Alaryn Hale woke with a violent start, eyes wide, mouth agape. Her stomach twisted with cramps as she retched, gastric acid stinging her throat.

  The intravenous sedation lines had cut off too fast.

  The mix of sedatives, melatonin and metabolic suppressors abruptly switched to a potent mix of neurotransmitters and hormones in a way the human body wasn’t meant to handle. Clearly something was wrong, she knew that much even before she registered the alarms.

  ELIOT, Wayfarer’s onboard AI had stopped them mid run.

  Warning lights pulsed around Wayfarer’s bridge, flashing against her visor. Her heart hammered, light-headed. This wasn’t the slow taper she should have woken to at the end of an FTL run. This was de-stupe.

  She’d experienced it once before, during training, but she had expected it then, prepared for it, braced for it. It had still been agony, a punishment more than a lesson. But here, it was worse. And wrong in every possible way.

  The stasis pod’s door hissed open and she staggered into the bridge, holding onto the back of the chair at the navigation console as she stared at the screens through blurry eyes.

  “Navigator Hale,” ELIOT said in her headset. “I must apologise for the abrupt revival, but an anomaly has been detected.”

  “What is the nature of the anomaly?” she slurred, her mouth refusing to act as it should.

  “Unknown.”

  “Then how do you know there’s an anomaly?” Her irritation at being de-stuped and now for no clear reason was evident.

  “INA Directives state zero-tolerance. All shipminds must execute mandatory abort protocols for any anomaly. I am accessing subsystem logs to identify the problem.”

  “What the hell is going on?” Captain Rourke’s voice cut in, loud and angry. He staggered from his stasis pod, groggy from the de-stupe.

  “Elliot is working on it,” Hale replied.

  “That was worse than I remember,” Rourke said, bending double as he was hit by a sudden fit of coughing.

  “You’re lucky,” Hale said. “At least Elliot granted you a few minutes of taper. I was full on cold-cut.”

  “Ouch! I guess Elliot knows what he’s doing. Must be a navigational problem if he prioritised you.”

  “INA Directives state—”

  “I know what they state. The question is why?” Hale said.

  “I will inform you once key subsystems are back on line.”

  “So, nothing in the FTL logs?”

  “If there was an error with the drive, I would have prioritised the engineer.”

  “I wish you had. Look at that lucky beggar,” Hale said pointing to the indicators on engineer Carrick’s pod. “He’s getting a full taper along with the rest of them.”

  Her gaze shifted to the medic, Soren Mavik’s pod, just as the taper indicators dropped to zero and the door swung open.

  She watched as his eyes sprang open and he swiftly injected something into his IV port. He shuddered briefly, then stepped out of the pod and stretched as if he had just woken up from a good night’s sleep.

  “What did I miss?” Mavik asked absentmindedly.

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  Hale stared at him, open-mouthed. “You’ve just de-stuped. How are you not sick?”

  “Oh, this.” He held up the syringe. “And something extra I took before going under. Something I’ve been working on. The AI has just given me the perfect opportunity for a clinical trial.”

  “I’m going to get a coffee,” Roarke said.

  “I’m sorry Captain, but all non-essential systems are offline until sensors are reestablished.”

  “Who put a machine in charge of catering? Everybody knows that caffeine is essential.”

  Carrick’s and Rook’s pods glowed a steady amber, their tapers running down slowly, the way Hale’s should have. She envied them with a bitterness she didn’t bother to hide. The sixth pod, the cargo, remained a constant green, its status locked and its revival parameters unchanged.

  “Elliot,” Roarke said, settling into his chair, “hurry up with the post-FTL sensor restart. I need a coffee.”

  “Acknowledged. Cycling passive arrays.”

  Hale blinked hard until the blur faded enough for her to focus. The first console lit up: EM spectrum — INITIALISING.

  A wash of static settled into place as calibration routines ran.

  “Why the delay?” Mavik said, lounging in his seat like a man on holiday.

  “Elliot needs time to rebuild a clean reference frame. He’s pulling archived astrometric data to rebuild a local reference frame.” Hale said. “Tedious, but standard.”

