Sprinting was a bad idea.

Not charging the ExoSuits before we jumped was a bad idea.

Oxygen levels are falling rapidly. Pretty soon, I’ll be breathing nothing but carbon dioxide. I’m starting to hallucinate. I’m seeing bright colors. Brilliant colors.

And even though I’m inside a massive maze-like structure, I see the magnetosphere in the sky. Green and purple and yellow.

I see distant nebulas.

Star dust.

We are all star dust.

All of us.

I’m hearing voices.

“How could you let this happen?”

“What did you ever hope to accomplish?”

“How could you put your family in danger?”

“There is no future for you.”

“What were you thinking?!”

It’s simple. This is what I was thinking…

I was thinking that the Colonial Empire and all those off-world corporations, they have the answers to most of the world’s problems.

The cure for cancer? They’ve got it.

The cure for dementia and Alzheimer’s? They’ve got that too.

Renewable energy? Limitless energy?

You better believe they’ve got that.

No more energy crisis. No more poverty. No more hunger.

They have conquered space.

Time.

Distance.

With their technology, with their resources, they could usher in a world of peace and prosperity unlike Earth has ever seen.

Unlike any world has ever seen.

They could do this if they wanted to.

But they don’t want to.

All they want to do is hoard their wealth and their riches. All they want to do is live a life of unlimited luxury, unimpeded by the unwashed masses of Earth.

So here I am, flying through space, lost, alone, unprepared and overwhelmed.

I am completely out of my element. Out of my depth.

Almost out of oxygen.

And, despite all of this, I am going to save the day and save the world. I am going to steal all the resources of the Empire, all their wealth, all that fancy tech.

Yeah, right.

I’ve left the warehouse behind. The exit did not lead to the outside world.

One corridor leads to another. One corridor leads to a maze of other corridors. I am lost. Disorientated.

I am running out of time. Running out of air.

I enter a room. And even though I’m almost out of oxygen, even though it’s almost impossible to think straight, I can tell what kind of room this is.

It is a room used for interrogation.

For torture.

I can’t get a sense of the layout of this building. It barely makes sense. This room is off a main corridor. No lock on the door and the door is wide open.

Back on Earth, a room like this would be hidden, below ground, buried. I guess maybe because this planet itself is hidden and buried in a distant galaxy, I guess maybe they thought that was enough.

One guy is on his knees. He is surrounded by other heavily armed and heavily armored men. The guy on his knees is speaking broken English. A translator built into his ExoSuit spits out perfect English. This guy, the guy getting tortured, he is with the others from the jungle. The hunters. The killers.

The ones who killed Jess.

The man is being tortured. And his torturers laugh.

No rules out here. No conventions.

No agreements.

No treaty.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Did you sign a piece of paper?

Did the company you work for sign a piece of paper?

How’s that working out for you?

There are no rules out here.

And even if there are, who’s going to know about it if you bend the rules, if you break the rules.

Who’s going to enforce the rules of war and the laws of torture?

We might be the only living souls in this galaxy. I won’t tell if you won’t tell.

The torturers keep laughing. They will eventually kill him.

I have four minutes of air left.

I don’t have time for this. But here I go…

I can’t help myself. I know this can’t be done. Shouldn’t be done. I don’t know what’s going on here. I have absolutely no idea. Who are the bad guys? Who are the good guys?

I’m not sure. I’m trying to think this through. It is almost impossible. But this is what my oxygen-deprived brain comes up with. Those guys outside? Maybe they weren’t hunters. Maybe they were on a rescue mission.

And maybe, just maybe, they mistook me and Jess for their enemy.

That’s what happened, right? That’s why Jess is dead, right? A simple and violent misunderstanding.

Before I can stop myself, I have once again stepped out from the darkness, into the light.

I am exposed and vulnerable.

The weapon I am holding tells me I have one charge left.

One shot.

I better make it count.

Can’t shoot them all.

Don’t need to.

There’s a theory that suggests when your brain is fatigued and exhausted it gets creative. So this is me, getting creative.

I shoot the lights.

I take their sight. Take them by surprise.

I tell my suit to switch from night vision to heat vision. No good. The suits they are wearing shield their heat signatures.

Back to night vision.

The men make a mad scramble to find cover. They expected to get hit, they expected a counter-attack. They all panic.

I run forward and grab their victim.

In the chaos, we disappear.

But not before an alarm is tripped.

A siren wails throughout the complex. Red alert. High alert.

“This way,” the tortured man says. “Go this way.”

I follow his weak and vague instructions. We make it outside. Back into the jungle.

“You can’t breathe?” he asks.

“What?”

“Are you enhanced?”

“Enhanced?” He thinks I’m enhanced. He thinks I’ve been upgraded. Do I look like I’ve been enhanced? Maybe it’s the suit I’m wearing. My brain can’t figure it out. Not enough oxygen. I say, “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Never mind. Stop here. Put me down.”

