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Chapter Text

Alpha Centauri B III (Olympia)

August 21, 2268 Gregorian

Derek Jameson wearily lifts his forearm and lowers his gaze from the observatory data feed. Fifteen minutes till the end of the shift.

He gives a dejected sigh, stretching his legs a little from their perch on the desk before him. One of the harsh ceiling lights flickers on for a moment, illuminating another empty row of desks and computer screens in front of him in the dusty, mundane room. It feels simultaneously claustrophobic and cavernous. Half the desks are missing screens outright, and most of the others are horribly out of date.

Derek looks up at the data feed again, trying to distract himself from the knot of frustration in his chest. Even going home is no reprieve from the constant slog that has become his everyday life ever since the war started. He holds out the hope on his shifts that there’ll be something worthwhile to go home to, but his twin sons are both hitting their growth spurts and keep complaining that they’re hungry far more often than he can manage. To them, he’s managing to keep food on the table and keep the lights on, but they can’t see the toll it’s taking on him. All they see is the little luxuries they have to give up, with the constant shortages from interrupted trade routes sending prices into orbit. Small solace that the observatory is offering him overtime shifts.

Who knows how long that will last, though. At the rate the Olympian Defense Forces are commandeering electronics from the observatory, there won’t even be a screen left for him to watch by the end of the month…

Why fight this war anyway? Derek wonders. When he’d heard the news of the Saladin Incident, he’d been right there in the rank and file of fervent protestors, calling for Medinan blood - but now, doubts swirled in his mind over whether it was really worth it. Not that he could do anything about it now… the great machine of war was in motion, and all he could do now was try not to get crushed between the wheels.

Derek pushes the thoughts from his mind and focuses on the data. The university bigwigs have had him watching Sol for the past week. God only knows why , he grumbled. He hadn’t been around for the Whatever - wouldn’t be for another twenty years - and as far as he was concerned they should just move on. The rest of the Ten Worlds had already. No sense wasting time looking at someplace they’d never be able to go back to.

Ugh, focus. He caught the drifting thoughts, shoving them aside more forcefully this time. Spectral lines, interference patterns, and luminosity values swam through his mind as they popped up on the screen every few seconds. Nothing particularly interesting expected for today; the fleet exercises were tomorrow, and he needed to save his attention for then to compensate for all the drive plumes clogging the receptors-

Derek blinks, and all the numbers are different.

“... what?”

He rubs his eyes and squints at the monitor.

Nope, he’s not imagining things.

But am I misremembering? Must be this long shift, I’m tired…

He minimizes the active feed window and pulls up the raw feed history.

And there it is.

“Wait, what? This… this doesn’t make sense…”

He pulls out a pencil from the holder beside the monitor and swipes a sheet of paper from the stack next to him, scribbling down the numbers and running comparisons in his head.

His eyes go wide.

“Hey, Derek, what’s up man-”

“Mack, I need to make a call.”

“Huh? What’s got you in such a hurry?”

“They’ve had me watching Sol the last few days. Pretty boring so far, but- today, all the emission spectra changed .”

“It- what?”

“Okay, listen. The only way for the entire emission spectrum to change the way it did would be the star, or the entire volume of space dust around it, to have completely changed composition. That doesn’t just happen . This breaks all of known physics… We could be looking at another Whatever.”

The mention of the Whatever sends a chill across Mack’s face. “You’re shitting me, right?”

“Nope. I have the data here.” Derek whips out a piece of paper, showing the numbers from the observatory data feed.

Mack is stone silent for a few moments, staring at the paper. Derek can see the gears trying to turn in his head. Mack’s not the kind of guy who’d know what he’s looking at, but he is the kind of guy who trusts Derek to know what he’s talking about.

“What’s the spectrum… saying? What’s it made of now?”

“That’s the kicker. I checked. This spectrum can’t exist. No known mixture of space dust or star composition should be giving off these wavelengths of light.”

“Now, hold on Derek, this is a lot to take in…”

“I know. I’m not sure what this means yet. But I need to get the raw data to some folks I know on Altiplano and Pacifica, maybe from there to Xing Cheng or Medina. Get everyone pointing their telescopes in the right direction. If this is real…”

Mack grimaces at the mention of Xing Cheng and Medina, but then gives a sigh.

“Alright. You’re just in time, the courier’s leaving the system tomorrow but we’ve still got enough time to get a few messages onto the boat. This one’s on me.”

“Thanks.” Derek darts to the message room in the back of the cramped store, taking a few moments to set up before Mack plugs in the message parameters and clears the screen for recording. He fumbles with the datastick but manages to get it plugged in, tapping a few keys to upload the raw feed from the observatory into the message body before starting to record.

“Hey, Hailey… I know it’s been a while. I found something we both need to take a look at…”

Sol III (Remnant)

March 17, 81 AGW

Snoooorrrreeeeee.

Weiss surveys her gaze across the sleeping team before turning her gaze outwards to the rolling dunes with an icy precision. She’d offered to take first watch for the night, and wasn’t about to let any Grimm - or any of Salem’s agents - sneak up on any of her friends.

It would still be another half day or so before they made the walls of Shade Academy, although just a few hours before they hit the outskirts of the city. Here’s hoping they thought to shelter in the walls… Better to have somewhere defensible than be out in the open like this.

Speaking of defenses… She whips out Myrtenaster, raising the blade up forcefully yet delicately, pointing it away from her to scrutinize the Dust cartridges. Still mostly full. Good. She gives the switching mechanism a flick to test the cycling.

The loading cylinder clicks into place, but Weiss can feel the internal mechanisms scraping like nails on a chalkboard.

“Damnit! This stupid sand,” she mutters under her breath. “Course, rough, gets everywhere - ” She looks down to find something to clean with, only finding her dress itself. She brushes a particularly obvious collection of the stuff from her shoulder, but only succeeds in spreading it. With a huff, she snaps the loading cylinder out of her blade and reaches in with a sleeve wrapped around her finger to try and tease out the offending granules.

Scrape scrape scrape.

Snap. Click.

Weiss breathes a sigh of temporary relief. No scraping.

She sweeps her gaze across the landscape once again. This time, she turns her gaze skyward - no sense poring over the ground for the slightest sign of movement if a Lancer or a Nevermore swoops in from out of the night and cuts them all to pieces.

Thankfully, the sky looks clear. Really clear, not a cloud in sight. Huh. Well it is a desert, so…

She leans back, gazing up at the stars for a moment, taking in the sight of them all. In the last few months, there’ve been so few opportunities to just… take it all in, she’s almost forgotten how it really feels. Staring up at those bright dots studded into the night sky, jewels of the void glittering in the shadows. She takes the liberty for a moment to focus like a needle onto one of the stars, scrutinizing the fringes of its glow, its exact color, its twinkling pattern.

