Chapter Three: Before the Fold

I remember the dockyards of Achel, though Achel itself is gone now. Its oceans dried, its cities hollow, its vaults stripped to feed the carriers. But in orbit, the yards still burned with light as our hiveships were loaded.

I was given a designation once, stripped of it in war, and now hold a simpler name: Veydril, Second-Spear of the Horizon of Ashes. Names are not gifts among us—they are tasks, reminders of what is owed. My Commander, Aor-Kesh, carries a name heavy with victories. His failures are forgotten, erased, though I remember them.

Our carrier hung above the world like a black ribcage, kilometers of alloy struts and folded sail-skin. Within its belly were a thousand seed-ships, no larger than an Earth shuttle, but each designed to embed and remake. They waited like spores in a husk, sleeping. I oversaw their loading, checked their claws and burrowing charges, their sealed casks of soil and organism. Mars would drink of us soon enough.

Others walked the decks with me:

• Jeyla, the Spore-Mother, who tended the vats of biota that would green Mars. Her hands were never clean, always damp with living threads. She hummed in a low register that kept the organisms calm.

• Dorrin, Blade-Caste, first of the Warclaws. He would command the surface nests once established, his body already tuned with more iron than marrow. He eyed me often, measuring.

• Selvek, Navigator Prime, thin as a filament. He alone could shape the warp calculus, bending the Fold around our hull. He spoke in equations, not words.

We lived as a caste does: bound by role, bound by hunger. On the long night before departure, Aor-Kesh summoned us to the central chamber. The great sail-skin was stretched above, patterned with the marks of our lineage. He spoke of duty, of reclamation, of how our people’s bones had been scattered across void and ruin. Mars, he said, would be our first stone in a new foundation.

We entered warp with ceremony. Selvek’s voice rose into a pitch that twisted the bones. The sails unfolded, lattices of light bent and snapped, and the ship groaned as reality surrendered. One hundred light-years folded beneath us. The stars stretched like molten glass, and then the void blinked away.

Inside the Fold, time was not time. Dreams came unbidden, memories collapsed. I saw Achel before its ruin, waves cutting silver under twin moons. I smelled the iron dust of our fallen cities. I saw, too, the Commander’s face, proud and careless, and the thought came uninvited: What if Mars does not bend to us?

I buried that thought as we emerged, bleeding speed into real space beyond Saturn. Duty is heavier than doubt. But doubt endures, even buried.