Several months ago – Oragon Star System — Beyond the Southern Frontier
The Battleship Somlaan, Flagship of the Angelic Republic, hung motionless in the void, a cathedral of grey-trimmed steel and shining gold Republic sigils. At 1,800 meters, the battleship was both fortress and monument—a symbol of everything the Angelic Republic had forged in twenty years of secrecy beneath the shadow of the Human Empire. Now it served as the heart of Taskforce 1, arrayed in a tight, protective coin formation at the head of something far greater than any fleet doctrine had ever anticipated.
This was the Migration Fleet.
It was an armada of survival, encompassing every element needed to rebuild a civilization:
- Ten thousand civilian ships stretched across the darkness like a scattered, floating city. The core consisted of five thousand three-thousand-meter Colony Arks, each a nation unto itself, their vast, slowly rotating habitats gleaming with pinpricks of life-sustaining light. Arrayed among them were five thousand two-thousand-meter Goliath-class vessels—fabrication hulks, beautiful in their raw industrial purpose, bristling with dormant construction arms, orbital segments, and the modules for space stations.
- Hundreds of Freighters and cargo vessels (ranging from 200 to 600 meters). These freighters, fat with essentials, were laden with seed vaults, memory cores, and the precious genetic archives of a thousand worlds—the biological and intellectual inheritance humanity would need to begin again.
- A massive number of Armed Taskforces—two hundred and fifty of them, comprising forty-seven thousand warships. Five thousand support vessels bolstered these taskforces, with an additional twenty thousand destroyers and light cruisers organized into squadrons of ten ships each. The warships’ hulls shone with the subdued, purposeful pride of a military that had never fired a shot in anger, yet carried the full, agonizing weight of an entire nation’s exodus.
Two billion souls were aboard those vessels. An entire nation, suspended between death and destiny.
Most of them were asleep, suspended in stasis pods that lined the cavernous, life-support interiors of the great colony ships like rows of silent, dreaming witnesses. But the officers and crew, the pilots and engineers, the doctors and technicians… they were awake. They had to be. This moment—this impossible crossing—would be etched forever into the soul of every person who remained conscious to witness it.
And ahead of them, vast and terrifying, loomed the dormant Oragon M-Gate.
Isaiah Kaelen stood at the exact center of the battleship Somlaan’s command deck, his hands resting lightly on the edge of his command crash couch. He had not yet sat. The sheer scale and finality of what was about to happen demanded stillness, presence, and perfect awareness.
He wore the immaculate white and gold of the Angelic Republic’s command uniform. The fabric felt cool and sharp against his skin, the lines of the jacket a perfect definition of his frame. But beneath the pristine cloth, hidden from sight, the Rune Mark pulsed faintly against his skin—a living script woven into his very soul, the echo of the Creator’s Dream, a direct gift from the Universe’s Spirit. It was simultaneously a map, a key, and a monumental burden. It hummed now, a low, subsonic vibration that only he could feel, resonating with something vast and patient that waited just beyond the veil of perception, waiting for his command.
Around him, the bridge crew worked in disciplined, almost reverent silence. Holoviews flickered with cascades of vital data: fleet positioning, power grid synchronization, reactor status, shield harmonics. Officers murmured clipped, professional voices into their comm relays, coordinating with the 250 taskforce admirals and the captains of thousands of destroyer and light cruiser squadrons across the impossibly vast armada. The air smelled faintly of recycled oxygen, the sharp tang of ozone from the shield emitters, and the subtle, metallic scent of overworked, bleeding-edge electronics.
Just as the final checks concluded, Albert Kaelen and his wife, Amara, stepped onto the bridge. They had taken a shuttle from one of the massive colony ships named New Zealand, bringing with them Isaiah’s younger siblings, Sara and Robert Kaelen. Albert wanted his children to watch their brother perform the miracle—to witness the moment Isaiah would awaken an M-Gate that should have been forever silent.
The bridge of the battleship Somlaan was the epicenter of destiny:
To Isaiah’s left stood his father, Albert Kaelen, gray-haired and steady, his arms folded as he watched the massive gate with the quiet, intense focus of a man who had walked away from Imperial nobility and built something profoundly better in its place. To his right, his uncle Jason, lean and sharp-eyed, leaned intensely into his holoview. Jason was muttering under his breath about reactor stability and quantum-field distortions, checking and re-checking the power distribution matrix as if the fleet’s survival depended entirely on his vigilance alone.
