There are many mysteries still to be uncovered in the Third Horizon, although most of the denizens of the cluster may never come into contact with them directly. The origin of the Portals is the first and greatest mystery. Who built them? Orbiting each system’s star at a precise half an astronomical unit’s distance, gates set equidistant about the star that are capable of hurling spaceships through the Dark Between the Stars to linked companion stars in a chain that forms the backbone of the Third Horizon, their technology is as unknowable as their creators. What is the Dark Between the Stars, and what is its link to the Icons that form the basis of religion across the entire Horizon? Travel from one star to another by Portal takes only a few minutes or hours, but all humans who travel through the Portal risk madness if they are awake when the rift opens, and so before the ship enters the Portal everyone on board must be in the stasis hold, fully submerged in the deep slumber of stasis. However, the Portals themselves are in constant movement, and every time a ship enters the Portal special astrogation calculations are required to ensure that this short period in the Dark Between the Stars does not lead to catastrophe. Although those calculations are matters of classical telemetry and astrophysics, it is well understood that prayer to the Icons before beginning these calculations helps to reduce the risk of a misjump in the Portal, though no one understands how the Dark Between the Stars, the physics of the universe, and human faith are inextricably bound together in this way.

  Occasionally a jump goes wrong, through a mixture of bad calculations, bad luck or bad faith. Misjumps usually just cause minor delays, or at worst become expensive errors, causing physical damage to the ship and nothing more, but sometimes the ship can be lost in the Dark Between the Stars, drifting for hours or days or even months in the empty gulfs between the Portals. When the ship returns to physical space it may emerge through the Portal of its destination system, or it may be spat violently out into the system from which it originated, its journey over before it even began. Sometimes when the ship returns the crew have been driven crazy by their experiences of the Dark Between the Stars, sometimes the crew are gone, and sometimes whether they survived or not, their ship returns haunted by something from beyond. That haunting might be a simple phenomenon cured easily with earnest prayer by a Rajul from the Church of the Icons, but sometimes the Dark manifests as a physical haunting, a violent beast of darkness that hunts the crew and needs to be destroyed before the ship can safely be returned to service.

  The creatures that live in the Dark Between the Stars are sometimes able to cross over by their own volition, haunting the planets and space stations of the Third Horizon. This, too, is a mystery. How do they cross over? Why? What is their interest in this dimension? Some scholars suggest that every misjump, every error in using the Portals, allows those monsters – or a fragment of the Dark that might eventually create such a monster – to slip through into our universe, where it drifts in space until it is able to find a habitable location to hunt. Others say that the simple existence of the Portals links our universe to the dimension through which they fling our ships, and that the creatures from that other dimension will always be able to cross over so long as the Portals are open. Many scholars who believe this principle also suspect that the Portal Builders either live in that other dimension, or passed through it to somewhere else. Some, however, believe that the Portal Builders were consumed entirely by something from the Dark Between the Stars, and that the same fate awaits the human denizens of the Third Horizon if they continue to flirt with this blasphemous technology. To those scholars the simple existence of the Portals is a sin, and human society will be tainted while ever the Portals remain open. Some heretics even suggest that the original Portal wars, which destroyed the Portals leading back to the First and Second Horizons, were actually a religious crusade to free humans of the sin of the Portals. That crusade, they whisper, only partially succeeded. Another crusade will finish the job, they imply, and strongly hint that there are forces at work in the Third Horizon who wish to complete the mission.

  Though ordinary folk of the Third Horizon disagree about the origins of the Portals and their influence on the human soul, almost all are in agreement about another mystery of the Third Horizon: the Mystics. These rare and dangerous people wield mysterious supernatural powers that give them control over human flesh and souls, and even over time and space itself. Where the Mystics originated is unknown, as is the source of their power or even how individual Mystics discover and hone their unique talent. There is no order of Mystics, no church or abbey or academy where they learn their trade. They are extremely rare, individuals who seem to appear from nowhere with special powers that no one can understand, and wherever they appear they are despised and distrusted. Although most people of the Third Horizon will never meet a Mystic, they mostly agree that the powers the Mystic commands are linked in some inextricable way to the Dark Between the Stars. In some places they are called Dark Channelers, in others Sorcerers, and almost universally across the Horizon they are also known as The Accursed. To be a Mystic is to be cast out, to be a pariah. There is no formal law against them or their powers, but the response to their discovery is almost always one of disgust and resilement, rejection and contempt.