She blinks.

Wait a second.

Where’d it go?

Her focus zooms out to the rest of the stars, and she sweeps the sky again, worried something unseen might have just passed in front of it.

What she sees is far, far scarier.

She gasps.

All the stars are in different places.

Chapter Text

Sol III (Remnant)

March 17, 81 AGW

“RUBY! Rubyrubyrubyruby wake upppp-”

“... hhhuuuuuh? What?” Ruby wearily blinks the sleep from her eyes, Weiss’s words barely registering. It can’t be my turn to take watch yet… right? She scans the rest of the sleeping team. Blake and Yang curled up together. Weiss awake. Jaune flopped over a rock, loudly snoring. No, my watch is after Jaune, and there’s no way he was just up. Something’s off.

“The sky is different.”

Ruby gives a quizzical headtilt, unsure if she heard right.

Jaune’s snoring stops.

“I don’t know what happened,” Weiss continues, “or what it means, but the sky changed. ”

“... what do you mean it changed?”

“All the stars are in different places! Look-”

Weiss stabs a finger towards the sky, guiding Ruby’s gaze upwards.

Ruby squints for a few seconds, trying to make sense of what she sees. Stars blur together in her foggy, sleep-addled gaze; she blinks a few times to clear her view, but she still can’t manage to focus…

“She’s right…”

Yang’s awake.

The worried sense of existential confusion in her voice yanks both Ruby’s and Weiss’s attentions towards her like the slug in a coilgun.

“All the constellations you’d normally see are just… gone, ” Yang elaborates.

“... what do we do about it?” Blake’s bleary voice struggles out as she rolls to her feet. “What’s it supposed to mean?”

“No idea what it means,” Jaune finally adds, as he levers himself up to sit on the rock. “As for what we do… what we always do. Keep moving forward, right? We can’t make any ground tonight, so we take our rest, and we head for Vacuo in the morning. Someone there might know something. If anyone knows, Ozpin will.”

Ruby takes a moment to process Jaune’s plan.

The rest of the team seems to as well, the chatter of wakefulness replaced again with the low howling of wind over the dunes.

“... yeah, good point,” Weiss acknowledges. “I’m still on watch. We can keep our cycles, I’ve still got a while left in me, so the rest of you can sleep longer.”

Ruby gives a tired thumbs-up and lies back down. She drifts off to sleep again, the determination of her last resting replaced with doubt and worry about just what kind of world they’ve walked back into…

A lone castle sits amidst a shrouded wasteland.

Great pools of softly churning ooze, darker to the eye than even the void of space itself, dot the landscape. A bulky beast claws its way out of one of the pools, its fur as dark as the pool, head enveloped by a chalk-white plate, eyes glowing furious red. It shambles its way across the land, joining ranks with countless other creatures, their forms myriad and diverse.

In the castle, two women stand, surveying the creatures from one of the windows. One stands behind the other, one eye shrouded by a patch, her tight yet flowing outfit laced with flame. Her left arm is bifurcated between the elbow and wrist, and made of the same material as the creatures gathering outside.

The other steps away from the window, pitch-black robes tracing across the floor as she slowly strides towards the long table behind her. She slides into the throne at the end of the table, its bulk comprised of filigrees of bone as pale as her skin.

As she does, she begins to ponder.

The first woman opens her mouth to speak, but the other raises a hand to silence her.

“Cinder, I did not summon you to discuss our plans for Vacuo. Something else has changed.”

“... oh?” Cinder’s gliding steps carry her smoothly into one of the chairs around the side of the table. Her gaze lingers on the creatures massing outside before snapping back to the other woman with a quizzical expression.

“Have you looked at the sky lately?”

“Can’t say I have, Salem. The clouds make it a little hard.” Cinder chuckles a little.

“I could tell.” Salem steeples her hands. “The stars just changed.”

Cinder tilts her head in curiousity. “How so?”

“All of them are in different places.”

The cold water bucket of Salem’s words splashes Cinder’s expression with utter bafflement. “Why would they do that?”

“That, Cinder, is why I have called you here.”

Salem stands from her seat once again, circling Cinder like a vulture to a carcass.

“Your task will be to infiltrate the city of Vacuo. Gather what information you can that will be helpful to our cause along the way, but I will have no tolerance for deviations from your primary aim. That aim, will be locating Ozpin.”

Salem runs a razor-sharp fingernail ominously down Cinder’s cheek to emphasize.

“Nothing more, and nothing less.”

Cinder sits frozen still, eye slowly tracking Salem as she steps away and hovers around to the opposite side of the table from her.

“I will not risk you making any more mistakes. You will leave his capture to me. This is how you will repay your reckless use of the last question in the Relic of Knowledge and your rash hunt for vengeance costing us the opportunity to take Team RWBY alive. Do you understand?”

Her voice is dripping with malice by the last words.

Cinder’s stillness grows ever tenser.

Salem plants her hands slowly and methodically on the table, hunching over and locking Cinder’s gaze with her inky black, almost voidlike eyes.

“Do. You. Understand?”

In an instant, pinpricks of pain shred through Cinder’s left arm, blossoming into searing knives as black steam begins to sizzle off the arm. She clutches her shoulder with her right arm, letting out a suffering shriek. The arm flails sideways almost of its own accord.

Salem can’t help but betray a bit of a sadistic grin.

It’s a few more seconds before she stops the torture. By now, forces on the arm have brought Cinder to her knees.

They both know what Cinder has to say.

“Y-yes,” Cinder forces out through gritted teeth and hissing breaths. “I… understand.”

Salem stays silent. You’re not done.

Cinder takes a moment to breathe. Her gaze doesn’t raise from the ground - the better to conceal her internal turmoil and tormented fury.

“Without you… I am, nothing.”

She barely manages to spit the words out… but Salem smiles, and leans back, and what’s left of the pressure and strain on her arm vanishes.

“Good. You have your task. Get to work.”

A large, caped man, a serenely tall and slender woman, and a nondescript boy with all the affect of a farmer stand clustered around a telescope.

The boy stands back from the telescope, having seen all he needs to see. His expression is one of confused dread. Doubt. Uncertainty.

The other two look towards him, equally concerned.

“Ozpin. What does this mean?” the man asks.

There’s a subtle shift in the stance of the farm boy as he closes his eyes. When he opens them, he seems far more confused but far less scared. A sense of authority still manages to emanate from him, though.

“Theodore, I… have never seen anything like this before.”

“You’ve lived a thousand lifetimes, maybe more, and you haven’t seen this before,” Theodore urges.

“No. This is something new.”

“Do we have any idea what might be causing it?” the slender woman adds.

