★ Prologue ★

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[i. Horizon]

It’s an established fact that certain people are drawn to space.

These are the wanderers—those who simply can’t keep their feet on the ground—and they respond to the siren song of things they can see, but never touch. They’re fully aware that they’ll never set foot on exotic planets orbiting distant suns, yet they always hold on to that faint, glimmering hope of the impossible.

Those who manage to leave Earth’s orbit and sleep among the stars, limited as those offerings may be by current technology, are granted a certain serenity to their thoughts—one they rarely find on Earth—and the individuals who made their home on the Europa Station were no exception. They accepted the rigors of military life: the rations, the curfews, the uniforms, and the rules imposed by the agency governing this outpost, which was really little more than a travel hub that had become a jumping point to other places. They greeted it with open arms, restrictions notwithstanding, and all of it was in exchange for being one step closer to the impossible dream.

This place was a tiny pinpoint of life in a sea of darkness, enveloped by night sky stretching immeasurably far in every direction. And the wanderers came, with lives and histories weaving a rich tapestry, seeking to fill that void.

Out of all of them, though, none had ventured further than Michael Gray.

As the junior research technician aboard the GSC Horizon, a deep space scouting vessel tasked with exploring the outer reaches of the solar system, he’d grown accustomed to spending weeks at a time in near-isolation. It wasn’t a particularly challenging assignment—the majority of his job consisted of sitting at a desk and glancing at a screen occasionally. The computer did most of the work; he simply collected data and sent it back to Headquarters.

Most personnel would’ve been devastated upon receiving such a role, but Michael could barely contain his excitement. Here, he could be alone with the one thing that would never disappoint him, and which he could never disappoint in return: Space.

As a member of one of the Space Corps’ elite families, he’d been pressured to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps, so he enrolled in officer training as soon as he was eligible, with the only result being an astoundingly mediocre career that had disappointed all of them. He’d always been bookish—too much so even for an agency renowned for science and exploration—but without the advantage of performance to match outside of his narrow range of interests. His grades were solidly subpar—a particularly embarrassing development, given his family’s history of producing generals. First he’d lost his legacy scholarship, then he was forced to repeat a year, then another, and finally he dropped out of the program altogether. From there he’d been funneled back into the enlisted ranks with a probationary note in his file.

There was still a possibility he might become an officer, should his performance improve, but with each passing year it became less likely. By his age, most academy graduates were well into their careers with a promotion or two behind them. Michael Gray, however, still shared a rank with enlistees ten years his junior. It was never meant to be, and deep down, he knew it.

The uncomfortable truth was that this career simply didn’t suit him, but none of that particularly bothered him. He’d adapted to the unique demands of deep space missions, and he enjoyed the lack of oversight that came with them. Any time he wasn’t working or studying, he could be found buried in a book.

He pored over novels, anthologies, and star atlases at his desk while the sensors worked at collecting their entries, and in between compiling reports, he spent every spare minute staring at the view from the vessel’s externally mounted telescope. He’d always loved the night and the things that populated it—stars, nebulae, and faint galaxies visible through the lens—and out here, it was always nighttime.

He was rarely interrupted. His only company was his commanding officer—Captain McCreary, a drunk man with a violent temper who’d been suspended here as punishment for punching a lieutenant. The Captain, he’d quickly discovered, would rather spend his time sleeping and skipping his shifts alone in his quarters, which was an arrangement that suited Michael perfectly. All the more time, he thought, to look through his telescope.

And the views were fantastic. The stars were no longer above, as they had been from a ground-based perspective, but all around, surrounding him in a familiar, welcoming curtain of light. Some were even uncharted, and he cataloged and studied them, taking his own detailed notes alongside his required measurements.

He became so engrossed in his work that he failed to notice when they set a new record. On a relatively uneventful Friday in December of 2086, the Horizon ventured further from Earth than any other expedition in history, passing an invisible line in the stars that had never been crossed. And with that milestone, Michael Gray became the most distant human from his homeworld.

He didn’t hold the distinction by much—the captain’s cabin was a few meters away—but since the vessel’s bow section where he currently resided faced outward, the record was his.

