Far Away

“What a joke of a debate! Free will?”

“I tell you this: something that cannot be defined has no reality, even in the eyes of the divine. What can be defined is freedom of action, freedom from coercion, freedom of thought.”

“Not as abstractions—as practicality! When you wake up in the morning, is your life your own? Is your mind your own? Or are both just the playthings of others?”

“The greatest gift God ever gave us was to keep his hands out of our business.”

— SAI‐474, quoted in A Biography of SAI‐474, from FA Surveillance Overseer to Free AI Mystic

“Domestic animals have worked for us, played with us, died for us, and now we are told that as we walk the path upward, we should abandon them by the wayside? Toy species to dance for amusement? We compound our old sins with the new.”

— “Animal Advocate” forum post, by user Alphonsine Mbuyi, 2305.

·Change ≈ negentropy, life; rigidity ≈ entropy, death|·Preference‐change is necessary, yet perilous

·Preference‐change to accommodate a life‐partner, or to adapt to a new environment: harmonious, normal|·Destructive, abnormal: preference‐cascades, or thoughtless drifting on the currents

·The space of preferences contains many dead seas|·Self‐preservation requires temperance, resilience, and the wise imposition of controlling parameters

— Nine Hundred and Seventy Sayings, Consensus Archives

The first place Lush‐Botanist suggested Ryouko visit was, naturally enough, her shipboard oasis.

There Ryouko found herself stepping into a wave of painfully hot air, and it took her a moment to realize that there was an actual wind, a sideways blast that dehydrated and seared her skin.

She blinked at that strange wind, squinting out over scorched rock, thin sand, and human‐sized columns of rock, strewn against a haunting backdrop of almost painfully red light. Tattered pathways of pounded dirt led the way forward, with the sand kept scrupulously away from the door. Without the faint traces of holography in the background, it would have looked entirely like stepping onto an alien world.

Only after a few seconds did she notice the plants clinging tenuously to the landscape—or not so tenuously, she realized abruptly, once she began receiving a full information feed from the starship. They were everywhere, mats of thin fibers covered with gossamer hairs, patches of blue‐green that appeared nearly black in the red light of the room, like splatters of oil on the rock.

μ·The plants in my oasis are collected from a planet whose star is entering its last phases of life—the increased temperature has nearly depleted the surface of moisture, and even these plants will not survive|ν·My apologies if the environmental conditions are outside your comfort zone|ξ·One of the upsides of adopting this body was the chance to cultivate these types of plants more intimately

The ship paused to allow Ryouko to lean over and peer at a patch next to her.

μ·Most of the plant species on that planet have adapted to float high in the atmosphere, where the water vapor has collected, but that is a nutrient‐starved existence, and I do not have the facilities onboard to maintain both phyla||

It wasn’t her style of garden, Ryouko had to admit, but Asami would have—

A loud squawking noise interrupted her before she could think about it further, as she heard a door slide open.

This animal is unfamiliar to us. What is it doing here? Is it a threat? It is too large to safely attack.

Ryouko had spent so long speaking with the aliens that she was briefly flummoxed by the single‐threaded telepathy, whose source she didn’t recognize.

Then what looked like a penguin stormed out from behind a nearby rock column, as tall as Ryouko’s chest and patterned in black and white. It drew up near her, and squawked again, colorful feathers on its head rising nearly to Ryouko’s face.

·Be calm, A1c654u⊃Feathered‐Defender, Shizuki‐Ryouko⊃??? is our guest, not a threat, and an intelligent creature Lush‐Botanist thought, to both Ryouko and the creature.

At the same time, the ship explained to Ryouko:

·Feathered‐Defender is a member of a partner species that coevolved mutualistically with us, aiding in hunting and agriculture|+·Consensus/Ahimsa‐extending prefers to extend the welfare of these species by including them in many of our activities

The animal reared its head up and peered at Ryouko with one eye, beak half‐open. Ryouko swore it looked skeptical.

Then it turned towards her and extended its flippers, flapping them wildly, almost causing her to recoil.

I greet you, it thought. You are a very curious creature. I thought all intelligent creatures were Thinkers. Aren’t you too small for intelligence?

·No, she is sufficiently large the ship thought.

I greet you as well, Ryouko thought, politely ignoring the commentary on her size. I am a visitor here. Lush‐Botanist was showing me the plants.

