📖 Stories

I don't even know how to start this.

Last night — and I mean that literally, last night — I went to sleep in my own bed. My wife was next to me. I remember the lamp being on because she was still reading, and thinking I'd ask her to turn it off, and then... not doing that, apparently. Just going to sleep.

And then I woke up here.

I don't have an explanation. I've been trying to build one all day and none of them survive contact with the actual facts. What I have is: it happened. It's still happening. And I'm currently writing this from inside a spaceship — yes, a spaceship— so I've decided the best thing I can do is just write it down. All of it. From the beginning.

I keep thinking about her.

This morning I woke up and I didn't know where I was, or when I was, or who exactly. There was a bunk — narrow, utilitarian, bolted to a wall — and the air tasted recycled and thin and the ceiling was definitely not my ceiling. I lay there for I don't know how long just taking stock. The light coming through the small window was the wrong color for Earth.

I got up, found a corridor, and a woman walked past and doubled back when she saw my face. I must have looked exactly as lost as I was, because she stopped and said "you alright?" like she already knew the answer was no.

Her name's Lin — she's the supervisor here on Vectera (I have since learned). She looked at me the way you look at someone you've worked alongside for a while, and I looked at her like a person waking up in a country where they don't speak the language, and somehow she chalked it up to a rough morning and moved on. She told me to get suited up because there was something in the rock they'd been working toward and today was the day, and she wanted me to go down and get it. So I went, because I genuinely couldn't think of a reason not to. Honestly I still expected to wake up from this dream soon and roll over to tell my wife all about how crazy it was dreaming of being a space miner...

The tunnels were long and dark and narrow, and I followed Heller through them because that was clearly what I was supposed to do and I had no better ideas. At one point there was a rockfall blocking the path and he handed me the cutter — That's what he called it, but it was like nothing I'd ever touched before in my life — and just sort of gestured at the obstruction like obviously I knew what to do with it.

And I did. That's the part that got me. I cleared the rockfall without hesitating, without fumbling, without having to think about it at all. My hands just... did it. I stood there for a second after and looked at the tool like it had betrayed me somehow. Heller didn't notice, or didn't say anything if he did, and we kept moving.

We finally reached a point where Heller and Lin stopped. Looked at some readings on their tablet thing, and argued briefly. Heller was very concerned about the readings he was getting. Lin didn't seem to think it was a problem. She sent me off on my way down this newly opened tunnel, telling me to find.... "it".

So off I went, still waiting to tell my wife all about this crazy dream.

Whatever it was I was sent after it didn't... it felt wrong.

By all reasonable observation it was just a strange metalic arc. But... the more you looked at it, the more it appeared to violate the rules of the Universe. It caught the light and reflected it as... and I know how crazy this sounds... as Sound in my mind. I don't think it even was producing actual sound, there was no echo or reverberation of this... this music in my head. I reached for it because that was why I'd come down here, because what else do you do, and the moment I touched it the tunnels disappeared.

I was... in space. But not like, on a planet in space I mean I was just... floating. Around me were stars, and bands of colors I don't have names for. Around me, oblivion stretched on indefinitely, but at the same time I felt I was... observing SOMETHING. Something on the scale of enormous — not a place, more like the shape of an idea so large I could only see the edge of it. I was there for no time at all and I was there forever.

When it ended I in the med bay, with Lin and her right hand man, Heller, looking down at me.

They asked me questions: what's my name, where am I, what did I do before I came to Vectera. Before I answered the simply asked "Does any of this sound familiar" and handed me a data slate (as they called it. I would have called it an iPad). I saw a picture - MY picture - next to a lot of data that I did NOT recognize. It even had my full name, though everyone up til now had just been calling me "Nova". Some kind of Nickname I'd apparently earned.

The slate had even more info on me that didn't make sense: Before Vectera, I was a long haul transport pilot. I have a family in a city called "New Atlantis". But otherwise, unremarkable.

I kept thinking about her. My wife. Whether she'd woken up yet. Whether she'd reached for me and found the bed empty and what she'd thought...

I don't think I'm waking up from this dream, anymore.

We went topside with the artifact and there was a man waiting — Barrett. He'd apparently arranged the whole dig and come all the way out here specifically for this thing, and when I handed it over his whole face changed in the way of someone who's been holding their breath for a long time. He started asking me about what happened when I touched the artifact, which was telling since I'd very much had an out-of-body experience. He also seemed to be the first person to realize there was something... off... about me. It was brief, the slightest flicker behind his eyes. He was definitely the smartest person I'd come across so far, and also the most... out there. I wanted to try to steer the conversation towards that, but I didn't get the chance.

Because the pirates showed up.

Crimson Fleet, Lin said, and it was clear from her tone that this was an anticipated but very unappreciated event. They came down fast and they were after Barrett. He'd just said "I really thought I'd lost them!" like a man saying he really thought he'd remembered to pick up milk from the store. Guns came out on both sides and I was behind cover before I'd consciously decided to move. A gun was knocked off the barrels I'd ducked behind. I picked it up and it felt... less unfamiliar than it should have. I returned fire alongside people whose names I was still working out, and somehow we took out enough of them to have their ship retreat.

