The Frontier is not built for four people.
She has one bunk. One bathroom. A cockpit and a common area that is generously described as such. VASCO doesn't sleep or require a bathroom, which helps, but there are still three humans aboard a ship designed for one and a half at most, and by the time we cleared the New Atlantis orbital lane I had already developed a clear opinion about this. Muira claimed the cargo hold within twenty minutes of launch because there was nowhere else to go, which I respect as a solution even as it underscores the problem. Sarah works at the common area table, which means the common area is, functionally, Sarah's office. I fly the ship.
I flew us out of New Atlantis and set course for Mars, and thought about the letter in my pocket, and began composing a mental list of what I need in a ship upgrade.
Cydonia is underground. That's the first thing — you come in through the surface, through a colony that exists mostly as pressurized tunnels cut beneath the Martian rock. It smells of metal and recycled air and the specific kind of human density that happens when people live somewhere they have no business living. The Well in New Atlantis has a similar energy, though Cydonia is smaller, rougher around every edge.
Muira and VASCO stayed with the ship. Sarah and I went inside the colony. I told her I had an errand to run first, and she playfully chided me to make sure I don't take too long, informing me she'll be scouting out the bar.
The woman in New Atlantis had asked me to deliver the letter to a friend here. I found her without much trouble. She lit up when I handed it to her — recognized the handwriting on the envelope, or maybe just the fact of it, actual paper, someone had sent her actual paper — and she thanked me before she'd even opened it.
Then she read it. I watched her face shift. Not all at once, but in stages, the warmth going somewhere complicated. She said "oh no" quietly, to herself more than to me, and then read it again, and I got the impression the second read didn't resolve whatever the first one had raised. She looked up with pained eyes, frowning at me with deep concern.
She said she needed to get on the next ship to New Atlantis.
I didn't ask what the letter said. I'm not sure she could have told me, exactly. Whatever her friend had written, she'd written it in the language of old friendship — the kind where you don't have to say the whole thing because the other person already knows the shape of it. Something was wrong enough to send paper across the galaxy, and that was enough for both of them.
I walked back into Cydonia and thought about how strange it is that I happened to come across one of the few people left who still uses paper.
I picked up two more tasks while before rendezvousing with Sarah at the bar. At times I almost feel like I'm in a video game, where every interesting person has some THING for me to do for them. Then it makes me wonder if things in the galaxy really just are so bleak that anyone is a valid target for requests for aid.
A man at the supply depot needed someone to check on a commissioned shipment that had come down somewhere off the main starport — landed, no contact since. A bounty hunter wanted a tracking device placed at the top of the old Mars Launch Pad. Both were close, both offered decent credits, so it seemed like a no brainer.
I actually took care of both of them after meeting up with Sarah, but for the sake of consistency I'll just add the ending in now:
The missing ship had a heatleech infestation. The crew were dead. The cargo was intact. I reported back, collected the credits, and chose not to think too hard about the gap between those two facts.
The tracker went up without incident. The bounty hunter seemed satisfied.
Sarah was at the bar. The bartender knew Moara's route and claimed he wanted to help us. But he spun a tale about how he just can't help us unless we paid his outstanding tab. I explained, in terms I thought were fairly clear, that this was not how the conversation was going to go. He thought about it and told us to look around Venus.
Not much. But it was a direction.
When we got to Venus, we were face to face with Va'ruun Zealots. Sarah gave me a quick rundown while we cut our power and drifted closer.
House Va'ruun is one of the three major factions in the settled systems — as politically real as the UC or the Freestar Collective, with a homeworld and an embassy and a seat at whatever table the major factions sit at. Their founding myth involves a man named Jinan Va'ruun who claimed the Great Serpent spoke to him, and what the Serpent apparently told him is that it lives in the space between grav jumps — in the tunnel, in the transition, in whatever actually happens during the fraction of a second that a ship crosses between systems. The Va'ruun believe the Serpent is real, ancient, and cosmic in scale. They believe grav travel disturbs it. The theological question they've organized their entire civilization around is: what do you do with that.
The Zealots are the answer that makes everyone else uncomfortable. Where House Va'ruun proper is political, ambassadorial, cautious about public relations — the Zealots are the wing that decided the Serpent doesn't want to be appeased, it wants to be fed. They've carried out attacks. A campaign Sarah called the Serpent's Crusade, which she described with the clipped efficiency of someone summarizing something that was genuinely bad. I got the impression she had a personal relationship with that particular piece of history.