  Roarke shot Mavik a look. “You shouldn’t be awake yet.”

  Mavik smiled. “The shipmind wakes medical personnel when essential crew are revived. It’s standard protocol.”

  “It is not,” Roarke said flatly.

  Hale turned to him. “Wait. Did you reprogram him?”

  Mavik shrugged. “I might have given it a tiny exception clause. For research purposes.”

  Roarke opened his mouth, closed it again, and decided this was not the moment for a dressing down.

  “Elliot, log a reprimand for Dr. Mavik for unauthorised shipmind access and medical experiments. We’ll deal with it once we get to where we’re going.”

  “Reprimand logged. Would you like me to restrict his access to the pharmaceutical supplies?”

  Mavik looked crestfallen. His eyes pleaded.

  “Not for now. We still don’t know what we’re dealing with and he might still be useful.”

  The consoles flickered.

  “EM sweep… online,” ELIOT announced.

  “Looks normal,” Hale murmured, scanning the graph. “A little noise here and there, but FTL residue always causes background jitter. Well within limits.”

  “Thermal array activating,” ELIOT said.

  The display resolved slowly, gradients settling from molten blur into a stable map of surrounding space.

  Roarke exhaled. “So far so good.”

  “Gravitic mapping coming online,” ELIOT added.

  Roarke straightened. “Elliot, give us a positional fix.”

  “Attempting starfield correlation.”

  “We’ve stopped close to a Rift,” Hale said, not looking up from her screen array. “AOR-7056-001, to be exact.”

  “When you say close…” Roarke prompted.

  “Over five AUs,” she said. “Well outside the Wake Zone. Nothing to worry about on paper, just a lot closer than any commercial ship has ever logged before.”

  “How long before you can plot us a trajectory away from here?”

  “Not until I know why we stopped in the first place.”

  Hale hesitated, eyes flicking between her displays. Was the Rift responsible? The thought felt wrong even as it formed. Rifts were poorly understood — wrapped in more theory than data, fiercely avoided since the first FTL pioneers pushed into the Rim. But they had one reassuring constant.

  Stars drifted. Systems evolved. Galaxies spun, collided, tore themselves apart. Even the universe itself expanded.

  Rifts did not.

  They were fixed points in a moving cosmos, mapped and re-mapped across generations of navigation charts. You planned around them. You trusted them to stay where the numbers said they were.

  “Might as well take a look while we wait,” Roarke said. “Elliot, put it on the main screen. Full visible spectrum.”

  The forward portion of the bridge shimmered, shifting from diagnostic text and graphs to a deep, star-speckled black.

  The Rift carved itself across the screen like a wound in the starfield, a vast, ragged trench of distortion where starlight bent, stretched, and vanished into bands of bruised violet and cold ultraviolet blue. Space around it flexed like heat-haze on a summer road, stars smearing into thin arcs of white and amber as their light was torn and refracted.

  At its core, a serpentine spine of darkness twisted through the glare, edged with hard, electric highlights that flared briefly, then slid away. Fractal offshoots curled from it like limbs, traced in faint cyan and ghostly magenta where invisible spectra had been dragged into view.

  At the centre of a bulge at the apex, something burned with the intensity of a white supergiant. It looked, uncomfortably, like an unblinking eye. Above it, a pale nebular veil streamed outward, layered in soft blues and silvers, motionless and immense, like a breath of frozen fire suspended in vacuum.

  “AOR-7056-001,” Hale said quietly.

  “Tiamat,” Mavik whispered, gazing in awe at the phenomenon. “It’s beautiful.”

  Hale barely heard him. The navigation mesh flickered to life, and a small window opened in the corner of her screen. A single line flashed:

  δ–FTL/47.1B: PATH VARIANCE DEVIATION – WITHIN TOLERANCE.

  She stared at it longer than she should have.

  “That can’t be,” she said.

  Roarke turned. “What?”

  Hale looked back at the Rift, vast and motionless on the main screen.

  “It’s moved.”

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