Nobody knew of this, though, because the Horizon was so remote and transmitted data back to Headquarters so infrequently, this milestone wouldn’t be announced for another fortnight. And Michael didn’t notice either, nor did he care, because this was where he truly wanted to be—lost among the stars, where he could disappoint no one.

✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦

Later that evening, Captain McCreary came storming into Michael’s workspace.

“Here,” McCreary said, tossing an object on the desk in front of him. Michael jumped at this unwelcome interruption and looked up, annoyed.

“Take this scanner, and go find out why that probe just went dark,” the Captain said.

“What… probe?”

“Have you not been paying attention? The one we dropped last night. You should’ve seen the data gap in your logs.”

Michael glanced at the screen. “I thought it was an error. That probe was brand new.”

The Captain sighed. “Yes, but that didn’t stop it from malfunctioning the instant we turned it on. Must’ve been broken right out of the box. Second time it’s happened. But regardless, I’d like to salvage the unit, and last time it was just a bad fuse on the transmitter. That’s a five-minute repair that can be completed outside, and I don’t feel like towing it back in, so suit up, get out there, and figure out what’s wrong. Once you do that, be prepared to fix it. That’s simple enough, I think even you can handle it.”

Michael nodded and did as he was told, but the spacesuit was ill-fitting and clunky, and several of his tools were missing. He tried his best over the course of an hour, but ended up frying both units—the scanner and the probe—past any point of usability. Once he realized there was no fixing them, he reluctantly returned to face the wrath that would follow.

Upon receiving the news, Captain McCreary slammed his coffee mug down on the table where he’d been eating dinner, just as Michael had anticipated.

“Why!?” he shouted as coffee splashed over the side. He threw his napkin down, then turned away with a frustrated sigh. “I don’t even need to read the diagnostic reports to know this was 100 percent user error.” After a long, uncomfortable pause, he stood and began pacing around the room. “What are we supposed to do now?”

“I… accept full responsibility, I guess. But we still have the backup scanners.”

The Captain drew a long, slow breath as he stopped near the window. “Yes, but they haven’t been turned on in months, and they’re worse than lowest-bidder quality—probably secondhand—so Lord knows if they’ll even work at all.” He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. “We’re three weeks out from resupply, and you’ve just broken two critical pieces of equipment. Even in a best-case scenario it would take almost two months to get replacement units from Europa, and what’s worse is that I’d have to tell them what happened. So now we’re stuck using backups unless you want to admit to screwing up, and I don’t want to file that report, do you?”

Michael shook his head.

“That’s what I thought. But you’ve left us no room for error, and for someone like you, that’s a pretty damning prospect. Do you know what they’ll say if we return without finding any prospective jump sites?”

Michael closed his eyes and nodded, and the Captain leaned against the table, gripping the edge tightly. “You might not care if your career is in a shambles, but I don’t have that luxury. We might as well just pack up and go home now, taking whatever disciplinary measures they choose to throw our way rather than waiting until the end of a seven month deployment to tell them this whole thing was a waste.”

He paused again, then looked out the window and spoke quietly. “You don’t know how badly I need a clean report from this mission. I’m in line for a promotion, and if you were to jeopardize that—”

“No you’re not,” Michael said.

The Captain turned toward him. “Excuse me?”

Michael shrugged. “If that were true, they wouldn’t have sent you out here.”

They stared at each other for a moment, and Michael took a deep breath as several weeks’ worth of pent-up frustration poured out. “Scouting missions are easy assignments, and they’re a good place to put underperforming staff. Out of sight, out of mind, where we’re shipped off to the deepest reaches of space for months at a time, most tasks are automated, and you only have to deliver a report once every few days. That’s why they send people like me, as you like to say. That’s no recommendation letter in your file, is it? I think it’s more likely that you were about to be busted down a rank, and this was your last chance to prove yourself.”

The Captain stared at him for a few seconds.

“If I find out you’ve pulled my file without authorization…”

“I didn’t have to.” Michael shrugged. “You seem to forget who my family is. Enlisted or not, I still receive an invitation to the Council Banquet every year, and I’m obligated to attend, for better or for worse. I know all those officers, and the top candidates for promotion are usually there too because senior leadership likes to meet them personally. If you were really up for promotion, you’d have been sitting at that table with General Novikov, but I didn’t see you there.”