Behind them, near the secondary holoview station, his mother Amara and his aunt Allison stood together, hands clasped, silent, earnest prayers forming on their lips. These women had raised gardens on stubborn, forgotten frontier worlds, coaxing life from reluctant soil. Now they would plant them again, on soil no Imperial boot had ever touched.
And somewhere deeper in the ship, in the crew lounge two decks below, his sister Sara and brother Robert—teenagers now, born into the Republic’s terrifying dream—waited with the rest of the off-duty crew, watching the external screens, holding their collective breath.
This was the moment. The culmination of twenty years of perfect, agonizing secrecy. Everything they had built, everything they had risked, everything they had meticulously hidden from the Emperor’s pervasive psychic gaze—it all converged here, at the absolute edge beyond Human space, before the uncharted M-Gate that, according to every law of Imperial physics, should never be able to be activated by human hands.
A dormant gate that, according to the Imperial archives, should have led nowhere.
A gate that Isaiah would now command to lead directly to the Eden Cluster. The Eden star system M-Gate connected to twenty-five other star systems. Using the Rune Mark, Isaiah had prepared this cluster of M-Gates—a new network, separate and pristine, free of the Emperor’s control and psychic taint, utterly outside the known Human Empire M-Gate network.
“Power fluctuations on Ark New Gaia,” Jason Kaelen murmured, his eyes fixed desperately on a secondary console. “Compensating. Shunting power from the Stalwart’s reserve. Reactors 4 and 9 on the Hephaestus are running hot. Gods, Isaiah, what is this thing putting out?”
He wasn’t speaking to anyone but himself. His holoview terminal station was a frantic, glowing web of holographic energy grids, a terrifying map of the ten thousand civilian vessels and their reactors keeping a billion people in suspended animation. Jason was a man of cold physics, of hard, provable numbers, and of the predictable, brutal mechanics of the universe.
This? This was something else entirely.
This was a force requiring faith.
He glanced up from his console, across the crowded bridge to where his nephew stood. Isaiah looked perfectly calm, unnervingly still, but Jason knew him. He saw the razor-wire tension hidden deep in his shoulders, the almost superhuman rigidity in his stillness. The boy—no, the man—was carrying a weight that would have effortlessly crushed established empires.
And it might crush him yet, Jason thought, a cold, sharp spike of fear lancing through his heart.
He remembered Isaiah as a child, quiet and strange, constantly tracing impossible patterns in the air that no one else could see. He remembered the blinding headaches, the burning fevers, the terrible night terrors. And then, the day the "visions" started, the day this impossible, terrifying, galaxy-spanning plan was born in the mind of a boy barely out of adolescence.
Jason had been the ultimate skeptic. He had been the one demanding proof, running impossible calculations, pointing out the thousand-point-five ways this whole concept could fail spectacularly. Moving ten thousand colony, cargo, and freight ships in perfect, utter secret from twenty systems at the southern frontier of the Human Empire? An impossibility. Building an Ark Fleet and a Military fleet under the Emperor’s ever-present nose? Absolute suicide. Relying on ancient, alien magic to... what? Politely ask a dormant M-Gate to bend the known laws of Imperial physics and transport them 60,000 light-years?
It was profoundly, dangerously insane.
But then, Isaiah’s "magic" had begun to bear terrifying fruit. The M.S.D.s—the Mind Shield Devices—that actually worked against the Emperor’s Dark Sisters. The sensor upgrades that could suddenly see cloaked Voryn ships. The fabrication schematics for alloys and reactor components twenty years ahead of standard Imperial technology.
And now, this final, terrifying gamble.
“Uncle,” Isaiah said, his voice quiet, yet somehow cutting cleanly through the bridge’s low hum of activity. He hadn’t turned, as if sensing the moment Jason looked away from his screen.
Jason started. “I’m here.”
“Stop worrying about the reactors. They will hold. They have to.”
