A low chime sounded, accompanied by a warm glow that steadily pushed the darkness into the corners of the small cabin. Anja grunted into her pillow and rolled over, letting the light batter at her eyelids for a few indulgent seconds.

In the first years of her military service she had happened to meet one of the scientists who had worked on her genetic structure, an elderly fellow with wispy white hair who had been delighted to meet her and insisted on treating her to dinner. Near the end of the meal the slightly tipsy geneticist had launched into an impromptu treatise on their efforts to remove sleep requirements from the Valkyrie genetic profile, only to be stymied at every turn by the creeping mental instability that resulted.

They eventually were forced to lower their aim and retain the sleep requirement, albeit reduced from the human baseline. Anja always thought of the old man when she was lying half-asleep and reluctant to move, unsure whether to curse him for giving up or thank him for the moments of lethargic morning bliss between awakening and arising.

She supposed it didn’t matter much anymore.

After dealing with the logistics of hygiene and clothing, Anja slipped out of her cabin and caught a lift up to the bridge. Qktk and Jesri sat hunched over a tactical display, peering at a grid with tiny black and white markers. Qktk flicked a few eyes at her when she entered, but immediately returned his focus to the display.

Anja sighed and shook her head. Going over sensor logs of the battle at Ysl had become tedious after the first several days. Jesri had been desperate to do anything besides scrub through the feed logs again, so she had pounced the moment Qktk offhandedly mentioned an interest in Go.

Strategy games were a core part of the Valkyrie educational curriculum, and their instructors had included the ancient games alongside modern virtual combat simulations. Anja had preferred the latter, as had most of her sisters, but Jesri and a few others had retained a fascination for chess, shogi and Go that had them playing often in the downtime between missions.

Given her long years of experience Jesri had expected little challenge from the Htt. To her surprise and delight, he played their first match to a vanishingly narrow loss. Evidently the game had caught on in a huge way with his species in the far past, and in his youth Qktk had been a player of some note. He quickly demanded a rematch, playing an aggressive opening that led to Jesri’s impressed and astonished resignation.

That was three weeks ago. Since then, the two had been locked in a series of increasingly intense games that consumed the majority of their waking hours. Anja wouldn’t have minded at all, except for one unintended consequence: it left Rhuar with only one person to talk to.

“Anja!”, he shouted, waving excitedly. “Anja, come look at this! You have to see what I pulled out of the sensor logs!”

She sighed, walking over to his console just as she had every other morning since they began traveling back towards the galactic disc. She couldn’t fault him for his enthusiasm - indeed, he was the only one of them that had managed to focus on productive work for the whole trip. She just couldn’t match his relentless obsession with technical minutiae. Rhuar’s fascination with the Grand Design was understandable, she supposed, but there was a limit to how much interest she could summon for off-band hyperwave resonance traces.

Rhuar was unencumbered by such constraints. As she approached his station, he moved aside eagerly to show her his latest discovery. “Look here, see? Check out that spike in the readings there,” he gushed, tapping the screen excitedly. “Now, I know you’re thinking ‘so what, it’s just a stupid spike’, right? Well, check this out - I took the same demuxing algorithm I used to isolate that spike and checked the rest of the logs from Ysl.”

He fiddled with the console to show several more graphs. Anja scanned them disinterestedly. They all showed a prominent spike in signal with a similar falloff pattern. “Rhuar,” she sighed, “these could be anything. Pulsar noise, local broadcasts, some idiot pinging wide-spectrum-”

“Nah, not this signal,” he interrupted, ignoring Anja’s cross look at the interruption. “See, I only started looking at signal traffic because you said that Trelir fucker was talking with the Gestalt. The communication was easy to spot - tightbeam, so I couldn’t read it, but the resonant backsplash from the hyperwave conversion shunt was nice and clean. Problem is, it looked super fucky. You know how a shunt backsplash is normally all like-”

He waved his arms in what Anja supposed was a descriptive manner. She stared at him expressionlessly and did not blink.

“Right, yeah,” he said, lowering his arms awkwardly. “Point is, it didn’t look right. So I demuxed it like I mentioned earlier and found out there were two spikes, both definitely from a hyperwave shunt. But here’s the kicker: two inbound streams. Right? So I was all ‘hold on’, and compared polarity fingerprints…”

Anja continued to stare at a fixed point ahead of her as Rhuar talked. Absent any other entertainment, she had been testing how long she could remain totally immobile and expressionless before he stopped talking. So far her record was just shy of an hour, and she had cracked before he did every time.

