📖 Stories

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...