Afterward Barrett came back over, looked at me for a moment, and held out the artifact. He asked me to take the artifact back to New Atlantis for him while he stayed behind to help Lin get the dig site packed up and ready for Evac. He even said I could take his ship, and his Robot.

I didn't ask why me. It didn't feel like the right moment.

So I walked up the ramp, sat down in the pilot's seat, and watched my hands run the preflight check on a ship I'd never seen in my life. Every switch in the right order, no hesitation, no second-guessing — The Frontier came alive underneath me and we lifted off an alien planet and rose up into the sky.

The Crimson Fleet came back for us as I exited the upper atmosphere. VASCO (the Robot) offered a crash course on dog fighting but somehow, I don't even think I needed it. Once again it felt like... instinct. I took down three enemy ships in The Frontier (which I had heard Heller back on Vectera mention is outdated). VASCO then informed me that we would likely need to take out the Pirate base on the nearby moon Kreet if we wanted to safely make the jump to Alpha Centauri.

So that's where I'm headed now, as I write this. I keep landing on: I don't know. I don't know what the artifact was, or what it showed me, or what Constellation wants with it, or why Barrett trusted a man he'd just met with his ship. I don't know what this body's life looks like or who's waiting for me in New Atlantis or what I'm supposed to do when I get there.

And I know that she's back home, three hundred years behind me, and she doesn't know any of this is happening, and as far as she's concerned I'm still asleep in the bed next to her. I can't think too hard about that right now or I won't be able to function. And I need to function, so I'm going to focus on Kreet, and then New Atlantis, and Constellation, and... I'll just get there first and figure out the rest after.

I'll write again when I have something to say.

They gave me a room.

It's on the upper floor of the Lodge — that's what they call it, Constellation's headquarters, this old building in the middle of New Atlantis that somehow smells like a used bookstore and bad coffee, which is the most comforting thing I've encountered since I woke up on Vectera, even though I rarely read books and never drank coffee.

My room has a window. When I woke up this morning I lay there for a while just looking at the light coming in, coming to terms with... everything.

I'm still working on it. But it's progress.

I should back up, because a lot has happened since I last wrote.

VASCO — Barrett's robot, who has been my co-pilot and my only consistent companion for the past few days — navigated us to Kreet before we made the jump to New Atlantis. According to the star map aboard the Frontier it's a moon in the Narion system, cold and ugly, thin atmosphere that makes everything feel slightly wrong. The Crimson Fleet had a base there, and apparently they were the reason we'd need to clear it before making the jump safely. I'm still not entirely sure how "clear a pirate base" was added to my to-do list in the middle of all of this, but here we are.

I'd be lying if I said part of me wasn't excited.

VASCO mentioned, almost in passing as we made our way inside, that the facility hadn't been built by the Crimson Fleet — it was an old "United Colonies" research base. Apparently that was interesting because this is "Freestar Collective" space, meaning this is some kind of secret base likely established during a war between these two factions. It was abandoned at some point after the war and then repurposed by whoever needed somewhere cold and remote and off the maps. I didn't exactly understand his explanation on a deep level, but I could wrap my head around what he was describing. War... War never changes.

The inside of the facility was larger than it looked from the approach — rooms feeding into corridors feeding into more rooms, the UC signage still stenciled on the walls under a decade or more of grime and Crimson Fleet graffiti. The pirates were spread through it in small groups, two or three at a time, which actually worked in my favor. I'd find a corner, get a read on where they were, and move before I'd finished deciding to. My body moved before my mind had the chance to react — same as the cutter on Vectera, same as the dogfight — and I'd be through the initial strike before I'd consciously caught up with it. Then VASCO would move in behind me to cover what I'd missed, and we'd hold for a moment, and then push on to the next room.

It wasn't clean. There were a few times I found cover and just stayed there longer than strictly necessary, waiting for my hands to stop shaking. But we worked through the whole facility that way, room by room, until we'd reached the roof access and there was nobody left between us and the top.

On the roof were three of them, including the man in charge. He'd heard me coming, obviously, and he had the look of someone who'd already done the math but wanted to hear what I had to say before he committed to anything. So I talked.

Here's what I found out: they were never after the artifact. They were after the Frontier. Apparently Barrett's ship has a reputation — stories that have been circulating long enough and traveled far enough that the Crimson Fleet had decided boarding it was worth their time and resources. Stories about rare cargo, valuable finds, the kind of haul that makes careers. Someone, somewhere, had started a rumor about that ship, and this crew had followed it all the way to Vectera and Kreet and lost people for it.