“It’s the gate itself,” Jason countered, gesturing at the main holoview. The colossal ring, forty thousand kilometers across, was still dark, but it felt… heavy. His sensors were picking up impossible subspace distortions, gravitational ripples that shouldn’t exist outside of a black hole’s event horizon. “It’s… it’s leaking, Isaiah. It’s radiating something, some primal energy. It’s putting immense, focused stress on the containment fields of every single ship in the fleet, from the Somlaan down to the smallest freighter.”
“It’s just waking up,” Isaiah said, his tone serene. “It’s stretching its ancient limbs. It feels us. More importantly, it feels me.”
Jason swallowed hard, running a shaking hand over his face. He felt decades older. “Just… please, be careful, nephew. Whatever it is you’re about to do—that is one billion lives you’re holding in your hands. Don’t… don’t let it break you when it pushes back.”
“I won’t,” Isaiah promised, his voice low and absolute.
Jason turned back to his console, his fingers flying across the controls. “Fine. But I’m keeping the emergency shunts open to all five thousand Ark ships. The universe may run on your magic, Isaiah, but someone still has to keep the lights on for the sleepers.”
Isaiah allowed himself a brief, faint smile. He knew his uncle's cynicism was simply a shield for his deep, pragmatic love.
Isaiah closed his eyes. He let the immediate murmur of the bridge fade—the sound of his uncle’s pragmatic fear, the comforting anchor of his father’s steady presence. He reached inward, past the doubt, past the crushing, agonizing weight of the billion souls balanced precariously on his will, and into the luminous, complex architecture of his Rune Mark.
It ignited at his touch. A universe of blinding white light and perfect geometric harmony bloomed behind his closed eyelids. This was his profound truth, his impossible gift, his terrible, sacred curse.
The truth he carried was simple, but its implications were vast and galaxy-altering:
All M-Gates or Gates of this galaxy were connected.
Not in the limited, fixed way the Empire understood them—a static network of fixed pairings, each gate linked only to one other in a rigid, easily exploitable lattice of commerce and political control. That was a lie. An artificial limitation imposed by an ancient, forgotten will eons ago. A deliberate architectural sabotage of the Creator’s original design.
No. The gates were alive, part of a single, cosmic nervous system that spanned the entire galaxy, a web of pure potential woven from the very fabric of creation. Once, countless eons ago, they had been open, fluid, responsive. Any gate could reach any other anywhere in the galaxy. The entire network had pulsed as one, a single, living heart. If he wanted to, Isaiah could connect this dormant Oragon Gate to Sol’s gate, instantly dropping the entire Migration Fleet into the Imperial heartland. But that would be madness and utter self-destruction. Isaiah focused, shaping his power.
But something—some ancient hand, some profoundly deliberate intelligence—had severed the web. Reprogrammed it. Locked it into static fragments, isolated clusters, disconnected chains. To every living being in the galaxy, the gates were scattered, predictable relics, fixed routes, and strategic bottlenecks to be constantly fought over and brutally controlled.
But Isaiah's Rune Mark reached deeper. It was older than the lie itself.
It touched the core instructions, the divine architecture etched into the lattice by the Maker. It was a fragment of the original administrative code, the master key. And through that touch, Isaiah could do what no emperor, no admiral, no engineer, no scholar, and no Dark Sister had ever dreamed possible.
He could command the gates.
He focused his will, shaping it into a single, piercing thought. He felt the cold, sleeping consciousness of the Oragon Gate, a billion-ton titan of exotic matter and frozen light. He pushed his consciousness into its structure, feeling the grinding weight of its dormancy, the forgotten majesty of its purpose.
He thought of Selene.
His cousin, his most trusted strategist, stationed at the far-flung Coorbash star system. She was the Shield to his Ark.
Right now, she was thousands of light-years away, nestled deep within the lion's den of the Coorbash Star System. She was walking among the Imperial admirals, smiling, negotiating, planting the deep, insidious seeds of their "legitimate" organization, the ARTA. She was the lightning rod, drawing all the Emperor’s paranoid attention, all the Dark Sisters’ searing, psychic hatred, onto herself. She and the entire Angelic Republic sub-organization were the diversion. The agonizing sacrifice.
