Read a preview
Chapter 1
Chapter One: The Baseline
They named the star Veil-93 because even at a glance it seemed to hide itself—red light braided with cold dust, a gauzy ring that turned its faint glow into a crown. Beyond it, nothing for a thousand years. Between its ring shards, everything.
Mira Kesavan floated in the viewport cradle with a gyro-stabilized tablet balanced across her knees. The tablet fed numbers to her inner ear in gentle, click-soft beats. Distance. Angle. Drift. She swiped and sent two micro-sail drones fanning outward from the scout ship Luz del Alba, their graphene petals trembling with photonic pressure as they coiled through the debris torus. Establish a baseline, measure parallax, trick the universe into giving up depth.
She had done this since Earth. She had done it before Mira was only Mira—when she was Mom, when there were small hands insistently waving picture books under the old balcony telescope. “Look,” her daughter had whispered, a lifetime ago. “If you move, the star moves.” Parallax, she’d said, and the word had stuck like a seed in the soft of her mouth.
“Kesavan,” Jiro’s voice crackled through the cradle speakers, roughened by too many long shifts. “Your drones are chewing close. Company’s leaning on us for data. We need spectacle.”
“Spectacle is not a unit,” Mira said, but she nudged their trajectories anyway, widening the angle, gel-flex boots anchored against the cradle as if gravity still applied. The ring sang—a chorus of ice collisions ghosting through the hull. Somewhere, the ship cat, a sleek solar-charger named Latch, rippled past and curled around the vent.
Mira reached for a strip of paper taped above the console, a list of first-contact protocols that promised sense. CALIBRATE. VERIFY. REPEAT. RECORD.
Make the universe resolve, she thought. Move, and make it bloom.
