly what kind of double he was trying to get and exactly how much ground he was standing on when he asked for it.

We didn't move. Walter was calm. I was calm. The seller looked at us looking at him and gradually recalibrated. We left with the artifact at the original price and his grudging acknowledgment that he'd played it wrong.

On the way out, an armed man stepped into our path and explained, with the confidence of someone who hadn't done his homework on who he was stopping, that Slayton Industries would like their property back. The Astral Lounge's security materialized behind us with the timing of people who take their VIP obligations seriously. The armed man did his own recalibrating and left.

We were almost to the exit when Issa appeared.

She'd been following, as promised. She had news: Slayton had put a bounty on us and gotten the Naginata impounded. He'd moved fast, which told Issa and Walter that he had to be close. Physically. their Headquarters was in the same Tower as the Astral Lounge...

Slayton's headquarters were the kind of corporate space designed to make visitors feel small — high ceilings, hard surfaces, a drop dead gorgeous receptionist positioned to maximize the impression that you were not expected and possibly in the wrong building. I talked my way past her. Walter and I took the elevator to head up to have a little chat. Then it stopped.

Slayton, from somewhere above us, had decided we'd gone far enough.

Issa had anticipated this too. She'd been working a different angle — one of Slayton's own security staff had a price, and she'd found it. While we were standing in a stopped elevator, she was taking over the security from the inside. A moment later the PA system crackled on and Issa's voice came through, warm and pleasant, as though she were directing guests at a dinner party. Turn left at the end of the hall. The third door on your right should be unlocked now. Mind the camera at the stairwell.

That was when I understood what I'd been missing. The warmth isn't a veneer. It isn't a tactic. It's just how she is — which simultaneously endeared me more to her, and made her considerably more unsettling than someone who at least looks like what they are.

It was a long path, but with Isse's guidance and a few long pauses at hallway corneres, we made it to Slayton without raising a hand.

Walter handled the conversation. This wasn't a conversation I had any place in anyway. It was a conversation between businessmen, with wealth and lawyers. By the end of it Slayton had agreed to settle — terms to be determined later.

Then Slayton did the thing that told me everything I needed to know about him.

The seller — the desperate man who'd stolen the artifact to get out from under a company that had already thrown him away — was in Slayton's hands, and from the looks of it with a bullet lodged in his lower abdomen. A non-fatal wound, most likely, but a brutal one regardless. And Slayton wanted us to decide what happened to him. Not because he needed our input. Because making us part of the decision was its own kind of message.

Walter wanted a bit of Leniency for the man, and I could understand it. It was the kind of attitude that men at the top of the world had the luxury of having. I said let Neon Security deal with it. That's what they're for. I'm not Slayton's instrument and I'm not the man's judge.

Andreja seemed very pleased with this answer. She was rigid in her beliefs of punishment for criminals. Normally I would agree wholeheartedly, but it's hard not to feel greasy when saying that on Neon.

The Naginata was back when we made it to the starport. The city was still lit up behind us, selling itself to everyone who hadn't been inside it yet.

We were barely clear of Neon's gravity well when the ship came out of nowhere.

Advanced. Quiet on approach in a way that shouldn't be possible. The pilot Identified themselves as "Starborn" and spoke in the tone of someone delivering terms rather than making a request. Surrender the artifact. Or don't, and see what happens next.

I didn't.

We fought our way clear. The Emissary's ship was better than it had any right to be — better than anything in the settled systems, better than anything with an obvious manufacturer...

Or at least that's what I would have thought shortly before the Razorleaf blew up. But we weren't on the Razorleaf. We were on the Naginata, a ship that cost me a whopping 200,000 credits. And this baby had POWER. I managed to push the Starborn Vessel to it's limit, and it jumped away before being destroyed.

Back at the Lodge, we had Noel run some scans of my ships computer so we could share what we encountered with everyone.

Nobody knew much beyond the name "Starborn" and the ship nobody could identify and the fact that they wanted what we had. I sat with that for a while. The artifact. The power in my chest. And now this — beings who move between stars in ships that shouldn't exist, demanding things from us at gunpoint.

