📖 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 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.

Sam Coe is a contradiction that mostly works.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He left before Sam found me.

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

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

I told them both to get aboard the Razorleaf.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Issa Eklund already knew.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We went to the Lounge.

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

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

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

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

We were almost to the exit when Issa appeared.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I didn't.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The artifact runs have started to have a rhythm.

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

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

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

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

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

And I had my own work to do, apparently.

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

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

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

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

We reached Petrov.

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

I shot him.

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

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

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

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

In the end I stayed.

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

He was there.

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

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

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

He followed.

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

Then he was gone.

We set course for the Eye.

Sam Coe had been at the Eye.

Sam Coe was dead.

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

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

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

I came through the entrance behind her and stopped.

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

She looked up at me.

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

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

"I HATE You"

I chose the Lodge. Sam died at the Eye.

I failed him. I failed her.

I failed.

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

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

That was worth following.

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

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

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

I boarded.

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

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

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

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

Alive. But not our Sam.

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

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

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

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

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

I'm not going yet.

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

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

I went down.

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

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

Then the world went sideways.

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

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

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

The other version of the facility had Rafael in it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rafael needed saving. I saved him.

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

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

We walked to the Naginata.

I really need to turn off this Lamp...