Before the war, James remembered reading several books about the life back on ancient Terra. Back before they discovered the mere existence of electricity, when light was provided by burning animal fat and ships were made of wooden planks, hemp rope and iron nails.

During this ‘Age of Sail’, man could rely on very few methods of long-range communication, and an admiral in command of a fleet had to gather all his captains aboard the flagship so he could formulate and discuss plans, give orders and generally perform his duties. James imagined it must’ve been quite a bother.

Fortunately for him, technology had long since caught up with that particular need, even before the very first use of nuclear thermal rockets over a millenia ago. Teleconferencing had mattered generations ago, to a point where captains could hold multi-fleet conferences from the chair of their own ship’s conference room. Each participant’s person was holographically simulated as sitting in one of the other chairs, while in reality they were sitting in their own chair on-board their own ship.

While long-distance conferences —spanning more than a light-second— were still confusing if not downright impossible, the method worked perfectly for communications within a fleet formation or even the orbit of a planet.

—

“Let’s get this meeting started.” James said as he sat down, taking in the view of over a dozen captains, staff and experts assembled into a single meetings. Even after hundreds of meetings like this, the view felt a daunting at the beginning of a meeting. The sombre atmosphere made it no better.

“First, the important stuff. What casualties did we incur during the crash-translation into hyperspace, and the engagement just prior to us gathering here? Commander Noriega, you have the floor.”

His chief-of-staff cleared her throat lightly.

“I’m please to say we didn’t lose anybody, fleet-wide. The emergency jump caused some banged up heads and the like, but the worst I know of are a few mild concussions. As for the…engagement, we have twenty-two navy sailors in the infirmary with mild injuries and three with severe, all of them thankfully stable. I’m happy to confirm no civilians came to harm from the pirates’ fire, though a few freighters had their paint-jobs scorched.”

Everybody in the conference smiled at the report.

“That is fortunate. I’d like to congratulate all warship captains and crews on their quick reaction immediately after the jump. Bravo, ladies and gentlemen.” James clapped lightly, his gesture echoed by the civilian and fleet auxiliary vessels’ commanders.

Some of his captains preened, others blushed lightly with embarrassment. Each one took the compliments differently, but James was happy to see that they all looked measurably better.

“Now, on to some more theoretical stuff. Lieutenant Commander Vasquez, I’d like you to answer us a simple question. Where are we?”

Every other face in the room, flesh or digital, turned to look at the astrogator of James’ staff. Vasquez was a short, stocky and bearded man with curly maple hair, singling him out as a descendant of the so-called ‘Venesians’. A special strain of humanity that according to history had been created for the sole purpose of colonizing high-gravity worlds.

During the Age of Fusion, when humanity had swiftly colonized nearly every rock in Sol, several groups of people had self-modified themselves and their descendants so that they could lay claim to high-gravity worlds without the planet-empires of Terra and Mars knocking on their doorstep. The first high-gravity colonies had sprung up on the planet of Venus, and thereafter the short, stocky and hardy people that were raised in or for worlds like Venus were called Venesians.

Ever since the hyperdrive was invented and humanity welcomed the Age of Light, the necessity of such colonies was reduced. The human race found ample planets that could be terraformed or directly inhabited by standard-strain humans, and so few venesians were raised. Genetic treatments were provided to Venesians who left their birthworlds, so that their children would achieve normal heights. It was not only a matter of quality of life but also health, as the side-effects of the Venesian splice-treatments often resulted in mutations and shortened lifespans.

Unfortunately, such treatments weren’t entirely effective. Sometimes, dormant genes resurfaced in children. Children like the lieutenant commander. Some had psychological issues their entire life, while stood with pride as living examples of their ancestors’ tenacity against gravity itself.

Vasquez didn’t give a flying fuck.

It help that he was married to his work; you didn’t need to be two meters tall to get a doctorate in gravitational physics.

Even under the gaze of two dozen captains and officers, the lieutenant commander remained entirely unfazed. With a few taps at his tablet’s controls, a hologram appeared over the conference table. It showed the entire spiral of the galaxy in all its beauty; an artwork that encompassed all known life and history.

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Then the three-dimensional image focused on the Orion-Cygnus Arm, highlighting borders and major colonies. James had seen this map many times before in his life; the so-called Map of Humanity.

“Our Imperium, as well as the rest of humanities’ known polities, reside within the limits of the Orion-Cygnus arm of the galaxy. Though it is unknown how much of the arm we have colonized thanks to the speed —or lack thereof— of intra-polity communications, it is almost certain that we have not crossed the gaps between galactic arms. Such a journey would be enormously, prohibitively expensive.”

The lieutenant commander took a breath, turning his eyes up from his tablet to look at the other participants of the conference. The look in his eyes was no longer so…plain. It was curious, excited, afraid and terrified all the same. And that made James feel…afraid.

“It appears we have done so anyway.”

