“Find us a good place to hide out while we recharge please, Min-ji,” Miliam requested the moment the Astrum Vitae was safely free of the Delta Bo?tis system. Well, once her heartbeat settled, and she’d taken some deep breaths to calm herself, and she was confident she could speak without her voice wavering. She really had done her best to speak as quickly as she could though. “Preferably somewhere like the crevice the vault was in, on an asteroid or moon. And, Aoibhe?”

  “Head there as soon as she has the location?” Aoibhe guessed.

  “Aye,” Miliam confirmed a bit cheekily. Then she activated the intercom. “Good work everyone, we made it out alive. We’re going to find somewhere to set down and let the capacitors recharge before we make the trip home. Abigail, you’re free to leave the cloister, but Tessa and Engineer, hold on a little long.”

  All of that taken care of, Miliam leaned back in her chair and sighed quietly, allowing the tension to bleed out of her body. She found herself consciously forcing her limbs to relax, so tense were they. The intense fear she’d felt during that entire encounter was still lingering in the pit of her stomach like a bad aftertaste and Miliam couldn’t quite convince herself it was over.

  She also felt like she was forgetting something, but couldn’t quite put her finger on what.

  At any rate, there was no way for the GNS Falcon Catcher to give chase, a fact Miliam repeated in her head as she waited for Aoibhe to land the ship. There had to be two or three dozen stars closer enough to Delta Bo?tis for a translocation jump, and while the Astrum Vitae hadn’t been fully charged at the time, it had gotten enough time between jumps to recharge partially. The mirazar cruiser could check only ten percent or so of the stars in range before the Astrum Vitae made a second jump, and that was assuming it had been fully charged itself.

  Eventually Aoibhe got the ship nestled into a good hiding spot on a tidally-locked moon orbiting a world with significant amounts of volcanic activity. Seeing that, Miliam decided it was time for an all-hands meeting. At least, as all-hands as it could get when one of the twins would need to remain on the bridge.

  “Alright everyone, let’s go ahead and meet in the lounge so we can discuss what we recovered. Eun-ji, Min-ji, sorry to split you up, but whoever is the least exhausted its going to need to watch the sensors and I want the other to attend,” Miliam announced after thumbing the intercom again.

  “Not. Possible,” Engineer responded from the engineering bay. Miliam tilted her head in confusion.

  “Haven’t checked the damage report yet, have you?” Aoibhe added a moment later. With a groan threatening to spill from her lips, Miliam fiddled with her displays until she got the relevant screen up. Staring her in the face was a 3D diagram of the ship which she rotated until the bright red section was fully in view.

  That’s what had slipped her mind. During their escape from the cruiser, the Astrum Vitae had taken a low-powered hit in the brief time its barriers were tuned specifically for the sort of lasers projected by missiles. From the looks of things, it had taken them amidships along the bottom, blowing through the useless, mundane armor protecting the ship to carve a line straight through the ship, exiting at the top of the elevator shaft. Along the way, the infirmary was blown to smithereens, though that room had, blessedly, been very poorly stocked for lack of a medic to staff it.

  Most relevantly, the lounge had been the first casualty. It remained pressurized thanks to the emergency wards for maintaining atmosphere, but the room was surely a mess. There was little chance anything had survived.

  “Ah,” Miliam grunted, smacking a hand over her eyes while she massaged her temples. That was going to be expensive to fix.

  ““Our saved games…”” mourned the twins in unison. Miliam wondered if it had occurred to them that, had the hit been a fairly short distance closer to the bow and to the left, it would have gone right through the bridge.

  “Okay, scratch that idea, I guess. Let’s just meet on the bridge. It’ll be a bit cramped but at least everyone can be here,” Miliam decided. It didn’t take long for the other three to arrive given the size of the ship. Tessa shamelessly claimed the copilot’s seat while Engineer settled into a crouch between Tessa and the sensor station and Abigail stood to Miliam’s left.

  With everyone present, Miliam got started. “First- Engineer, how bad is the damage? Will we have any more issues on the way back?”

  “Two turrets. Gone. Rest…superficial,” Engineer reported, prompting Miliam to click her tongue. That was four laser turrets offline in total and even if it was possible to salvage the orichalcum from the two they’d just lost, they probably wouldn’t be able to rewire the first two without a dry dock.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “Well, nothing we can do about that, so just make sure we have a full list of damages for the repair crew I guess,” Miliam said with a sigh. “Onto better news- we found what we were looking for. It wasn’t just a surviving structure, it was a time capsule built by a species that knew the end was coming.”

