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The top scientists were still trying to work out exactly how The Hegemony had managed to Jump so deep into our territory without any of the typical forewarnings.

It was only because Humanity, sitting right at the very border of The Collective’s influence, had always kept a wary eye pointed outwards, that those faint gravitational harbingers had been detected at all.

The Hegemony had obviously made some breakthrough in their Jump-Drives that allowed them to displace a whole Armada’s worth of mass with barely any gravitational footprint.

Furthermore, it seemed as though they had also drastically increased the range of their Jumps. In the aftermath of the attack, all available eyes had been cast skyward in hopes of detecting the Gravitational Signatures of a fleeing Hegemony Armada’s sequential Jumps in and out of Hyperspace. Those anomalous blips that would be strung out across the cosmos, the trail leading back to our aggressor’s origin point.

But no such trail had been found.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

It seemed that The Hegemony was now capable of extremely prolonged periods of HyperTransit, no longer needing regular reprieves from the violent maelstrom of Hyperspace. Or if they were jumping in and out, it was on a scale of distance so vast that our sensors hadn’t yet detected it.

Recon probs sent out in pursuit through the faintest Rift remnants seldom returned, likely lost in eternal loops between long decayed Jump-Points. Otherwise ejected out of the galaxy entirely, never again to be seen.

Mapping and measuring the Far Reaches proved excruciatingly slow going. Vast swaths of the void were found to be totally barren. Occasionally the telltale signs of previous Hegemony presence were found—discarded mining stations, derelict ships—but the majority of the space was completely empty.

If the Hegemony had been there, they hadn’t remained for long. Not that there was any indication that their Armada had jumped out of HyperTransit so early anyways.

Several experts had even suggested—assuming their scaling predictions were correct—that if the days at a time our own ships spent in Hyperspace to travel a few hundred LightCycles, then The Hegemony, with a mere tenth of a Cycle spent in continuous HyperTransit, could be beyond even the Far Reaches, that they might be all the way out in the unexplored exogalactic space, far beyond our reach.

But interesting as it all was, I was no expert on any of it myself, so I didn’t really understand much beyond the superficial details.

The jist of it was clear enough though: wherever The Hegemony was centered now, it was far, far from here…