The room was so silent you could hear a pin drop. Confusion, thought, realization and shock; facial expressions shifted faster than James knew was humanly possible.

“Please, lieutenant commander, elaborate.” He asked.

“Of course, milord.” The officer bowed lightly, tapping at his tablet.

The map shifted, rapidly. The center of focus moved further spinward, crossing the starless rift between the Orion-Cygnus and Perseus Arms. And then it steadied over a rough circle in the midst of the Perseus Arm, its diameter almost a thousand light years.

“To the best of my capabilities, I estimate we are somewhere in this circle.”

A sick retching sound came from one of the civilian captains, and the pale-looking man collapsed out of the camera’s field of view. James felt pity for the man, but he would hardly stop such an important conference for a single captain of a freighter. No more than a few seconds later the hologram shifted, the captain’s face replaced by that of his executive officer.

“Captain Ziegler, do you have a question?” James asked the veteran captain of the cruiser Circe, who’d raised his hand during the civilian captain’s unfortunate incident.

“I do. If we really are in the Perseus Arm, where you said no man should’ve ever gone before us, then how come we are orbiting a human colony, after fighting and defeating two human pirate vessels?”

Nods came from around the table. James raised his eyebrow at the astrogator, who seemed entirely unperturbed by their stares.

“That was the first thing I noticed, but a simple examination of several neutron stars answered the question. Running an interstellar polity anywhere from two to two thousand systems large requires accurate timekeeping. However, the length of a jump varies, with the limits of this variance extending exponentially with range. We can artificially decrease these limits with well-tuned hyperdrives and special components —such as those used on imperial messenger ships— but not nearly enough to use messanger ships to synchronize time between two or more systems. So, we turn to pulsars, also known as neutron stars.”

“As a pulsar rotates, usually several thousand times a second, it emits radio waves that we can measure. With the right equipment and software, it is possible to accurately measure time whenever you are by simply referencing a specific pulsar before and after a hyperspace translation.”

“And you did just that, I imagine?” James asked.

“Quite so. In short, it appears we ‘time traveled’…” The astrogator quoted with his fingers. “Roughly one thousand years.”

—

It took a five minute break and three replacements on the civilians’ side for the fleet conference to continue. Everybody looked some degree of shocked, though the gulf between the civvies and James’ navy captains was vast.

Morale among the civilians was already terrible. Life in the system-capital of the duchy had been relatively alright until it wasn’t, with the war feeling far away until Vogdi ships started jumping in from the hyper limit and burning towards the inner worlds, broadcasting demands of unconditional surrender.

The navy captains, meanwhile, were more surprised than afraid. James felt little surprise as he looked at their faces. He’d long come to terms with the Domus Pupillus system that his dynasty had enforced since before the birth of his grandfather. Many had criticized it —including himself, though never out loud— but for all its ethical and moral failings it had kept the dynasty going for nearly four hundred years.

A member of a ‘normal’ navy had a family, a hometown, something that he was protecting by serving. A member of the akritan navy, whether he be the lowest rating or the senior-most admiral —not that there were any other than him that had survived the war— had been raised, educated and trained within the embrace of the Ducal Youth Houses.

Not everyone who graduated from the Houses ended up in the military, and not everyone who served in the military came from the Houses, but there was significant overlap. Graduates were also more often than not fast-tracked into officer roles, which ensured a chain of command from the lowest midshipman to the commander of the fleet that was loyal to the Duke first and to the Duchy second.

The concept had sickened him as a child, but he’d grown to understand its necessity. Loyalty and human ability were the only two things that had kept the Akreitan Dynasty truly competitive; its land was resource-poor, its commerce weak and its industries often kept isolated. The dynasty’s role had been that of a wall, keeping the filth and scum that occupied the Uninhabited Zones to the Imperium’s far north from entering.

And now the Domus system was the only reason his fleet wasn’t actively disintegrating in the face of total defeat, exile and the fear of the unknown.

“My liege.” Captain Jenkins raised his hand, the act inadvertently silencing any further whispers from the civilians. “A question, if you’d allow?”

“Of course, Captain.”

“What does this change, sir?”

“An excellent question.” James answered, chuckling.

“Our initial plan, as you all know, was to make a jump to NJ-99, an uninhabitable system where space-dust densities are uncommonly low. From there, we would’ve put most of the personnel still awake into stasis and executed a sub-light maneuver through deep space that would see us arrive several centuries later in a colonizable system, light centuries away from the Imperium and the Vogdi.”

Several people nodded along with his words.

“Currently, we are several hundred thousand light years away from the Imperium, and with so much time passed I couldn’t say with certainty if the name Vogdi even means anything anymore to the common citizen of the Imperium —if it still exists—. So I would say we’re still far enough to start anew.”

“Yes, our environment might be different; we’re not alone. But this changes nothing, ladies and gentlemen. We will rebuild, and we will rise out of the ashes stronger than ever before!”