“...absolutely can’t be a coincidence, not with that timing,” he said, looking at her expectantly.

Anja sighed. Only ten minutes today. “I’m afraid I don’t follow,” she said, quite truthfully.

Rhuar tossed his head frustratedly. “Look, it’s easy - here, here and here,” he said, pointing to the console. “Each time before an atypical error. Someone is jamming the Emissaries.”

She blinked, feeling a chill rush through her stomach. “Wait, what? When did you say that?”

He rolled his eyes. “I’ve been saying it. There’s a secondary communication stream overlaid on the main Gestalt link, but it doesn’t come from the same point of origin and it only appears sometimes. And every time it does appear, the Emissaries screw something up.” He dragged one graph to fill the screen, tracing the jagged line with an arm.

“See, this is your suit log from when you were in the bunker with Trelir. You’re talking, he’s talking a lot, Jesri’s talking, he’s talking, then he gets the transmission from Big G-”

“Please don’t give it nicknames,” Anja muttered, peering closely at the graph. She could practically hear Trelir’s oily voice overlaid on the plot, see his eye-fluttering look of ecstacy when the connection with the Gestalt came.

Rhuar shook his head in irritation. “Point is, he gets this extra transmission at the same time, then you beat the smug off his face and he cuts your leg off and tries to blow you up - and it doesn’t work.”

Anja frowned, absently scratching her knee. “I slammed him against the wall pretty hard, and Jesri shot him in the face a few times. I had assumed his transmitter was damaged.”

“Nah,” replied Rhuar, “because when he used the physical failsafe and tore his own head off, the transmitter worked just fine. Plus, look at this one - the Emissary ship. It catches us belly-up and has all the time in the world to aim its bullshit bendy-space cannon. It gets another one of these transmissions and whoosh - misses us.”

“The next shot was right on target,” Anja pointed out.

Rhuar grinned and flounced his tail. “Ah, but it was late. Another transmission hit before it fired, and the time between cannon charge and discharge was noticeably longer than with the first shot. It wasn’t a lot, but it was the difference between taking the shot in normal space versus hyperspace.”

Anja grimaced. “Which landed us outside of the galaxy.”

“Which is better than being dead,” Rhuar pointed out.

“After three weeks stuck in hyperspace I think that may be debatable. Anyway,” sighed Anja, “this is actually interesting. It means we have an ally of sorts, one familiar with the Gestalt and capable of interfering with its Emissaries.” She crossed her arms, eyes flitting between the spikes on the graphs. “We would be dead without them. If what you’re saying is true, each one of those transmissions saved our lives.”

Rhuar nodded gravely. “Whoever this is, they have an impressive ability to coordinate against the Gestalt. The disruptions were always precisely timed and subtle enough that they didn’t appear to be anything more than a simple malfunction. Quiet, careful and effective.”

Anja nodded. “Sounds like people we could use,” she agreed. “I would very much like to talk to them.”

“Actually, I think they’d very much like to talk to you,” Rhuar replied.

Anja shot him a confused look. “What do you mean?”

Rhuar jumped back in front of the console, pulling up another dataset. “So, I mentioned that I had spotted a different point of origin for the transmissions. Trouble is, I shouldn’t have been able to see that so easily. This sort of tightbeam communication is easy to disguise if you want to mask your origin. Like, I can’t derive the Gestalt’s origin from the sensor records of its transmissions. But I can see the origin of our mystery buddy’s signal.”

“Why?”, Anja asked, crossing her fingers for a concise and comprehensible answer.

He shrugged. “Because they wanted us to. There’s some carefully tuned noise in the signal confinement that lets the origin vector leak out.”

“But then the Gestalt could also trace their position,” Anja frowned. “So it would likely be a disposable relay rather than their true location. This may be a dead end.”

Rhuar bounced on his paws excitedly. “No, the Emissary ship couldn’t see it. The leak was structured such that it only propagated back towards the original source vector. The recipient of the transmission would never be able to trace it. It’s brilliant, and would be really, really hard to pull off. The grasp of hyperspace field theory involved… It would be like trying to strip and rebuild your hyperspace coils while you were in hyperspace. In zero gravity. With your teeth.” He grinned up at her, tongue lolling out of his mouth. “They did it three times. I think I may want to meet these guys even more than you do.”

