We traveled for nearly a week from Leval towards Coral, reaching an unimportant system partway between called N48FL11. Once in the system, we sailed to a previously untraveled exit. There, the captain made a speech.

  “Crew, we are about to sail into the unknown, the blackest of the black. It will be dangerous, testing the resolve of each of us. I have faith, however, that we will not only survive, but succeed in our mission of discovery. We will push the limits and break past them. We will empower our great empire with knowledge and power. We are the Bluejay, and we will not back down!”

  Looking around the mess hall, I watched as nervous looks transitioned to ones of determination. I felt it, too—the belief that we were doing something meaningful. Yes, there was a risk, but most things in life worth striving for involved risk.

  Soon, we crossed into the major current. There was no signal of this change, but the captain made another announcement, this one simpler—“We have officially left Erythralian space.”

  When I began my journey by fleeing the palace, this wasn’t what I expected. Honestly, I expected to be caught that first day. Now, though, I was proud of the life I had built. This was just another adventure, but one that could literally change maps.

  “You look pensive,” commented Jara as she sat down next to me.

  I shrugged. “Just thinking of everything that happened to get me to this point.”

  “Yeah, I get that,” she replied, dropping into silent contemplation herself.

  My shift was uneventful—we would be spending a few days in this current, and there wasn’t much going on in the deep black. That evening, some of us were playing cards when Ess spoke up.

  “So, how is everyone feeling about our mission now that we’ve officially left behind everything we’ve ever known?”

  Ani snorted. “That’s one way to put it, I guess.” Her face turned contemplative after that, though, matching the rest of ours.

  Isa seemed to come to a conclusion first. “Yeah, I’m still excited.” She punctuated her declaration by bouncing in her seat a little.

  “Well I’m definitely nervous. It’s a big risk we’re taking, even if we have a likely route to follow,” Tiroteo said in contrast.

  “What’s there to say?” commented Jara. “The navy says go, we void-damned go.”

  That kind of put a point on it. We didn’t really have a choice, so in a way, our feelings didn’t matter.

  “I win,” Ani said, laying down her cards and breaking the tension. I groaned along with the others—I really wasn’t very good at that game.

  A few days later, we arrived in the first unexplored system. I was working on the bridge as it happened. There was nothing special about the transition—it was no different from every other transition I’d done.

  “Ma’am,” Lieutenant Rokloth said. “We’re officially in an uncharted system.”

  “Excellent,” replied the XO. “Start the long-range scans for celestial bodies.” She then announced the transition over the intercom.

  Our long-range scanners worked by detecting distortions in the gravitational field. Since the mana signals carrying the information transmitted at the speed of causality, it would take nearly a day for the scan to finish scanning the entire system. However, we began seeing partial results much sooner. Within an hour, we had identified two small planets, likely rocky. By the end of our shift, we had found two planets large enough to likely be gas giants and one that was probably on the upper end of rocky.

  By my shift the next day, we had a better idea of the system. There were eleven planets in the system—four that we suspected were gas giants and seven rocky planets of various sizes. With the scan completed, the captain had ordered us to check out each planet, so by my shift, we were already underway to the closest planet, one of the small rocky planets.

  We reached it before the end of my shift. It was a small, rocky planet with little of note. It seemed to have an average density of mana crystals and minerals.

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  Over the next week, we surveyed the system and its planets. None were of particular note—we didn’t detect any important resources in abnormally large quantities, and none were habitable. There were a couple moons that seemed to have ice deposits, so it was possible there existed microbial life in the system, but that was it.

  Once our survey was done, we left for the next system. While people had relaxed a bit during the survey, the knowledge that we were traveling to yet another unknown system brought us back on edge. Again, though, the four-day current trip was uneventful, and we reached the next system safely.

  Said system only contained four planets—a binary pair of small rocky planets near the sun and two gas giants. The interesting part was that the larger and closer of the two gas giants had a moon covered in liquid water. From what we could tell, there was no land, but there were possible signs of life. Interesting from a scientific perspective, but unfortunately not habitable.

