Chapter 1: The Orka

It was a myth, but the question that gnawed at every Alluran who'd ever stared at the twin moons long enough was this: how much of the ancient myth was fundamentally true?

The story went like this. Three thousand years ago, the human race fled a distant planet called Earth — a blue-green marble orbiting an unremarkable yellow star in an unremarkable spiral arm of a galaxy whose name we'd long forgotten. They fled because demons had come. Not metaphorical demons — the ancient texts were specific. Creatures with multiple eyes arranged in clusters like rotten fruit, fangs that curved inward so that anything they bit could not be pulled free without tearing. The texts called them Rakshasas, in a language that predated our five nations, a language that scholars said originated on Earth itself. The Rakshasas killed everything. Spared nothing. Turned cities to ash and fields to salt and the oceans to something the texts described as "black water that burned the skin of the living."

The people left. They had no choice. They built ships — crude things, if the illustrations were accurate, held together by metals we no longer used and prayers we no longer remembered — and they launched into the void. They searched the cosmos for centuries. Generations were born and died in the darkness between stars, never seeing sunlight, never feeling soil beneath their feet. Finally, the survivors discovered a habitable planet in a red dwarf star system. For those who made it, years of suffering followed. Disease. Hunger. The primal mathematics of survival: eat or be eaten, build or be buried. Only the strongest endured. Only the warriors who called themselves the Nakshatra — the Star-Born — triumphed against the odds and were able to create a new world.

My world. Allura.

To a species whose average life expectancy was sixty-eight years, three thousand years was an eternity. The context of any story could be distorted in that time — could be inflated, reduced, made beautiful or terrible depending on who held the pen. I had often wondered if the myth only existed to justify why we honoured the ancient Nakshatra temples scattered throughout our two continents. On Allura, everywhere you travelled, the temples were identical. Circular sanctuaries made from black Alluran stone, with high-pitched roofs and walls inscribed so densely with script that the letters seemed to move in torchlight, telling the story over and over, the way a river tells the same story to every stone it passes. Even though the Alluran people were now divided into five nations — Dharani, Vayu, Agni, Jal, and Akash — we all worshipped the Nakshatra. The warriors who delivered us salvation when humanity faced its darkest years.

I sat at the helm of the Alluran Solarfleet ship The Orka, staring at the small figurine of a Nakshatra warrior sitting in the centre of the control panels. For as long as I had flown with Captain Rudra Mathur, this tiny figurine was always kept visible on the bridge. Black boots. Gold-painted armour that caught the artificial light and threw tiny constellations across the console. A golden sword scaled down the warrior's back with an archer's bow slung over one shoulder. The facial features were barely distinguishable — years of Rudra's thumb rubbing the figure's head for luck before every mission had smoothed the face into something universal, something that could be anyone, which was perhaps the point. When and where Rudra had originally got the figurine, I didn't know. But its presence was meant to give the crew courage. Motivation. The old Nakshatra fire that the temples taught us still burned in our blood, if only we had the guts to reach for it.

I was reaching for that fire now. Deep down, I felt unnerved — a restless apprehension that sat in my stomach like undigested food, heavy and sour. This mission was like no other. Never before had a Solarfleet crew been permitted to exit the safety of the Alluran solar system. No crew had ever been assigned a task without a definitive directive.

The Alluran Solarfleet was primarily used to transport employees and mining produce to and from the several mined moons and asteroids orbiting our sun. Vessels like The Orka were glorified cargo haulers — reliable, unspectacular, built for routine. We knew our routes the way a farmer knows the paths between his fields. We knew the gravitational pulls, the debris zones, the pockets of solar radiation that could fry an unshielded hull. We knew everything about our solar system because our solar system was: our world. The boundaries of our existence. The fence around the garden.

And now we were being sent beyond the fence.

"Esha." Rudra's voice came from behind me — low, steady, the voice of a man who had spent thirty years in Solarfleet and who had learned that panic was a luxury a captain could not afford. "Status report."

I pulled my gaze from the Nakshatra figurine and checked the console. The numbers glowed green — always green on The Orka, because Rudra had insisted on green displays when the ship was retrofitted, claiming that green was "the colour of life, and I want my crew to see life every time they look at their instruments." The crew thought this was sentimental. I thought it was: wise.

"All systems nominal, Captain. Fuel reserves at eighty-seven percent. Hull integrity stable. Life support cycling within parameters. We're approximately nine hours from the boundary."