I’m safe. The Migration fleet has already left the southern frontier and human space. She’s in the fire, and I put her there. The guilt of it was a searing, physical pain in his chest, almost doubling him over on the crash couch. But he straightened his back. It was the only way. The Empire’s focus had to be locked onto the Northern and Western frontiers and the newly signed Mayoral System Charter that gave Selene’s organizations the legal rights to operate in both civil and military matters. The political chaos, the discovery of both the stealthy Voryn and the Alliance polity—all of it increased the distractions. All of it allowed this great migration exodus from the southern frontier. They were here now, several thousand light-years from human space, and the Oragon M-Gate waited before them.
He owed her this moment. To make it work perfectly. To get their people to safety, to build the new sanctuary for which she was risking her very soul.
He gathered all his strength, all his focused will, all his pain, and all his hope, and pushed it into the Rune Mark.
Isaiah raised one hand, his palm upturned toward the holoview of the massive gate. “Open,” he whispered.
The word was soft, barely audible over the bridge’s low hum, but it carried the full, commanding weight of his will. The Rune flared beneath his skin, lines of living, internal light tracing glowing paths across his chest, his arms, his hands. The glow was faint, hidden beneath the uniform, but the sensation was anything but subtle. It burned like fire, like ice, like the first, raw breath of creation itself, a terrible beautiful agony.
And the Oragon M-Gate responded.
“Sir! Sir, look!”
Lieutenant Varen’s voice cracked, a gross breach of protocol that, in the ensuing chaos, no one even noticed. His hands, usually so steady on the tactical console, were visibly shaking.
“Report, Lieutenant,” Captain Grimaldi of the Somlaan said, his voice a low, disciplined rumble of command.
“The gate, sir. It’s… it’s doing something the true Creator only knows!”
Varen’s tactical display was suddenly a nightmare of impossible data. The colossal ring on the main holoview, previously a dark, inert circle, was now terrifyingly alive.
A visible, massive ripple passed through its structure, a cosmic shockwave of sheer force. Faint lines of light—runes, mirroring the script on Isaiah’s skin—flared to life across its surface, glowing in colors that Varen’s tactical sensors couldn’t even quantify. Violet, deep gold, shimmering silver-white, shades that seemed to shimmer between the perceived dimensions of space.
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“Energy signature spiking!” Varen yelled, his discipline momentarily returning. “It’s off the scale, Captain! Harmonics aligning to… to a matrix I’ve never seen. It’s not in the Imperial database. It’s not anything known to human science!”
“Gravitational distortion rapidly increasing,” the helm officer added, his voice strained with effort. “Space-time curvature forming at the aperture. We’re reading… sir, we’re reading a stable event horizon!”
The gate’s vast structure gave a powerful, grinding shudder. A low, profound hum resonated through the fabric of space itself, a sound so deep it bypassed the audio pickups and vibrated directly in the very bones of every crew member on the bridge, threatening to crack their teeth.
Varen tore his gaze from his console and stared at the man standing in the center of the room.
First Citizen Isaiah Kaelen was glowing.
It was faint, a silver-white aura that seemed to cling to the perfect white fabric of his uniform, strongest around his eyes, which were now wide open and reflecting the impossible, multi-hued light of the gate.
“It’s… it’s responding to something,” Varen whispered, his technical report forgotten, replaced by sheer awe. He stared at his console, where the colossal energy spike from the M-Gate and the minute bio-electric reading from the First Citizen were syncing perfectly. The harmonics were matching, note for note, a terrifying duet between the man and the galactic-spanning machine.
“He’s… he’s controlling it,” Varen finally realized, his blood running cold with a terrifying, religious awe. This was not advanced physics or Imperial engineering. This was a miracle of creation.
Isaiah opened his eyes completely. They glowed faintly, silver-white, burning with the reflected, impossible light of the gate’s aperture.
“Signal the fleet,” he commanded, his voice calm, steady, absolute. It cut through the rising tension on the bridge like a masterfully wielded blade. “Prepare for transition. Now.”
The command rippled outward through the vast fleet like an unstoppable wave of certainty.
Across ten thousand migration ships and the seventy-one thousand two hundred and ninety-four military vessels with their support ships, the comm relays crackled to life with confirmation.