“Mmhmm,” replied Anja absently, already lost in thought. “Did you identify the origin system? How long would it take us to get there?”

Rhuar grinned wider. “That part was easy, they’re at an unlisted transit station on the rim. Well, Grand Design knows about it, but I’ve never seen it on a map before. It’s called Nic, ah,” he frowned, cocking his head. “Nicnevin? Just two days out, and it’s within our fuel margin. I adjusted course as soon as I realized what the transmissions meant.”

Anja raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”, she purred, her voice suddenly chilly. Rhuar’s grin withered and died. “It is not customary for an ensign to redirect a ship without consulting the captain, you know.”

“I, uh,” stammered Rhuar, but Anja smiled and waved him off. The cloud of ominous intent that had swirled around her disappeared in an instant.

“It is fine because you were right,” she said dismissively. “We have to check this out. I like independent action, Rhuar,” she said, “as long as it’s correct action.”

“Yes, sir,” he managed, still off-balance from the rapid shift in tone. Anja walked over to Jesri and Qktk, leaving Rhuar to his research. He shivered, then began browsing through signal traces once more.

“Nicnevin?”, frowned Jesri, looking up from her game. Qktk flitted a few eyes irritatedly at Anja, studying the game board. Anja was never an aficionado of the game like Jesri, but she was familiar enough with it to know that Qktk was losing. “I’ve never been there, but I’ve heard of it before. I think they used to stage rim prospecting groups out of that area, it was kind of a backwater.”

“Everywhere is a backwater now,” grumbled Anja. “But I am inclined to take that as a positive. Less commerce, less traffic, less chance of the station being overrun by who-knows-what.” She shrugged. “Probably why our mysterious benefactors chose to set up there in the first place.”

Jesri nodded. “It’d be helpful if the port’s fuel stores were intact. A cruiser isn’t the hardest ship to keep fueled, but it does run through a fair bit of it. If we were able to top the tanks off we wouldn’t have to worry about it again for years.”

“I would not worry about that,” Anja said dryly. “Somehow I think running out of fuel is too calm a fate for us. Given the number of times we have nearly died since finding the Grand Design, worrying about the state of our fuel reserves a year down the road seems premature.”

“Fair,” Jesri chuckled. “And you’re sure it’s a good idea to just stroll up to the station and say hello? The only thing we really know about these folks is that they’re capable, which is great if they’re disposed to be friendly. If not…”

“Then we would not be here in the first place,” Anja finished for her. “If they had wanted us dead they could have simply not intervened. If you have a spare hour or two ask Rhuar about it, he can run you through the details. Actually...” she said, an impish grin tugging at her lips. “Ensign Rhuar! Come over here!”, she yelled. “Jesri and Qktk would like to be briefed on your findings. Please make sure to start from the beginning, I want them brought up to speed on everything.”

“You monster,” Jesri whispered, a look of horror spreading over her face.

Anja smiled. “Crybaby. Have fun!”

Rhuar came up to the stunned duo just as Anja was leaving, her hair flouncing from the happy bounce in her step. “I’m going to get her for that,” Jesri muttered.

“What?”, asked Rhuar, clearing the Go board from the console display and calling up a dense series of graphs and reports. “Whatever it is, can it wait a little bit? We’ve got a lot to cover.”

Qktk and Jesri gave him sullen looks, but were defenseless against the beaming grin on Rhuar’s face.

“...it’s nothing,” Jesri sighed.

“Okay, great!”, he cheered. “Now, how much do you two know about hyperwave signal analysis?”

Compared to the weeks of aimless tedium leading up to Rhuar’s discovery, the two days before their arrival at Nicnevin passed quickly. Anja and Jesri busied themselves with a full supply inventory in case there was an opportunity for trade with the inhabitants of the station, while Qktk had been pressed to assist Rhuar in running a wholly unnecessary systems diagnostic.

It was scant hours before their scheduled arrival and Jesri was hurrying to tally the contents of a medical storeroom far to the fore of the ship. She re-sealed two small boxes of adhesive bandages and placed them in her growing pile of salvaged goods, diminutive cousin to the much larger pile of junk accumulating on the floor. Out of all the supplies on the ship, it seemed that medicines were the least likely to remain usable after five millennia on the shelf. It was frustrating, but she couldn’t precisely fault the manufacturers for failing to anticipate the end of human civilization.