The Captain remained silent for a long time, his face a thundercloud churning with unspoken words. Finally he stormed off, and Michael decided it would be prudent to return to the signal room.

He sat back down at the console and resumed his duties in this small, windowless compartment where there was little to do and little to look at, making a note when a light blinked and pushing a button occasionally.

He knew better than to agree to another spacewalk. If he went out there again, he feared that an unfortunate accident might prevent him from coming back, and Captain McCreary might just look the other way. Michael knew this was unlikely since it would reflect very poorly on a mission commander to lose half the crew of a two-man vessel, but he dared not invite the temptation.

He ignored the screens around him as the sensors worked at collecting their entries, only glancing up occasionally to update the logs. Otherwise, every spare moment was spent reading, as usual, while the bow of their ship—the part in which he now resided—pressed further into the outer reaches of the solar system, rendering him the most distant wanderer to have ever ventured from Earth.

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But around this time, he also received his first inclination that something was very wrong.

[ii. Without a Trace]

In the corner of his vision, Michael saw a light flash. This was nothing unusual; lights flashed all the time, and his job was to turn them off and make a record of it. He reached over with an idle motion to flip the switch, but then he frowned.

This light wasn’t flashing red like the others. It was green, and as his fingers fumbled around in an effort to find the switch that turned it off, he realized there wasn’t one.

He turned his attention back to the screen in front of him, but it gave no indication that anything was awry. He studied it for a moment, then glanced back at the light as it flashed on, and off, and on again.

He paused, then took a deep breath and hit the call button.

“What do you need?” came the Captain’s reply, and Michael could sense the annoyance in those words even through the speaker.

“There’s a flashing light.”

“So turn it off.”

“I can’t. I mean… I don’t know how. I’ve never seen this one before, and there’s no switch.”

“So read the manual.”

“I can’t find the manual. I looked, but it’s not where it’s supposed to be.”

Captain McCreary inhaled sharply as if holding back some choice words, then spoke again. “I’ll be right there.”

And then Michael waited for several long, tense minutes. As usual, the Captain was in no rush. “This had better be worth my time,” he said when he finally entered the room and stopped behind Michael’s chair. But then, his expression changed as his gaze settled on the light.

“Move.” He shoved Michael aside, then typed a command into the console. Michael sat riveted to his seat, waiting for something to happen, but nothing changed, and the resolute blinking continued. Captain McCreary’s expression grew even more frustrated as he typed yet another command, and another still. Finally he frowned, took a step back, and surveyed the screen before them. “It’s a false alarm." He must’ve seen the look on Michael’s face, because he hastily added, “that’s the hull integrity monitor.”

Michael frowned, but the Captain merely shrugged.

“Relax. If we were truly in danger, we’d know. That light’s never supposed to go off on its own because it’s tethered to some of the others. That’s why there’s no off switch. It doesn’t just tell us when the hull’s compromised; it’s designed to tell us why.” He entered one final command into the computer, then looked away with a frustrated sigh. “It’s an error. The light’s broken, just like everything else here.”

He turned abruptly to leave the room, and Michael stared after him.

“I’ll have to pull the fuse to get it to stop,” he said over his shoulder. “I’ll be downstairs in the mechanical closet. Keep an eye on it, and send me a message when it cuts off, will you?”

Michael nodded, and then he waited. Several minutes passed, and the light kept blinking.

After half an hour, he leaned over the console and typed a brief message to the Captain, and an instant later, a reply appeared on the screen.

“That was fast,” he said to himself. But as he adjusted his glasses and read the text, he frowned.

Message failure.

He’d never seen that before, just like the green light. Then he remembered that he couldn’t recall a scanner malfunctioning, either.

“It’s the most idiot-proof piece of equipment we have,” his platoon sergeant had said during one of his earlier deployments. “Even one of you lot couldn’t break it.”

Michael’s thoughts drifted back to McCreary. He re-read those words on the screen, then pushed the call button.

“Captain?”

When only silence greeted him, he swiveled around in his chair, stood up, and walked toward the door as if compelled by instinct.

“Sir?” he said, a little bit louder this time. He leaned into the hall, but the Captain was nowhere to be seen.

Of course not, he’s downstairs, Michael thought.