Human or human-adjacent. That's my working theory. I don't know why I'm so certain of it. But something about the way the Emissary spoke — the cadence of it, the shape of the threat — didn't feel alien.

It felt like someone who had been where I am now, and hadn't liked how it ended.

I also made a decision somewhere in all of that: I hung up the Mantis.

The suit is still aboard. The Razorleaf is still the Razorleaf. But the title — the identity, the performance — I set it down in Neon. I'm not playing a role anymore. I'm finding artifacts for Constellation, and that's what I am now, and that's enough.

The Naginata carries Sam and Cora, Muira, VASCO, Andreja, and me. A proper crew. The largest thing I've ever called mine.

There's room for Cora to be eight years old somewhere that isn't directly underfoot, which I consider a significant design feature. She spent the first hour out of Neon cataloguing what she thought could be improved about my storage organization, and I found myself listening to about sixty percent of it and thinking she wasn't wrong. Sam caught me doing that and said nothing. He just looked like a man who had been in this situation before and was glad it was someone else's turn.

The artifact runs have started to have a rhythm.

Vladimir finds them. I go get them. There are usually Starborn between me and the getting. It has gotten to the point that it's stopped being a surprise. Knowing that something is coming was step one. Knowing what to do about it was step two, and I think I'm getting there.

Andreja came with me on the last two. I'd seen how she handled herself when I found her, but it's different working alongside someone — the way she moves through a space like she's already decided what she'd do if it went wrong, the way she doesn't announce things she's noticed. We don't talk much while we work. We don't need to. Muira, back on the Naginata, had gotten increasingly good at dry humor. "Oh. You made it back. Guess I'll put your coffin away."

When we got back to the Lodge, Vlad was there again in person, another rarity. The Eye needed repairs. That was important enough that he needed to be here in person to discuss it.

Several of us helped — Barret with parts of the system I didn't fully understand, Andreja with assembly, Sam with the welding. The work took the better part of a day. Sam was confident about his section, the way Sam is confident about most things: quietly, without making a performance of it. He waved off my offer to check the connections when he was done. He had it.

He did not, as it turned out, entirely have it. Something went wrong during the welding. Sam volunteered to stay behind on the Eye until it was completed properly. That's the kind of thing Sam did, and I respected him for it.

And I had my own work to do, apparently.

Vladimir had information on an artifact aboard a vessel called the Scow, orbiting Procyon A. Its owner — a collector named Petrov — wasn't interested in selling. The artifact wasn't for sale and never would be, and anyone asking could find someone else to ask.

Vlad seemed insistent that I shouldn't try to handle this alone. That meant Andreja came with me to the Scow.

I hailed the ship on approach. His lackey wasn't expecting that. Collectors who aren't interested in selling are usually expecting to be boarded, and responding to force with force is a kind of conversation they know how to have. Someone calling ahead, professionally, and asking for a meeting is a different situation. Begrudgingly, he let us dock.

We talked our way through the ship. Crew by crew, door by door — the right framing, the right amount of deference, the suggestion that we were interested in the collection and not specifically in the one piece he'd never part with. Andreja was not good at this and let me handle the talking, for the most part. More than anything, I was trying to ingratiate myself with everyone aboard in case things went south. And, more importantly, I was giving Andreja the chance to survey the ship's layout for the same reason.

We reached Petrov.

It took a bit more talking, but he agreed to show off his collection to us. He had the artifact in a display case, and he was proud of it, in a strange way that felt borderline fanatical. I made a genuine offer. He declined. I made a more specific offer. He declined again, with the very clear statement that I would take that from him over his dead body. I looked at the display case and then at Andreja and then at Petrov.

I shot him.

Not lethally — a few hits, enough to reframe the conversation. He went down, reassessed his position from the floor, and decided that the artifact wasn't worth what he'd previously believed it was worth. I helped him up. We left with the artifact and a 500 credit bounty, which is, by any reasonable accounting, a good day.

We got back to the Lodge from the Scow to find Noel at the comm station, face tight, running the same hail on repeat.