What I had in my favor was the truth. The Frontier doesn't have any of that. I walked him through it — what's actually in the hold, what the ship actually is, what Barrett actually uses it for. I let him be angry, because he'd earned it and trying to talk anyone out of anger never works. I just kept pointing at the facts until the anger had somewhere real to land, which was on whoever had fed him the bad information in the first place. By the end he was furious, but he believed me, and he let me walk back down those stairs.

And on wobbling legs, I did just that.

New Atlantis.

Landing at the spaceport, a technician came out to meet the Frontier before I'd even finished powering down. She recognized the ship immediately — looked it over, looked at me, then Turned to VASCO and said "No Barrett? Indigo Protocol again?" in the tone of someone who has asked this question before and fully expects a non-answer. I told her Barrett had stayed behind on Vectera. She nodded like that tracked, made a note on her slate, and waved me through without another word.

I recalled, vaguely, that Barrett had told VASCO to use this "Indigo Protocol" when I was leaving Vectera. I didn't ask then, Because I'd assumed it was just Constellation Jargon. But now this random Technician was aware of it, and I found myself wondering if this is more common that I realized. Regardless, I filed it away and walked into the spaceport.

I had credits in my pocket from Kreet, thanks to the sheer quantity of now-dead pirates I had to wade through, and I found the bar and sat down and ordered something without knowing what I was ordering. Fortunately, there aren't many alcohols I dislike at this point in my life. I sat there for a while just letting the noise of the place wash over me — it was busy, the spaceport, people moving through with purpose in every direction — and I was somewhere in my second drink when I noticed him.

Full spacesuit, matte black all the way through. No markings, no faction insignia, the helmet completely opaque — I couldn't see his face at all, had no way to read his expression or even confirm he was looking at me. He was just... leaning against the wall at the end of the bar some 6 feet away, and something about how still he was made him impossible not to notice once you had. He wasn't drinking. He wasn't waiting for anyone, or if he was, it wasn't visibly. He was just there.

I said something to him — I don't even remember what exactly, just something offhand, the kind of thing you say to someone sitting near you at a bar when the silence feels pointed. He turned toward me, or I think he did, it was impossible to tell with the helmet, and said that it wasn't often someone approached him for conversation. The way he said it wasn't a complaint. It was closer to an observation about the nature of things.

What followed was one of the stranger conversations I've had since I got here, which is saying something. He had a worldview — that came through immediately — and it was bleak in a very calm, settled way, the way a person is bleak when they stopped being upset about it a long time ago. His general position was that people don't help each other. Not really. Everyone is operating in their own interest, always, and what looks like generosity or kindness is just self-interest wearing a more socially acceptable coat.

I told him that sounded like a whole philosophy he'd built up. He paused at that — something shifted, not in any way I could see, but in the quality of his attention — and I got the impression he found it faintly amusing that I'd named it so plainly.

I said I preferred to be optimistic about people, even when it cost me. He made a sound that wasn't quite a scoff and wasn't quite a laugh. Called it foolish. But then he added — and this is the part I keep turning over — that at least I wasn't naive enough to think hope alone was going to carry me through anything. That I seemed to understand the difference between expecting the best and just waiting for it to happen.

I'm not sure I do understand that. But I didn't say so.

What I can't fully articulate is why that conversation left me with the same feeling Barrett had given me on Vectera — that flicker, that sense of being assessed rather than spoken to. The man had no face I could read. No eyes I could track. But something in how precisely he engaged, the way certain things I said landed with a weight that suggested he was measuring them against something I wasn't aware of, made me feel observed in a way that went past the conversation itself. Like he was looking at a version of me that didn't quite line up with what I appeared to be, and had quietly noted the discrepancy.

He stopped engaging after that, in a way that made clear we were done without him having to say so. I finished my drink and walked out into New Atlantis.

The city is something I don't have words for yet, or I have too many and none of them feel right. It's built up the side of a mountain on a planet that has no business supporting a city, and it's enormous and clean in the way things are clean when someone has put serious thought into infrastructure — transit lines, districts, a whole underground level called the Well. More people than I've seen in one place since I got here, all of them moving like people who have never once had to think about where they are.

I kept stopping. Just stopping in the middle of walking somewhere and looking at things. Ships in orbit visible from the surface. The scale of the skyline. A transit platform with a viewport that shows the curve of the planet and everyone on it thinking about where they're going next. I did it probably three times on that first walk, and each time someone would flow around me and keep moving and eventually I'd start moving again too.

I'm getting faster at recovering. That feels like progress.

Constellation is the group Barrett had mentioned, and the Lodge is their headquarters, and they are — genuinely, I think — some of the most interesting people I've met since I got here. The woman who seems to run things day-to-day is named Sarah, and she has the precise energy of someone who could have been very successful doing anything she chose, and still chose this, which you have to respect. She gave me a speech about exploration and curiosity and the unknown that I would have been cynical a few days ago and now I couldn't find the cynicism if I tried.

They took a vote, of sorts. They weren't even all present, don't think there was any kind of official procedure for this. Either way, I'm in. A Full member of Constellation, with a room in the Lodge and access to their research archives and an ongoing expectation that I'll help track down the rest of whatever those artifacts are.