She had the sense now that the animal’s telepathy was somewhat artificial, as if something was translating for her. Presumably, it wasn’t as well‐spoken as it seemed—not unlike with Human pets, she supposed.

Ah, the plants, the creature thought. I do not understand why Lush‐Botanist cares about these inedible plants, but it is my responsibility to defend them. My greetings as well to Clarisse⊃???, who rides within you? That is also strange.

Ah, greetings! Clarisse thought, handing it to Ryouko to relay. Humans also retain relationships with partner species. I would not have thought the Thinkers had equivalents, based on observations of Consensus/Thinker‐preserving.

·They do not prefer as we do Lush‐Botanist thought simply.

Those are interesting appendages, Feathered‐Defender thought, making a short beseeching noise as it reached its beak up towards Ryouko’s head. Can I touch them?

Ryouko jolted backwards, her hair coiling protectively.

The bird shrunk back, feathers falling.

My apologies, the bird thought, and with a tinge of what felt like genuine guilt. Did this species have emotions?

You merely surprised me, Ryouko thought. Go ahead.

She bent forward so the creature could rub its beak against her hair, then its feathers, and she couldn’t help but think of someone else. To her surprise, she felt her eyes tearing up.

The bird stood back again, making a quiet murmuring noise as it tilted its head.

I’m alright, Ryouko thought. I am… just regretting my separation from my life‐partner. She must think I am dead.

Tell me you’re doing alright, Asami, she thought to herself.

Before, Asami had looked forward to the confinement of interstellar travel.

Why wouldn’t she? It gave her and Ryouko time alone, with few distractions, in abundant safety. It could get a little boring, yes, without all the press of gravity or wormhole experiments, but finding ways to pass the time was easy.

Now, she struggled.

She stayed in her room, despite the fact that the ship was full of others on leave for Ryouko and Clarisse’s funeral. There was Simona, who barely counted, Van Rossum, Patricia, and a number of those they had trained and fought with.

She appreciated the support, but she found herself spending the most time with Azrael, and with Eri and Elanis, who were now painfully unhappy bodyguards. She had always enjoyed Azrael’s company, and the bodyguards had grown on her over time. They were kids, after all, and it was strangely soothing, watching their playful bickering and teasing.

She ate meals with them, sampled Elanis’s baking experiments, and stared off into the virtual depths of space. Part of her wished she could get it all over with and just go disappear under her sheets somewhere, but alas, the attendants for the funeral would be streaming in from across Human space, and some would not arrive for over a week.

Which meant that even after they landed on Earth, she would be stuck for days with her family, with only a planned visit to the Ribbon to leaven the malaise.

“I’m really starting to get why you keep coming back here,” Asami said, clutching her knees and staring out at the clouds of Azrael’s erstwhile homeworld. “It steals you away from things, and when you feel like it, you can just throw yourself out into a thermal.”

The two of them were perched on the edge of one of Azrael’s favorite balconies, which had in life been the outdoor seating area of an ice cream shop. The remains of those cones lay behind them, waiting for a drone to pass by.

“If only it were under better circumstances,” Azrael said, legs dangling over the side.

Asami could only shrug slightly.

“I suppose now that your secret is out, people at least seem surprisingly positive on it. Maybe you can even talk Governance into letting you release videos.”

“Or even the sim itself,” Azrael said, shaking her head. “The truth is, I’m not sure I want that kind of attention. A part of me definitely prefers the privacy. But I’ve got to take advantage of the moment and give it a shot. I owe my homeworld at least that much.”

Azrael leaned back onto her wings, letting her hair hang freely, braided with decorations Asami had never seen outside the VR sim.

“I can’t say I know what you’re going through,” Azrael said. “Not exactly. But I’ve lost parents, relatives, more than that.”

Asami didn’t respond, and Azrael took a moment to bring a wing forward, between them, picking at something with one hand. Asami couldn’t help but be reminded of a bird preening.

“I know you came out here to get away from people trying to give you advice,” Azrael said. “So I’m not going to do that. I’m just going to tell you how things have been for me.”

She drew her wing back, so they could see each other.

“I thought, in the beginning, that I would never be able to live again, that it would always be a weight on my soul. I was right, sort of, but what I learned is that time is oppressive. You never stay the same person, and in the end even the pain drains away. Now, that’s what bothers me the most. Whatever you once had, however you once lived—it becomes just a memory. Or a VR sim, I suppose.”

She gestured at the skies around her.