“Salem has the Staff of Creation; she might have created something that did that… but what could she have made that would shift the very stars themselves?”

“She does have the Lamp of Knowledge; it still has two questions, right?”

“One. Ruby Rose asked it a question.”

“What did she ask?”

The boy is quiet for a few moments, looking away.

Then his stance shifts again, the sense of authority fades.

“Ozpin hadn’t told them the whole story yet. About Salem, and about himself. The Lamp did that for him. It gave her the truth she needed to keep going, and taught Ozpin to trust her.” His gaze is compassionate, almost imploring. It was worth it.

The slender woman paces slightly. “Right. We need to figure out what this means.”

“Not like anyone has any leads, Glynda.” Theodore swings around dramatically and presses his eye to the telescope. He keeps his other eye open though, meticulously turning it to a few precise angles before scrutinizing what he sees.

“... right.” Glynda Goodwitch continues to pace, plucking a branch from a nearby fern and swinging it back and forth.

The farm boy leans back against the wall, staring up at the night sky. Pondering both the beauty of the stars themselves… and what to do about them.

If only we still had Ruby and her team… they’d at least know where to start…

They would have pressed on regardless. Stayed alert for anything that might explain this. Even if they’re gone, they can still help you, Ozpin offers from within the farm boy’s mind.

Yeah… I know, Oscar thinks back. He slouches a little down the wall, expression souring to the hollowness of old grief. I just. Wish they were here…

The low thrumming of the Manta’s engines fades into the background of Chipp Zamgee’s ears as the shuttle roams across the rolling dunes.

He leans back in his seat, hands still on the stick but attention beginning to fade. The late patrols just before morning are always his worst - the drop-off lines up just right with his sleep shift to have him tired for half the flight.

Well, look on the bright side, he tells himself as his gaze drifts out the side window. His co-pilot, Emily Hart, has the exact opposite situation - the flights he’s most alert on, she’s barely woken up.

“Why does Winter keep these accursed shifts anyway?” he idly muses. “Why not reshuffle to something easier to handle?”

“Well,” Emily replies, “she is pretty busy. Inheriting command from Ironwood will do that to you.”

Chipp chuckles. “Fair point…”

“Feel free to doze off,” Emily adds. “Sure, it’s against regs, but it’s not like anyone’s watching us too hard, and you’ll fly better for it the rest of the run. I’ve got the stick, and sensors are green across the board. If I see anything odd I’ll give you a shake.”

“Thanks.” Chipp leans his head against the window, hands still on the controls but fully focused on the dunes. As much as he’d like to, he knows its better to keep a second set of eyes awake, and he can hold on until they get to base.

Almost beautiful, he acknowledges. The sweep of each dune, the myriad arcs and weaves of the sand, their slow rolling as the capricious desert wind sculpts them. Even their bland yellow-brown pallor seems a unique touch, after all the cold blue-and-greyscale shimmer of Atlas.

A cloud passes in front of the window for a few moments as the Manta races past it.

When it clears, he notices a splotch on one of the dunes that wasn’t there before.

Huh?

Chipp squints, trying to make out the splotch. It’s not quite black… no. It’s five splotches, all brightly colored, just obscured by the thin dust layer between the Manta and the ground.

“Hey, Emily, I just spotted something-”

“I see it too. Swinging around. Let's see if we can’t get a better trace.”

The dashboard of the Manta obscures the splotches on the ground for a moment as it swings around, but in a few moments dips down to reveal the splotches once again. But now, they’ve resolved into the figures of people… oddly familiar people…

“I’m picking up… a scroll signal?” Emily reports, dumbfounded.

“I’ll run it, you keep us circling,” Chipp says, pushing his flight controls back into the standby position and tapping on the console behind them to bring up the link back to Vacuo Command.

Link the feed here… check the ID there…

“Holy shit!”

“... what?”

“That’s Ruby Rose!”

“It’s WHO?? You’re sure? It’s got to be spoofed…”

“I’m sure!”

“Right.” Emily picks up the comms microphone from beside her seat, tapping a few controls to link back to Vacuo Command. “Vacuo Actual, this is Manta Six-One-Three, Patrol Group Alpha-Charlie-Niner, requesting priority link to Shade Academy Command. We have located the scroll signal of one Ruby Rose on our patrol route. I believe we have located Team RWBY. Please advise. Repeat, I believe we have located Team RWBY, please advise.”

“Ruby!” Jaune gives Ruby a firm jostle by the shoulders to wake her.

“... whaaaaa- Jaune? What’s that sound-”

“There’s a Manta here.” The buffeting from the engines showers them in sand as the shuttle circles them like a great metal albatross over an updraft. “Vacuo found us. We can get to Ozpin!”

“Uhhh! Right!” Ruby finds herself shouting to be heard over the growing din of the turbines. She springs to her feet, raising a hand to shield her view and gaze up at the shuttle. Jaune barely has time to get off his knees before the other three have also woken up.

Snap.

A blinding searchlight from the shuttle envelops them in a sharp white void, blotting out the dunes around them.

“DON’T MOVE!” a voice booms from the shuttle. “WE ARE OPERATING UNDER VACUO COMMAND! STAND BY FOR FURTHER AUTHENTICATION. WE NEED TO ENSURE YOUR IDENTITES BEFORE RETURNING YOU TO SHADE ACADEMY.”

Ruby tosses a confused glance back at Jaune, managing to hold back the increasing pressure from the turbines as the Manta descends.

“JAUNE ARC!”

“What do you want?” Jaune shouts towards the Manta, confused.

There’s a pause.

“... WHAT IS NORA VALKYRIE’S FAVORITE FOOD?”

Utter bewilderment crosses Jaune’s expression. Why ask that? Don’t they know who we are?

“They need to verify in case we’re some sort of infiltrators!” Weiss offers, noticing Jaune’s confusion. “It’s standard Atlesian protocol! Check for something personal or cultural only the true subject will know!”

Jaune nods in understanding, turning his gaze to the shuttle.

“PANCAKES!”

The searchlight snaps off, and within a moment the wind and the noise stop as the Manta finally settles onto the sand. The side door of the transport slides open with a soft hiss, revealing two figures.

“We found them,” Emily breathlessly gasps. “They’re back.”

Chapter Text

Delta Pavonis III (Altiplano)

September 31, 2268 Gregorian

Hailey Garcia paces the crisply businesslike waiting room. The electric hum-buzz of the aging lights echoes in her ears amidst the quiet tap-tap-tap of the secretary’s fingers on her keyboard. One of them flickers as she sits back down again, trying to be as calm and collected as she can.

She can’t breathe deeply without attracting attention, but she manages a sort of thin inhale-exhale through her nose.

