📖 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.

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.

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...