These ones were just praying. Over open comms, loudly, to whatever they believed was listening in the grav tunnel nearby. Sarah said that was typical — they broadcast because they want the Serpent to hear, and they want everyone else to hear them hearing.
I thought about the Sanctum Universum priest back in New Atlantis and his book about the holy stars. I thought about touching an artifact on Vectera and spending a moment that lasted forever inside something too large to name. I am in a somewhat reduced position to have opinions about what is and isn't out there.
We accessed a relay while they were occupied with their prayers, and Moara's trail led us to the starport in Luna orbit.
Luna. Earth's moon.
We docked and the airlock cycled open into the reception area, and the first thing I saw was the viewport.
Earth was below us.
I don't know how long I stood there — Sarah was beside me and said nothing, which I appreciated. Long enough. It's gray. The shape of it is right; the continents are where they should be, the coastlines trace where the oceans used to reach. I know that geography the way you know the layout of a house you grew up in, and looking at it from up here I can still find everything in the dark. It's just that the lights are off.
She's down there, in a sense. Not in 2330 — in 2330 that planet has been dead for over a hundred years. But in 2026, in the three centuries between that surface and this viewport, she's there. on her phone, probably. In the dark because I'm not there to turn on the light for her.
I can see where I came from. I cannot get there.
The second thing I saw was the corpse. Just inside the door, in the way of someone who hadn't made it much further than the threshold. Sarah and I looked at each other and drew our weapons.
The station was a war zone. Ecliptic mercenaries and Spacers had been at each other long enough that bodies were spread across multiple rooms, and whoever was still standing wasn't interested in letting us walk through. We didn't get to pick our moments — we got pushed into a corner in the second room and had to fight our way back out, and then push forward, room by room, with no clean gaps to exploit. Sarah handles herself well under pressure; she has the instincts of someone who's been doing this longer than she'd probably prefer to admit. We didn't talk much. There wasn't space for it.
Moara's recording was in a room at the end of the station, left for the Spacers — taunting, pointing toward Neptune. I grabbed it, and I grabbed a slate a Spacer had left behind mentioning a haul on a moon called Denebola I-b. Spacers are less a faction than an absence of one — no hierarchy, no leadership, just people who have opted out and ended up drifting in the same direction. And yet information moves through them somehow, addressed to nobody in particular and signed the same way. I pocketed it for later and thought about how that works.
We found Moara's ship at Neptune. We knew it was his from the comm signature, and we knew something was wrong because it opened fire immediately. It wasn't the biggest leap to conclue Ecliptic had taken the ship, and HOPEFULLY they still had Moara somewhere aboard it. I disabled the engines before they could maneuver away, brought us alongside, and we boarded — which meant going through a ship full of mercenaries who had every reason not to let us reach the end of it.
But we reached the end of it.
Moara was there, alive if not worse for wear, and looking like a man who had recently recalculated his odds several times in a row. He's genuinely grateful, as far as I can tell. He handed over the artifact without hesitation, said we'd more than earned it. And then, in the way of someone who's been alone in their own head for too long, he asked what the point was. He'd been out here his whole career patrolling dead systems around a dead planet. Was any of it mattering.
Surprising even myself, I answered him immediately. I told him the Sol system needs someone like him. And I meant it.
Because it does. This is where everything came from, and it's been stripped of the thing that made it mean something, and what's left are ruins and Va'ruun prayers over open comms and Spacers drifting through without destination, and somebody ought to be here. Somebody cavalier enough to lay bait for mercenaries and diligent enough to still be here after they've followed it. Someone who hasn't decided the old neighborhood isn't worth caring about just because it's run down.
Moara seemed to sit with that. I hope it landed.
We went back to the Lodge.
Sarah made an announcement, there was applause or something close to it, and I was formally recognized as a full member of Constellation. Someone handed me a drink. It still felt unceremonious. I'm not sure what I'd expected, honestly. I made a joke about Champagne, which Sarah laughed at. Only to reply with a witty remark about letting her know if I find any. That stung, though she had no way of knowing. To her Champagne was a myth. To me, it was a tradition.
With that, I've been "cut loose" so to speak, but Sarah clearly expects great things of me. She has given me three new leads, delivered privately afterward. One of them is Barrett. He's been out of contact since Vectera, longer than he should be, and someone needs to go check on him.
I worry not just for Barrett, but for Lin and Heller and all the Argos miners. I only knew them briefly, but they were good people.
I'll go. But first I need a bigger ship.