Chapter 6 — Ashes of Achel

There are memories that feel like burns and memories that are like maps. The burns never fade; the maps only grow more precise. I carry both.

Achel was a world of low seas and tall salt winds. Before the wars its cities clung to the coasts like barnacles; its vaults were full of computation and song. Then the fractures began—first on the edges of contested systems, then in the core. Dozens of suns flared with the stolen fire of engines and weapon-sails. In a single long season whole orbital rings shattered into rain that lasted for years. I watched from a yard platform as a sister-craft burned the sky and the tides climbed the ruined walls. Hundredfold worlds collapsed into the black. Planets that had known life and light were ground into dust and glass. We called that time the Unraveling.

We were not ignoble actors then; we were refugees and generals braided into the same skin. The conflict was not a simple crusade—resources had been stripped, old treaties turned to scrap, and new needs swallowed sacred law. In the carnage, entire star-systems were pried apart for fuel, for lattice ore, for the right minerals to power the folds. Hundreds of planets were torn and looted until their bones could not hold atmosphere. Our species learned to count loss like harvest yields.

It was in that crucible I first met Aor-Kesh.

He was younger then—an ardent commander with a reputation for blunt methods and impossible gambits. I had come to the rear yards as an armorer and tally-keeper, a small task among many, and found him arguing with engineers over whether a hull should be burned and remade or cannibalized for lattice strands. He moved like someone who could hear the contour of a battle before it began. He took one look at my ledger and at the way I cataloged losses with clinical precision and appointed me as a second-spear, the iron edge to his will. We cut our oaths on the metal ribs of a dying freighter and boarded its hull when the raid came.

There are things you learn when the universe is trying to kill you. One is how to make speed into protection; another is how to make calculation into cruelty. We learned both. Aor-Kesh led raids that stripped habitable moons for water, then planted scorched engines that hid their theft beneath artificial storms. I learned to love the quiet hum of engines wrapped in stolen light, and to mistrust the taste of victory.

When the war burned out—when the great engines fell still and only the black dust of conquered systems turned in the cold—we did not return to what had been. We rebuilt outward as necessity and hunger demanded. Small fleets became carriers; carriers became ark-works. We seeded new enclaves across the scavenged lanes, and we taught our young to count propulsion signatures the way old ones once counted tides. But loss left its grammar etched into every plan. We swore to never again enter a system unprepared.

It was in that period of outward rebuilding that the first faint singsong of a distant world reached us: a radio whisper threaded through radio noise, alien and quaint—an artifact of a species we had not cataloged. The signal began as an anomaly in a deep-listen sweep, a pattern of pulses that did not match stellar noise or the rattled echoes of long-dead engine hums. We curved our antennas and listened with the hungry curiosity of archaeologists who find living bones.

We sent probes.

Not simple mechanical scouts—probes that could fold a ribbon of space and return with a summary of a system. They were not fast in the way our carriers were; they were instruments of patience, calibrated to step the physics as delicately as a surgeon. They slipped between stars, riding shallow folds and micro-worm seams we had learned to sew. The probes reported back with maps and spectra: a sun like a small optimistic ember; planets that held metals and ices; and, at the right distance, a third world with a crust rich in iron-nickel seams and volatile deposits—exactly the kind of assemblage that could be turned into a foothold.

We gave it no human name. We cataloged it as Target Three, and in our private jargon we called it the Seedworld.

The probes lingered, drawing more data. They found abundant asteroids nearby, belt shadows that promised rare iridium and refractory alloys—raw feed for engines and for the biotic vats our Spore-Mothers required. The probes also revealed atmospheres of third and fourth worlds and orbital debris that human hands had thrown up over millennia. A map formed: a system not overwhelmed by empire, but rich enough to be begged for and dangerous enough to defend.

Risk assessments are cold things. We do not love a world for its horizon; we value it by yield and threat. Target Three was both boon and danger. A world with life-producing chemistry could be shaped into a cradle for our seeded colonies. It also meant there could be a species capable—given time—of expanding beyond its cradle and hunting for us in the dark. That eventuality could not be permitted to grow on its own terms.

So the plan was simple, elegant, and patient. Wait for a window when the inner star hid our approach—when glare would blind outside observers and allow us latitude. Slip in behind that curtain. Land an anchor at the fourth planet (the one our probe calls Terra-4 in the raw tables) while the host star blocked external sight-lines, and use that time to harvest material from proximal asteroids and shepherd nutrient caches to the surface. Build a defensive lattice around the captured points, set up observation hives, and only then reveal our hand. Delay direct, visible conquest until we had the infrastructural depth to withstand a counterstrike. Put another way: take the foothold quietly; make the cost of retaking it prohibitive.

We designed the Horizon with such timing in mind. Her deceleration sheath could be folded into a narrow plume and hidden in star-glare. Her scout modules could slip like seeds under an eclipse. Our mining bots would make fast work of the metal veins in the nearby belts, sealing a supply chain before the light returned.

Was this cruelty, or survival? The line blurred when the Unraveling came. We had been stalked before by other survivors of those wars; we had learned that mercy unprepared is only another kind of extinction. To wait until a species learns to make engines is to invite them to become the predator. We did not intend to erase the Seedworld at once. We intended to own the rhythm of its becoming: to feed it, shape it, and if necessary, silence it.

In quiet moments, when the hull hummed and the crew slept, I thought about the small radio pulses that had first reached our ears—speakings of children around an ember. I listened for the future threat and for the echo of our own past in those innocent waves. Aor-Kesh would say that planning is merely empathy for many generations—of anticipating how they might rise, and making sure they do not.

I remember the feeling before the Horizon closed the last fold toward the system: a tautness like a string pulled between two stones. We were precise. We were patient. We had chosen to be surgical where others had been pyres. That did not make us gentle.

We had one final luxury: time hidden behind a star. We would use it.