“Director?”

  Simon startled in his chair.

  “Sorry,” he said. “There something you need, Essa?”

  Essa crossed her arms and fidgeted in the doorway. Her glasses were in her hands, he noticed. Her eyes were bloodshot at the edges, with enlarged dark rims underneath.

  “We need to speak somewhere in private,” she said.

  Simon stood and did a quick job of straightening his uniform and running fingers through his hair. It was heavily mussed on one side, a victim of the awkward position he’d fallen asleep in.

  “That bad?” he asked.

  Her frown tightened. “Yes.”

  That chased away the last of Simon’s sleepiness. He nodded and gestured for her to lead the way. The pair walked the hallway to her office, Simon leaning heavily on his cane to endure the travel. Essa was one of the sharpest minds on Station 79. Originally she had been brought on to help with scanning Majus as the main technology specialist, but her dual studies in linguistics had proven invaluable in studying the Artifact and the symbols slowly appearing across its surface since it made contact with Nick. She was ten years his senior, her personality sharp, her mind sharper, and her black hair kept wadded behind her head in a large bun. It did nothing to hide how strikingly beautiful she was, thoughts he had to keep to himself given his role as director.

  “Has something happened?” he asked when they entered her little office. He shut the door so they would have privacy. The station was currently emulating night, so the lights were dimmed throughout, the hallways lit only with thin white guidelines where the floor met the walls. He thought Essa would force the lights on to their full strength, but she did not, and instead walked to her desk and hit a few buttons to remove the security screen.

  “I’ve been carefully monitoring transmissions as requested,” she said. It was a task he’d given her not long after initiating dark quarantine, for truthfully, he did not trust himself to give it his full attention, given his brother’s deteriorating health. She’d not been pleased to have her attention diverted from attempting to translate the Artifact’s bizarre symbols, nor scanning the planet for geography matching Nick’s stories of “Yensere,” but she took to the task without complaint.

  “In particular, I’ve been focusing on those coming from Vasth,” she continued. “At first, I feared we might be caught in an incident, especially if any of the world’s governors made public Director Lemley’s death and accused us of being responsible.”

  “I take it that didn’t happen?” he said. A bit of diplomatic nonsense would be unwelcome, but he’d handled similar nuisances before. An angry governor would not bring Essa to him in the middle of the night, nor would it explain the redness of her eyes.

  “That’s the thing,” she said, sitting at her desk and putting on her glasses. Her hands flashed across the keyboard. “I don’t know, because yesterday, Vasth’s gate went dark.”

  Simon flinched as if he’d been flicked in the nose.

  “What do you mean, went dark? Did something happen to the gate?”

  “I don’t know. Official explanation so far is no messages, no recordings, and no explanations. Not only that. Look.”

  She shifted her chair so Simon could lean closer and see her screen. It was a news article from the planet Salus, whose gate positioned them between Majus and Vasth. The bulk of the story was easy enough to get from the headline alone.

  HELD BREATHS AS ALL AWAIT EXPLANATION FOR VASTH GATE SHUTDOWN

  “What do you think happened?” he asked. “Did the gate suffer a collapse?”

  It seemed unlikely. A gate collapse had not happened in more than a hundred years, with the OPC’s stabilizing technology improving in leaps and bounds over the original versions of the interstellar gates first used to expand humanity’s presence beyond their home-world system of Sol.

  “Doubtful,” Essa said. “Collapses happen spontaneously, without warning. Vasth was held in quarantine for over a month.”

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  That piqued Simon’s growing interest.

  “Vasth was under quarantine?” he asked. “Why did I never hear about this?”

  “It’s a small planet, harsh to life and with little to offer in terms of research or trade,” Essa said. “Supplies were still sent in, but nothing sent out. I only knew because my brother is there, serving as lead biologist. All his communications halted, with vague nonanswers given as to why.”

  “I wish you’d told me,” Simon said, scanning the text. Most of it was questions without answers, guesses as to what error had caused it to seal and no timetable given for when it might be repaired. “You’ve been worrying about this all on your own.”

  She shook her head.

  “My business is my own, Director, as I prefer. But…I wondered, how did Planetary Director Lemley break through the quarantine? Why was he allowed to come here?”

  “He came to shut us down,” Simon said, a pang of anger flaring in his chest. “To kill us because of the Artifact. He knew about it, somehow, and wanted it destroyed.”