  She let that sink in for a few moments. Everyone mostly just looked relieved that all they’d been through hadn’t been for nothing. No one had gone in expecting the trip to be nearly so dangerous; by all rights it should have been a milk run. If Miliam had been able to pay for a full reactor overhaul, maybe it would have been. Avoiding the need for a stop at True Eden could have allowed them to arrive at Delta Bo?tis before Delve Lead Clawfisher…though there was no point in worrying about what-ifs. For all Miliam knew, the mirazar cruiser had been there already by the time her reactor malfunctioned.

  “Was it really the observers?” asked Eun-ji after she processed the information she’d just been given.

  “They appear in a lot of games and we’ve always been curious if they were accurate…” Min-ji followed up. Not actually knowing if she’d come to a conclusion about that, Miliam looked to Abigail who, seeing the question was being passed off to her, spoke up.

  “…we do not know. I would be inclined to say no, however. From what we were able to witness before being forced to leave, the civilization in Delta Bo?tis was young- although the recording ended prior to their world’s destruction, it appeared they were only just testing their first translocation drive when the cthulid arrived. That does not, needless to say, bode well for their survival. However, we know the Observers were highly advanced and continued to exist for hundreds of thousands of years, so what need had they for a time capsule if they had a means of escape?” Abigail explained, though her words seemed to lean heavily into the negative.

  “Aye, but that’s with the benefit of hindsight,” Aoibhe pointed out. “They wouldn’t have known that they would survive at the time, assuming it was the Observers.”

  “Maybe they wanted to leave behind information on the cthulid and came back to build the vault,” Eun-ji suggested. She hadn’t seen the magical array in the back of the vault, though.

  “That would not have accounted for the efforts taken to preserve the vault,” Abigail countered. “Had they merely returned later I cannot see why any lives would need be sacrificed to activate a spell.”

  “Sacrificed…?” Min-ji reacted by covering her mouth with both hands, an action that was surprisingly not mirrored by her sister.

  “Er, not, like, a blood sacrifice. They just didn’t have a way to survive very long after activating the spell,” Miliam clarified.

  “Indeed. It was a desperate act, utilizing the lives they knew were doomed to be lost either way. Of course, if anyone had survived, they would have been able to retrieve those people,” Abigail responded. Something didn’t quite add up about that to Miliam though, and after considering it she figured out what it was.

  “What if they were different groups? I mean, it was a whole planet with…we don’t even know how many civilizations. Maybe different people had different priorities, or the people that couldn’t fit on the ships wanted to leave something behind, or they weren’t sure how successful the evacuation would be, or the two factions didn’t even know about each other,” Miliam theorized. After all, Earth had dozens of nations in her time. In a situation like that she was fairly certain there’d be at least two alliances of nations that wouldn’t cooperate with each other.

  “All valid theories,” Abigail acknowledged. “We did retrieve a projector, incidentally- I stowed it in the cargo bay. One need only power it to see a visual representative of its makers’ history.”

  “Feel free to take a look later, but…make sure to ask Abigail to oversee. We really don’t want to damage that thing before we have a chance to sell it,” Miliam told her crew.

  “Speaking of which, the history is all well and good, but how much is it actually worth?” Aoibhe asked Abigail.

  “Between the projector and the data drives we obtained, a great deal. More lucrative than the ancient grimoire you sold previously by far. We will need to devise a way to extract the information on them safely, but I would suggest selling the physical drives to my institution, and first rights to a copy of the data for a period of time at auction. You are free to sell us the data and auction the drives as well, of course, but I do implore you not to leave this discovery solely in private hands,” Abigail answered honestly.

  “I’m not picky as long as we’re making a lot of money. Which is good, because we have a lot of repairs to make and they’re going to cost a lot…” Miliam told her with a dead look in her eyes and a hollow tone to her voice. Between the list of modernizations the ship still needed and the repair costs, she had a feeling there wasn’t going to be much left. Especially not with crew pay to consider.

  Hopefully there would be enough for the treatment she needed left over.

  The meeting continued on for a short time before Miliam dismissed everyone and returned to her room. She dropped onto her bed tiredly, but was still to wired to fall asleep yet. This mission was a success, but soon enough she’d need to figure out what came next. It wasn’t like she had a long-term contract with Abigail to provide steady employment.

  Miliam still wanted to explore more; to see sights she never could have back on Earth. And she wasn’t done looking into her brother’s fate just yet. She’d trace that trail to the other Isaiaite colonies if she had to- or even all the way back to Earth if that’s what it took. Her first step would be looking into obituaries and burial records. That was going to be the priority the moment Miliam had enough money on hand to pay the crew’s salaries for a few weeks or months without a contract active.

  But that was all future Miliam’s problem. For now, sleep.

  entire original novel when I used to struggle to get more than a few chapters out before my undiagnosed ADHD ground things to a halt. I think I benefited in some ways from waiting until now to get this far, though; my early work was pretty garbage and I learned a lot in the interim.