She’d been trying to reach Vladimir on the Eye for twenty minutes. No response. I stood there and watched her try again and again, and then the line crackled and Vlad’s voice came through — strained, but steady. They’d been attacked. A Starborn, alone. Sam was hurt. Hurt bad. He’d gotten what he came for and left on his own terms, and now he was heading to the Lodge next. Vlad’s recommendation was clear: stay, defend the Lodge, protect the artifacts.

I stood there for a moment with that. I don't know why I felt like I was contemplating something while everyone else felt miles away even as Noel frantically packed up the artifacts six feet to my left.

In the end I stayed.

I heard Walter before I saw what was happening — something heavy moving on the upper level, a struggle. I went up.

He was there.

Full matte black suit. No markings. The helmet completely opaque. He had Walter from behind with a gun to his head and an arm around his neck, and I stood at the top of those stairs and understood two things at the same time: that I had sat two seats away from this man at a bar in New Atlantis and another one in Akila, and that everything he’d said to me in both of those places had been perfectly true.

Everyone implements their vision by force. The honest ones just admit it.

He let Walter go when he saw me. Not out of mercy — out of something more like reorientation. Walter wasn’t the point. I put myself between him and the others and bought whatever time I could while Noel got everyone moving through the basement. When I made an opening I took it and we ran — through the basement, up through the Well, through the streets and the starport... The man in the Suit followed us the whole way. For the first time in the weeks since I'd arrived in this... Since I woke up on Vectera... I was afraid. Afraid of losing the new bonds I'd created, afraid of dying. This was a battle unlike anything I'd ever fought. And one that I don't think I could have won on my own. Andreja got the Naginata first, got it running, and I had the ship moving before the ramp had fully closed.

He followed.

His ship came up alongside us in orbit and he opened a channel, and the voice that came through was not the voice of someone who had been in a fight. He said he was done hunting us. Just like that. The tone of it — unhurried, full of curiosity and wonder — was worse than anything else that had happened. He hadn’t been threatened. He hadn’t been stopped. He had simply decided he was finished, the way you set something down when you’re done with it.

Then he was gone.

We set course for the Eye.

Sam Coe had been at the Eye.

Sam Coe was dead.

I don’t know how to write Sam Coe. I knew him for a handful of weeks. He was straight-laced and rough around the edges and he raised his daughter alone in a universe that makes that harder than it has any right to be. He had a father he was complicated about and frontier principles he wasn’t complicated about at all. He thought things through and then said them, without decoration, and I’d come to realize I trusted his read on situations in a way that surprised me when I noticed it.

He was a good man. I don’t say that easily. I mean it in the plain sense: he was someone who tried to do right by the people in front of him, consistently, without needing credit for it.

Andreja had gone in ahead of me at the docking bay.

I came through the entrance behind her and stopped.

She was on the floor near the entrance, Sam’s body in her arms, and she was crying in a way I had never seen Andreja cry and hope to never see again. Cora was kneeling beside them, her hands on her father’s arm. Her face, I...

She looked up at me.

“No. Go Away!” “I kept telling him to hold on. That you were coming. That you’d save him.”

She was right. She was completely, entirely right, and I had nothing to offer her.

"I HATE You"

I chose the Lodge. Sam died at the Eye.

I failed him. I failed her.

I failed.

The Hunter said a word before he left the Lodge: Unity.

Matteo knew it. Or knew of it — the way people know the edges of something without being able to see the center. His faith, the Sanctum Universum, had a version of the idea. It was... deliberate. Explicit. Matteo simply couldn't shake that it was relevant somehow.

That was worth following.

Keeper Aquilus met me at the Sanctum with the careful attention of a man who has been asked many questions and has learned to wait for the one that matters. I asked about Unity. He gave me what he had, which was partial — fragments of a thing larger than any one tradition had preserved. But he also had some breadcrumbs for me. He told me to talk to the other major "religious" orders operating in the Settled Systems. The House of the Enlightened, which was explicitly an Atheist organization, but apparently had early records that came off as prophetic in nature. and the Zealots of House Va'ruun. Fortunately both were readily accessible in New Atlantis.