  It was in the third system that the biggest surprise happened. We were surveying a planet in the habitable zone, though the atmosphere was toxic, when we started getting strange readings. We were detecting high concentrations of certain materials, higher than would be expected. Unfortunately, because of the thick, cloudy atmosphere, we couldn’t get more details about the locations.

  The captain apparently decided she had a hunch about it and requested an away team investigate one of the sites. Lieutenant Rokloth volunteered to lead it and suggested I come with. Besides us, Specialist Anabadas—Tiroteo—was the pilot, marine Lieutenant Toreada brought Private Votonia and Private Eskivon along, and Specialist Dalgado came for engineering support.

  The shuttle we took down was smaller than the transport shuttles I had been on previously but was loaded with sensors and equipment. My job was to work the sensor suite and ensure the data got recorded correctly.

  We traveled down through the cloudy atmosphere, approaching the location we had identified previously, albeit at a bit of a distance for safety. As we neared, even through the hazy air, the answers to the mystery became clear—there was a city there.

  “Ensign, do you detect any life?”

  “Negative, ma’am—though we are not close enough to the city for the life sensor, there are no life sources below us large enough to sense.”

  It made sense—the atmosphere was toxic, so likely the only life that might remain would be microbial life specialized to break down the complex toxins in the environment.

  “Specialist Anabadas, continue on toward the city. Let’s get as detailed of readings as we can before we return.”

  As we approached, the sensors began to pick up more details. The city was heavily damaged, more high-tech ruins than anything. Skyscrapers and arcologies intermingled with the destroyed remnants of smaller buildings, showing an interesting mix of architectural styles that suggested the city was built up over time.

  It was huge, even by our modern standards. As we passed through, we were able to glean more information. Buildings seemed sized for elf-sized creatures, and, judging by the size of some of the arcologies, they had advanced building capabilities beyond even ours. There was no evidence to determine what they looked like, at least not without leaving the shuttle and investigating in person, something far too dangerous to consider without proper planning and specialized gear.

  Once we had gotten as much data as we could, we returned to the Bluejay in silence. Personally, I was contemplating what could poison a planet so thoroughly and leave such a society destroyed.

  When we made it back to the ship, I uploaded the data from the mission to the ship’s storage before reported to the bridge with Lieutenant Rokloth.

  “Ma’am,” she said. “We discovered the ruins of a massive city from a clearly-advanced civilization. While there were no obvious signs of space travel, it remains a possibility. There were no life signs on the planet, matching expectations due to the atmospheric conditions.”

  “Good work, lieutenant. The xenoscientists will be ecstatic to learn about this. I’ll send a report to central command. Dismissed.”

  The discovery of new alien life was all that anyone could talk about for the next few days as we continued our survey of the system. The talk had finally started to move on when we discovered a mining installation on one of a gas giant’s moons, inciting everything all over again with proof that the civilization was spacefaring, at least within their system.

  We didn’t find anything else of note in the system, but no one seemed to care. It was as though our dangerous mission became a success, something of importance beyond repetitive scans. We were a part of something bigger, a discovery that could have long-lasting implications.

  Things escalated even further when we reached the fourth system in our journey. On the far side of the system from where we entered and a good ways from where we’d be leaving, we found a habitable planet. It was on the smaller side, but it featured abundant plants and animals. Further investigation revealed that there were ruins at one location on the planet, perhaps the remains of an abandoned colony or one that died out.

  Despite what many of us hoped, we didn’t travel down to the planet—that wasn’t our duty. As much as I wanted to be one of the first to set foot on a new world, that would be the responsibility of a specialized team of scientists and marines. All we could do was to gather as much information from orbit as possible before moving on.

  Needless to say, the mood after that discovery was jubilant despite not getting to visit the planet ourselves. The topics of conversation ranged from increasingly-wild guesses as to the nature of the former inhabitants to suggestions for what to name the planet. It wasn’t often that a new potential colony was discovered, after all, let alone one that previously contained intelligent life.

  Despite all that, the biggest surprise was yet to come.