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—THE TRAVELER'S CREED

Forty thousand years ago, humanity constructed a fleet of arkships and fled a dying Earth in a mass exodus. Traveling near lightspeed, these ships were capable of crossing vast distances within the span of just a few generations. Humanity sought only one thing: to find a new home among the stars.

Many of these ships were lost in the void of space, but the fortunate few discovered habitable worlds in the Centauri Cluster. Over the course of the next 25,000 years, these human settlers flourished and evolved into thousands of cultures and advanced civilizations. They are known as the Celestials.

But previously lost arkships carrying humans from the twenty-third century continue to arrive in the Cluster even now. Upon arrival, the passengers of these ships are assigned protected worlds, where they take shelter from a universe that has long since left them behind. To Celestials, these humans are seen as primitive, relics of a bygone age, living in the shadow of their own legacy. They have no future.

CHAPTER ONE

THE ONE THING Finbar Charles Louis Griffin Jalgori-Tobu (Finn to his friends) promised himself was that under no circumstances would he ever scream. He wasn't going to give his captors the satisfaction. So he remained silent as their sharp knife sliced through his soiled one-piece thermal regulator undersuit, gritting his teeth every time the blade nicked his skin. Nor did he flinch as his now-naked body was shoved to the ground and his wrists and ankles were bound. He refused to grunt in pain as they dragged him up to the rooftop landing pad, deliberately knocking his shins on the metal stairs as they went. His jaw remained resolutely shut as they dumped him on the utilitarian floor of the sleek squad-deployment plane waiting on the pad.

Finn didn't know if it was the fury he felt at his betrayal or the stubbornness that his family always chided him for, but he managed to keep his mouth closed throughout the whole flight as he endured the humiliation of being used as a footstool for their boots—a footstool they had fun kicking. 

A couple of hours after takeoff, when they were in Anoosha's southern hemisphere and cruising eight kilometers above the Camurdy Mountains, the plane's rear ramp hinged down, letting in a blast of freezing wind. His captors pulled on their oxygen masks and laughed as he sucked down the perilously thin air. He even managed not to scream as they hauled him onto the ramp. One last kick sent him tumbling off the end into the clear night sky.

He saw the delta shape of the plane silhouetted against the vibrant clouds of the Poseidon Nebula, which filled the skies above Anoosha. A bright orange strobe flared underneath the fuselage as it dwindled away. Then he was hurtling down at terminal velocity toward the jagged snow-capped mountains below.

Finn started screaming.

* * *

THE STARSHIP ALUMATA was an elegant sculpture of polished silver-white metal, consisting of a cylindrical engineering section two hundred meters long that sprouted sinuous copper-shaded spokes to connect it to a broad life support ring. Its fuselage was inset by the shallow contours of photothermal radiators, glowing an outlandish grenadine as they disposed of excess heat from the internal machinery.

Sitting on a couch in the lounge at the forward end of the ring, where the bulkhead was a curving window of ultrabonded diamond, Makaio-Yalbo, Archon of the Now and Forever Queen of Wynid, stared out at the dramatic vista provided by the Pillar of Zeus nebula in which the starship was immersed. The nearby star, Tinaja, was the only visible light source, and behind it the extravagant blues and greens and purples of the cloud strands swirled in complex ragged patterns that took millennia to dance around each other as they slowly expanded outward from their ancient explosion core.

Visits to the Tinaja system were rare for Makaio-Yalbo. His assignment as one of the queen's spymasters was to cover the Kelowan system. Yet this meeting had been agreed upon five years ago, after he'd received an unexpected message from Olomo, Archon of the Heresy Dominion, whose brief was similar to his own. It was a heavy investment in time. The trip through the Gates of Heaven that connected Kelowan and Tinaja had taken only a couple of weeks relativistic dilation time on board the Alumata, while nearly two years had elapsed outside. Then after they arrived at Tinaja, they'd taken ten days to fly just over an astronomical unit, 150 million kilometers, from the Gate of Heaven to this gas giant Lagrangian point—a location so remote that no one would ever observe them by accident. Such an in-person meeting between dominion archons was extremely rare; normally their business was conducted by secure encrypted messages at pre-agreed drops. The rarity was the reason Makaio-Yalbo had accepted the invitation without question. The Heresy archon clearly believed it was exceptionally important—in itself a worrying notion.