I will spare the details here of what specifically I learned, and I do so ostensibly because I am not sure yet that it's information that I want anyone to ever be able to stumble across in the future. But in the end, I did find myself on a remote planet, in a sort of abandoned compound, reading the diaries of a man who seemed to have been following a similar path... or, has followed a similar path. It is... confusing. But this point in the path lead me to a new location. And this location had its own strangeness, its own puzzle.

When I warped to where the trail had ended — the final star of the Scorpius constellation — I was greeted by a familiar ship. A Starborn ship. The Hunter's ship.

I boarded.

On this ship were two Starborn: The Hunter, who had killed Sam and tried to kill the rest of Constellation, and the Emissary who had confronted me in orbit over Neon. The two Starborn we'd encountered, in the same room, waiting. They each spoke, spun a tale that I'm hesitant to believe even with the evidence before my eyes. I almost don't want to divulge what I've learned here, either, but I feel I must.

The artifacts form something referred to as the Armillary. The Armillary leads to the Center of the Universe, and at the Center of the Universe there is... The Unity. And when one glimpses the Unity they are presented with an option: The chance to ascend humanity and become Starborn. But it is not without cost. You leave your world behind, travel to another universe, much like this one but wholly different at the same time.

I never would have believed any of this were it not for what happened next. The Emissary revealed their face to me, and it was one I knew all too well, and one I never thought I'd see again. It was the face of Sam Coe.

But it was not Sam, at least not the one we'd lost at the Eye mere days ago. It was Someone else. A different version of Sam.

Alive. But not our Sam.

My theory — human, or human-adjacent — was correct. The Starborn are us. Were us. People who found the artifacts, found the temples, followed the path I am on now, and made a choice.

What infuriated me, what I am still furious about, is that the Hunter's argument makes sense.

He killed Sam. He attacked Constellation. He has done things I cannot forgive, and I am not interested in forgiving them. And his position on Unity — what it is, what it costs, what repeating the cycle endlessly actually produces — is not wrong. I can see the logic of it. I followed the thread of his reasoning and arrived, against my will, at a place where I understood it.

I hate that. I hate it in a specific, bone-deep way that I don't have a more precise word for.

Earth's moon. The Emissary says it's relevant. The next step.

I'm not going yet.

Right now I'm sitting in my room on the Naginata, staring at a lamp. I don't know why. I can't...

Vladimir had a signal — an artifact, somewhere in the Freya system. I jumped in and picked up something else alongside it: a distress call from a research facility on the third moon. Equipment failure. Crew status unknown.

I went down.

Research Station Nishina had a security intercom at the entrance and a very skeptical voice on the other end of it. They weren’t expecting anyone. They hadn’t called for help — as far as they knew. I mentioned an explosion in the high energy research lab and the voice went quiet for a moment, then let me in. Just me. Whatever was happening inside, they weren’t ready to open the doors wide.

Hughes met me in the entryway — head of security, the kind of man who assesses a situation by walking into it with his hand near his weapon and his face giving nothing away. He was taking me to the Director’s office. That was the plan.

Then the world went sideways.

One moment I was walking a corridor in a functioning research station. The next I was in the same corridor — same walls, same layout — except the walls were wrong. Cracked. Overgrown, biological matter threading through the gaps, something that had been spreading through the structure for months. And there were things in it, local fauna that had decided this building was theirs now. They made that argument with teeth and I made my counterargument with whatever I had on me, and then I was back. Same corridor. Functioning station. Hughes with his weapon out, telling me to calm down.

I wasn’t the one who needed to calm down.

It kept happening. Every crossing brought me back into the overgrown version — fighting off whatever had moved into that section of hallway — and then back again mid-step into the version where Hughes was trying very hard to keep it together. We made it to the Director’s office the long way.

The other version of the facility had Rafael in it.

I found him on one of the phases — hunkered down in the mess hall behind a counter, surviving on whatever he’d been able to find for what had apparently been months. He looked like a man who had stopped expecting to be found. We couldn’t stay in contact long before I phased back, but enough to understand: he was alive over there, alone, in a facility that the rest of the universe believed had been a near-miss.

The Director told me what the near-miss actually was.