Her nerves are as sharp as they ever were.

Why is it always the waiting…

She stares at the door of the meeting room, both dreading the invitation in and yearning for the catharsis of getting it done and over with. She can’t decide whether the uncertainty of the delay is worse than knowing for sure. Every extra second is a second more prepared she can be - but would it really make a difference? Is it really worth the torment of not knowing?

Not knowing. I have to know.

Hailey’s thoughts drift back to the last time she’d been called to give a proposal like this. Because of course people have to get in the way of science…

One of the handful of white dwarfs in mapped space, GJ 1087, had started showing some strange readings that established theories couldn’t quite explain, and she’d campaigned for a mission to investigate - but despite overwhelming support right up to the seat of government itself, when they finally brought the mission plan before the Estado Mayor they’d dismissed it outright.

“The Guardia Espacial is entrusted with the task of protecting our vital trade routes, not supporting wild goose chases looking for ghost readings in irrelevant systems. We cannot condone the commitment of our scarce assets to this endeavor.”

A death sentence for the mission. Nobody would sign off on an expedition without an escort to deal with potential pirate activity or foreign hostility. All those once-friendly faces turned against her with that pretend empathy, really just a facade to hide their relief behind. All her preparations… all for nothing.

And of course they didn’t even so much as look at the mission options… That was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and now we may never know what caused those readings! The knowledge is the reward, how can they not see that…

Hailey can’t help but wring her hands together with the uncertainty, as if weaving the slowly forming knot in her stomach. She should just give up now, shouldn’t she? But no, there’s still that tiny chance they’ll greenlight the mission, that all her planning and consideration for what the Estado Mayor might sign off on could finally pay off…

Dammit, Hailey, no tangents. Get ready. What are they going to ask…?

The hum-buzz and keyboard tapping take over the soundscape once again. Hailey manages to shut them out, iterating over conversational Markov chains at breakneck pace like some crazed Babbage engine on the world’s longest input strip.

Tap tap tap tap from the keyboard.

Tap tap tap.

Hum-buzz.

More hum-buzz.

No tapping.

Creak.

Creak?

“The Brigadier General will see you now.”

Oh God.

The knot in Hailey’s chest becomes a swarm of wasps, writhing to the beat of the lights’ buzzing with their furious malice. They’re punctuated by a stab of abject terror into her heart. She manages to keep her cool. Another thin nose-breath.

She rises from her seat.

“Right this way, please,” the secretary directs, gesturing towards the door to the meeting room and placing a hand on the knob.

“Thanks,” Hailey offers as the secretary opens the door and she trepidatiously steps inside.

“Señorita Garcia! Please, take a seat.”

Hailey nods, taking a deep breath as she strides towards the empty chair, right at the head of the long, looming table. All eyes turn towards her, as if scrutinizing her every motion for a failure to pounce on. Was this room always that coffin-shaped? She dismisses the perception as a trick of the angles, but can’t quite shake it completely.

Her gaze sweeps the room in an instant, taking in the veritable jury of the court arrayed before her.

There’s a lot more of them than last time, she immediately notices. As far as she can tell, the vast bulk of them are aides who she doesn’t recognize - none of their uniforms stand out, and she doesn’t know any of their faces.

But there are three who do catch her eye.

Juan Francisco Labastida, the Minister of State. What’s he doing here? He’s made a point of letting the Guardia Espacial do their jobs undeterred by his administration… unless he wants this to go a certain way. Which way does he want it to go, though…?

Maria del Carmen Costa-Ramirez, a key official in the Casa de Comercios. Makes sense, I guess. Anything to do with interstellar transport, they’ve got their hands in. But it can’t be a good sign - science expeditions aren’t business ventures…

And of course the Brigadier General himself. Jaime Sterret-y-Mondragon. The man she’s officially here to see. The man who’ll ultimately have the final say in whether her mission goes ahead or not - with the chaos of the war, any expedition will need an escort from the Guardia Espacial more than ever. Hailey’s blood runs cold. What’s he going to do this time?

“Hello everyone. Thank you for having me,” she begins. “I trust you’ve all read my report on the findings from Olympia?”

“We have,” Sterret-y-Mondragon replies, “as well as your mission profile writeups and the data corroboration from the courier vessel itself. Damn lucky they thought to turn their scopes that way!” He lets out an affable chuckle, with several of the others joining in.

They read the mission profiles. Wasn’t the point of the meeting to go over the mission profiles? Why did they need me here in the first place? What did the courier see? Daniel wouldn’t be lying, not about something as momentous as this, he’s not like them… right?

She wants to scream. She wants to run.

She smiles along with the rest of the room.

“I must say, your writeups were incredibly thorough. Although, there was one thing I couldn’t quite ascertain - would you describe for me the sequence of events that led to this data coming into your possession?”

I knew I’d forgotten something … “Two days ago, at about a quarter to 26, I was up collating observatory data for the monthly summary when I received a message from the distribution center. Opening the message, it contained the data in my report along with a video from an old friend of mine - Derek Jameson. We’ve stayed in touch over the years, whenever either of us can get a message out, although the last I saw of him was decades back on the orbital hab we grew up on. He skipped the usual pleasantries and got straight to the point, explaining the contents of the data… and then that was that. I looked over the data. Pinged back the courier to see if they could verify, and they did. Spent the next six hours writing up the report as fast as I could, then went straight to sleep, I think about half past five it was-”

“No need for more. We got the message as well when we interviewed the courier, and have Dr. Jameson’s file right here.” The Brigadier General slaps a sheaf of papers onto the table. “I just wanted to make absolutely sure you could vouch for your friend.”

Huh? “With all due respect, I’ve known him since we were kids - he was just as enthusiastic in the pursuit of knowledge as I was.”

“And I don’t doubt that.”

The Brigadier General smiles.

Hailey clenches her hands under the table, bracing for the worst…

He’s made up his mind. It’s over…

“You’re getting your mission.”

Hailey grits her teeth, trying to lock down the inevitable spiral of grief and-

Wait.

What?

She unclenches her hands, trying to rewind the words in her brain. She must have misheard.

But the looks on the aides’ faces… that beaming grin…

“... say that again?”

“You heard me. You’re getting your mission.”

“No.” She can’t hide anymore. Astonishment splays across her face for all to see.

“Well, I do have one question…” Sterret-y-Mondragon raises a finger, then leans forward in his chair. “Give us your most ambitious plan. What do you need?”

“I. Uh. Okay, this is a lot to take in… Most ambitious. Right. I need one standard shipping pod and one week to gather everything and everyone.”

“That’s all?”

“I’m used to having to hold things together with chewing gum and bits of string.”

“How many personnel?”