I said yes because what else was I going to say? I woke up on Vectera a few days ago with no idea where I was, and Constellation is the first thing that's pointed at an actual direction and said: go there, find out what's happening, it matters. The artifact matters. Whatever it showed me matters. I have no idea how to get home, or whether home is something that's available to me anymore, and in the meantime I might as well be doing something that means something.

I keep thinking about her, and whether she'd find that reasoning convincing. Even if she did, I doubt she'd be happy about it.

Maybe it's both.

I have not done anything of cosmic significance in four days and it has been genuinely wonderful.

Constellation has given me a direction — chase the artifacts, understand the visions, figure out what the universe is trying to say — and I intend to do that. I do. But I arrived in New Atlantis with the artifact delivered and no immediate next step, and somewhere between the Lodge and the spaceport I apparently became the kind of person that strangers feel comfortable approaching with their problems.

I genuinely cannot explain how this happened.

It started with Kelton Frush, who I met near the MAST district looking like a man on the edge of an academic breakdown. He's a researcher. He'd deployed a series of environmental survey probes around the city that he needed to collect (apparently urgently) and at least one of them had gone missing — gone dark, wandered off, lodged in places it shouldn't be. He asked if I might collect the 4 that he hadn't had time to retrieve himself.

I had nothing pressing. I said sure.

They were exactly where you'd expect survey probes to go if they malfunctioned and nobody was watching. Stuck in a tree, hidden amongst foliage... One had been found by a child, who called it an "egg", and he sold it to the nearby Supply Depot. I tried to convince the woman running it to give me the probe, but she wanted some credits for it.

I got it back from her, and brought the 4 I'd retrieved back to Kelton.

Kelton was grateful, I think. He was a bit distracted by some apparently dangerous readings.

I met the head of the Sanctum Universum while I was in that part of the city.

I want to be careful about how I write this because I don't want to be unkind. The church believes that the universe itself is divine — that space, the stars, the act of exploration, all of it is sacred. The Keeper was warm and earnest, and we had a chat about his book "Between the Grav Jumps". Then one of his parishioners (if that's the term they would use) asked if I'd be willing to hand out slates to a few folks who had come to the church in the past, inviting them to come back.

It wasn't too many people, just 3 specific folks in the city that I had to track down. One was a particularly angry woman protesting (alone) outside a building I identified as the Freestar Collective Embassy. I didn't engage her in much conversation, I've seen her breed of "protestor" before. Truly some things don't change. The second was a ginger kid with a nose ring who I think is being pressured by his girlfriend to leave New Atlantis. I think he went to the church seeking guidance, though he seemed afraid to admit it. I actually met his girlfriend, by pure coincidence, and she seems like a sweet girl working as a janitor in the transit line. When we talked, or shortly after we stopped talking, I instantly found myself feeling... Hm. Empty.

The last person was a pretty nice guy, if maybe not all there. Diligent, working in the same UC Supply Depot where I'd... "recovered" the missing probe for Kelton. He seemed just happy that people thought about him enough to send the slate inviting him back.

It was a fun diversion. But here is what I keep coming back to: I arrived in this world through something I cannot explain. A glowing artifact showed me visions I don't have language for. A man in a black suit spoke to me about time like it was a road he'd walked before. I don't know what I believe. But I have a great deal less certainty than I used to about what's impossible.

The Sanctum looks up at the stars and calls them holy. I look up at the stars and feel something I also don't have a word for.

A man at Gal-Bank asked me, very politely, if I would help collect on some outstanding debts owed to his institution across various systems. Initially he tried to shoo me away, then realized I wasn't a new employee. When I introduced myself as a ship captain, his eyes lit up.

He called it debt collection, and as far as I can tell he's being on the level with me. I told him I would, but explicitly promised no concrete timeline. He seemed thrilled by this regardless, and provided me the location of the first debtor: a con man hiding on a small moon. I am honestly kind of shocked, and very intrigued.

Later that same day, on the other side of town, an old woman flagged me down and asked if I was going anywhere near Mars. I said I could be. She had a letter — actual paper, sealed — that she wanted delivered to a friend in Cydonia. She seemed aware that sending an actual pen-and-paper letter in this day and age was silly, but was insistent anyway. I had to respect it.

I took the letter. She had the look of someone who had been waiting a long time to ask someone that question and I wasn't going to be the person who said no. She even paid me up front, which I tried to refuse but she insisted yet again.

The Well is the lower district of New Atlantis — under everything, literally, accessible by elevator. It's where the people who can't afford the upper city end up. It also, as I now know from personal experience, is where you go when you want to do commerce without attracting the wrong kind of attention. The Trade Authority office down there has a certain flexibility about it that their name doesn't quite advertise.

