Thrynn Confederacy
Gazurtoid Frontier

It wasn’t charted on the starmaps. Billions of years earlier, the laws of physicsruled that the clump of matter didn’t have enough mass to ignite into a young star and so it became a brown dwarf, a dark orb riding along the galactic current. In orbit around the dwarf circled its lone companion, a ball of swirling methane and hydrogen, it, too having failed the stellar test. But the gas giant was not unremarkable. A series of moons accompanied the planet, fighting an endless war of gravity that churned the atmosphere into a colorful chemical frenzy in the dim starlight. Eerie flashes of lightning ripped across the orange clouds, the fury of a forgotten backwater.

Looking down at the murky layers of the upper atmosphere, an observer might have caught a glimpse of a steadily blinking series of lights that traveled in a procession through the clouds along the path of the equator. Separated at intervals of a dozen kilometers, three groups of strobes flashed through the haze.

Leghk Sector
Nassau Town Colony

Urussa Kanavus stopped for a moment on the grassy hill and wiped a light sweat from her forehead. She could see for miles over terraced hills of planted land and gentle waves that disappeared at the horizon. Nassau Town was an infant colony, a small settlement that strung along a hundred miles of archipelago on an ocean world.

When the Cloud frontier opened up, Urussa Iru packed a few essential pieces of equipment, scraped together the passage fare, and braved the hazardous route to the Leghk Sector. She had been eighteen at the time and now she was twenty-one, newly married and the master of her own cluster of plantation islands. The young colonist tied her red hair back and took a long draw from her canteen. It was humid.

Urussa picked out a group of stars in the rising evening sky, knowing that beyond the constellation was the stellar gateway on the route back to Arth. Urussa’s husband Perth had volunteered to help flesh out Interstel’s thin ranks as a warrant ensign until the threat from the Spemin was dealt with. While Urussa tendered her first loyalty to Nassau Town and its people, most of the colonists—Perth among them—still felt the pull of their Arthenean roots. Urussa climbed back onto her horse and reached for a remote command pad. She ordered the robot cargo skiff to follow her down the hill, back to the compound by the cove.

Across a wide ocean of space, ISS Negelle pulled off her standard patrol route and fired a coaster pulse on her engines, set on a course to trail the first G’Nunk ship that had ever been recorded venturing into the Earth Sector.

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Next: “Fulcrum”