“And the Breakers came, and gave their Oath,

But they chose not the way of the People.

Their words were naught but wind in the hills,

As hollow and empty as their Souls.

Thus the Breakers cheated and lied,

slew and scattered, maimed and murdered.

And from their actions were the Mangi born.”

The Curse of the Breakers

Dominus Valerius Artifex, Eternal Emperor

Somewhere deep in Unknown Space

Loading cargo into the Crown’s Vigor was more of an operation than Artifex had bargained for. The corvette was more warship than cargo ship, so its actual capacity was relatively small. The shuttle bay was barely large enough to house the shuttle, and the corresponding cargo bay on the opposite arm of the warship was equally tight. Ultimately, Artifex and Titus had to load the shuttle by hand since the warehouse the materials were stored was completely offline and powerless. Then, they had to dock the shuttle to the cargo bay of the warship. Mostly this was so that there was a connecting walkway between the two ships for convenience. From there, the photogravitic grapnels could be used to lift and carry the heavy ingots and crates into the cargo bay.

“I miss having people for this,” said Artifex when they finally finished. “Was that the last of it?”

“We are done,” confirmed Titus. “I’ll go load the shuttle and do a final system check.”

Artifex nodded. “I’ll button up the cargo bay, and start doing my pre-flight checklist. If all goes well, we’ll be off the Sphere and re-calibrating our astrogation system in thirty minutes.”

The Crown’s Vigor looked unchanged from the outside after two weeks of work, but the inside was much improved. Rotted carpets, disintegrated chairs and bedding, and ruined equipment had all been unceremoniously dumped in a corner of the hangar. Most of the staterooms were completely sealed off, and the few that were still unsealed were being used to store every bit of usable tools and equipment that could be salvaged from the hangar and his personal lab. Another stateroom had both medical pods and all four drones Artifex made a mental note to come back for a more thorough salvage operation in the future. The massive fragment of the Sphere had trillions of tons of materials in its construction, with enough finished goods and salvage-ready equipment that he could easily rebuild entire fleets from this shell alone.

“Manpower,” mumbled Artifex as he walked into the cockpit. “It always comes down to manpower. I need people to gather resources, but need gear to equip people. To get gear I need money, and to get money I need resources.”

After strapping himself in with a five point safety harness, and double-checking the emergency tell-tales, Artifex began flipping switches. The dashboard indicator lights began to light up, and a worrying number of them were amber and red. The crucial, life-or-death ones were all green, however, and that was what mattered. They didn’t even have space suits, as the seals on the ones in storage had all gone bad. A massive heads up display was projected up on the front wall above the dashboard, a display from the front of the warship from the driver’s perspective on the wall behind the holograph. The display was useful only when docking and undocking, after which it could be swapped to a variety of views of the solar system from the ship’s sensors. Most of those were offline, too, since the sensors were damaged.

In the front of the ship, the massive blue and black orb that hovered between the two arms of the ship began to glow a deep, ominous blue. It throbbed even as it sucked power in from dimensions that couldn’t be located without intense amounts of math and some mind-bending physics. The ship began to hover, and the four legs that had held the ancient craft for centuries pulled up into its bottom, before the skin hid any trace that the legs had ever existed.

Titus came into the cockpit and strapped himself into the co-pilot chair. “All buttoned up, and we’re all good… no, we’re as good as we’re going to get.”

“We’re taking off in three, two, one,” said Artifex.

The Crown’s Vigor exited the hangar through a wide bay door into the massive cavernous space above the ruined palace. They flew past the cold, dark artificial sun and into a wide access tunnel large enough for a frigate-class warship and small cargo cogs. The massive blast doors that had once protected this tunnel were open and unpowered, the protective fields that had once prevented atmospheric bleed off were no longer operational. The slow bleed of atmosphere from the relatively small hole, and probably dozens of other smaller penetrations, meant that the shard of the Sphere would eventually become an airless hulk. Only its own gravity and the fact that most of the ‘sky’ of the shard was metal prevented the continent-sized fragment from having already lost all of its gasses.

Once cleared of the fragment, the corvette’s sensors were finally able to fully expand and take in the information about their location to give them a clue as to where they were. Titus remotely operated the navigation computer from the co-pilot’s chair so that he wouldn’t need to unstrap and move. Except for the pilot and co-pilot acceleration couches, none of the remaining workstations in the cockpit had usable seats. While the shell remained, the rotted cushions and safety straps had been discarded in the hangar.

“Cen X-3… GX 301-2… and… Vela X-1. Oh, there’s Hercules X-1. Calibrating now,” narrated Titus as the astrogation sensors located and identified pulsars.

Meanwhile, Artifex worked his own set of sensors, looking far more locally. His sensors looked for signs of local stars, planets, and stellar objects, as well as sweeping known communication mediums for any signs of civilization. Artifex’ face deepened into a frown as more and more readouts came back.