The last items squared away, she straightened up and sighed. More than anything, she felt a bit lost. She had never forgotten about the fall of humanity or the impending destruction of the universe during her long years traveling, but she hadn’t spent much thought on it either. Who would bring it up? It was like living on the edge of a volcano, on top of a fault line, around a star on the brink of nova - it was there, if anyone bothered to look at it, but what could you do but keep living?

Of course, Anja’s revelation about the Grand Design’s whereabouts had returned the scenario to prominence in her mind. Suddenly it was an addressable problem. Find the ship, recover the weapon, kill the enemy, save the universe. Yet there was no weapon after all, and in its absence even Anja seemed to concede they had no chance of confronting the Gestalt directly - not that she seemed discomfited by that admission. In fact, her sister seemed to be more optimistic and motivated since her injury than Jesri had ever seen her.

She shook her head. She wasn’t Anja, and although she was cautiously hopeful at the prospect of meeting these mysterious allies she could summon only questions when her thoughts dwelled on them. If they had the ability to disrupt the Gestalt, why had they not acted until now? If they were waiting for the Grand Design to appear, were they pinning their hopes on recovering the weapon as well? What would they say when they found out it was a ruse?

They were not the bearers of good news, nor of resources useful to the fight. As powerful as their ship was against the ragtag warlords and tin-pot monarchs that infested humanity’s moldering corpse, they were helpless against even one Emissary. They had no intelligence to offer, no secret weapons. Just two old soldiers and two naive merchants, strutting around a relic and trying to ignore all of the dead bodies. Jesri sighed and walked back into the hall, making her way towards the bridge. Sometimes you just had to wait for life to open up more options and hope you survived to see them.

She was just so tired.

Qktk and Rhuar were huddled around the pilot’s console on the bridge, although it had grown considerably as Rhuar tacked on monitors, spare consoles and miscellaneous diagnostic equipment in a loose semicircle around his duty station. Although he could comfortably stay connected to the shipjack for hours at a time now, he was still forced to spend much of his time disconnected and therefore needed an alternative control and monitoring setup.

Rhuar flitted between three screens pulsing with graphs and gauges, making minute adjustments as they neared the final reemergence from hyperspace. They had last dropped out a day ago to run some maintenance on the overtaxed drive coils and reconfirm their bearings. Qktk found himself wondering when Rhuar had last slept, as every time he made his way up to the bridge he seemed to have found some new system to triple-check in preparation for their arrival.

They both looked up as Jesri walked onto the bridge, giving them a wan smile. Rhuar was harder to read, but Qktk was sure Jesri hadn’t been sleeping properly. After spending weeks pitting himself against her on the gameboard he had become quite adept at reading her mood.

“Hey, Jesri,” said Rhuar, waving an arm. “Ready for arrival?”

She rolled her eyes. “No, please, let’s stay in hyperspace for another month.”

“Can’t do that!”, responded Rhuar cheerfully, either oblivious or choosing to ignore her sarcasm. “We’re running nearly empty here. If there’s no fuel at Nicnevin then we’re going to have to take the Leviathan out to find more somewhere else.”

He broke off as Anja strode onto the bridge, her uniform looking sharp and her face vibrant. “Oh good,” she said, “everyone is already here.”

“I cleared my schedule,” Qktk deadpanned, earning a quirk of Jesri’s lips. Anja gave him the slightest of acknowledging nods and walked over to the command dais, sliding into her chair.

“Ensign Rhuar, prepare for arrival,” she called out. “Our sensors outrange the transit station’s, drop in a bit early and keep signal silence. I want to buy us a minute to observe the situation before we have to start talking. Will our fuel reserves permit an exit at the edge of our sensor envelope?”

Rhuar grabbed the shipjack and plugged it in, bowing his head for a moment before answering. “Yes,” he said flatly. “That should be fine. Strap in, I’ll start bringing us up now.”

Qktk and Jesri found their chairs and fastened their restraints just as the first hints of starlight began to limn the viewports above them. Qktk settled back, but soon found himself leaning forward unconsciously in anticipation. “Stupid,” he muttered quietly, settling back again and wondering what he was so excited about. It wasn’t as if he had anything to add to talks with their mysterious allies.