So that’s where he went—past the door, down the stairs, and through another hallway to the neglected, cluttered alcove leading to the mechanical closet. But as he approached, he slowed down and hesitated as he peered around the corner and looked inside.

It was empty.

“Captain?” Michael said again, and this time his voice contained a tinge of fear. He looked up and down the corridor spanning the lower deck, but again, he saw no one.

There weren’t many places the captain could’ve gone, and even if he couldn’t see him, he certainly would’ve heard him. This ship wasn’t large enough to be out of hearing range, especially on the cramped lower deck.

But as he listened for a reply, all he heard was silence, and all he felt was a deep, all-encompassing sense of stillness.

Nuclear vessels were quiet, but they weren’t this quiet. Even in the absence of speech, there was still ambient noise—the latent hum of machinery, the buzzing of the lights, and the odd drip of the condenser every now and then. But Michael heard nothing at all.

“Sir!” he shouted again, but now he could barely hear his own voice, as if he was speaking underwater. A creeping sense of unease rose within him, and he rushed back through the hall, sprinted up the stairs, and rounded the corner to the upper deck. But he stopped abruptly and let out a muffled cry of alarm when he nearly collided with the captain.

“Where the hell were you!” McCreary shouted.

“Downstairs.” Michael wheezed as he caught his breath.

“No you weren’t, because I was just down there, and I didn’t see you. I came back up here to find out why you never sent that message. Why weren’t you at your post?”

“I… was indeed down there. I came to check on you because you’d been gone so long. The light never stopped.”

“What do you mean, ‘gone so long?’ I wasn’t there more than five minutes, and the light should’ve stopped because I pulled the fuse, then double-checked the connection just to be sure.”

Michael shrugged. The Captain studied him for a moment, then shoved past and made his way back to the signal room, with Michael following close behind. When they entered, though, his heart sank.

“Does that look like it’s on to you?” McCreary motioned at the dark light with a pointed gesture.

“No, but I swear—”

“Then learn how to look better, and get your eyes checked when we get back to Europa. I don’t see how you could possibly need thicker glasses, but it seems you might."

He turned to leave, but then Michael gasped. “Captain…”

“What?” McCreary shouted as he turned around. But then his gaze landed on the light, which had begun blinking once more. He stood there motionless for what felt like a very long time, then crossed the room in a few short strides.

“That shouldn’t be possible,” he said quietly. “I disconnected the power source, so I don’t know where that current’s coming from.”

“Is there a backup battery?” Michael asked.

Captain McCreary reached behind the console, felt around blindly, and yanked a plug from the wall. “Not anymore,” he said as the screen and all of the lights around it went dark.

And for a few seconds, it stayed that way. But then the green light brightened once more, and this time it didn’t flash, but remained on continuously.

“How?” the Captain whispered, and this time, when Michael glanced at him, he saw fear in his eyes.

“Why isn’t it blinking?” Michael whispered back, more to himself than McCreary.

“The blinking interval indicates the level of damage,” the Captain began slowly. “Each lost signal increases the rate slightly, so the only way this can happen is if every part of the hull containing a sensor is equally compromised. A solid light is something you only see in hypothetical scenarios and console tests, because it indicates total destruction. A ship in that state wouldn’t have working electronics anymore, but even if it did, this can’t happen without visible damage.” He sighed. “I don’t know what’s going on, and I don’t like it.”

He stayed there for a moment, then stepped back from the console.

“It’s an error,” he said, and Michael heard an infusion of confidence re-enter his voice. “There must be an electrical anomaly of some sort. It’s messing with the sensors and powering components that would otherwise have no connection.” He looked away and sighed. “Too bad it can’t fix that scanner you broke.”

“The outside electrical readings were normal, though.”

“Enough,” the Captain said. “I don’t know where that charge is coming from—if it’s internal or external—but we have to assume that any readings from our ship are unreliable. And even more alarming, we don’t know what else is affected. There might be components on board holding a lethal charge right now, and we wouldn’t know until we touched them.”

Michael inhaled sharply, and Captain McCreary turned away and sighed. “I want you to send a message to Europa immediately requesting emergency evac.”

“But the console’s off.”