There had been an incident in the high energy research lab. A problem with the experiment — something involving an artifact they’d been studying, something with unusual gravitational properties they hadn’t fully accounted for. Rafael had gotten to the controls and shut the system down before anything catastrophic occurred. It had cost him his life. He was dead, in her version of events. A footnote in what would have been a contained incident.

The phasing, once we more-or-less understood it, had rules. Specific energy fields in the facility triggered the crossover — controllable, once you knew where they were. The task was clear enough: get to the high energy research lab, shut off the machine. The machine that was, as it turned out, still running, still experimenting on the artifact at the center of all of this.

I asked the Director what happened to the people on the other side if I shut it down from this one.

She was quiet for a moment. She said that most likely, I couldn’t save both. That given the choice — if it were just her — she’d trade places with Rafael without hesitation. But it wasn’t just her. She had people. People who were alive and who deserved to stay that way.

Hughes’ people had robots to deal with — security systems that had gone autonomous when the incident hit. Rafael’s version had the fauna. Neither was gentle. I moved between them as the energy fields allowed, fighting one reality’s problems and then the other’s, working my way toward the test chamber.

I’m standing at the entrance to it now. The machine is still running. The artifact is inside.

I don’t know yet what I’m going to do.

Rafael needed saving. I saved him.

The artifact was in the test chamber. I took it.

Rafael stared at me in disbelief, thankful to be alive and free to leave the facility. I offered him a ride back to civilization.

We walked to the Naginata.

I really need to turn off this Lamp...

The Alpha Tirna system has ten planets and a number of moons. He had been to most of them now.

He went alone. Every time. When Muira raised an eyebrow at the first landing he told her they were explorers. That was the last conversation they had about it.

She stayed on the ship. Mostly. When he came back from his outing, she was often standing outside the airlock in her suit — not waiting, or not admitting to it. She found things to look at. Rock samples. Atmospheric readings on her scanner. She looked up when he approached, without a word, or sometimes with a dry remark about having to stop slacking off now that he was back.

There was more significance in what went unsaid between them.

The moons were not hospitable. That was fine.

Tirna II-a: no atmosphere, point-one-eight gravity, barren but silently beautiful. He took the rover out for two hours across iron-grey terrain that gave nothing back in any direction. The silence was total — no wind, no atmosphere to carry anything, just the sound of the vehicle and his own breathing. Helium-3 in the rock. Nothing else of note. He catalogued what there was and came back.

Muira was outside. She appeared to be very interested in the landing strut.

Tirna VI-b: frozen, thin CO2 atmosphere, no life of any kind. The rover crossed ground that was pale and featureless in the way of places that have never had anything growing on them and never will. Chemical water locked somewhere beneath the frost. Eight different resources in the rock — gold and Europium among them, which felt like a joke nobody was laughing at. He took his samples and left.

Tirna VIII: a gas giant, unbothered by the survey. He ran the orbital scans from the cockpit and moved on.

The crew had dinner ready. Model G had started placing the food and retreating without being asked, which was appreciated more than was acknowledged. VASCO asked how it went every time. Fine, he said. Muira didn't ask. She ate and read something on her datapad.

He was a striking figure on the surface of Tirna IV, if there had been anyone to see it. The suit was deep red, the kind of red that had no business on a geological survey — a full-body shell of articulated plates, sealed at every joint, built for situations considerably more violent than sample collection. It caught the pale light of Alpha Tirna and gave nothing back. Even with his face obscured, he looked like a man broken into pieces and hastily glued back together.

He simply stood and listened.

Tirna IV had a sonorous lithosphere. The rock resonated — mineral composition, internal structure, something — and when the wind crossed the surface formations at the right angle the planet made sound. Low. Sustained. Felt in the chest before it reached the ears.

He stood there longer than the survey required. One hand flat against a rock formation, feeling it hum under the plating of his glove.

There was a thought nearby that wouldn't come into focus. The shape of something he'd been carefully not-thinking for weeks. He was almost at it when the comm crackled.

Noel's voice. Sam's funeral was tomorrow. She wanted to know if he was coming.

He looked at his hand on the rock. The planet kept humming.