“Six, all in the pod. They won’t take any-”

“Ten. On the ship. Plus any who can handle jobs to pad out the crew, of course. And if you’re worrying about food, don’t - we’ll handle that. Just because you’re used to chewing gum and bits of string doesn’t mean we can’t offer you a little duct tape this time.”

There’s no way he’s doing this. Not even one mention of opportunity costs or scarce assets!?

“... you’re serious?”

“As ever. Earth means a lot to us all, even if we don’t care to admit it, and the spectral anomaly you saw ought to be more than enough to make up for our… past mistakes.”

“I… see. Is that all?”

“Unless you have anything else for us.”

“That’s it from me. Thank you all for your time.”

The door shuts with a soft clunk behind Hailey as she takes a few more steps out into the reception room before coming to a halt. Two men in Guardia Espacial dress uniforms stand at the desk, engaged in muted conversation with the secretary.

Hailey stands still for a moment. Conflicting emotions - confusion, elation, determination - gyrate in her mind and chest like a hurricane might once have ravaged a coastline on Earth, impossible to make coherent heads or tails of.

Deep breaths. Calm. Deeeeeeeep brreeaaaaaaaths.

She lets herself inhale all the way, no longer caring about appearances or decorum.

And with the breaths comes clarity.

The hurricane congeals, slows, and Hailey is left with but one thing.

She takes another breath.

“YEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!”

“Business is booming, Señor,” Maria del Carmen explains, as if laying out the undeniable logic to some archetypal offer-that-can’t-be-refused. “In case you haven’t noticed, everyone cut off from trade by the war is coming to us looking for goods. If anything we need more freighters, not to be sending them off on some fools-errand of a mission.”

“Fool’s-errand? Come on , Maricarmen. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten what Sol means,” Sterret-y-Mondragon counters. “The cradle of humanity, finally within our grasp again. Who knows what’s happened there in the fifty years they’ve been gone. Who knows what we could find! It’s just one freighter.” The others nod as the Brigadier General imploringly opens his hands.

“Are you sure it’s a good idea to send a freighter out there unescorted?” the Minister of State interjects. “We need at least something to deter any convoy raiding forces on the path to Sol. You know how the Olympians have been getting with their ‘inspections’...”

“Don’t even get me started on the Echevarria . Retasking that ship will mean throwing out months of planning and delaying a year of scheduled transits! Not to mention the convoy she’s about to escort…”

“Perhaps we should consider a ship at Schwarzvaal?” one of the aides proposes, making a few last checks on his tablet before looking up. “Latest readiness reports suggest they have a few small freighters waiting on new contracts, and they should be able to muster at least one ship for escort. The Mgong Neri looks particularly promising - she’s got a shuttlebay for surface landings if they can get into Sol itself, and enough cargo to keep the team going plenty long.”

“But that still means tasking freighters,” Maria del Carmen retorts.

“… right.”

“And the Neri doesn’t have her own gantries for pods,” Sterret-y-Mondragon ponders. “Even if she did, we need every ship we can get in case Olympia goes back on the deal and tries to shove a battlegroup through the back door…”

Silence reigns for a moment as everyone considers their options.

“But, you know, the Leif Larsen does carry pods.”

“Not a chance.” Labastida cuts Sterret-y-Mondragon off before he can say any more. “We cannot compromise the defense of our world, our people for a gamble like this.”

“She’s barely a ship,” Sterret-y-Mondragon continues. “She’s good for simple presence operations, but if someone comes steamrolling in here with a battle fleet the best she’ll manage is to annoy them a little before being swatted out of the sky.”

“That doesn’t matter. If the people know we cut any corners protecting their homes-”

“Fine then.”

Labastida gives a puzzled expression.

“You won’t budge, Maricarmen won’t budge, I don’t have options. So we’re at an impasse.”

“One of you has to cave,” Maria del Carmen smirks. “You need my freighters running to keep the money flowing that you need to fight your war-” she gestures at Sterret-y-Mondragon “-or run your government.” She gestures at Labastida.

More silence.

“Well, maybe not,” a voice from the back of the room adds.

Everyone turns their gaze towards the man. He’s leaned against the back wall, in the shadow of one of the structural pillars. He takes a nonchalant step outwards, placing his hands on the table.

Sterret-y-Mondragon meets his gaze with a slight scowl. “Jaime Antonio Rodriguez-Jackson. I was wondering when you’d poke your head in.”

The weathered ex-Commodore gives a slight chuckle. “The Mothball Fleet at Schwarzvaal still has a few tricks up her sleeve. Depends how much you’ve got there now, but with enough fabricator time and enough elbow grease you could probably get one of the ships we gutted for parts into flying shape, if not fighting shape.”

“How much fabricator time?”

“Depends which ship. You’d be looking at maybe half a year for the fastest ones, though.”

“That’s far too slow,” Maria del Carmen says. “We have no idea how long the Sol anomaly will last; you must have seen Sta. Garcia’s reports? We need every day we can get.”

“Right… I was worried you’d say that. Which is why I thought of… this.”

107 Piscium II (Schwarzvaal)

October 20, 2268 Gregorian

Leonardo Alonzo gives a quick tap of his knuckles on the door of the dock chief’s room before swinging the door open and drifting inside in the zero-g of the station.

“Got a message from the Estado Mayor!”

“Huh? What’s it say?”

“We have to get some ship called the Haida up to fighting trim in three months. Except… we don’t have a Haida in the docks at all, right?”

“Oh, God, that old thing… She died trying to stop the Garibaldi way back in ‘44. They shot out her radiators and boiled the crew, but she’s still floating in her old orbit, nobody’s tried to salvage her. And you said three months?”

“Yyyyyeeeaah. The crew’s coming up from Altiplano, something about an expedition to Sol? They’re due to hit the rabbit-hole in exactly two months, and from there it’s about a month to here…”

“... God help us all. God help the Schwarzvaalers , there’s no way we’ll get that done without commandeering the fabbers and delaying those water filters they’ve been asking for again. I just hope they send enough overtime pay to make this worth it. Now leave me alone, I need a drink if we’re gonna get this done on time. Oh, and get a team ready in a tug for when I come back out! We’ll need to tow her back to the docks first.”

“You got it, boss,” Leonardo acknowledges, pushing off from the doorframe to fling himself back out into the main station.

He sighs and shakes his head. I just hope they send enough food for Schwarzvaal to pick up the slack… they’ve got it bad enough without us getting in the way…

Chapter Text

107 Piscium II (Schwarzvaal)

October 23, 2268 Gregorian

The first thing Leonardo notices as he drifts out of the airlock is the stars.

Gets you every time, he chuckles to himself. It’s his seventeenth EVA, but he still can’t get over the awe-inspiring immensity of the void before him. Just a few centimeters of glass between his face and the gaping chasm of space.

