📖 Stories

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.