The light intensified.

  Evan felt the familiar paralysis creep through his limbs as the beam crossed his body.

  And then everything disappeared in a flare of bright light.

  21

  Evan blinked against the soft orange glow that traced where walls met floor and ceiling. The familiar warmth of the Ascendant's interior greeted him, the constant low hum of the ship's systems creating subtle vibrations in the deck plates. He stood in the shallow depression set into the wall, the green grid fading from his vision as his consciousness settled fully into his duplicate body.

  The circular door dilated open as he approached, the material peeling back in overlapping arcs that had become familiar over the past weeks.

  The central lift shaft waited at the end of the corridor. Evan stepped onto the circular platform and touched the uppermost symbol on the vertical column of glowing markers. The subtle sensation of lightness pressed against his inner ear as the platform rose, carrying him up through the heart of the ship.

  Deck One. The bridge.

  The platform settled into position and Evan stepped off. He went straight to the command station at the center rear of the bridge. The elevated seat within its partial sphere recognized him as he approached, the white composite material conforming to his body as he settled into it. The armrests rose to meet his forearms, warmth spreading through the seat as the ship's systems came fully alive around him.

  The viewports shifted from opacity to transparency, revealing the star field beyond.

  Empty space stretched in every direction. No planets. No debris. No other vessels visible against the scattered points of light that marked distant suns. The ship was still moving, he could feel that much from the subtle vibration in the deck, but nothing in his immediate vicinity suggested danger.

  The tactical display showed a sphere of space surrounding the Ascendant, layered rings of detection extending outward in every direction. No red markers. No amber warnings. No contacts of any kind within the sensor range.

  He exhaled slowly.

  His hands moved to the helm controls. The ship had been traveling on a constant vector since he'd left it, burning through empty space at whatever speed he'd set before transferring back to Earth. That needed to stop.

  He slid his finger along the throttle controls, pulling back to neutral and continuing past, feeling the deck shift beneath him as the engines reversed their pull.

  The sensation was still strange. No roar of engines. No vibration from thrust. Just the feeling of the room tilting sideways, of gravity shifting in a direction that his brain insisted was wrong. The ship slowed, the star field steady through the viewports as the Ascendant bled off velocity.

  Thirty seconds. A minute. The vibration faded as the ship settled into a dead stop. Evan returned the throttle to neutral, leaving them hovering motionless against the backdrop of distant stars.

  Evan kept his eyes on the sensor display. No new contacts appeared at the edge of detection range. No warnings flashed across the tactical projection.

  He was alone.

  For now.

  The data pad remained where he'd left it during his last visit, wedged into a gap beside the command station where it wouldn't slide away during maneuvers. Evan retrieved it and activated the screen, scrolling through pages of notes he'd compiled over dozens of hours of exploration and experimentation.

  The Maker symbols still challenged him. He'd made progress, enough to operate the basic systems, but the language remained more intuitive than understood. Context helped. Repetition helped. The thousands of pages of documentation, diagrams, schematics, and text would take years to fully comprehend.

  He compared his notes to the navigation menu, looking for anything that might suggest a log or recording of the ship's trajectory. He spent nearly half an hour guessing at controls, drilling down into menus until he finally found it.

  The tactical display shifted, the real-time sensor data replaced by recorded information. A timeline appeared along the bottom edge of the projection, symbols marking intervals that he'd learned to recognize as time units. The display showed the Ascendant's position at the leftmost point, a small representation of the ship surrounded by empty space.

  Evan slid his finger along the command station's control surface, and the timeline began to scroll.

  The ship moved backward through space, retracing its path in reverse. The stars shifted around it as hours of travel compressed into seconds. He increased the playback speed, watching the sensor record unfold at ten times normal rate, the Ascendant sliding backward through the void like a film running in reverse.

  Nothing.

  Nothing.

  Nothing.

  Then something.

  Evan's hand shot to the controls, freezing the playback. The display showed a contact marker, large and stationary, positioned maybe a thousand kilometers from the Ascendant's recorded trajectory. The ship had blown past it during its journey, close enough for the sensors to register its presence, far enough that no collision had occurred.

  He studied the marker. The size indicator suggested something substantial. Not another ship, at least not one of normal scale. A station, maybe. An asteroid with enough mass to register on the sensor grid.

  Or something else entirely.

  Evan opened the star map.

  The projection expanded, filling the space before the command station with a three-dimensional representation of local space. Stars and planets materialized as points and spheres of light, orbital paths traced in thin lines that curved through the void. The map was beautiful in its complexity, a record of astronomical knowledge that had taken millennia to compile.

  He found the Ascendant's current position, then traced the ship's path backward to the point where the sensor contact had appeared.

  Empty space.

  According to the map, nothing existed at those coordinates. No planets. No stations. No debris fields or asteroid clusters. Just vacuum stretching between distant stars.

  Evan stared at the display, his jaw tightening.

  The map was four thousand years old.