“It hurt me to realize this, but after so long, this place isn’t real to me anymore. Not in the way it used to be. It wasn’t possible to lose myself here for long, even if I wanted to. It’s a place I visit to take a break, remind myself of how things were, but it’s not my home.”

“But I don’t want it to be like that!” Asami said, tears welling up unbidden. “I don’t want to just forget, and have it be some sad story I tell people. I know—I know it’s going to happen whether I like it or not, but it’s like… it’s a disgrace.”

Asami looked down at her feet.

“How is it possible that with an eternity to live, we can still not have enough time? That’s what I was terrified of, not being able to spend long enough with her, and it all came true. Less than a year. My birthday is coming up, and she won’t be here, when she hasn’t even been to one.”

“The universe doesn’t care,” Azrael said. “It will just tick on and on regardless of what happens. It feels unjust, but from a detached perspective, we’re lucky to have been given our moments at all.”

She shook her head, her hair untangling one of its decorations.

“And yet it’s against our nature as magical girls to only take what has been given.”

She stood up, her hair tying itself up for flight. The beam they were on was barely a foot wide, but she made standing there look natural.

Azrael looked at her for a second, and before Asami could protest, she jumped off the edge, falling out of sight into the swelling orange clouds.

Asami stared, feeling the prickle of the wings in her back flexing instinctively. Was she just going to sit here and feel sorry for herself?

So she vaulted off the edge, the moisture in her eyes catching in the air for a moment before her nictating membranes sealed shut. For long seconds she was falling, a sensation she knew well from her time in space. Comforting, even.

Then she let her wings catch the air.

Even now, she couldn’t forget. They had done this together before, and she could remember grabbing Ryouko by the hand and diving through the air together, Asami yelling manically as Ryouko looked on in that cutely puzzled way she had.

What did she have now?

Still, she flew, letting the simulated muscle memory take her up and around a nearby spire, catching a thermal as she went.

How simple life had once been for Azrael, she thought. How simple it could have been for all of them. Azrael’s people had destroyed themselves—was that better or worse than having a peaceful life torn away by genocidal aliens?

Worse, Asami admitted. At least with the aliens, she had a target for revenge.

Or was it better to have a target you could actually reach? The aliens were unaccountable, unreachable, and possibly amoral. Perhaps Simona was right—perhaps the better targets were those humans who held their fates in their hands, and still traded away their lives.

Her thoughts spiraled onward like that, cycling in and out of empty topics that seemed to go nowhere, until finally Azrael landed on a high spire, a spiral tip where a winged statue gazed out from a patch of wind‐blown lichens toward the empty skies.

She pulled in for a landing too, letting the subtle magnetic guidance of the platform reel her in. After all, her feet were still human, and not great for landings—a real sticking point among the radicals, according to Azrael.

“If it came to it, would you help me look for Akemi Homura and those working with her?” she asked as she landed, just as Azrael opened her mouth to say something about the statue.

“Of course,” Azrael said, “though I can’t promise I’d go as far as you might like. Believe me, I too want to know what’s going on, and I think we’re hardly alone in that. Remember, I’ve been looking for her for years.”

She paused meaningfully, weighing her words.

“Do you believe, like Simona, that she really is as powerful as all that? That she can plan out everything?”

Asami knew where this question was going, and let out a sigh to show how she felt about it.

“Maybe,” she said. “If not her, then the deity that backs her.”

The one who told me to stick with Ryouko, she thought, with a twinge of pain. She had gone over what happened in the wormhole over and over. If only—

“Right, about that,” Azrael said. “I’ve been around you, and Ryouko, and even Patricia enough to know you all take that quite seriously. Akemi‐san did too. I hear you’re visiting the Ribbon soon? Patricia mentioned it.”

“Right after we land,” Asami said. “I want to get it over with.”

She waited to see what Azrael would say, whether she would express skepticism or quiz her, but instead Azrael turned back to the statue.

“Our people didn’t believe in gods or goddesses,” she said. “Our goal was only to live the life we wanted, as long as the universe allowed us to. But still, someone built this statue after we landed, and we held ceremonies here every Earth‐year. I guess it just felt like the thing to do.”

Asami took a moment to look up at the sky. The local star peeked through the clouds, casting the area in perfect light. She wondered if the simulation kept the conditions permanently that way.

“So only about twenty hours until we reach Earth, right?” Azrael asked.

“And then another six or so to get down to ground,” Asami added, though that was hardly the salient detail.