  “Knowing of the Artifact is explainable given his ranking,” Essa said, leaning back in her chair. “But my hypothesis is thus: The quarantine was implemented on Vasth’s side about a month ago at their request. Sneaking through a gate is impossible, so Lemley was allowed passage because our research into the Artifact was considered a greater danger than whatever caused their own quarantine. One great enough to warrant the destruction of a research station.”

  Simon bit at his thumbnail as he thought.

  “He knew something about it that we don’t,” he agreed.

  “There is only one reason why that would be true,” she said. “They, too, possess an Artifact.”

  Now, there was a fascinating theory. Simon had assumed from the moment of finding the Artifact that they had stumbled upon the first-ever proof of intelligent life outside their own. Oh, they’d found simple organisms before, especially fungi and plant life, but never proof of what would colloquially be called aliens. The potential ramifications of their discovery on Majus had kept Simon’s research station isolated, his superiors hanging on his every update but doing little to attract attention. Debates about what to tell the various world governors, if anything at all, had become the hottest topic of late.

  “Have you any proof?” Simon asked.

  Essa closed down the article and started loading up a different file, one he noticed required her to input two separate passwords to progress.

  “I don’t,” she said. “Which is why I doubled my efforts to break through the security to Lemley’s thumb drive. I needed to know what he knew. I needed to see if there was a clue as to what was happening on Vasth, if only to…” She paused. “I know it is unprofessional to let worries over my brother affect my work, but they did.”

  “Consider yourself forgiven,” Simon said, and he smiled wide to convince her how little he cared. “So did you crack it open?”

  “I will spare you the work and the copious amounts of swearing required,” she said. “But yes. I did.”

  A folder flashed up on the screen. Simon frowned.

  “Just one file?” he asked. “That’s all?”

  An image file, in a universal format used by all OPC researchers. Essa hovered her cursor over it.

  “I don’t think this was for us,” she said. “I think this was for himself. For courage to do what he believed must be done.”

  She opened the file.

  It was a beautiful picture taken from what Simon believed to be the surface of the planet Vasth. The ground was awash with blue moss speckled with tall white mushroom stalks. It was the beginning wave of a terraforming project to increase oxygen in the atmosphere as well as break the hard ground down into soil more welcoming to advanced forms of life. The sky was an extremely dark blue, which was odd given that the atmosphere on Vasth was still developing. Two people in OPC blues stood to one side, looking upward, with one pointing. It was a moment frozen in time, strange and chilling.

  Hovering in the sky next to their pale yellow sun, its color so deep the monitor screen felt insufficient, hovered a black sun wreathed in swirling blue fire.

  “That can’t be,” Simon said, backing away from the monitor.

  “It is,” Essa said. “Something happened to Vasth. I know it.” She looked over her shoulder. Fear and frustration dominated her visage. “No communications. No travel. My brother is in danger, or maybe he’s dead, I don’t know, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  Simon’s eyes could not leave the black sun. With just one picture to go on, he could not guess its size and distance. Was it small, and in the sky above them? Or was it tens of thousands of miles away, rivaling the size of a moon?

  “Is there a date on this photo?” he asked.

  “Only for the file’s creation,” Essa said. “This picture was added to the thumb drive two weeks ago. How long it was taken before that, we can only guess.”

  “The quarantine,” Simon said. “They must have initiated it the moment it appeared.”

  Essa spun in her chair. Her hands rested on her knees, her fingernails digging into her skin.

  “I’ve read your reports,” she said. “This…Yensere your brother visits, it bears the same black sun in its sky. The fate of Vasth? It may have been the same fate that befell the world locked inside the Artifact.”

  “That’s absurd,” Simon argued, but Essa just shook her head. Before she could say more, her watch beeped, an irritating little digital scraping sound.

  “What is that?” Simon asked.

  “An alert I set up for news involving Vasth,” Essa said, rotating her chair back around to face her monitor. A quick tap, and another article popped up. Its headline, written in all capitals, shocked the pair into momentary silence.

  “It can’t be,” Simon whispered.

  Essa pushed away from her console. Her hands shook.

  “My brother,” she whispered, then turned his way. The fierceness of her gaze overwhelmed him. “Nick is all we have, so get him to focus. We need answers, and we need them now, Simon.”

  She stood and then stormed away. Simon watched her go, paralyzed with guilt and indecision. He stared at the monitor and the article left looming there like a dire threat.

  VASTH GATE DESTROYED