I hadn't planned to spend the afternoon there. A MAST employee, Louisa Reyez, stopped me on the way out — power problems in the Well, she said, failing conduits, the grid was overloaded and it had been a crisis for long enough that someone had to actually go fix it. She looked at me the way people in this city apparently look at me now, which is like I might say yes to things. She was right about that.

I spent most of the afternoon down there tracing the fault, replacing couplings, talking to the residents. It is worse than the upper city. That's just true — it's underground, the air is recycled twice over, the housing is whatever fits in the space available. People know each other's names because they don't have any choice but to. They watched me work with the careful attention of people who have been promised fixes before and received nothing, and I found I wanted to actually finish.

The brownouts stopped after a few hours, but Louisa wasn't done. She'd been sitting on a theory the whole time — that the Trade Authority had been siphoning power from the Well — and she wanted to take it to Zoey Kaminski, the TA's New Atlantis manager, and she wanted me there when she did.

Zoey had the confidence of a spider watching the room already caught in her web. While Louisa made her accusation, Zoey brushed it aside without blinking and disappeared into the back to get evidence. When she came back, she looked surprised, and then amused. There was power siphoning happening, she confirmed. But not to the Trade Authority. Through it. Someone had been using their infrastructure as a conduit.

Another few hours after that, working with Zoey and Louisa (a match made in hell), I tracked it to an apartment topside. The tenant was long gone. He'd been running a program off the stolen power — skimming fractions of credits off Gal-Bank ATM transactions, the kind of thing that adds up slowly and never trips any alarms. Both MAST and the Trade Authority wanted the information I'd collected. I gave it to the TA.

My distrust of government bureaucrats, it turns out, is something I haven't managed to shake.

This next little adventure is one I'm hesitant to document.

Someone — I didn't ask their name and they didn't volunteer it, which should have been the first sign — hired me to pick up a package from the Trade Authority in the Well and deliver it to him. I should have noticed that he was paying me to walk the equivalent of a half mile and carry a package for half of that. They described it as art, with no elaboration.

When I reached the Trade Authority and spoke with Zoey Kaminski once again, I was handed a briefcase and told that all the "necessary paperwork" was updated and included. Art doesn't need paperwork. I knew at that moment I was entangled in something I should have avoided.

By that point I was already committed. I played along, telling her I understood.

I delivered it, and I'm not going to pretend it wasn't exhilarating.

A man who runs the ENHANCE! clinic in the commercial district had misplaced a slate with patient data on it — sensitive records, the kind of thing that turns into a liability if it ends up in the wrong hands. He was understandably frantic. I found it at Whetstone, the steakhouse nearby. He'd left it there. That was it. That was the whole mystery.

And a bartender at the spaceport had a shipment of goods confiscated by security on what sounded like a technicality. I made some inquiries, did a littl bit of smooth talking, and I convinced a maintenance guy to open the door. The goods were "released". She poured me a drink and said I looked like someone who was getting used to something.

I asked what she meant.

She said: you've got that look. Like you keep being surprised by life.

I didn't answer right away. She wasn't wrong, exactly, but she was also missing something — the surprise is not just life throwing the unexpected at me. It's that it's SOMEONE'S life. That a person could live like this, just moving through a city fixing things that needed fixing, sitting at a spaceport bar getting read by a stranger. That this is a thing humans do. That she does. That I did today.

I thought about my wife, which I try not to do too much because I can't do anything about it and I still need to function. She would have liked the bartender. She would have liked my little adventures in the Well, probably. She has always had more patience for people than I do. Maybe that's why I've been doing what I have. Just trying to fill the void she left in my life.

I walked back to the Lodge at the end of the day with aching feet and the faint smell of the Well's recycled air still on my jacket, and I stood outside for a minute looking up at the New Atlantis skyline against the dark.

I don't know what I'm doing here. But I keep being handed things to fix and I keep fixing them, and I'm starting to wonder if that's its own kind of answer.

Going to sleep. Mars tomorrow, probably. Someone's waiting on a letter.

I appear to be building a crew.

This wasn't a plan so much as something that kept happening to me. Two people in one day, through routes that had nothing to do with each other, and I said yes to both of them without a lot of deliberation, and now I have to think seriously about whether there's enough room on the Frontier.

The first was a woman at Gal-Bank who had no business being at Gal-Bank, at least not for the reason she said she was there.

Muira Siarkiewicz. Properly goth, waiting in the same line I was waiting in, with the precise droll delivery of someone who's spent years developing a whole strategy around being underestimated. We started talking the way you do when you've been standing somewhere long enough, and I asked what had brought her in. She said she was applying for a job. I asked — half-jokingly, because it seemed like the obvious question — why a bank specifically. She said she wanted to work for someone more evil than herself, and unfortunately that basically narrowed it down.

I told her, also half-jokingly, that there was a spot on my crew if the interview didn't pan out.

She looked at me for a moment with the expression of someone doing quiet math, and then said: come back in a few hours and we'll see.

I came back that evening. She was still there, sitting in the lobby with the particular stillness of someone who has received news they were already prepared for.

