📖 Stories

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...