Over the skies of an Alpharonian planet, a broken and battered carrier ship of a faraway world rumbles through the atmosphere, shaking the air as it limped and heaved itself through the clouds.

  It had appeared very suddenly in the planet’s orbit, without warning or prior communication. At least, any legible communication. Neither did it come through any standard infrastructure, let alone the usual expectation of an extrastellar gateway. The ghost ship seemed to simply materialize out of nothing, against the dark void of space.

  Speculations arose as news of this began to be circulated. There was no number, no face, no identification that survived on the scarred hull. Practically nobody on that planet knows the outdated ship’s origins, who might have built it, and what fleet and mission it must have been on.

  There used to be an era in which the vessels of the first spacefarers to come out of the Cataclysms, in their limited and archaic technology, would now and then reappear in a vastly different time, displaced by decades, or even centuries of time dilation; they could only do so much to counter it. However, the expectation of that ever happening again died a very, very long time ago. Let alone, the era of which such a phenomenon still occurred.

  Nobody at the moment thought to connect this to the devastating incident that destroyed military-world Ritus some months ago, which had long exited the news cycle.

  *****

  Although it was only a day’s passing for them, the ship’s damaged internals have come to bring them back into realspace several months after the incident on World Ritus. Suddenly, the Ulminhan carrier ship found itself on its last breaths, far away in a foreign world, displaced in both time and space.

  The research vessel, the only other possible survivor, has since remained silent across the stars. It too, like the many others, has been deemed lost, making the carrier the sole surviving ship of its original fleet.

  The surviving crew now number less than a few hundred, with several having succumbed to their injuries since, and the dead were sealed off in an enclosed and restricted space onboard. Everyone remained weary, traumatized, and exhausted.

  And above all, a split was brewing.

  As Gahn brought the behemoth into the planet’s atmosphere, he could feel the ship creak and groan, as though it struggled with tremendous effort to remain aloft. With every breath, every puff and every heave, the vessel plowed itself through the sky, dutifully fulfilling its orders whilst on its last limbs.

  Away from the major populated urban areas, and with its shadow growing ever larger on the ground, Gahn fought hard to slow and cushion its descent. As it approached for landing at a nearby dock, as though wheezing in its final gasp, the ship dropped itself from its hover, and thundered the last few meters to the ground. Some parts of the internal superstructure could be heard with alarming damage, and the sound of its engines and other internal machine organs sputtered and wound down until its choir was soundless. The beast could finally be laid to rest.

  The shipyard at which they landed is rather out of the way, and relatively small. Either way, it appeared very ill equipped to handle such a vessel even half as large as the Ulminhan carrier. Amidst the smoke, the fumes, and the gigantic shadow casted, the locals and the workers rush out to meet the ship, and the local fire department prepared to subdue any potential fires.

  In rather anticlimactic fashion to the onlookers, someone is spotted atop the ship out on a deck, waving what appears to be a white makeshift flag. Subsequently, the doors of the ship opened, and its walkways extended down to the ground below.

  A storm of flames breaks out in one area of the ship, and a fire engine is dispatched in its direction, using a hydrant that siphons water out of the nearby lake.

  Coming down from the ship, the Ulminhans find themselves in the midst of a gathering crowd. A barrier had been set up to keep the people back. To their surprise, despite being more “out of the way” and being a “smaller town” for Alpharonian standards, the port city is nonetheless still a marvel larger than any of their hometowns growing up back in Ulminh.

  “Is there anyone I can speak to here?!” a stout man shouted amidst the chatter. “I want answers!”

  “Over here!” Gahn shouted over as he made his way through the crowd. “You can speak with me. Are you someone of authority around here?”

  “Yes, I’m the general manager!” the stout man replies. “What’s going on here?! What the hell is this? Who and what are you?!”

  “We ran into some troubles and got lost along the way,” replies Gahn. “We had to make an emergency landing here, and we apologize if none of our messages came through—”

  “Emergency landing, huh?” the stout man comments. “You think I don’t see that?! I’m asking what is that? You brought a whole warship to my doorstep and it’s riddled with holes! What the hell did you run from? Don’t tell me you brought with you any of those demon-things I heard about—”

  “What? No! No, there’s no demons onboard. What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Don’t think you can fool me! Everyone knows there’s no wars going on, what else could it possibly be?!”

  “I told you we ran into some troubles and got lost! Is that not—?!”

  “What are you not telling me, young man?! Or I’m calling this up to—”

  “We can’t tell you that, actually,” Vertan steps in, to Gahn’s confusion. “Our mission is confidential. It’s for the safety and security of countless people.”

  “And I’m supposed to believe you?” the stout general manager retorts. “What do you even offer in exchange for taking you all in? You know that I—”

  “How much debt are you in?” Vertan asks.

  “What? Why?”

  “I’m asking you.”

  “What that’s—! That’s none of your business!”

  “I’ll pay it off, that’s what I offer in exchange.”

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  “You’re crazy! You can’t be—”

  Fishing out the StarComms clipped to his belt, Vertan opens up his account to display the exorbitant amount of money awarded to him in the Expeditions. It was growing in there by the second.

  “If you leave us without any further questions or trouble, I’ll give you extra,” Vertan says.

  The general manager stared for a moment at the insane number floating on the holoscreen in front of him. As always, he felt the obligation to turn the offer down. After all, one should be honest in work and life.

  But, the loan sharks are coming for him tomorrow.

  “You can put that away,” he stammers, sweating, looking around at everyone. “Let’s go talk about it in my office.”