Not enough pep, apparently.

We negotiated. She knew what she was worth and said so clearly, which I'd been expecting after the bank comment, and I paid her sixteen thousand credits to come aboard the Frontier. I didn't blink at the number, which I think surprised her slightly. If you're going to have someone on your crew who wants to work for someone more evil than herself, you want her to have committed to the arrangement properly.

I got the impression she was frequently unbothered by things that should bother her. That's either a significant liability or exactly what you want.

I'm betting on the latter.

Back at the Lodge, VASCO asked me formally if he could join my crew.

I want to get this right because I'm not sure I've said enough about him. He's been with me since Vectera — before I had any idea what I was doing — and he's been consistent and competent and even funny at times, albeit unintentionally, and he's navigated us through every system we've crossed without complaint. He's Constellation's robot. He was supposed to be a temporary arrangement. But he stood there in the Lodge and formally requested, in his very correct way, to be part of whatever I was doing, and something moved in my chest that I didn't fully expect.

I said yes immediately.

Then Sarah found me with purpose in her walk, which I've already learned means there's a direction and I'm going in it.

She has a rumor about another artifact. A Vanguard pilot named Moara had apparently been bragging to anyone who'd listen about a strange find and using it as cockpit decoration. The kind of story that spreads because it's specific and because it's weird and because Moara apparently has no filter about who he tells things to. Her source was reliable. First step: MAST, and the UC Vanguard recruiter there, because that's who would know where Moara is stationed.

The recruiter's name was John Tuala. He recognized Sarah the moment we walked in, and the history between them rearranged the air in the room. He tried to get her to come back to the Vanguard. She declined with the measured patience and good humor of someone who has answered a question so many times they've moved past irritation into something closer to ritual. The rejection was received in the same manner.

Then he turned to me. He had the pitch ready before I'd said anything — fleet, structure, purpose, the full vocabulary of institutional belonging. I want to be honest: I thought about it for a moment. Not seriously, but the appeal is real. There's something to the idea of fitting into a system with clear rules and a visible chain of command, where the mission is always defined and the authority behind it is maintained and nobody's operating on the vague mandate of their own judgment. I know that world. I was born into a version of that world. I understand its logic.

But we weren't there for that. I said no and Sarah took over the conversation.

Moara is stationed in the Sol system.

I'd known, in the abstract, that Earth exists in this universe — that we're in the same history and the same sky. But there's a difference between knowing a thing abstractly and having someone say: that's where we're going. We're going to Sol. Which means I'm going to see Earth.

Sarah saw something on my face when we were going over the route. I don't know what I showed — not much, I hope — but enough. She'd assumed I knew what she knew, the way most people in 2330 know, and then she stopped mid-sentence and asked if this was news to me.

I said I'd been off the grid for a while.

She sat down. And then she told me.

I'll write it briefly because I can only process so much of it at once.

Earth's magnetosphere failed. That much is settled and agreed upon. Why it failed — nobody knows. Sarah said it plainly, without hedging: no explanation, no leading theory, nothing. Three hundred years and the question just sits there unanswered. The field went. And without it, the atmosphere had no reason to stay. It went too, over years, and what's left now is a bare, cold, irradiated rock covered in the ruins of everything we built. The cities are still there. The skylines are still standing in places. They're just not anyone's anymore.

Sarah was kind about it. That made it harder.

I grew up on Earth. I know how that sounds — everyone before 2203 grew up on Earth, more or less — but I mean I grew up there. I had a street and a neighborhood. A house. She's in that house right now, three hundred years behind this conversation, probably with the lamp on.

I don't know what that house looks like in 2330. Whether it's rubble or buried under something else or still standing in the ruins with the paint peeled off. There are probably records. There are probably photographs. I didn't ask Sarah any of that. I just sat there until it settled somewhere I could carry it, and then I said: we're going to Mars first anyway.

Cydonia, the mining colony on Mars. That's where we'll wait for Moara — Sol is where he's based, and Cydonia is a logical waypoint. It also happens to be convenient for other reasons. I've been carrying a letter for a woman in New Atlantis since my first week here, actual paper, sealed, for a friend she hadn't been able to reach. Someone is waiting on it in Cydonia. I'd been meaning to get there.

A woman sent a letter made of paper and ink because she wanted her friend to hold something real. That's all it is. Someone will be waiting on it and I'll deliver it, and then I'll find Moara, and then we'll figure out the artifact.

It's good to have something concrete to do.

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.

I spent twenty-seven thousand credits on a Marksman's AA-99 last week and hadn't had a proper chance to use it yet. So when the Denebola I-b lead from the Spacer slate panned out and I found a compound crawling with Spacers on approach, I told the crew to stay with the ship and went in alone.

This was partly practical and partly I just wanted to see what I could do on my own.

