The Tartarusios drifted through the silent abyss with her hull scarred and bruised from the battle at Altea. The faint hum of her engines was the only sound on a command deck heavy with tension. The crew had gathered around the central holo-table, and its flickering blue light cast tired shadows across every one of their faces.
Oscar slammed his fist against the console. "Damn it! A bounty, placed by the Emperor himself. We've just turned into a moving target, and those Imperial dogs never quit."
Halley leaned against the railing with her arms crossed, her green hair catching the dim light. "Don't lose your cool, Oscar. We need to make it back to base. Supplies are low, half the ship's systems are still bleeding power, and we can't fix any of that out here."
He shot her a glare, and his voice was rough with exhaustion. "You think I don't know that? Even if we leap three times back to back, we won't reach Antia in under two weeks. The Empire will catch us long before we can restock."
As if to prove her point, Nolan's voice crackled over the intercom from somewhere deep in the engine room. "Captain, I can give you three leaps, maybe four, before the heat sink starts complaining again. But our Brion reserves are worse than I thought. After that, we're drifting." The line clicked off, and nobody on the deck said anything for a while. Oscar stared at the star chart glowing on the table, at the long empty distance between their little blinking marker and the faraway point labeled Antia, and he did the arithmetic again in his head. It came out the same way every time.
The room stayed silent until the door hissed open and Bjorn came in, clutching a tablet to his chest with his glasses catching the faint light. He set it on the table and tapped the screen. A rotating hologram bloomed above it — a massive, ancient ring suspended in space, its surface fractured and covered in strange runes.
"Captain," Bjorn said, and his voice was careful but alive with excitement, "I think I have an idea."
Oscar frowned. "If it's another one of your ancient theories, Bjorn, we don't have time for—"
"Just hear me out." Bjorn enlarged the hologram until it filled the space above the table. "This is the Baraka Ring. It's older than most of recorded galactic history — decaying, but still intact. A while ago I came across an ancient Barakan text. It took me months to translate, but it describes something called Spatials, devices capable of instant travel across the universe. It doesn't explain how they worked, but if my translation is right, these rings were never monuments at all. They were gateways." His eyes glinted. "The coordinates put one only five hundred light-years from here. One leap, and we'd be at its edge. If there's even a chance it still works, it could get us out of the Empire's reach."
The crew leaned in, and the hum of the ship suddenly seemed very far away. Oscar studied the projection with his brow furrowed. "I've heard of the Baraka Rings, but I always thought they were myths — old stories to scare recruits. If what you're saying is true, why hasn't the Empire taken them already?"
Bjorn adjusted his glasses, and his voice dropped lower. "They tried. Centuries ago, the first exploration fleets were sent to study them, and they vanished without a trace. No signal and no debris, only a faint distortion in the void, as if reality itself had been torn. The Empire is proud, so it sent more — whole armadas — and every time the Rings woke up, the ships disappeared into the black as if they'd been swallowed whole." He paused. "The Imperial Archives talk about energy readings that defy mathematics. Some scholars believed the Rings weren't machines at all but living gateways, relics of beings older than the Empire. The superstitious ones called them the mouths of gods and said that trying to claim them was trespassing on creation itself."
He looked around the table. "The Baraka weren't just advanced. Compared to us, they were gods. They ruled half the known universe long before the Terrian Empire was born, and their technology was thousands of years ahead of anything we've built." His reflection flickered in the hologram. "And then they vanished."
The crew exchanged uneasy glances, and Bjorn leaned forward with his fingers spread over the glowing table. "There's a legend. When the Baraka reached the center of the universe, they found something there — something divine. A hand descended out of the void, a single finger wreathed in celestial fire. It struck their worlds one by one until nothing was left but ash and silence. Whole planets shattered. Empires burned. The few who survived gave up their lust for conquest and turned to worship the thing that had destroyed them. They called it the Hand of God."
Silence fell once more, and only the low hum of the engines filled the room.
Oscar looked at the hologram again, at the enormous ring turning slowly like the eye of some ancient god. "So that's what wiped them out," he muttered. "And now we're heading straight for the ruins they left behind."
Halley smirked faintly. "Well, Captain, you always said you wanted to make history."
"Let's just hope we don't repeat it," Bjorn said, and though his voice was steady, there was a tremor underneath it.
Oscar stood over the table for a long while after the others had drifted back to their stations, weighing the ring against the dark, the bounty and the empty supply logs. In the end there was really no choice to make at all. He gave the order, and Bjorn plotted the leap with hands that were not quite steady.
The Tartarusios turned her bow toward the coordinates and slipped onward into the dark, toward the forgotten light of the Baraka Ring waiting somewhere ahead of them, like the eye of a sleeping god about to open once more.