“Taskforce 1 to all way to Taskforce 249, acknowledgement received. All ships, green for transition.”
“Ark New Gaia, all stasis pods stable. Green for transition.”
“Goliath Hephaestus, all fabrication modules and construction drones secured. Green for transition.”
Light cruiser and destroyer Squadron captains acknowledged. Ship captains rechecked their reactor cores, shield harmonics, and sublight drives. Marine commanders ensured their troops were secured in crash-webbing. Medical officers ran final, fleet-wide diagnostics on the integrity of the life-critical stasis pods. Engineers ran final checks on the fusion plants, diverting all non-essential power to the forward shields.
The Migration Fleet began to move, a single, deliberate gesture.
Slowly at first. The 249 Taskforces fanned outward, forming perfect, protective arcs on the flanks. Destroyers and light cruiser Squadrons accelerated ahead, their sleek hulls cutting through the void like knives, the first to brave the unknown aperture. Behind them came the cruisers, heavy cruisers, battlecruisers, and battleships, their heavier frames gliding into formation with the deliberate, heavy grace of warships that knew their ultimate, final purpose.
And at the very center, the heart of the great migration—the thousands of great Colony Arks.
Three thousand meters, massive, cylindrical, rotating slowly to generate gravity for the billion sleepers within. Each one was a self-contained, perfect city, housing untold numbers in suspended animation. Seed vaults lined their cavernous holds. Memory cores preserved the knowledge of millennia—art, science, philosophy, history, ready to be reborn. Genetic archives carried the blueprints of humanity's flora and fauna, ready to be resurrected on new soil.
With them were the Goliath-class fabrication ships, vast industrial hulks designed by the Angelic Republic to move entire orbital stations across the stars. They carried pre-fabricated modules, construction drones, orbital ring segments, planetary elevator components. Everything required to instantaneously establish a civilization from scratch.
More than eighty-one thousand ships in total, the Migration Fleet moved as one, a single, unified organism of steel and light, gliding toward the gate with the inevitability of a tide.
On the battleship Somlaan, Isaiah stood, watching the tactical display. The fleet’s coin formation was perfect. Defensive, protective, centered perfectly on the vital colony ships. Taskforce 1 led the way, the Somlaan at its heart, a beacon for the rest to follow.
His father, Albert, stepped closer, his voice low, filled with a raw, almost painful pride. “You’re sure this will work? This defiance? This rupture?”
Isaiah glanced at him, the faint, silver-white glow still lingering in his eyes, a residue of the Rune. “I am. The Rune’s connection is complete.”
Albert studied him for a long moment, the lines around his eyes—lines earned from years of political maneuvering and frontier construction—softening. “I walked away from a Dukedom. I thought I was simply building a company. A new life. I never dreamed… this. You’re leading our people to absolute freedom, Isaiah. In a way I, as a former Imperial noble, never could have dared.” He paused, his resolve hardening into iron. “Then we trust you. As we always have.”
Jason snorted softly from the other side, his hands still a blur over his console, still fighting the magic with logic. “Trust’s one thing. Surviving’s another. If this gate doesn’t hold the tunnel for the full eight hours—”
“It will,” Isaiah interrupted, his tone gentle but absolute, utterly unyielding. “The Rune doesn’t lie. The gate knows where we’re going, and it knows it must hold.”
“Where you’re sending us,” Jason corrected, but there was no accusation in his voice now. Only weary, grudging acceptance. He finally looked up from his screens, his gaze locking with Isaiah’s. “You’ve seen it, haven’t you? This… Eden star system and the Eden Cluster.”
Isaiah nodded slowly, a profound calm washing over him. The vision was as clear as the bridge around him. “I’ve seen it. A world untouched. Green oceans. Azure skies. A G-type star, like Sol, warm and stable. And twenty-five gates—a new, clean network, connected to worlds we can make our own. A sanctuary away from the Empire’s corruption and the taint of its rule.”
Jason exhaled, a long, shuddering breath of relief and fear, rubbing his face with the heel of his hand. “And you’re absolutely sure the Emperor won’t follow? His Dark Sisters… they’re psychically hunting for us, Isaiah. I have a terrible feeling they will follow us, even to this Oragon M-Gate system.”
