It had been forty years since Emery last set foot here.
Alfa Station—known across the stars as the City of a Thousand Planets. A colossal, sprawling metropolis suspended in the void, it resembled not a single designed structure but a chaotic patchwork of constructions fused together over centuries. Towering spires of glass, steel, and alien alloys jutted into the darkness, stitched together with conduits that pulsed like glowing veins. Whole districts floated as massive plates anchored by invisible gravitic fields, giving the impression of a city cobbled together from civilizations across the galaxy.
Yet, for all its strange, disjointed appearance, Alfa Station remained one of the most advanced and prosperous cities in the Neutral Quadrant. Tens of millions called it home: humans, reptilians, insectoids, machine-beings, and countless others, thousands of species gathered from every corner of the universe.