"Yes."

The Lodge was quiet.

He arrived just before it began. The common room had been arranged — chairs, people standing at the edges, the particular stillness of a gathering that has not yet found its shape. He stood in the doorway for a moment and looked at the room, his mind and body in agreement that he should not be here, but his last shred of humanity urging him to enter.

Jacob Coe was in the corner.

He recognized him immediately. The last time he'd seen the two of them together, in Jacob's office in Akila, the air between father and son had the quality of something long compressed — not an argument, exactly, but the residue of years of arguments bottled and remembered.

There was a raging voice in his chest demanding that he confront Jacob, ask him what the hell he thought he was doing here, and where he got the nerve.

"Did... Did you ever patch things up in the end?"

Jacob was quiet for a moment. He said that all he had ever wanted was to protect his son. That his son had been out the door the moment he was old enough — away from him, from his mother, from everything they had built. That all he ever did was love his boy. That it should be him in the ground, not his son. He said it without anger. That was the part that was hard to listen to. The love and sorrow in it was plain and it had nowhere to go.

"I'm sorry for your loss..."

Cora was on the upper balcony, looking down. Beside her stood a woman he didn't recognize — composed, watchful, with Cora's same quality of taking stock of a room without appearing to.

She introduced herself when he reached them. Cora's mother. She said that Cora would be coming to stay with her for a while. It was probably for the best, after all, that she get away from all the reminders of her dead father.

He looked at Cora.

She looked back at him. The last time she had looked at him her face had been something he couldn't remember without a deep pain welling up in his chest. This was different. The rage was gone. What had replaced it was harder to name — a flatness, a kind of settled emptiness, as though she had arrived somewhere and found nothing waiting.

"Hey," she said.

"Hey" he replied.

She asked what the point of this was. Whether it was supposed to make anything better. He said something about keeping living. About how you had to. He heard himself saying it and knew it wasn't enough even as he said it.

She looked at him for a moment.

"Don't you get it?" she said. "Every single day is just going to be worse from now on."

He didn't answer that. There wasn't an answer for it.

Below them, Noel was beginning to speak.

He made his way back down. He stood at the edge of the gathering and listened to Noel speak — about what they had lost, what Constellation had lost... She spoke well, even as she struggled to choke back tears.

When she finished, she asked if anyone had anything they'd like to say.

Every head in the room turned toward him. All of them, at once. He could see it in their faces — the way they’d been watching him since he walked in, the way this universe had been watching him since Vectera, The artifact, the pirates... The Starborn. And...

He walked to the lectern. He felt the weight and the pressure of everyone around him, the new family he'd found since waking up in this world, the people who had trusted him, the people who he had become a sort of defacto leader for...

The weight of their broken expectations.

His eyes glazed over and his focus blurred as they looked back and forth, going through the motions of "making eye contact" without truly seeing anybody. Walter. Mateo. Sarah. Barret. Vasco. Andreja...

There was a lamp on the corner table near a book shelf. The light flickered a moment.

He opened his mouth.

“Sam—”

The air in the room felt stale. The silence, oppressive.

He stood at the lectern for a long time after that. Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. Eventually, He apologized. It was unclear who this apology was for... Was it to Constellation, for failing them? Was it to Noel for failing to give a speech? Was it to Cora, for failing to save her father? Or was it to the one person not in the room with them?

He wasn’t sure how long he was up there. His body felt like something he was carrying. He breathed slowly. He stepped back from the lectern and moved through the room and did not look at any of them. He walked past a silent gathering of Constellation members. He walked past Vasco whirring quietly in the corner. He walked past the lamp, its light flickering like morse code trying to reach him. He walked down the steps and through the door and out into the cold air of New Atlantis. He walked toward the spaceport.

The ship was where he had left it. Inside there was only silence as Muira sat at a table contemplating some Chunks before her.

She didn't say anything. Neither of them did.

The Lodge was behind him now, Constellation was behind him now, but Cora's words were not behind him at all.

Every single day is just going to be worse from now on.

He sat in the pilot's seat for a long time before he started the engines. When he did, he already knew where he was going.