“The Imperial taskforces he sends will not be able to follow us to this Oragon M-Gate, not through this gate,” Isaiah said quietly, confidently. “Not through this passage. Not without me controlling it and allowing it.”
The Oragon M-Gate was now fully awake.
Its aperture blazed with impossible light, a shimmering, hypnotic membrane of folded space that pulsed like a titanic heartbeat. Energy bled from its surface in massive, visible waves, ethereal ripples of gold and violet light that defied the vacuum. The colossal ring thrummed with raw, unimaginable power, the low, deep hum resonating through the very hulls of every ship in the fleet.
It was beautiful. It was terrifying. It was, undoubtedly, divine.
Officers on the Somlaan watched in stunned silence, their hands hovering over their consoles, their mouths slightly agape. Some whispered old, forgotten prayers. Others simply stared, their minds struggling to process the colossal, metaphysical power before them.
Isaiah alone remained calm. He had seen this moment a thousand times in his visions. The gate's awakening. The fleet's crossing. The emergence into Eden's light.
But now, standing here, feeling the Rune burn against his skin, he understood something far deeper than the vision.
This was not just a journey. It was a severance.
By his conscious will, the Oragon Gate was bypassing the entire Imperial lattice. It was tunneling through the hidden, ancient structure of the network, reaching across sixty thousand light-years to a pairing that no one else could possibly trace or replicate. Eden’s Gate lay far beyond the eastern frontier of human space, in a region the Empire had never charted, never explored, never even imagined existed.
And once the fleet crossed, once they emerged on the other side, Isaiah would sever the connection. He would command the Oragon Gate to forget Eden’s coordinates. The Imperial M-Gate network, for all its sophistication, would remain blind, deaf, and dumb to the Republic’s sanctuary.
The Human Empire would search for the missing Argonauts fleet. They would eventually find Argonauts star system empty, its twenty constituent systems abandoned, their populations vanished without a trace. They would discover the Oragon system, eventually, through slow Jump Space travel and exploration. They would see the dormant gate.
But they would find no trail. No breadcrumbs. No way to follow.
And in several months, when Isaiah was ready and established, he would reconnect Argonauts and its twenty systems to the Imperial network. It served his purposes. By then, the southern frontier would be nothing more than empty star systems and abandoned habitable worlds, ripe for re-colonization by the next wave of humans—if humanity survived against the Voryns or the approaching cosmic horror of the Doom.
Once he was ready, he would create a permanent connection with the Oragon M-Gate and the Coorbash Star system M-Gate, establishing a permanent, secure bridge—a way for Selene and her Angelic sub-organizations to reestablish contact with what would soon be the Human Republic, now safely in the Eden Cluster.
But Eden would remain hidden from the Emperor and the vile Dark Sisters he controlled.
Forever.
Two decks below the command bridge, in the aft observation lounge, Sara Kaelen had her nose pressed against the thick, cold viewport. Her younger brother, Robert, was vibrating with nervous energy in the seat next to her.
“Are we moving now, Sara?” Robert asked, his voice a terrified squeak.
“Duh,” Sara said, not looking away. She was sixteen. She was too old for this kind of childish fear, but she was also too fundamentally terrified to be anywhere else. “The first ships are going in.”
She could see them clearly, even from this distance. The destroyers of Squadron Seven. Tiny, silver darts against the immense, terrifying blackness. They approached the shimmering, swirling thing in the void. It looked profoundly wrong. It was a hole punched clean in the middle of the sky, framed by the silent, colossal ring.
“What if it… what if it eats them?” Robert whispered, clutching her arm with cold fingers.
“It’s not going to eat them, dummy,” Sara snapped, but her stomach clenched hard enough to make her gasp. “Isaiah is… you know. He’s Isaiah. He’s got this under control.”
She watched, mesmerized, as the first destroyer reached the aperture. Its sleek, predatory hull shimmered, blurred at the edges, and then, in a silent, blinding flash of white light, it was just gone. Dissolved into light and memory.
Robert gave a profound, terrified gasp.