The compound had layers — not just Spacers, but a story underneath the Spacers, assembled piece by piece through slates and terminal recordings as I worked through the rooms. There is a figure the Spacers call the Mantis. The name carries weight in a way that a name attached to a real person usually doesn't — it's become mythology, which means it's bigger than whoever originally wore it. The Spacers in that compound were scared of this place in a way that had nothing to do with whoever was currently alive in it.

It... reminded me of Batman.

The deeper I went, the more specific it got. The compound was the Mantis's base. I learned by the end of this that the current (or most recent) iteration of the Mantis was a woman named Dorianne, and she'd died of illness — not in combat, which felt important somehow — and before she died she'd tried to reconnect with her son Leon. She hadn't told him what she was. She'd called him here under the framing of an inheritance, which was true, just not the kind he'd assumed. He came to collect whatever she'd left him without knowing she'd spent her life as a living terror to criminal operations across the settled systems.

Leon's recordings trace his confusion from the surface entrance down into the facility, piecing together the same story I was piecing together a week later. He didn't want it. That comes through clearly. He didn't want the Mantis or the legacy or any of it. He wanted money, not a legacy, not even to understand his mother, and instead he got a lair.

He didn't make it out.

The mother-son angle didn't land for me the way it might for someone else. My relationship with my own mother was not good — borderline abuse at moments, if I'm being honest — and I've spent most of my adult life carrying the faint social guilt of not particularly caring for her. Society is very insistent about mothers. That insistence doesn't do much when the reality doesn't cooperate. I felt more for Leon than for Dorianne. I understood not wanting anything to do with your mother, and then ending up suffering for her instead.

She'd left a clue to the laser hall, though apparently none of the spacers before me figured it out — a corridor of pressure plates that triggered turrets, with no obvious answer posted anywhere. What she'd left was a recording where she mentioned a phrase she loved. Sic Semper Tyrannis.

Thus always to tyrants.

I know that phrase. From Brutus and from John Wilkes Booth and from a history I grew up with — it attaches itself to the most dramatic acts of defiance in the record, for better and worse. That a vigilante had adopted it as her motto, had loved it enough to encode it into her legacy, is something I've been sitting with since I walked out of there.

I spelled out TYRANNIS as I crossed the floor. The turrets stayed quiet.

Past the hall were robots, and past the robots was the inner sanctum, and in the sanctum was the suit.

It's white. I'd expected black — the Batman instinct — but it's white, and clearly designed to unsettle in a different way. The Mantis wasn't hiding in the dark. The Mantis was meant to be seen, in white, in the moment before things went very badly for whoever was looking.

There was also a ship.

I put on the suit before I left.

I didn't really decide to. I was standing in front of it and then I was wearing it. The practical argument exists — Spacers fear the Razorleaf on sight, that's genuinely useful — but I don't think that's why I did it. I think I just wanted something that was mine. Not borrowed, not inherited through circumstance. Mine, because I chose it.

The Razorleaf is not dramatically larger than the Frontier on the inside — I want to be clear about that, because I walked aboard expecting to finally have space and discovered that "larger" and "more spacious" are not the same thing. The crew will fit without someone sleeping in the cargo hold, which is progress. But what I keep coming back to isn't the square footage. It isn't Barrett's ship. It isn't Constellation's ship. Nothing in this century has been mine before this. The Frontier always carried the implicit asterisk of borrowed, temporary, someone else's. The Razorleaf has no asterisk.

I sat in the pilot's seat for a while. Then I flew it out.

I was still in Denebola when the distress signal came through.

VASCO fielded it before I'd fully processed what I was hearing. The LIST designation, he explained, stood for League of Independent Settlers — frontier families who'd claimed land out here beyond the reach of the UC and Freestar, trying to build something that belonged to them. He gave me this information in his usual manner, which is to say efficiently and without editorializing, and then waited to see what I was going to do about it.

I set a cruise heading for the signal's origin.

The man who came out to meet me had a rifle leveled before the Razorleaf had finished landing. He held it there for a moment — long enough to make the point — and then lowered it when it became apparent I wasn't a Spacer.

His name was Alban Lopez. He was genuinely surprised that I'd come, which I found strange. You send a distress signal into the dark and then express shock when something answers? I didn't say that. I made a mental note that he was the kind of man who complained loudly about the problems he'd caused himself, and filed it away.

His problem was this: the Spacers had taken over the Denebola system. Not just his land, but the whole system — four settler families cut off from each other, their communications satellites either taken offline or left to decay. He needed someone to get the satellites back up. He needed that someone to fight through whatever the Spacers had left guarding them. And then, if those satellites happened to re-establish contact with the other three families, maybe something could be organized.

I told him I'd handle it.

The satellites were spread across the system. Between each one, I had time to watch the stars drift past the viewport while the Razorleaf cruised on, unhurried, through the quiet between distances that would have taken lifetimes before grav technology made them unremarkable. There is something I keep noticing about space travel: that the scale is so far outside human intuition that the only honest response is to stop trying to feel it and just let it happen.

The Lopez satellite had three Spacer ships waiting. I cleared them and made the repair.