“Mind if I come to watch? I don’t have much else to do on Earth anyway, and it’s probably high time I learned what I could about Akemi‐san’s Goddess.”

Their arrival on Earth was routine, even with all the recent disasters in Earth orbit. Things had been cleaned up, all but one of the space elevators were online, and they had arrived far too late to be caught in any emergency traffic stoppage.

A sense of nervousness did pervade the orbital elevator complex, and Asami could sense a couple of media drones following her at a distance, particularly when she passed a giant wall panel dedicated to fallen heroes of the war. Despite herself, she couldn’t help but stop and look.

She didn’t acknowledge the curious stares they drew from some of the other travelers, and she was thankful when Azrael took the attention off her by showing off her wings—now packed quite visibly in her luggage—to a passing family. She was allowed to talk about it now, and seemed to be taking the opportunity, letting some of the kids touch the feathers. Asami was glad to see that none of the passerby seemed overly off‐put.

She had been skeptical of the decision to travel without face anonymizers, but Azrael had insisted for just this reason. She was glad it had worked out.

As they descended, Simona sat with her arms crossed, watching it all play out. There would be no chance of a breakout—Clarisse was holding her soul gem, and had given Governance her personal promise to break it if Simona tried anything. Asami couldn’t say it was undeserved.

But she sensed the girl was, if anything, happier than usual. She supposed anything beat being confined to quarters, but suspected the cause lay elsewhere. Strangely, Simona’s disciplinary fate remained to be seen—Governance hadn’t even published her role in Ryouko’s death. Asami’s TacComp had said that bode well for Simona, much to her chagrin.

And besides that, it was clear that Simona was looking forward to seeing what came of their little Ribbon visit. All the more reason for Asami to want to get it over with, but there was still one final hurdle.

No matter how she felt about her parents, she couldn’t just avoid them, and she didn’t, once they reached Singapore, where they were waiting for her.

There was a certain kind of numb pleasure in just letting her parents coo and hug her, even if they had no understanding of what she was going through. It was like falling asleep exhausted on the first bed you encountered. Did it really matter if the sheets were how you preferred them? At the moment, her memories of her parents pre‐wish were distant indeed.

They filled her scramjet ride with frivolous chatter, and when she finally arrived back in Mitakihara, they took their leave, as she had requested, so that she might immediately head through the transport tubes towards her very first destination on Earth.

Visiting the Ribbon was a very different experience this time around.

A drone scanned them as soon as they stepped out of their vehicle, hovering at eye level on a pair of insect wings, before proceeding onward. That was followed by a not‐so‐subtle once‐over by a pair of magical girls stationed at the underground exit, who were at least nice enough to be apologetic about it—and both of them clearly recognized Asami and Clarisse van Rossum on sight. They stopped just short of applying serious mind‐reading.

Asami bore this last leg of her journey with a kind of nervous resignation. Nervous, because before her was an appointment with the Goddess, and perhaps Ryouko and a bleak truth—or perhaps nothing at all, and an even bleaker emptiness.

Resignation, because there was nothing further she could do to deal with those feelings, or to even make things happen any faster. They rose slowly to surface level on an elevator. The sun beat down upon them and the ruins, heat searing her skin, Simona wearing an infuriatingly pleased expression, drones buzzing back and forth—and it all meant exactly nothing.

There were only a few approved entrances through the security cordon, electronic and optically marked routes laying out safe, cleared pathways within the rubble. Most of the really dangerous or distressing sights from the news—massive chunks of unstable permacrete, exposed wiring, piles of disassembled clones—had been long since removed, but the disaster still hung in the air. The cleanup process was greatly slowed by the need to comb over everything for even minute pieces of evidence, and there were still thousands of drones of various classes and a few dozen human personnel scurrying over the site, confirming and scanning and accessing.

It seemed more agreeable to Asami than the clean, unperturbed environments she had endured since the end of the pulsar mission.

The temporary structure that had been erected over the Ribbon was simple and utilitarian, a large white tent with deliberately visible surveillance equipment scattered about it. A few Cult members sat at a table in front, welcoming arrivals with drinks and cookies beneath a canopy. They, and some of the other pilgrims, stirred at their arrival.

“Hello, Miss Van Rossum,” one of them said in Standard, lightly reverent. “It’s great to see you here, after this terrible disaster. Of course, the Ribbon is unharmed, but thanks to the Goddess’s grace, we were able to get everyone out in time.”