One by one, with agonizing slowness, the ships followed. Light cruisers. Heavier cruisers. Battlecruisers. Battleships. Troop transports. Colony ships. Each one flickering out of existence in the Oragon M-Gate.
Sara felt a profound, aching wave of sadness wash over her. She was leaving. She’d lived her entire life on Argonauts star system, on the habitable planet Sarah. She’d had friends. She’d had a life, simple and real. Now, it was being irrevocably wiped clean. She was leaving her distant home forever, all because of something called the “Doom” that no one would explain, and because of a mad, psychopathic Emperor whom she’d only ever seen in heavily edited propaganda holos.
The Somlaan thrummed violently beneath her feet, the vibration from the gate growing stronger and deeper, making her chest cavity ache.
“I’m really scared now, Sara,” Robert admitted, his voice barely a breath.
Sara finally pulled her gaze from the window and took his hand properly, holding it tight. It was icy cold. “Me too, Robbie. Me too. But Mom and Dad are right there on the bridge. And Isaiah’s flying the ship. He’s the Architect of Destiny.” She forced a reassuring smile that felt brittle. “It’s okay. We’re all together. We’re going to be okay.”
We’d better be, she thought, turning back to the void, just as the last of the towering Colony Arks slid, painfully slow, into the blinding, swirling light.
“First wave entering gate proximity,” the helm officer reported, his voice tight and strained with exhaustion. “Destroyer Squadron Seven crossing threshold… now.”
Isaiah watched the holoview as the lead destroyers reached the aperture. He could feel it through the Rune, a tiny, distant pop in his consciousness as Squadron Seven arrived at their destination, sixty thousand light-years away. He held his breath, the entire bridge silent, waiting on the most crucial confirmation.
A minute later, a tiny flicker appeared at the center of the gate’s shimmering, vast aperture.
“Sir!” Varen yelled, his hand slamming his console with excitement. “It’s an automated drone ship! Republic automated courier, returning immediately!”
The tiny, high-speed drone vessel shot from the event horizon, its sublight drive flaring, and began immediately transmitting its light-speed compressed data burst. Varen’s console lit up with the encrypted message.
“It’s from Squadron Seven, sir!” Varen’s voice was choked with pure, raw emotion. “Message is…
A profound wave of quiet, shuddering relief passed through the bridge. The crew slumped slightly, allowing themselves a moment to breathe.
One by one, the vast procession followed.
Light cruisers. Heavy Cruisers. Battlecruisers. The mighty Battleships. Titan-class Auxiliary vessels. Dedicated Medical ships. Troop transports. Colony Arks. The huge Goliath-class fabrication vessels. Freighters and cargo ships. Each one flickering out of existence in the Oragon M-Gate and reappearing—Isaiah knew—in Eden’s system M-Gate instantaneously, perfectly safe.
The crossing took agonizing hours. The fleet was impossibly vast, and the gate could only handle so much mass at once before risking catastrophic collapse. The colony ships moved the slowest, their massive frames approaching the gate with deliberate, agonizing care. Stasis pods hummed within their hulls. A billion souls, dreaming of a world they had never seen, passing through the eye of a needle that could, at any moment, unravel them all.
Finally, after nearly eight hours of relentless transition, the last ship—Ark New Hope—slipped through the aperture.
The void of the Oragon system was empty.
It was just them. Republic Taskforce 1. Two hundred ships with the Battleship Somlaan at its center, perfectly aligned before the blazing, obedient gate.
Albert placed a comforting hand on Isaiah’s shoulder. The contact was solid, grounding. “You did this. All of it. You gave them hope and a new world.”
Isaiah shook his head faintly, the glow in his eyes dimming for a moment. “I gave them a chance. What they build with it… that’s theirs to decide.”
Jason snorted, a laugh of pure, nervous relief. “I’m going to need three bottles of Imperial Reserve Brandy to rationalize the physics I just witnessed.”
Republic Taskforce 1 and the Battleship Somlaan approached the gate last, as befitting the flagship and the center of command.
Isaiah sat now, finally, deeply, in his command crash couch. The restraints locked around him with soft, firm clicks. The holoview flickered, displaying the gate’s aperture directly ahead—a swirling, blinding vortex of light and folded space, waiting for them.
