The transition through the gate didn't feel like flying; it felt like being unmade and stitched back together by an amateur. Kael's lungs burned as if he'd inhaled liquid nitrogen, and for a terrifying ten seconds, he couldn't see anything but a searing, impossible shade of violet.
Then, gravity slammed back into place.
The Rust Bucket groaned, every rivet protesting as the ship stabilized. The screaming of the engines died down to a rhythmic, jagged throb. On the flight deck, the silence was so heavy it felt physical.
"Mina?" Kael croaked, rubbing his eyes. His vision was swimming with dark spots, but the golden lines on his arm had faded to a dull, bruised purple.
Mina didn't answer. She was slumped over the controls, a thin trail of blood trickling from her nose. Kael unbuckled his harness—his limbs feeling like lead—and checked her pulse. It was steady, just slow. She was out cold.
He turned his gaze to the main viewport, and his heart stopped.
They weren't in the debris field anymore. They weren't even in the Sol system. The sky wasn't the charcoal black of the Ring's neighborhood; it was a deep, bruised indigo, crowded with more stars than Kael had ever seen in the polluted haze of the station.
Directly ahead of them hung a planet.
It wasn't the blue-green paradise of his vision. It was a world of shifting ochre sands and vast, violet-tinted oceans, wrapped in a thin, swirling atmosphere of silver clouds. Orbiting it were two moons—one a shattered crescent of white rock, the other a smooth, pearlescent sphere that seemed to glow with its own internal light.
"Jax, are you there?" Kael whispered, tapping his comms.
Only a hollow, rhythmic clicking responded. Not static, but a patterned signal.
Click. Click-click. Click.
"Is that... Morse?" Kael wondered aloud. He checked the ship's external sensors. The "Echo Drive" was sitting on the console, now dormant and cold as a tombstone. But the ship's long-range scanners were picking up something the drive had ignored.
"Mina, wake up," Kael said, shaking her shoulder. "Mina, we have company."
She stirred with a gasp, her hand instinctively flying to her holster before her eyes adjusted. She took in the sight of the two moons and the violet oceans. "Where the hell are we?"
"The other side," Kael said. "But look at the thermal readouts. We aren't the first ones here."
Mina wiped the blood from her face and leaned into the sensor array. Her brow furrowed. "That's impossible. This sector is... it's not on any Hegemony chart. It's not on the old NASA archives either."
She pointed to a cluster of signatures hovering in the high orbit of the ochre planet. They weren't ships. They were massive, geometric structures, miles long, tethered together by glowing filaments of energy. They looked like a graveyard of cathedrals, silent and dark.
"Stationary platforms," Mina whispered. "Old ones. Look at the hull designs—those aren't Hegemony. They aren't even Human-standard."
"Maybe they're the people my grandfather was talking about," Kael said. "The ones who stayed."
"Or the ones who died," Mina countered.
Suddenly, the ship's proximity alarm began to wail. It wasn't the frantic shriek of a missile lock, but a melodic, three-tone chime. A holographic window snapped open on the dashboard, unbidden.
A face appeared.
It wasn't human, though it had the basic architecture. The skin was a pale, translucent gray, and the eyes were oversized, flickering with a rapid-fire stream of data. Behind the figure, the interior of a ship looked organic, with walls that pulsed like a living heart.
The figure spoke, and the ship's translator struggled to keep up, the words coming through in a distorted, mechanical voice.
"Identification... requested. You carry... the Key of Voss. Explain... your presence... in the Cradle."
"The Key of Voss?" Kael looked at the drive. "My name is Kaelen Voss. I don't know where we are. We were fleeing the Hegemony."
The alien figure tilted its head, its eyes narrowing as it processed the name. The data stream in its pupils accelerated.
"Voss. The Architect's blood. You are late, Kaelen Voss. One hundred and twelve years... late."
"Wait," Mina shouted, leaning into the camera's view. "Who are you? What is this place?"
"I am UNIT-7," the figure replied. Its image flickered, and for a second, the alien facade dropped, revealing a chassis of chrome and wires—a droid, but one far more advanced than anything on The Ring. "I am the Custodian of the Silent Cradle. And you must maneuver immediately. The Hegemony did not stay behind the gate. They bled through the wake of your jump."
As if on cue, the space behind the Rust Bucket began to ripple. The gate they had just exited wasn't closing—it was tearing. Two massive Hegemony heavy-cruisers began to emerge, their hulls blackened by the temporal transit, their broadside cannons already swiveling toward the tiny freighter.
"They followed us," Mina hissed, her hands slamming into the flight controls. "They actually followed us through a wormhole!"
"Dock with the Primary Spires," UNIT-7 commanded. "I will activate the defense grid, but the power cells are depleted. You must bring the Key to the Central Core. If the Hegemony takes the Cradle, the Echo will be silenced forever."
"Mina, go!" Kael yelled.
The Rust Bucket surged forward, racing toward the massive, silent cathedrals of the alien station. Behind them, the Hegemony cruisers opened fire, their massive slugs tearing through the vacuum, seeking the drive—and the boy who carried it.
The mystery of the "Second Earth" had just turned into a war for the stars.