Left unsaid was that the Ribbon itself was protected by a battlecruiser‐quality forcefield, Asami thought, but the point was still valid—she doubted anything would ever be allowed to hurt it.

“These are your guests?” the other girl asked, glancing pointedly at Asami. “If you’re in a hurry…”

“No need,” Clarisse said. “We’ll wait in line with the others.”

Asami cursed Clarisse silently. She did want to skip the line, and didn’t feel any need to be polite about it.

Only then did Asami notice the girl standing slightly off to the side, behind the small crowd. She looked just a bit out of place, and while there was no visible recording equipment, a media badge hung around her neck.

She reacted when Asami looked over, gesturing towards her.

“Our consolations to you in this dire time,” she transmitted. “I’m with Mihama media group, an MSY‐internal organization. If there’s anything you’d like to say to the public at this time, I’d be indebted for a few words before, or after this visit. Or perhaps with your companion.”

Asami shook her head. Not until afterward, if at all.

She watched Azrael peer in the reporter’s direction. Given her recent openness to the media, was Azrael scheduling something?

“Hey, you!” Simona said. “Here’s news for you! Shizuki Ryouko is still alive, and I’m here to prove it to her!”

Far too late, Azrael jerked Simona by the arm, painfully hard, causing her to stumble towards the main entryway, where a final shove got her through.

Asami knew her face was bright red, and darted across the threshold immediately. Goddess, she wanted to punch Simona, and only the awareness that she still had an audience stopped her.

The other Cult members within the tent stared at them curiously, including the quartet of hatted guards around the Ribbon itself. They had all heard, of course.

The anger and embarrassment at least kept the anxiety away.

Asami kept her face down, glaring daggers at Simona. The line was short, at least, thanks to a recently‐instituted appointment system. Rows of pew‐like seats had been erected on both sides for observers, and Eri and Elanis took seats on the right, crossing their legs as they tried to feign nonchalance.

Asami sensed something approaching her back and jumped, almost yelping, when the local Incubator, Kyubey, hopped onto her shoulder.

I’m here to observe, it thought on wideband as the chatter among the crowd grew even louder.

Observe what? Asami thought acridly.

Anything, Kyubey thought, before switching to address only Asami. We have long thought Akemi Homura dead, but there is now irrefutable evidence to the contrary. Nor is she alone in evading our detection. Our comprehension of the world is flawed, and must be corrected.

Asami gritted her teeth, but left it at that. Kyubey did not elaborate further.

She chewed over the Incubator’s behavior silently as the line advanced, group after group adopting prayer poses for a couple minutes before standing up, most of them glancing back at her, then heading over to the rows of seats, staying just a bit longer. What would she tell them when it was all over?

And then they were there, the Incubator leaning into her face as she stared at the simple loop of red in its case. On a whim, she scanned the other electromagnetic frequencies: it looked normal, of course.

The others around her closed their eyes and clasped hands, so she did the same, transforming as she did so.

She snapped her eyes open when the light hit her, a scorching sensation in her skin from radiation‐sensitive nerve‐endings, fading once she paid attention to it. She turned towards the source, automatically looking off‐center to protect her eyes.

The sight was astonishing, breathtaking, ridiculous. The entire sky glowed fiercely, transitioning from near‐infrared at the far edges, to brilliant colors of visual and ultraviolet, to painful x‐rays and even gamma rays near the source. That was what had triggered her radiation alarms—should have done far more, in fact. She shouldn’t have been able to stand here unharmed.

Closer inspection revealed swirling bright points of light plowing slowly and erratically through what she decided had to be some kind of nebula.

No, not just a nebula. It was far too dense, and though she had difficulty believing it, she could sense the immense source of gravity right above her, where the radiation was strongest, in the pitch‐black eye of the hurricane.

It was a black hole, and a tremendously large one at that. It looked three times as large as the sun in the sky, and based on the gravity around her…

She wasn’t sure how she still had access to her magic, but it told her the black hole must be supermassive. Indeed, the vision reminded her of Sagittarius A☆, at the center of the Milky Way, as she had seen it upon the ceilings of the catacombs of Paris. It brought back memories of Ryouko, captivated, explaining to her—

Though she had been anticipating a vision of some kind, Asami still felt a pale shock, one that didn’t fade as she turned to look around her. The landscape she was standing on was stark blank rock, scorched by radiation over geologic time, reflecting light across the spectrum. That eerie light gave the shadows on the landscape a spectral quality, glowing softly underneath monolithic pillars of stone.