  *****

  “I can’t believe you bribed that guy,” says Gahn as he ate his sandwich. He sat across from Vertan at an outside patio of a local diner. “How’d you even know he was in debt?”

  “I didn’t,” replies Vertan between sipping his beer, having long finished his meal. “Guess you could say I got lucky. But you know, once you know, you just know.”

  “Really? You can tell just from looking at him?”

  “Everything’s expensive here, and will keep being so. Odds are in my favor that if I ask almost anyone around here, they’re probably scraping by more than we think just to afford living.”

  “Well, they still make more, don’t they? Doesn’t that even everything out? You’re paid more, you pay more. Look at how big their ‘small town’ is compared to our biggest cities back home, I’d say that’s a fair price.”

  “It’s about proportions. It doesn't matter how much they make if they spend a higher percentage of their income. We save proportionally more at home, at least for now. Who knows how things will change.”

  “I don’t know, it still seems like poor life choices on their part to me. Look at us, we’re from a much smaller domain and we still made it. You didn’t even tell me you were that rich.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “What? Call you what?”

  “Don’t call me rich.”

  “What do you mean? Are you not though?”

  “You see what I did with that guy earlier? That’s what they did to me years ago. ‘Here you go, you were good enough for us to let you go alive, so here’s a bunch of money for you to shut up about it.’ And like a good little dog, that’s what I did for them. Don’t ever fucking call me a rich man.”

  “Alright, alright, damn. I didn’t know. I didn’t know you felt so strongly about it.”

  “I hate using this money. I hate that I’m forced with such indignity to use it for my means against them. For every one of me, there’s countless others that never go home, and that money’s part of the wealth they generated. That’s growing off of speculation over stocks of companies that give them guns and bombs. I refuse to be called a rich man in a universe where genocide is profitable!”

  “Woah! Easy, chill out. Can you keep your voice down?”

  “Fine, I know.”

  “You’re getting really political and we’re trying to be on good terms with these people, alright? What if they overhear us?”

  “You at least get my point though, right?”

  “Yes, I get it. Look, I’m not going to call you a rich man again, alright? I’m sorry, I didn’t know this was such a big issue to you. I can’t say that I agree with everything because of how far-fetched everything you’re saying is, but I get it that it’s a sore topic, alright?”

  “Really? You can’t admit there’s a genocide going on out there?”

  “I can’t, and I’ll tell you why! Buddy, you’re probably the only one to ever bring it up like this. Just stop for a second and consider. What credible proof and evidence do you have for that? You know I only work based on factual and reviewed evidence.”

  “Is Lym not enough evidence for you?”

  “We’ve never even heard of her people and their world, let alone such a conflict. There’s no verifiable proof for me to stand with! Given that kind of conflict you two claim, you’d expect that we’d hear much more details about it by now. For all I know she could be a plant by the Federation! They’re probably running a ton of experiments anyway to get her that strong. She doesn’t even look that different from the rest of us, and she’s speaking our language fluently. Do you really expect me to believe there’s an entire planet out there of these people that have never seen any of us?”

  “That’s the point I’m trying to tell you! They’re keeping this shit secret from you! They don’t want you knowing about this war, they don’t want you knowing about these people. They’ve kept that secret for decades!”

  “What war? I don’t care what Lym says, there’s no proof of this greater war! She just came in out of nowhere with her gunship one day, and now we’re stuck in this politically charged mess. There’s been no conflicts since, the biggest thing going for the Coalition right now is just the Expeditions and those demons—”

  “Didn’t you hear her at all? Gahn, there are no demons out there. Demons have never been a thing in this context. She is the ‘demon’. Her people are the ‘demons’. They want something out of them, and that’s their excuse to go after them!”

  “And I’m supposed to believe that? You know the only ‘evidence’ I’ve been hearing from you is rather the lack thereof, right? What are they even going after? What are you suggesting that they have that is so valuable?”

  “Don’t you see that they wanted her captured? An individual as powerful as her? They want her! They want her people! By the cosmos Gahn, get it into your head, won’t you? Those people are the resource they’re after! They want that kind of power!”

  “I can’t get that into my head, do you see how crazy and conspiratorial that sounds? And I thought Tilko was insane. It’s logical that anything anywhere close to that kind of impact will be a wanted asset. That still doesn’t prove there’s a bigger war with another world out there!”

  “I saw what I saw! I was there when her brother died on that god-forsaken fortress-world all those years ago! We were all taught we were containing supernatural phenomena and you know what I survived to find out? That it was just a person! He was right there in front of me!”

  “Anecdotal evidence is still not statistical evidence. Talk to me when you bring something real. I care about what’s real and what’s here right now. We’re stuck on this planet far from home, and I’ve lost most of my troops and ships. I have a family to protect. I can’t be damned with your conspiracy theories right now!”

  “Is that it, then? You can’t care about anything that doesn’t directly affect you? My experiences aren’t real unless you were there to verify them?”

  “We can only control so much, Vertan. I know you!”

  “It will affect us, Gahn. I’m warning you now.”

  Frustrated, Gahn finishes the last bites of his sandwich, and tosses his napkin after wiping his fingers. His mood soured, he got up to leave.

  “I’ve had enough of this shit,” he snaps angrily. “Don’t make things any harder for us, got it?”

  And with that, he stormed off, leaving Vertan to sit with his beer alone. Quietly, he found himself boiling on the inside, at odds with the monopoly held over competence and credentials.