“Ah, there we are,” said Titus. “We’re in -”

“Swiftes System. Or what’s left of it. We didn’t go very far,” interrupted Artifex.

“Right. How’d you…? Nevermind, I see the outer system planets, Mares and Cibus. Anyway, we’re much further out than Cibus now.”

Artifex said nothing, only pulling up a rendering of the system on the large screen above the dashboard. Where a star had once been was now an expanding ball of hot gasses. Most of the inner planets had been been core mined to make the first ring around the Swiftes star, but those hollowed out husks were destroyed, as were the two gas giants beyond them. Despite the lack of a star, the heat from the shattered star was still enough to provide a dim illumination, and the myriad of colors left a beautiful, if not spooky, display.

“So we have a problem, Imperator,” said Titus.

“Valerius,” corrected Artifex.

“Not onboard your warship, sir,” said Titus.

Artifex nodded, conceeding the point. “So the problem?”

“Obviously, the Hypercube was destroyed with the Sphere. But the secondary and tertiary Manifold Waypoints in the system are somewhere…” Titus waved his hands at the display of the destroyed star system, “...in there. We can probably find them, but with so many defensive systems offline, we wouldn’t survive getting to them.”

“Much less through them,” said Artifex in agreement. “That still leaves, what, two or three useful outer system Waypoints?”

“There were three beyond the tertiary Waypoint. Two were fully explored, while the third only found a single Way. At the time, the system was unsettled, and using an outer system Waypoint was too inconvenient. Unfortunately, one of the three is inside the edge of the danger zone for those hot gasses. The second is on the far side of the star system, and we don’t have enough supplies to get there before we run out of food and / or air. That leaves only the third, leading to the empty system.”

“That doesn’t leave us a lot of choice, does it,” stated Artifex. “The empty system, does it have mapped Waypoints?”

“Two,” said Titus. “It was marked ‘militarily insignificant’, and we kept token patrols to watch out for smugglers and expeditionary military forces. Realistically, with a seven or eight month transit time from the Waypoint in Swiftes to the inner system, it was hardly considered a threat. But I digress. Two Waypoints, both with Ways to minor inhabited systems, one by a single translation, the other by two.”

“Which route is faster?”

“Well, the faster route may not be the better route. If we take the faster route, we’ll get to a system with three inhabited systems, and multiple Waypoints leading to major trade routes. If we go the longer route, we’ll hit a smaller colony with a full space station, with one Waypoint leading to a different, smaller trade route.”

“You’re worried about hostile local space fleets?” guessed Artifex with a grin.

“Shouldn’t I be? We’re in what can only generously be called a small ‘war’ ship, with no weapons or defenses to speak of, no crew and the barest of necessities,” said Titus.

“Let’s reason this out then,” said Artifex. “If the Imperium, or parts of it, have survived, then this region, which was near the heart of the Imperium, should be fairly safe and not too jumpy about small ships. If it didn’t survive, however, then they probably formed a local government.”

“You know as well as I how paranoid small, multi-planet governments were. We conquered enough of them, after all,” said Titus.

“It’s not paranoia if I’m actually coming to get you,” said Artifex dryly. “Let’s go with the smaller system. A single planet might still be paranoid, but in a remote location they’ll be hungry for materials. More importantly, we can go to the space station and work on refits without having to worry the planetary government with a toothless-but-scary-looking warship. Besides...”

“You’re thinking about conquering the planet, aren’t you,” said Titus.

“No point in letting them see me coming,” said Artifex.

The Crown’s Vigor turned away from the mausoleum that was the shard of Sphere, where by all rights, the Eternal Emperor Artifex should have died. The blue and black orb held invisibly between the two arms of the v-shaped warship glowed brighter as untold amounts of energy from foldspace coursed through it. The manifold engine, obeying laws native to a different dimension of the universe, or maybe a different universe, began to pull the warship away. Faster and faster, the ship accelerated at a pace not seen since the Formican War centuries previous. The inhabitants of the craft barely registered the speed, internally experiencing only 1.5 gravities. The hum of the gravitational generators barely registered, while the corvette leapt towards the Waypoint at an incredible pace.

Unlike non-Imperium ships, the Crown’s Vigor didn’t need to slow down as it approached the Waypoint. Manifold translation was not in human hands. The polaritonic neural network calculated and re-calculated the exact second of translation, allowing the ship to translate into the transdimensional fold without needing to slow down. It would easily save weeks of time, by eliminating the acceleration and deceleration burns of typical translations.

Three weeks after leaving the fragment of the Imperium Sphere, Artifex translated out of his ruined capital star system. Known as Artifex the Builder to his own, and Artifex the Destroyer to his enemies, the Eternal Emperor was once more set loose upon an unsuspecting universe.