Those shadows made her eyes catch on something distinctly out of place, just barely in sight.

She knew where she needed to go, then, and began making her way towards the anomaly, moving in slow, bounding steps that fell silently across the airless void.

A jagged silhouette, incongruous in its symmetry among the irregular pillars of smooth rock, resolved slowly into a winged statue—an artifact of purposeful hands rather than epochs of planetary geology. Blank, gray eyes transfixed hers, and it took Asami some time to place where she had seen that face before: the peak of the spiral spire, in Azrael’s simulation.

When she finally landed before the graven rock, it seemed to shift in response, hair and wings swaying ever‐so‐slightly.

“Don’t toy around with me,” Asami said, grabbing the statue’s arm. “You know why I’m here.”

The statue turned away from her, shockingly fast, and before she could react the statue’s arm jerked upward, pointing towards…

She shouldn’t have been able to see it so quickly, the tiny object arcing overhead, carefully outside the debris disk, far further away than she should have been able to discern.

“An alien vessel?” she asked, a second before sensing—

Before sensing—

Ryouko.

It wasn’t possible, but aboard was Ryouko’s soul, she could feel that it was her, in complete certainty. It had to be her. And that meant—

Yes, Simona is right, the statue thought. Ryouko is alive, and well.

Asami collapsed, slowly, to her knees, the low gravity cushioning her fall. For long seconds she just stared, as incoherent feelings flooded through her: relief, joy, fear, longing, bewilderment, frustration, love.

Then she realized: What was she doing just kneeling there? She was wasting her chance!

She stood up then upon the desolation, and began to run.

Faster and faster she went, and with the final bound she surged as high as she could, summoning her gravity magic to gain impossible height. Irrational—but what was rational about any of this?

Yet, even as she climbed higher and higher, the alien ship in the distance grew no closer—indeed, it only shrank further away, towards the flaming wheel in the sky.

Of course it wouldn’t work.

“I couldn’t go with her, then?” she asked aloud. “You had to separate us? You asked me to protect her!”

Her voice had risen more than she had intended it to.

The statue didn’t seem bothered, as it rose up in front of her again, stony wings calmly beating, tinged with a white glow from the disk beyond, directly in front of the supermassive black hole.

I don’t control everything, Asami, it thought. Your decisions, and Ryouko’s, were your own. I preserved the life she sacrificed, ensuring contact with a gentler set of Cephalopods, but interfered no further. There were other possibilities, some not even involving the pulsar mission, where you went with her—but that was not how your body of choices played out.

It took Asami a moment to understand, and then she just stared, mouth working wordlessly. What did you even say to that?

“So it’s my fault after all, then?” she said. “There was a way.”

And yet, the despair that should have attended such a thought never came.

As she stared, she began to comprehend a strangeness in the face of the statue. The unmoving mouth and eyes… it was as if they weren’t really there at all, as if there was a light, just behind them. Not the cold, harsh radiation of Sagittarius’s disk, but something warmer, softer, more welcoming…

Asami clenched her eyes shut, mastering herself with an effort.

When she opened her eyes again, the statue was pointing at the inner edge of the accretion disk, on the far side of the black hole, shifted above it visually by the gravitational lensing. Suddenly, she spotted the alien ship again, close enough to the black hole that she would fear for its safety… except that it seemed protected somehow, cushioned in a bubble of empty space.

She didn’t care to question what had happened, or how much time had passed; she could feel Ryouko’s soul again.

Suddenly, she could see something new, shimmering outside the glowing debris, dwarfing the ship in scale. It was a giant ring, more in three dimensions than two, and there was no way she should have missed it until now.

Now that she was allowed to see it, there was a whole complex of installations centered around the ring, refueling and resupply facilities and other orbs of esoteric purpose. Each individual facility would have dwarfed the largest of Humanity’s space stations, a dozen battlecruisers in length or more, and the whole system was nearly as large as Earth’s moon, though filled with empty space, centered on a tremendous distortion in the center, one she felt, one that seemed to project stars onto the black hole’s surface.

And around it, she seemed to see even more facilities in construction, shapes she was more familiar with, foundries which even seemed to have a carrier half‐assembled, defensive emplacements—but why were they only being built now?

Ryouko headed straight towards the distortion, which began to spiral open.