And the stars.

Cast into such knife-edge clarity against the infinite blackness, no atmosphere to smear or obscure them, they fill the sweep of his gaze with such indescribable depth and volume. So small… yet so large and so far away. He reaches out a hand as if to pluck one from its place and examine it. Some say the twinkling from groundside is beautiful, but Leonardo wouldn’t trade that for the stark honesty of pure space.

“Leo, quit woolgathering!” a voice hollers in Leo’s ear. Fernando, the mission lead. From the safety and comfort of the tug while the rest of us get our hands dirty. As always.

“Yeah, yeah. You ever really looked at the stars?”

“You ever really looked at the Haida? We need to get the tow frames hooked up to bring her back, and we aren’t making that happen with you staring out across the light years like some romantic space cadet of ancient literature.”

“Oh, fiiiiiine.”

Leonardo gives a tap on his EVA suit’s RCS control, slowly slewing himself around to bear his gaze on the Haida and beginning a drift towards the ship.

The main hull of the drifting ship looms in his vision, an eighty meter cylinder of imposing dull grey metal with red highlights running down the sides. The foremost surface is flat, bearing four wide, bulbous yet flat laser mirrors. Sensor emplacements bristle out between their wide diamond configuration. The cylinder tapers outward from there like a steep cone sliced off most of the way down, with long stepped platforms along opposite surfaces of the hull holding pairs of bulky turrets in superfiring posture. The coilguns protruding from them are rotated at odd angles, as though frozen mid-battle. Several charred holes in the nose allow glimpses into the guts of the ship.

About a third of the way down, the taper sharply reverses, pinching down for the next section of the hull. Seven capsule-shaped fuel tanks fill the resulting recess in an octagonal ring. The gap left by the vacant eighth is occupied by a protruding red-painted sheath, covering and supporting the base of the ship’s most striking feature.

The radiator.

The long, wide panel of metal stretches all the way down the rest of the hull, long-thawed coolant pipes running up and down its reach.

But its grasp outwards from the hull and into the stars is cut short.

Where dozens more meters of radiator should stand lies only twisted and charred metal remains. A blackened gash in the panel - and a much smaller but no less gory hole further up - betray the killing blow.

Leonardo’s blood runs cold for a moment. He knows the story, he knows how things are on Schwarzvaal… but until now he’s never seen the callousness of the Garibaldi this intimately.

They had finally given up. And yet Garibaldi slew them all the same.

The pinched recess for the fuel tanks gives way to an untapered cylinder slightly wider than the nose for the last third of the primary hull. Its shape is unremarkable, but its features are anything but.  Several melted scars in the hull mark where kinetic impactors struck home decades ago. A retracted strut with a clamp on the end protrudes directly opposite the mangled radiator, while a pair of lasers and a countermissile pod jut out of the hull surface perpendicular to both features. The flank defense clusters, Leonardo observes, recalling the mirrored cluster on the opposite side of the ship. Why’d they put the kinetics defense on the sides on a ship that turns that slow? Just behind them, a maple leaf roundel stands plastered proudly across the side.

A long, spindly truss - much longer than the one with the clamp - stretches out from the butt end of the cylinder like the mast on a sailing ship, almost as long as the hull itself. A few scorch marks punctuate the otherwise clean surface, but none of them belie any structural damage. It terminates in a skeletal orb-shaped frame, half again as wide as the main hull’s sixteen-meter diameter. Massive spikes stretch outwards from the frame like a medieval mace. Tubes extend from their undersides down into the frame itself. Injectors for the main fusion plasma.

That’s one hell of a torch, Leonardo remarks. He’s seen the same engine on the Toronto , where the even larger - and spherical - cruiser it sat upon hid the true bulk of the drive, but here on a reasonably average frigate it becomes apparent just how big the old Crimson-35 is.

It’s a few more minutes before Leonardo taps the control again, thrusters spurting for the briefest moment to stop his drift and slide into place alongside the rest of the team.

“Alright,” Fernando’s commanding voice interrupts the silence again. “Let’s just make sure you all know the drill. Leo, check her thermals, secure anything loose, and make sure the fluid systems don’t have any outstanding leaks. If they do this gets a lot trickier. Candi, Felipe, down to the torch and look for microfractures, I don’t want the mast snapping off when we start the towing burn. I’ll orbit on RCS and assess external damage from here, and make sure we’ve cleared all the shrapnel.”

“Understood,” Leonardo says. The others split off, echoing their own acknowledgements with far greater candor.

Their tone latches in his mind as he drifts. All in-jokes he’ll never be party to. All superficial joviality he can’t reciprocate.

Better to just ignore it.

Leonardo’s gaze sweeps the ship. He locates one of the airlocks, its smooth surfaces and circular profile distinctively protruding from the hull. His gaze idly traces the recessed rim around the main door surface, noting the curved handles extending from it. He fixes it in his mind and in his maneuvering computer. A quick spurt from the thrusters and he’s drifting towards the hull again.

The chatter between Candi and Felipe fades exhaustingly to background noise as the distance ticks down on the proximity tracker. The cold, unfeeling… no. Not cold. Just hollow and absent of care.

Ten meters. Nine. Eight. Seven.

The airlock grows in Leonardo’s vision.

Three.

Two.

One-

Leonardo taps the RCS, stopping his drift at arm’s length of the airlock.

No time for feeling things. Get in, check the thermals.

He reaches around to the rim, prodding around in the gap for a few moments before finding what he’s looking for - a fairly large knob. He twists the knob by feel, taking a few tries before he finds the right direction, then braces himself against the door’s surface and shoves it flush with the gap’s surface.

Of course it has to be overengineered to hell, Leo complains internally, even as he works his hand around the rim again. Just like the damn pod docks. Why make it so complicated? Easier if the mechanism is on the outer surface… Wasn’t making everything way more finicky than it needs to be the Germans’ thing? -Oh, there’s the latch.

Leo snakes two fingers into a hole in the gap, and levers outwards with a mild grunt. A long stretch of the curved rim swings up with his grasp, and with a soundless pop the outer surface of the protruding airlock separates at the edge of the rim. He swings around to grab the bottom surface and finally pulls the outer door open.

For the first time in just over two decades, light pierces the airlock chamber.

Two specks hurtle through the incomprehensible vastness of space.

Gravity binds them fixed to the tremendous rocky mass of the planet below them, its innards churning on geological timescales, the layer of gas shielding its surface a mere sliver against the endless night. The vastness of that world is itself dwarfed by the celestial immensity of the cloud of plasma tying it to its neighbors. A mere stone’s throw away - yet entire magnitudes greater.

Then the two specks merge, the bonds linking them together indiscernible against the void.