  The realization settled over him with uncomfortable weight. This record had been compiled during the age of the Makers, when their civilization had spanned the galaxy and their technology had reached heights that modern empires still couldn't replicate. Whatever the Ascendant's sensors had detected, it hadn't existed when this map was created.

  Planets didn't just appear from nothing. Stars didn't spontaneously generate. But stations could be built. Outposts established. Civilizations could rise and spread and construct things in spaces that had once held nothing but vacuum.

  Had he passed a station?

  Had they seen him?

  Evan's hands moved across the controls, calling up the sensor record again. He studied the contact marker, trying to extract more detail from the limited information available. The object had been stationary relative to the surrounding stars. No movement. No apparent power signature that the sensors had flagged as threatening.

  But the Ascendant had been moving fast. Very fast. The brief window of proximity might not have given the sensors time to compile a complete picture.

  Were they chasing him now?

  He checked the real-time tactical display again, searching for any sign of pursuit. The sensor sphere remained clear. No contacts approaching from the direction he'd come.

  That didn't mean much. If whoever operated that station had spotted him, they might be taking time to prepare. Launching ships. Calculating intercept trajectories. Planning an approach that would catch him off guard.

  He couldn't stay here.

  Evan pulled up the ship's power status. The indicators showed four separate bars, which he had taken to mean the ship was powered by four engines, or at least had four units that held energy for the ship to use.

  The Ascendant had been cruising through empty space for days now. Minimal power draw. No combat. No shields. Just the basic systems required to keep the ship functional.

  The reserves should have replenished completely. Three of the power supplies appeared to be at full strength. The fourth remained stubbornly empty.

  Four thousand years old.

  The thought returned with new implications. The Makers had built technology that modern civilizations couldn't replicate, but even their engineering had limits. Systems degraded over time. Components wore out. The Ascendant had survived millennia of dormancy, but that didn't mean it had emerged unchanged.

  Maybe the power network was damaged. Maybe one of the reactors wasn't functioning at full capacity. Maybe the problem was something else entirely, something he couldn't diagnose without understanding far more about the ship's engineering than he currently did.

  Either way, he couldn't fix it now.

  And he couldn't stay where he was.

  Changing course would help. Anyone who had monitored his passage would assume constant trajectory, constant velocity. The predictable behavior of a ship traveling on autopilot. If he altered his direction now, any pursuit based on projected intercept points would find empty space instead of a target.

  But what if he hit something else?

  The map was four thousand years old. Outdated by an amount of time that made the concept almost meaningless. He'd already passed one object that wasn't supposed to exist, not to mention flying right into the aftermath of another fleet battle before that. There could be other structures. Stations and outposts and debris that had accumulated over millennia, none of it reflected in the Ascendant's ancient records.

  He needed somewhere safe. Somewhere he could stop and assess the situation. Somewhere off the beaten path, where the chances of stumbling into another unknown contact were minimal.

  Evan opened the star map again and began searching.

  The projection rotated at his touch, stars and planets sliding past as he scanned the local region. He needed a world marked as uninhabited, somewhere the ancient Makers had cataloged as empty of civilization. Such a place might have changed in so much time, but the odds were better than traveling blind through space that the map couldn't accurately represent.

  He found a candidate five hours away at top speed. A rocky world orbiting a dim red star. It must have been uninhabited when the star map was made. The planet had no name. Not even a designation. It was just a huge, round chunk of rock in the middle of nowhere.

  It was perfect.

  Maybe.

  It would take five hours to get there. A long time to travel through potentially hostile space with an outdated map and a power system that might be failing. But the alternative was staying motionless, waiting for whoever might be tracking him to come looking for the ship that had blazed past their doorstep.

  Evan set the course, the ship generating the path through space he needed to follow. He used the helm controls to put the ship on the right vector and pushed the throttle forward.

  The deck felt like it tilted beneath him as the ship fell into motion. The vibration returned, subtle but present, the Ascendant building speed as it began its journey toward the barren world.

  Evan watched the sensor display for a long moment, waiting for contacts to appear. Waiting for pursuit to materialize from the direction he'd come. Waiting for something to go wrong.

  The display remained clear.

  He rose from the command station and made his way back to the lift shaft. The bridge felt different now, less a sanctuary and more a temporary refuge. He had questions that needed answers. Problems that needed solutions. None of which he could fix from here. Not now.

  Right now, he needed to get back to Earth. To Harris and Sadie, waiting in the motel room. To a world that had become infinitely more complicated than he'd ever imagined, but still felt like home.

  Evan descended to Deck Two and made his way to the transfer chamber. The shallow alcove waited for him, its green grid pulsing softly against the darker material of the recess.

  He stepped into position and triggered the return sequence.

  At least he already knew his next move.

  22

  Evan blinked against the sudden shift in light as the motel room materialized around him and his consciousness settled back into his earthen body. The green grid faded from his vision, leaving him sitting on the edge of the bed with the effigy in his hands, the toy starship's weight impossibly mundane after everything he'd just experienced aboard the real vessel.