  Which is what Al Hamra faced when they returned to the Phoenix of Hamura, and gathered in the main lounge to discuss his powers.

  “He’s a what!?” Olivia Greenstar demanded as soon as they told her. She sprawled in one of the main lounge’s two love seats, a cupola of real wicker hanging in a frame between a large pot plant and a long, abstract sculpture made of copper and ceramic, which separated it from one of the lounge’s three observation windows. Those windows were currently set to opaque, hiding the uninteresting view of the Neoptra docks with a visualization of faint pastels and demure greys, which pulsed in time to the gentle music Dr. Delecta had ordered the lounge to play. Shocked at the news, she jumped to her feet and set her drink down on one of the appendages of the sculpture (if they were appendages; the crew had debated this extensively already and everyone had a different opinion about what it represented). Now she held her dark blue gown together with one hand while she pointed at Al Hamra with the other, one silk sleeve falling back to reveal a starburst-patterned tattoo on her inner wrist.

  The rest of them stood in a loose ring around their captain, except for Lavim Tamm who had collapsed onto a sofa in the corner of the room and shrunk as deep into the shadows as he could, as if he could hide behind the large succulent that had been set there. The lamp above him pulsed with silver and gold light in time to the music, its tubes and shades shaped to match the sculpture that held Olivia’s drink, casting his weary face into an even more sickly pallor. In the rush to demand answers from Al Hamra they had all forgotten their promise to find him clean clothes, and he lay curled up on the sofa in the detritus of the massacre at Teranganu valley.

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  “How long have you known?” Dr. Delecta asked Al Hamra, as if it mattered.

  “All my life,” Al Hamra replied, looking around at his crew with a fixed, unblinking expression. “Look, I know I should have told you, but –“

  “Too right you should have fucking told us!” Adam exploded. “You know what kind of trouble it can cause us to be associated with a Mystic, it’s –“

  “The kind of trouble it can cause you?” Al Hamra interrupted, raising his voice. “You think I don’t know what kind of trouble I am?” Having silenced the soldier briefly, he continued. “This is why I didn’t tell you! Because everybody reacts like this! Do you think I’m a different man today than I was yesterday? You trusted me to make this deal, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah and look how that’s turned out,” Siladan said pointedly.

  “You can’t blame him for that!” Saqr interrupted. “Whatever Al Hamra is or isn’t doesn’t make Merez less of a … a treacherous Kahlet!” She rounded on her colleagues, her tiny frame bristling with ferocious energy. “We don’t know anything about each other do we? You all have secrets too! You, Adam, what did Arkial mean when she told us about your long history with the Draconites?!” She jabbed a slender, jewel-nailed finger at Adam. “What’s worse for us, our captain being a Mystic or our gunner being entangled with them?” The Draconites were the Third Horizon’s most mysterious and secretive Faction, a cult of warrior-philosophers whose home base was as obscure as their motivations. They had formed within the original crew of the Zenith, but during the rebellion that led half the crew to abandon their generation ship and migrate to the surface of Kua the Draconites had disappeared into the Dark Between the Stars, returning decades later changed by whatever they had found in their wanderings. Their numbers were few, their technology legendary, and their purpose obscure. “Or you, Dr. Delecta!” Saqr emphasized the honorific with a sneer. “You want us to be angry at our captain for hiding his powers when you lied to us about being a doctor? Someday soon our Draconite is going to get shot and he’s going to have to rely on our doctor to tend his wounds. And Olivia here’s already been in your care, though she lied to us about every detail of her past.” She waved her small, skinny arm in Olivia’s direction, where she sat on one of the lounges with her foot raised in the rapid recovery unit, eyes half closed and heavy with drugs. “Why can’t you go home Olivia? Did you do something on your colony? Was it worse than Al Hamra using his dark power to save our lives?”