With comms re-established, Alban pointed me toward the remaining three.

The Banda satellite had three more. Same result.

Chanda Banda — a name that his parents either loved him very much or not at all to give him — seemed surprised to hear from anyone, let alone Lopez after I'd re-linked their comms. The conversation was brief, with Alban recommending a meet up.

The Lemaire satellite had three ships. I took them down and made the repair and waited on the comms.

Jackie Lemaire came through sharp and tired in the way of someone who had been holding things together through force of personality alone. She had words for Lopez even over comms, but agreed to meet in person.

The Wen satellite had no ships guarding it.

I noticed that on approach and understood what it probably meant before I'd finished the thought. I made the repair anyway. Ran the full sequence. Sent the connection request.

No response.

The system stayed quiet on that frequency. I sat with it for a moment — the particular silence of a signal that goes out and finds nothing on the other end — and then set a cruise heading for the rendezvous point.

The meeting was aboard a Lemaire family ship, which Jackie had insisted on and nobody had argued with. The three family heads were already in the same room when I arrived, which meant Lopez and Lemaire had been in the same room for several minutes, which meant the argument was already well underway.

Jackie's position was that Lopez was a scammer, that she wouldn't give him an ounce of Helium-3 if her life depended on it, and that she saw no reason to formalize an arrangement with people she didn't trust.

Chanda wanted everyone to work together and said so with the steady optimism of a man who had learned not to lead with how tired he was.

I let it run for a while. Then I talked to Jackie.

She had the most ships. She knew it. She'd framed that as having the least to gain from an alliance — if they were already the strongest family, why share? — and she wasn't wrong, exactly. I told her she had that backwards. The strongest family was the most visible target. The one the Spacers would come for first when they finished consolidating. She had the most to lose if this system didn't hold together, not the least.

She was quiet for a moment.

I may have also mentioned that driving Spacers out of an entire solar system was, objectively, a good story to tell.

She laughed. First real laugh I'd heard in that room. Then she said fine, she was in, but if Lopez pulled anything she'd leave him to the Spacers herself.

I told her that seemed fair.

Alban told me there were two clusters of Spacer ships that needed to be cleared before we could move on the station. He offered to send ships from all three families.

I told him to save them.

This was partly confidence. Partly I didn't want to be responsible for what happened to anyone else's family members if the fight went wrong. And partly — I'll be honest about this — I wanted to see what the Razorleaf could do in a real engagement, with something actually at stake.

Eight ships. Two groups of four, stationed at different points in the system. I cleared them in order, cruising between them, and by the time I reached the second group I'd found a rhythm that left me feeling unbeatable. A dangerous mindset, perhaps, but a boon in confidence for certain.

When I reported back at Lopez's farm on the moon's surface, he was excited to have won a bet with Chanda. At least he bet on my success, I suppose...

He then informed me that he hadn't been idle while I was risking my neck. he'd used the commotion to triangulate the location of their base of operations. That would be our next target, and this time we'd send everybody.

The base, a derelict star station in orbit over Denebola II, was the kind of structure that Spacers adopt the way rats adopt abandoned buildings — not because it's good, but because nobody else wants it. We came in together: the Razorleaf, and the ships from three families who two hours ago hadn't been sure they could share a room.

We cleared the ships around it. Then we boarded.

Muira was at my side through the interior. We'd done enough of these now that we had something like a system — I don't think either of us had named it, but it existed. She took one side, I took the other, and we met in the middle, and the Spacers in between had a very bad few minutes.

The station had been used as a staging point for a while. There was gear, supplies, weapons. There were Galbank safes ripped from somewhere and stacked against a wall, which raised questions nobody left alive was going to answer. I found the key eventually and discovered they were full of credits and good weapons, which I distributed between the Razorleaf's storage and crew.

When it was over I spoke with Alban on a bridge in the station. The system was clear. The families were talking. Something that looked like a future was taking shape out here in the dark, which is what they'd come out here for.

He offered the reward credits.

I told him to keep them.

He started to argue — out of form, I think, more than genuine protest — and I said what I actually meant, which was that their survival was less certain than mine. They were going to need those credits more than I was. The Spacers would be back eventually, or someone like the Spacers, and when that happened I wanted them to have every resource they'd earned.

He accepted that without making it sentimental, which I appreciated.

On the way back to the Razorleaf, Muira walked beside me and said nothing. Part of me wonders if she was disappointed with me for not taking the credits.

I thought about the Wen satellite on the cruise back out of the system. The signal that went out and found nothing. Four families who'd come out here together, and now there were three.

I don't know their names. There was nothing in the station records that helped. Somewhere between the dream and the attempt, the Wen family ran out of time, and I arrived too late to matter, and all I could do was make sure the same thing didn't happen to everyone else.

That's the job, I think. You can't save everyone. You do the math on what's still possible and you work the problem in front of you.

It doesn't make the silence any easier to sit with.

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.

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.