The boundary. The edge of the Alluran solar system — the invisible line beyond which no Solarfleet vessel had ever travelled. Beyond the boundary was: the unknown. The void. The darkness that the ancient texts described as "the space between the stars where even the Rakshasas feared to tread."

"Nine hours," Rudra repeated. He moved to the captain's chair — a battered thing, its cushion compressed by decades of captains before him, its armrests worn smooth the way the Nakshatra figurine's face was worn smooth: by use, by presence, by the weight of a body that came back to the same place every day. He sat. He looked at the viewscreen — the screen that showed stars, only stars, the dense starfield of deep space that was beautiful in the way that dangerous things are beautiful: from a distance.

"Have you ever wondered," he said, "what the first Nakshatra felt when they left Earth? When they looked back and saw the planet getting smaller?"

"I try not to wonder. Wondering makes me: nervous."

"Wondering is the only thing that makes any of this: worth it. A species that stops wondering is a species that stops: moving. And a species that stops moving is: dead."

The philosophy of Rudra Mathur. The man who quoted the ancient Nakshatra texts the way other captains quoted regulations — not for authority but for: meaning. The man who had chosen me as his navigator not because I was the best (I was competent, thorough, but "best" was a word that belonged to people with more ambition and less caution) but because, as he once told me, "You ask the right questions, Esha. Most navigators ask 'where are we going?' You ask: 'why are we going there?' And that question is: the only one that matters."

I didn't know why we were going there. None of us did. The directive from the Alluran High Council had been: vague. Deliberately vague, in the way that powerful institutions are vague when they want compliance without: conversation. The directive said: "Investigate the signal. Report findings. Return."

The signal. Detected six months ago by the deep-space monitoring array on Akash's northern moon. A signal that was: not natural. Not the background radiation of dying stars or the electromagnetic burp of a black hole. A signal that was: structured. Repeating. Intentional. A signal that said, in the language of mathematics: we are here.

Someone was out there. Beyond the boundary. Beyond the fence. And we were being sent to: find them.

Chitra appeared on the bridge — Chitra Desai, our science officer, a woman whose brain operated at a frequency that the rest of us could only approximate. She was small — five-two, compact, with the wiry build of someone who forgot to eat because eating interrupted: thinking. Her dark hair was pulled back in a braid so tight it looked structural, as if the braid itself was holding her thoughts in place. Her eyes — dark, quick, the eyes of a woman who processed information the way a computer processes data: continuously, without rest — her eyes were: worried.

"I've been running the signal analysis again," she said. No preamble. Chitra didn't do preamble. Preamble was: wasted breath.

"And?" Rudra asked.

"The signal isn't just repeating. It's: evolving. The pattern I documented six weeks ago has added a new sequence. A fourth layer. Whatever is sending this signal is: adapting. Responding to something. Possibly: us."

The bridge went quiet. The quiet that a space of people produces when the people in that space realise simultaneously that the situation has: changed. That the mission they thought they understood — investigate, report, return — might be something: else entirely.

"Responding to us?" I said. "How? We haven't transmitted anything."

"We haven't transmitted intentionally. But The Orka is: not invisible. Our engines produce a signature. Our hull reflects light. Our life-support systems emit radiation. We are — to anything with sufficiently advanced sensors — a bright, warm, moving thing in a very dark, cold, still void. We might as well be waving."

Kabir entered the bridge. Kabir Kohli — our engineer, built like the engines he maintained: solid, reliable, the kind of man whose hands were never clean because clean hands meant idle hands and Kabir's hands were: never idle. He was eating — a protein bar, the Solarfleet-issue kind that tasted like compressed disappointment and that Kabir consumed by the dozen because "fuel is fuel, and the body doesn't care about: flavour."

"What did I miss?" he asked, mouth full.

"The signal is evolving," I said. "And it might know we're coming."

Kabir stopped chewing. The stopping of a man who has been told something that his brain needs: a moment to process, and whose jaw has decided to participate in the pause.

"Well," he said, after the pause. "That's: not ideal."

"Not ideal," Rudra agreed. "But not: unexpected. If the signal is intentional — if something out there is broadcasting on purpose — then it's reasonable to assume that something is also: listening. And if it's listening, it's heard us."

"So what do we do?" I asked.

Rudra looked at the Nakshatra figurine. The gold-painted warrior with the smoothed face. The warrior who left Earth three thousand years ago and sailed into the dark and survived and built: a world.

"We do what they did," Rudra said. "We keep: going."