  Everyone stopped in shock at Saqr’s rage. She had never raised her voice with them before, and although they had seen the prodigious inner strength that belied her tiny spacer’s frame during the escape from the Ghazali, they had never seen her infused with such intense energy. Her whole body was rigid and tense with her anger as she stared them down.

  “It’s not the first time, either,” Al Hamra told them in the silence that followed the pilot’s outburst.

  “What do you mean?” Dr. Delecta asked, as they turned their attention away from Saqr and back to him. Saqr sank back to her normal diminutive self as soon as the focus turned away from her, and tilted her head like one of Kua’s semi-sentient lemurs to regard Al Hamra as he began to explain himself.

  “I used my power during the escape from the Ghazali,” he told them. “We were trying to cross the spine of the ship to the bridge, do you remember?” They nodded, Olivia making the finger-thumb sign of the evil eye at the memory of doomed ship.

  “I remember that,” Saqr acknowledged, physically shaking at the memory. “That was when the Nekatra attacked us.”

  “Yes,” Al Hamra said. “And you and Olivia got separated from us during the fight. By the time we escaped the Nekatra we had lost you.”

  “We were trapped in that barracks,” Olivia reminded Saqr. “With one reload each and the Nekatra hammering on the door.”

  “It was so dark…” Saqr whispered.

  “I used my powers to find you,” Al Hamra told her. “It seemed like a coincidence to the rest of you, but actually I …” He paused, trying to think of a way to explain his mystery. “I have a way to find things, if I have seen them before. So I used it. Other people can’t feel it the way they feel my voice. So I made it look like luck.”

  “Fuck,” Dr. Delecta whispered. “We couldn’t fly the ship without Saqr.”

  “And she couldn’t get to the ship without us,” Adam grunted.

  “And we couldn’t get our escape ship working without Olivia,” Saqr finished. “Remember? It was damaged, and she had to do emergency repairs in the reactor room.”

  “We would have all died there if I hadn’t done it,” Al Hamra pointed out to them. “Saqr and Olivia slaughtered by the Nekatra, maybe, and the rest of us turned to atoms when the Ghazali’s reactor finally failed. As it is we barely escaped the blast radius. Because of my power!” His voice changed, from quiet explication to almost yelling at them to reinforce his point. “So do not tell me now that you don’t trust me, and don’t call me Accursed.” That last at Dr. Delecta. "Without my curse you would be space dust.”

  “What else can you do, then?” Siladan asked, switching smoothly from outraged and superstitious citizen of the Horizon to scientist. He had seated himself in one of the extremely luxurious armchairs that faced the window, feet dangling over one of the arms, and was looking over at Al Hamra with interest.

  “Nothing else,” Al Hamra replied. “Just the voice you heard, and finding things.” He held his hands up when he saw everyone’s expressions. “I swear it by the Gambler!” He assured them, revealing to them all his personal Icon. “It’s all I have. But I didn’t always have the power to locate things. Maybe I have other powers I don’t know about yet.”

  “So you couldn’t haunt Al Haish’s dreams?” Dr. Delecta asked him, and he responded with a sly wink.

  “Location?” Siladan asked, looking intently at the Captain. “So you could find Merez?”

  They all turned to look at the archaeologist, realizing what he meant.

  “Do we really want to do that?” Saqr asked. “He seems like a lot of trouble.”

  Siladan sat up, swinging his feet down from the arms of the chair and leaning toward them eagerly. “Maybe he is! But do you think he isn’t going to come back here and silence us? We haven’t even checked if the tag he gave us has any money on it, and he knows we’re here. If we find him first we can put a stop to all of this, and get that statuette back. We can sell it, give Lavim half the money, and be ready for when Arkial wakes up. And,” he added, “We can get back at that kahlet.”

  “I’m in!” Adam declared. “I want to fuck that old man up. And we need as much money as we can get.”

  Everyone looked at Al Hamra, who shrugged. “Sure,” he said, after just a moment’s hesitation, and then he grinned with obvious pleasure at the renewal of their bond of fellowship. “Let’s be accursed together!”