Deep Space
Windward Passage
Moretto Line

“With a delicate touch,” cautioned Captain Boruul, slightly rustling his vines. ISS Restoration was only forty meters above the dorsal hull of ISS Yorkshire, gliding along in practiced formation. “Come about to three five one mark two seven on a five second delay…mark now, helm,” ordered Commander Clayton Franklin, the executive officer. The two ships banked sharply to port, drawing down on the Zulu axis. The tight symmetry of the maneuver wasn’t just pretty, it was deadly practical. From any serious distance, Restoration and Yorkshire would appear as a single signature on a sensor array.

The new tactic was part of the overall strategy on Admiral Yuuvi’s Moretto Line, the arc of space running parallel to the Downspin Coreward Spemin border. The idea was simple enough: the Veloxi weren’t going to help Arth fend off the Spemin, but at the same time, they weren’t going to let a Spemin fleet just waltz through their empire, either. That left a relatively short line between the Spemin-Veloxi border junction and Gazurtoid space. If the Spemin were going to make a run on Arth they’d come rushing across the line at the weakest point they could find.

Interstel had laid early warning buoys all along the line, sometimes with ridiculous redundancy. They had positioned decoy transponders in the same areas, feigning the presence of nearly one hundred more ships than were actually on patrol. None of the same measures had been taken along a short stretch just downspin of the Veloxi-Spemin border junction. In fact, every effort was being made to ensure the line there looked especially thin. That’s where Admiral Yuuvi was employing the new tactic to hide the real strength of the supposed weak point. If the Spemin went for the bait, chances were the Veloxi would get dragged into a fight that close to their border.

Captain Boruul and Commander Franklin were working on the possibility of getting three ships hidden on the same sensor signature. If the Spemin came knocking, they were going to walk into a vicious wall that would stick and fade, all the way back to Arth.

Thrynn Space
SS Yardbird

Senator HvHuss was alone, sitting on an overturned crate in the small cargo hold above the engine well. In one hand he held the artifact, studying it in the fluorescent light that bathed the nearly empty bay. “From the stellar nexus of the hill bound sea,” read the opening line of cryptic message on the miniature rendition of Thoss World. HvHuss spun the globe slowly around its axis, wondering what precisely it meant. He said the lines aloud. Nothing.

For over a decade the senator has secretly, painstakingly overseen and led the renegade cells, sporadically communicating with outsiders, trying to uncover the lost histories, trying to grasp the new reality fomented by the return of the Humans. He’d had so little to work with and almost nowhere to begin. The artifacts of the ancient order were scattered and few, all of them marked with the highest heresy. But HvHuss had sifted through the rubble, careful to avoid detection, and slowly assembled those Thrynn who knew something had changed, who sensed the spring tide. Now they needed strength.

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Next: “Sargasso”