“All systems green,” the captain reported, his voice resonating with grim, total satisfaction. “Shields holding. Reactor stable. Republic Taskforce 1 is ready for transition on your mark, First Citizen.”
Isaiah took a slow, deep breath, feeling the full, monumental weight of his new title: First Citizen. Not emperor. Not prophet. Just… the first among equals. The one who had seen the way forward and delivered on the promise.
“Engage,” he said softly, the single word commanding the ship and the Taskforce.
The Battleship Somlaan’s sublight drive pushed and surged the ship forward. The rest of Republic Taskforce 1 moved in a protective wedge with their flagship.
The gate embraced them.
Light flooded the bridge, blinding, beautiful, and infinite. The ship shuddered violently as it crossed the threshold, a groan of stressed metal protesting as space-time collapsed and instantly reformed around it. For a single, impossible, agonizing moment, Isaiah felt everything.
His consciousness, tied to the Rune, exploded outward. He was the lattice. He felt every gate in the galaxy, every thread of connection, every severed link, every hidden, forgotten path. He felt the cold, dead, empty systems of the deep void. He felt the teeming, chaotic, over-lit systems of the Imperial core. He felt the psychic screaming of the Dark Sisters as they searched for him, their minds sweeping the 500 Human Empire’s star systems M-Gate network like a frantic spotlight, and he hid his passage, folding his fleet’s psychic wake under a thousand other, normal, white-noise transitions.
He felt the Arqan gate, far beyond the northern frontier outside human empire space, and the shattered debris of Voryn stealth ships that the anti-stealth sensor module program upgrade had been designed to find.
He felt… something else. An ancient, slumbering cold. A presence in a dead star system, so vast and so dark it felt like a massive, terrifying hole in the network itself. Galgamish. One of a thousand predicted Dooms. Sleeping. But stirring.
And then the battleship Somlaan and its Republic Taskforce 1 emerged into Eden’s system, and the blinding light faded, and the stars were new, clean, and unfamiliar.
A brilliant, benevolent yellow-white G-type star hung in the blackness. Before them, a jewel of deep green and vibrant blue swam in the light—Eden 3.
Around him, the bridge crew gasped, staring at the holoview. Varen was openly weeping tears of exhausted relief at his station. Jason was staring, mouth agape, his console utterly forgotten for the first time in hours. Albert had his arm around Amara, who was crying silently into his shoulder.
A new star. A new sky. A new, terrifying beginning.
But Isaiah did not look at the view. His most vital work was not yet done.
He closed his eyes and reached back through the Rune, back across sixty thousand light-years, back to the Oragon Gate, now blazing alone in an empty system. He gathered his will into a final, surgical, perfect blade of command.
And commanded it for at least this time:
Sleep and Forget. I will call on soon, Oragon M-Gate. Soon, you will connect to other gates.
His Rune Mark was the master key, and the M-Gate listened and instantly severed the newly written pathway to Eden star system M-Gate. It waited, obediently, for Isaiah’s promise to connect it to other gates. It did not go fully dormant like before; it simply waited, its vast, unknowable consciousness understanding that to the M-Gate, time had no true meaning.
On the bridge, Isaiah slumped into his chair, the silver-white glow vanishing from his eyes, leaving only profound exhaustion.
The gate obeyed and waited.
The connection to Eden’s coordinates dissolved, utterly erased from the lattice’s shared memory. The Oragon Gate fell silent once more, its aperture growing dark. It waited for new connections, forever tied to Isaiah’s unique command.
And in the Imperial archives, in the Senate’s records, in the Dukes’ star charts—there would be no trace. However, as the connection snapped shut, Isaiah could still feel the psychic residue of the Imperial taskforces the Emperor had ordered to follow: Imperial Taskforce 6, Imperial Taskforces 13, and, worryingly, Isaiah’s favorites, Imperial Taskforce 9. And with them, burning like a cold, terrible star, the consciousness of a Dark Sister named Sister EVE.
Isaiah opened his eyes and exhaled, a long, ragged, final breath. He felt his father’s comforting, solid hand on his shoulder.
“Set course for Eden 3,” he said quietly, his voice hoarse with effort, yet ringing with ultimate authority. “Signal the fleet. We’re home.”