And with a spark, hotter than the star at the center of the system, they dare to defy the bonds of gravity, raging against the path of their orbit. Pulling it inwards imperceptibly slowly…

“Dock, this is Retrieval One. We’ve got the Haida and we’re bringing her in.”

Delta Pavonis III (Altiplano)

December 18, 2268 Gregorian

“Oi! Rodrigo! Catch!”

The head of the soft-voiced woman who uttered the words pops out from the accessway. It’s swiftly followed by her hand, hurling a bulb of richly brown liquid towards the larger of the two tables in the room.

One of the two men floating around the table in the zero-g manages to snatch the hurtling bulb before it can collide with anything, his expression jerked into one of mild surprise.

“Whoa! Be careful there Andi- oh, hey, you brought coffee. Thanks!”

Andi chuckles, pushing herself the rest of the way out of the access corridor. “You’ll need it! Jump’s in two cycles.”

“Naaaaaah,” another man interjects. He leans away from the table, meeting Andi’s upside-down gaze bemusedly. The light glints off the nameplate on his jumpsuit - Arturo Franco Ruiz . “We’ll be fiiiiiine, jump day’ll be long enough as is.”

Andi’s eyebrows narrow into a knowing smirk - the kind of look that screams “Yeah, right…” without needing to utter a word.

Arturo retaliates with a smirk of his own, this one more of a grin. “You’re one to talk, Señorita ‘Making Sure We Turn A Profit’. What do we even expect to find there, anyway? How do we know the rabbit hole is open now? Why bring an economist on a damn science mission?”

Andi points her thumb over her shoulder at the other table. “Hailey’s orders.”

Hailey glances up from her perch at the second table with a mildly irritated scowl, finally unable to shut out the conversation. “No sense sending a ship to Sol with just a probe, we’d have the payload space on anything that could take the probe anyway and it means we can pivot to an expedition much faster. Also, we already had people for all the obvious fields of expertise, and it pays to be prepared. Also I’m trying to focus.” Also, I didn’t have any other contacts, and the Casa de Comercios seemed really keen on putting her on the mission. She just better not mess with anything…

Andi returns to her “Yeah, right…” expression, this time vindicated by Hailey’s last sentence.

“Oh, alriiiiiight,” Arturo finally relents. “I’ll take a look at those data dumps from the accelerator. After Rodrigo here finishes his coffee.” He elbows Rodriguez amicably in the rib, prompting laughter from both.

Finally clear of the accessway, Andi rotates herself to align with the upward direction the rest of the room seems to have agreed on. She notices Hailey’s piercing glare tracking her before snapping back down to the laptop, but she pays it no mind - the jovial demeanor of Arturo and Rodrigo blot it out handily. She still can’t help but be a bit astounded how well they’ve meshed together. God, we were so awkward back at the launch. Just a few months ago... Wow, it’s been that long. Still, it’s a damn good sign. I’ve still got it.

“Oh, how are the crop samples coming along?” she asks, drifting up beside Rodrigo and slipping into the vacant seat.

“Never thought you’d ask! Turns out they’re growing really well,” Rodrigo excitedly explains. “They’re actually growing faster than what we’d projected they would. They seem to need a bit more water than we’d expected, though, which might be a problem for failure-hardening - although there’s a few things in the rest of the ecosystem that are supposed to help with that.”

“Hmm. Any idea why?”

“Not yet. I’ve got a bunch of tests running, although the centrifuges won’t be done with the last of them until tomorrow and I’ll still need to parse the results.”

“Fair enough. Won’t be joining us for dinner before the jump, then?” Andi jovially wonders.

“Before the ju- oh, shit, two cycles to loss of contact!” Realization dawns on Rodrigo’s face, Andi’s declaration having shunted his thought processes from socialization to number-crunching. “Right, okay, I have to scoot.”

He pushes himself out of his seat, flipping head over heels once before kicking off the wall and rocketing towards the accessway. He tries to blunt the impact with the ladder by planting his feet, but fumbles and crashes butt-first with a soft “Ow…” and a loud clunk. Undeterred, he reaches down and grasps the ladder’s sidebars, leveraging them to swing himself back upright with the rest of the room before hurling himself up the tunnel.

His belated “Thanks for the coffee!...” echoes back out the accessway, followed shortly by another sizeable crash.

Arturo winces. “I hope he’s alright…”

“He’ll be fine,” Andi dismisses. “I’ve heard plenty of those these last few days and he seemed perfectly intact just now.”

Arturo clearly doesn’t buy it, but doesn’t say anything.

The two sit in silence for a few moments, broken only by the tapping of Hailey’s fingers at her keyboard.

“How about you, Hailey? Any progress?” Andi ventures.

No response.

“What’s up with her?” Arturo whispers. “Everyone else has loosened up, but she’s always in her bunk, catching up on old data.”

Andi pauses for a moment before replying. “... yeah. Isn’t she supposed to lead the mission? But she’s always so closed off… Honestly I don’t think any of us really know her like we know each other, now.”

As they whisper, Hailey’s eyes silently track upwards, leaving her laptop and landing on Andi and Arturo. Her posture remains fixed, her typing patterns slipping into the lockstep of a repetitive input sequence. Her expression holds at a cold neutrality, but to any trained observer there’s a layer of discomfort behind her eyes.

“Exactly. She’s a great scientist, but…”

Hailey’s typing stops.

She pauses for a moment before saving and flipping down the screen of her laptop.

“I need to go somewhere I can focus,” she bluntly declares, her voice dispassionate yet somehow strained. “I’ll be in my quarters if you need me.”

She lifts herself from her chair and pushes off towards the accessway, far less haphazardly than Rodrigo before her. Reaching the ladder, she leaps upwards, drifting up the tunnel and out of sight.

Andi and Arturo share a confused glance.

“... what was that?” Andi wonders.

Arturo just shrugs, but his face belies an undercurrent of concerned unease.

His unease permeates the room as they sit in silence.

Hailey reaches the top of the accessway, snaking through the connecting passages and halls toward her bunk.

The words of Andi and Arturo echo in her mind.

“A great scientist, but.”

“Always so closed off.”

“Everyone else has loosened up.”

Why can’t they see this mission for what it is?

We aren’t here to make friends. We’re here to figure out what happened to Sol.

107 Piscium II

December 19, 2268 Gregorian

The ancient bulk of HMCS Haida hangs within the spindly trusses of the Sierra Vacío fleet yard, a spider’s web of too-thin cables suspending her as its titanic fly, as though simultaneously rooted firm and hurtling towards the surface below.