  Harris watched him from the other bed, his expression tight with concern. Sadie stood near the window, the Glock still held properly at her side.

  "Everything okay?" Harris asked. "You were only gone a few minutes."

  "Everything's good." Evan set the effigy carefully on the nightstand. "The ship's been traveling on autopilot since I left it. No pursuit that I could detect. I set a new course toward a planet that should be uninhabited. Five hours to get there. I need to be back on the Ascendant before it arrives. We can't have the ship showing up at an unknown location without someone at the helm."

  "So what do we do in the meantime?" Sadie asked, putting the Glock down on the dresser.

  Evan didn't answer immediately. Instead, he moved to his backpack and dug through the contents until his fingers found the prepaid phone Adam had programmed with his number. The cheap plastic device felt inadequate for what it represented—a connection to an organization that might be his best chance at survival.

  He held up the phone so Harris and Sadie could see it.

  "I'm going to step outside," he said. "Make a call."

  Harris's eyebrows rose slightly, but he didn't ask questions.

  The motel room door clicked shut behind him. The parking lot stretched out below the second floor walkway where he stood. Maybe a dozen vehicles were scattered across the faded asphalt, including the Range Rover. Beyond the lot, traffic moved along the main road in the steady rhythm of a city going about its business, oblivious to the cosmic drama playing out in a run-down motel on its outskirts.

  Evan leaned against the metal railing, pulled his phone out of his pocket and scrolled through the phone's sparse contact list. One entry. No name, just a number that Adam had entered before handing the device back to him.

  He stared at the screen for a long moment. Once he made this call, there was no going back. He'd be committing to something he didn't fully understand, trusting people he'd known for less than a day.

  But like Harris had said, he had to take a leap of faith at some point, and the Null Guard hadn't given him any reason to doubt them. Returning to the Ascendant had been a quick, firm reminder of everything he lacked: an ability to operate the ship beyond its basic capabilities, no way to communicate with others inside the Oridian Galaxy. The Ascendant had a malfunction with whatever served as a battery, and he had no one to talk to about it, no way to learn how to fix it, no allies in that distant universe.

  But he could change that.

  He pressed the call button.

  The line connected on the second ring, but the voice that answered wasn't Adam's.

  "Mr. Marshall." The tone was older, more measured, carrying an accent that Evan couldn't quite place. "How can I help you?"

  Evan's grip tightened on the phone. "Who is this? I was expecting Adam."

  "My name is Brennik Tal." A pause that felt deliberate, weighted with significance. "I'm the founder of the Null Guard. Adam reports to me, as do all our operations worldwide. I heard about what happened in Texas."

  The founder. Evan filed that information away, recalibrating his expectations for this conversation. He wasn't talking to a field operative anymore. This was leadership.

  "Then you know Adam made me an offer," Evan said carefully. "Training in the Maker language. Oridian Standard. Protection here on Earth. Some other things in exchange for me serving as liaison between your operations here and in Oridian."

  "That's right." Brennik's voice carried a note of careful interest, the tone of someone evaluating an asset. "He told me all about it. He also told me you weren't ready yet. That you needed time to think things over. Are you ready now, Mr. Marshall?"

  "Yes," Evan said. "I'm ready."

  "Good. That's very good." Something shifted in Brennik's tone—satisfaction, perhaps, or relief. "Is the Ascendant safe?"

  "Safe enough for now." Evan watched a delivery van roll past on the street below, its logo faded and unremarkable. "I set a new course toward an uninhabited planet. It'll arrive in about five hours. But I can't make any promises about the long term."

  "Understood. We'll discuss the details once you're settled." A pause. "Look across the street, Mr. Marshall. Do you see the red truck?"

  Evan scanned the opposite curb until he found a pickup truck with equipment loaded in the bed, two men in workman's uniforms visible through the windshield. The kind of vehicle you'd see at any construction site in America.

  As he watched, both men turned toward the motel. One of them raised his hand in a casual wave.

  Evan's stomach dropped.

  "How the hell did you find me?"

  "We didn't find you." Brennik's voice remained calm. "We followed you. Picked you up on the highway outside Austin and traded cars along the way, different vehicles taking point at intervals so you wouldn't notice the same headlights in your mirror. Trailed you all the way back to Nashville without you ever knowing we were there."

  Evan's mind raced back through the sixteen-hour drive. The gas stations. The rest stops. The hundred small moments where he'd let his guard down, believing himself alone and unobserved. And the whole time, the Null Guard had been right behind him.

  "Why?" The word came out harder than he intended.

  "Not to harm you." Brennik's tone softened slightly. "To protect you. You destroyed the last tracker, yes, but that doesn't make you invisible. We couldn't let you drive from Texas to Tennessee without backup, even if you didn't know it was there."

  "I never saw them. Not once."

  "That's rather the point." A hint of dry humor entered Brennik's voice. "Our people are very good at what they do, Mr. Marshall. But once we bring you in, you'll be as safe can be. Proper facilities. Trained personnel. Everything you need to become effective in the role we're offering."