Jesri looked over at Qktk, seeing the small Htt muttering to himself. She too had learned something of her opponent’s tics - he was anxious, frustrated. She sighed. It was hardly inappropriate. Rhuar was a statue, just as he always was when jacked in. Apart from the occasional twitch of an ear or bristle of fur, he simply stared blankly ahead, seeing far more than any eye could show him.

Anja… She looked every inch the captain. Leaning forwards eagerly but keeping her posture casual, her face composed but still somehow vivid with excitement. She looked like one of the freewheeling ship captains from a viz-drama, daring the future to try and overwhelm her. Sometimes Jesri wondered if they were truly forged from the same template.

“Here we go,” said Rhuar, tensing and bracing his legs. “Exit in three, two, one-”

A wash of light rippled over the viewports, dissolving into hazy wisps that drifted off like steam. The starfield was properly ablaze now that they were in a galactic arm, doubly so because they were facing coreward. This far out Jesri couldn’t see the transit station with the naked eye, although her console promptly informed her that it was around a twenty-minute sublight burn ahead of them.

“Report,” said Anja tersely.

“Looks like a transit station from here,” Rhuar said unhelpfully, taking a moment to scan through sensor feeds. “Hmm. High thermals. Uncommonly active, especially for a station nobody I know has ever heard of.”

“I’m not sure if that’s good or bad,” said Jesri flatly. “At least it’s still in one piece.”

“No ship traffic,” Rhuar continued, a note of consternation creeping into his voice. “Now, that is a bit strange. Normally a station with this level of activity would have queues of ships lined up outside the docks.”

“No response to our arrival?”, asked Anja.

Rhuar gave a slight shake of his head. “Nah. We’re pretty dark, this far out, and our cross-section is minimized. They might have seen the splash from our exit if they happened to be looking in this direction, but they’re not beaming any active pings our way.”

“Hm,” sniffed Anja, considering. “Well, take us in. Let me know if you see any movement.”

“Aye sir,” Rhuar said distantly, his ears twitching as the engines engaged with a low hum. They sat in tense silence for one minute, then two, then five. Suddenly, Rhuar’s head snapped up to stare at something in the distance. “Multiple launch from the station,” he said, alarm threading through his voice.

Anja blinked in surprise. “Missiles?”

“No, sorry,” Rhuar said, information flickering onto the large tactical display. “Ships. Can’t see much about them from this distance besides size and bearing.”

Two red dots peeled away from the station, curving outwards before changing course to build speed towards their position. Statistics streamed onto their personal consoles, detailing the specifications of the ships approaching them.

Qktk trilled in consternation. “They look like they’re heading this way. I thought you said they couldn’t see us with their sensors?”

“They shouldn’t be able to, the stations only have civilian traffic control suites,” Jesri frowned.

“Hm, they…” Anja said, frowning. “They are rather large for civilian ships. Actually, they look like-” The ship pinged and refreshed the specification list to add a flurry of additional information, pictures of the hull rendering in fine detail. The tactical display wavered, both incoming red dots shifting to a royal blue. Anja looked up at Jesri, confusion on her face. “What the hell?”

“Uh, guys?”, Rhuar said nervously, “I’m getting IFF and hailing pings from the lead ship. Denying response so far like you ordered.” His eyes widened. “You want to explain what’s going on?”

A chime sounded and a light flashed at Anja’s arm. Jesri noticed a slight tremor in her hand as she punched a control, replacing the tactical display with an incoming video feed.

The display changed to show a woman on the bridge of a ship, her stance practically vibrating with anger as she glared into the camera. She was dressed in an immaculate grey and black uniform with a golden falcon spreading its wings on each shoulder board. Her curly blonde hair framed pinched grey-green eyes, fury radiating from every line of her face.

“Unidentified vessel, this is the TNS Cormorant,” she said, her voice low and ominous. “Explain who you are and how you located this station or we will open fire. You have thirty seconds to comply.”

Jesri looked over at Anja, knowing the wide-eyed shock she saw was mirrored on her own face. The dashing captain from moments before had vanished to leave her sister looking younger, almost vulnerable. Anja toggled their outgoing video feed and spoke softly, a faint quaver unmistakeable in her voice.

“Ellie?”