Chapter One: Emergence

The fold unraveled with a tearing silence that no sound could carry. Instruments flared, recalibrating as real space took hold. The sensation was always the same—like existing in too many places at once, then collapsing back into a single fragile body.

I steadied my breath against the pulse of the hull. Warp transit was complete. We had crossed one hundred light-years in the time it took our homeworld’s moons to turn once. Now, in the black gulf between Saturn and Neptune, the colony carrier held steady, bleeding velocity into real space.

“Speed stabilized,” the Commander announced across the bridge. His voice was iron. “One hundred fifty thousand units per hour. Safe transition.”

I logged the numbers before him, though I spoke nothing. It was my place to record, to confirm, to execute. Second-in-command. Soon, perhaps, first.

Through the viewport, I watched Neptune’s azure sphere diminish behind us. To the other side, Saturn gleamed, its rings like a fracture of light. Neither world mattered. Their moons would serve as waypoints, fuel, or harvest later. The true target hung farther inward: a dull red pinprick against the dark. Mars.

I calculated the course corrections in silence. A simple burn, a curve through the void, a trajectory that would bring us into orbit within twenty-seven days. Then the descent. Then the seeding. A thousand hiveships would peel away from our carrier like spores from a great drifting body. They would strike the Martian surface, embed, and begin the work.

Humans were a known factor. Their transmissions filled the void, sloppy and undisciplined. I had studied their archives: stories, instructions, crude entertainments. A noisy species. Clever, yes. Dangerous, eventually. But not now. They nested on Earth, fat and complacent. Their machines cluttered orbit, but none could reach us here.

The Commander dismissed them with a gesture. “They will not interfere. Mars is unguarded.”

I bowed my crest, though I did not agree. The humans were not irrelevant. I had glimpsed patterns in their signals, a growing structure, something not unlike our own old intelligence at its infancy. But it was not my place to say. Not yet.

Instead, I traced the red star in the viewport with one claw. Mars. Our cradle, our foothold, the seedbed of rebirth.

For now, I obeyed.