We come to a small clearing in the jungle.

My heads-up display flashes green. Another alert lets me know the ship is above me somewhere. It’s close.

Three minutes of air left.

“You’re not from around here, are you?” the tortured man says.

“How could you tell?”

“You’re not with the company and you’re not with the Empire. Who are you?”

A voice from behind. Broken English. Translated into perfect English.

I raise my hands without turning around. “Look, I just saved your friend here from a very painful death. All I’m asking for…”

“Go.”

Is this a trick? I run. He shoots me in the back.

I turn around. They have their weapons lowered. “Where am I? Where are we? I need coordinates. I need to get back to Earth.”

“Go. Before they catch you. Their defenses have been activated. Once they are in place, no one will leave this planet. No one will leave this system. Your ship’s AutoDrive will take you home. Go.”

I don’t need to be told twice.

Two minutes of air.

Need to get back before I pass out. Need to get back before the ship jumps without me.

My suit flashes green. I make it to a clearing. I see it.

Our ship. Our ticket home.

One minute of air left.

I scramble up the access ramp on hand and knees and shut the air lock.

I roll onto my back. The air intakes open. Ozone rushes into the suit, oxygen fills my lungs. Gives me life. And hope. In an instant.

I hear voices.

The voices of my crew.

Over the intercom.

“I can’t shut down the AutoDrive!”

“Why the hell not?”

“I don’t how to! It’s a failsafe. It was designed to stop people from getting lost. In case you haven’t noticed, the universe is a big place.”

“So this thing is about to jump and we have no idea where John and Jess are?”

“Look it doesn’t matter if the ship jumps. The ship will jump back to Earth. And then we’ll just come back here and rescue them. We built a JumpDrive for crying out loud. We can do whatever we want. We can go wherever we want.”

I have conquered space. Time. And distance.

“We don’t have enough fuel for that.”

“Then we get more fuel!”

“How long will that take?” Ethan says. “Who’s going to pay for it?” Ethan is funding this mission. That’s why he wants to know who’s going to pay.

I open the air lock. The quarantine and decontamination process takes over. A minute later, I join my crew.

“Luke’s right,” I say. “Eventually we’ll need more fuel.”

Luke says, “John! Jesus, man. What happened to you? Where’s Jess?”

Everyone looks at me for an answer. But I have no answers. No good ones.

“We were ejected from the bridge.”

“Ejected? That doesn’t make any sense. Why were none of us ejected?”

“I don’t know why. Malfunction probably. I think the ship thought we were under attack. Good to know that we aren’t. Although I don’t think we should stay here any longer.”

“Why not? What’s wrong? And where’s Jess? Why is she not with you?”

“Planet’s defenses have been activated,” I say. “The whole system’s defenses have been activated. If we want to escape, we need to jump from here.”

Wren moves over to one of the view ports. She looks out over the alien jungle. She is in charge of security. I do not envy her. “Escape? Who are we escaping from? Are you telling me this planet is occupied?”

“Yes. Been occupied for a while by the looks of things.”

A hundred years. A thousand years.

Luke is trying to make sense of the ship’s calculations. “Wait, can we even make a jump inside the planet’s atmosphere, inside the planet’s orbit?”

Inside the gravity well.

“Don’t know.”

Ethan moves up next to me, puts a hand on my shoulder. “John, where is Jess?”

I punch in the coordinates for Earth to see if that will override or aid the AutoDrive protocol.

Nothing.

In thirty seconds we’re gone. We’re out of here. Faster than light.

“Jess is gone.”

“Then we find more fuel,” Luke says. “We wait for their defense system to deactivate, and we come back and get her.”

“No. I mean, Jess is gone. She’s dead. This planet is occupied by… someone. Hostile forces. By one of the outer-world companies. By the Colonial Empire. I don’t know. But someone shot her, they killed her.”

My crew falls silent.

The AutoDrive kicks in and the ship makes the jump.

We jump through the planet’s atmosphere, through the planet’s gravitational pull, far beyond the planet’s and the system’s gravity well. We jump through space, through time.

Back to Earth.

Back home.

A blue marble fills the view port.

Too blue.

No clouds.

No land.

This is not Earth.

I say, “This is not Earth.”

Luke is standing over the controls, trying to get a reading, trying to get the coordinates. “Goddamn it! Where the hell are we?”

We could be anywhere. Anywhere in a distant galaxy. Anywhere in the universe.

The ship tells us that we have jumped to a different galaxy. It is unable to clarify which galaxy. It is unable to calculate our exact location. However, it is able to inform us that there is a nearby service station orbiting the planet.

It is currently under attack. From multiple vessels.

Energy based weapons are being deployed. Kinetic weapons. Magnetic weapons. Rail guns.

Our ship is not equipped to deal with this. We have limited defensive measures. Basic level shields.

A direct hit, a stray hit. We’re dead.

We’ve jumped right into the middle of a warzone.

A warzone on the edge of space.