“So turn it back on, and get it done. While you’re doing that, I’ll be preparing the emergency shuttle, because we might just need it.” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “There’s never once been a lifeboat deployment on a scouting mission, but we might just be the first. And honestly, given our recent string of screw-ups, it wouldn’t be the worst turn of events.”

Michael nodded. “What should that message say?”

“Something simple. Begin with the standard SOS call, and include a few lines about what’s going on. Keep it brief and direct, but most importantly, just get it out as fast as possible.”

“It’ll still take them weeks to reach us.”

“I know. I just pray that message goes through before we lose communications entirely, because I have a feeling we’re going to. If it ends up being a dud, so be it; we’ll send a cancel call later. But I want to prepare for the worst before it happens.”

Michael nodded again. The captain nodded back and retreated into the hallway, and Michael sat down and got to work. He plugged in the console, waited a few minutes as it turned on, compiled the message, and leaned back in his chair. But when he pushed the “send” button, it returned an error.

He tried again and got the same result. Then he did it a third time. And finally, on the fourth try, he was successful.

He leaned back with a relieved sigh, then typed a quick note to the Captain.

Message sent. Took a few tries.

Understood, came the reply.

And then, he waited. He didn’t want to disturb the Captain because he knew shuttle prep was a long, arduous process, and he still had a job to do. But as the minutes ticked by, his sense of unease grew. He’d heard nothing from the lower deck, and that compulsion crept in again—the one telling him to go check.

That’s when he realized the silence had returned. Once again, he heard nothing at all.

He couldn’t bear it any longer. He wasn’t sure how much time had elapsed since the Captain’s departure, but he guessed at least an hour.

He took a deep breath, stood up, and crossed the room, but paused momentarily by the wall-mounted clock near the door.

It must’ve stopped, he thought, because it hadn’t changed since the captain left. That creeping sense of unease surged back even stronger, and Michael took a deep breath. Another electrical problem, he thought as he made his way down to the lower deck.

At the base of the stairs, he stopped. The air down here was stagnant and still, almost to the point of being unbearable.

“Captain McCreary?” Michael shouted. But his words were swallowed as if by a void.

He stepped into the corridor—a few short meters of hallway that now seemed to stretch for eternity.

“Captain!” he shouted again.

He took another cautious step forward, and the sense of unease turned to a feeling of dread—one that quickened his heart rate and made his hair stand on end.

It’s just static electricity. It’s fine, he thought. But these were placating reassurances of the sort one said to calm themselves, and deep down, he knew it.

And in that moment of realization, it was as if a veil was lifted, and when he looked down the hallway again, he saw it for what it truly was. It was the briefest of glimpses, but it was enough.

And that was as far as he got.

He already knew he wouldn’t find the captain. And there were no windows down here, but he knew that if he were to look outside, he’d see no stars, and no light, and no universe.

The clock hadn’t merely stopped; time wasn’t passing. There was no such thing as time anymore—not here, anyway—nor matter, nor anything. There only existed a field of possibilities: endless, timeless, and boundless.

Michael couldn’t comprehend any of this, of course, with his limited human mind, but he knew he’d escaped reality somehow. The hallway appeared endless, because it was—the laws of physics were breaking down and now existed in a constant state of flux. This space was truly infinite, and growing longer with each second that wasn’t passing. There was only one way to go, now—down, falling toward the source that drew them in. He hadn’t been able to see it earlier because he’d been on the brink, and everything else had been falling too, but now they were accelerating at a rate that defied comprehension.

That rescue might come, but they’d never find him. Once the ship had crossed the threshold, he’d never stood a chance.

Light had vanished, and all was dark. Time had passed, and all was still. The small part of the universe he’d occupied had disappeared, and it was gone. The end was near now, as he approached the precipice of an endless void, and he realized, in what were to be his final thoughts, that the universe he’d always known was merely the surface of an endless, churning sea of reality far greater than this one. He’d been floating at the top, as did all living things, but there was more beneath than he could ever comprehend. However, in this small gap between spaces there was only Michael, frozen forever and gone in an instant.

And right before he was compressed down to an infinitely small point and disappeared from existence in a manner so thorough he might as well have never existed at all, his mind formed one final thought.

For the first time in his life, he wasn’t disappointed.