She’s dwarfed by the twenty-five-meter girth of GEA-DDG Valiente’s football-shaped primary hull and the two-hundred-twenty-meter total length of GEA-DD Hideki Alvaro, moored beside her with their torches protruding away from the station like spokes in a wheel. Yet despite her comparatively small size, she still manages to loom over Leonardo like some sleeping dragon.

Not dead… he triumphantly ponders. Sleeping.

Sparks fly from various points across her hull, saws slicing away the twisted metal ringing her wounds and welding crews tenderly fusing new plates into the gaps. Within her hull, more teams scurry to reconnect wires and coolant pipes, replace broken components, and reinforce the internal structure.

As Leonardo watches the work, letting the background noise of the open-channel comms chatter wash over him, his chest fills with a warm sense of pride. He’s been doggedly fixated the past weeks on hammering out task after task, and taken some joy in finishing both quicker and more thoroughly than the others around him, but this time all of that fades away. We, together, we’ve taken that dead and forgotten ship and we brought her back to life.

Behind him, he hears an airlock hiss open through his magboots.

Leo turns to look - and finds the station head.

“Oh hey! Welcome back.” He’s been away down on Schwarzvaal way longer than he was supposed to be…

Stationmaster Cortez offers a curt nod before turning to survey the Haida.

“... how’d the talks with Olowabi go?”

Though the polarized glare-shield of the spacesuit helmet keeps Leo from seeing Cortez’s expression, his silence manages to carry a palpable irritation.

“Ah.”

The airlock sphincters shut behind them, and Cortez storms off towards the torch end of the mooring structure - albeit carefully, as to maintain the grip of his magboots on the truss exterior.

Leo turns back to gazing up at the Haida. A sign of what they can do when brought together. He can pick out a few of the patches he himself welded, and manages to put names to a handful of the others. Still got five minutes on break. May as well savor the view.

Delta Pavonis stellar orbit

December 20, 2268 Gregorian

“All hands,” a gruff voice intones over the freightliner’s loudspeaker, “this is the captain speaking. Be advised we are five minutes to scheduled jump. Repeat, we will be conducting interstellar transit in five minutes.”

The last vestiges of the bustle of jump preparations die down amongst the science team. Hailey and a few others settle into their places on the observation deck. Others nestle into their bunks, or gather around the displays in the mess hall. Few but the most seasoned veterans can really resist the urge to watch.

A palpable sense of anticipation fills the carefully managed atmosphere of the vessel, too esoteric for the air scrubbers to filter. It chokes out any intention to talk. The silence it smothers the entire ship in is almost deafening.

Or it would be, if not for the sounds of the ship itself.

The rumbling of coolant through the thermocouples and heat exchangers in the reactor, immense yet perfectly comprehensible energies cycling from the splitting thorium in the fuel rods to the sprawling radiator panels on the ship’s exterior. Each of the pair stretches as tall as a five storey building, and nearly as wide across.

The electric hum of power, flowing through the main power busses to the capacitor array. Chilled superconductors guzzle the energy, holding it fast in their tightly coiled loops for when the time is right. The pump motors for their own cooling loops add a faint buzzing, inaudible to all but the keenest ear, to the mechanical soundscape.

Hailey almost manages to catch it for a moment, but her focus shifts as the coolant rumbling begins to wind down. Pitch and volume slowly descend. Soon the other noises decay around it.

The batteries are full.

“All hands, we are one minute to transit. Capacitors are charged, commencing final calculations.”

For all Hailey knows, she feels the aching gap where an understanding of those calculations should be. It manages to pierce her own anticipation and begin mixing into her state of mind. She can tell it hardly even occurs to the others.

Escaping her notice is the twinge of anxiety laced into the captain’s voice. Collating stellar weather reports, checking and double-checking measurements on the accelerometer to be sure of their exact position within the jump point, tuning the esoteric parameters of the jump drive itself… So many combinatorial elements to keep track of, to pass between the astrogator and the helm crew. But they’re ready now.

It’s time.

“All hands, brace for transit. Executing in five.”

“Four.”

“Three.”

“Two.”

“One.”

Before the advent of space travel, countless media had played host to countless more romantic visions of interstellar travel. Kaleidoscopic flashes as a ship folded the very fabric of space and time. Vessels punching like bullets toward the horizon, stars streaking out in front of them as they slammed into a parallel dimension. Great gates stringing together webs of rippling portals.

All of them proved to be wrong.

Space itself had become a mere mundane fact of life for so many across the scattered colonies of humanity. The ever-lauded Final Frontier, stripped of all its spectacle. And so too had the means of crossing its vast gulfs turned out to be so visually pedestrian.

One moment, the freightliner bound for Schwarzvaal hangs in the void, as if falling in every direction at once. Its frame casts a spindly black shadow against Delta Pavonis’ blinding rays.

The next, it’s simply gone.

There’s a loud clunk , a switch releasing, then a subliminal crackle as the tremendous energies in the capacitors dump themselves into the jump drive in a fraction of a fraction of a second - and then the star in the window of the observation deck is different.

In the blink of an eye, it shrinks by about half to the apparent size of Earth’s long-lost moon. Its color dims from off-white to a pale orange.

But the most apparent change is its brightness. Piercing rays and optical flare give way to a dull glow that casts the observation deck into shadow.

“Transit complete,” the captain’s voice conclusively declares. “Welcome to our first stop - Gliese 54.”

107 Piscium stellar orbit

February 1, 2268 Gregorian

Silence.

Just over a hundred million kilometers from 107 Piscium, the ruthlessly structural silhouette of a civilian freightliner pops into existence. Cylindrical pods of various sorts - most propellant or cargo, a few housing the indescribably fragile crew, one crammed with scientific equipment - encrust the central truss like parasites.

Were it not for the emptiness of space, the lack of an atmosphere to carry the noise, the void would be awash with sound. The fiery roar of the star. The snap of air shoved away in an instant to make room for the freightliner. The fizzle of its newly-igniting drive plume. But space is empty, and emptiness is-

Silence.

The ship isn’t alone. A far smaller, yet far more rigid vessel drifts mere hundreds of kilometers away.

Flashes of light begin to dart between them - colors too deep and wavelengths too long for the human eye to perceive, perfectly timed to convey messages inscrutable to the immensity of the silence surrounding them.

Engulfed by the star’s brightness, yet directed enough to be seen.

Silence.

The two ships begin to laboriously drift closer together. Atoms slam together within the layered confines of magnetic fields and compressed propellant. The bonds of gravity and momentum do not break, but they can only soundlessly yield against those furious energies.

Silence.

Hundreds of kilometers become dozens.

Dozens become ones.

Kilometers give way to meters.

Spurts from precise control thrusters inch the two machines towards each other with minute precision, lining up the apparatus extending from each to meet.

And at last, they lock together.

Clunk.