SINV: LUMINOUS RUINS

You weren't trying to leave. You'd hit quota, the gate was right there, and then the sector behind you went dark, and sectors aren't supposed to go dark like that.

Your vision starts closing in. The instrument strips go out one at a time, outer edge first. At some point your hands slip off the throttle and you don't notice until they already have. So this is how it goes, you think. It's quieter than you expected.

Then something catches light inside you, and it isn't the reactor.

It climbs up through the deck and into your chest, way more than a hull this size can hold. The ship is gone before you can put a name to what took it. Where there was only dust, space opens, and you get pulled through with your vision still failing and one hand still closed around a throttle that isn't attached to anything anymore.

You come out somewhere older.

The ruins are already lit when you get there. Someone built all of it, the ring stations, the convoy lines, the seams cut straight through rock, and then they stopped, and the lights never went off. Each run, three of those places will open for you, and it's never the same three. The dust out here drifts like it's breathing. The best gems sit right up against whatever is most likely to kill you, and the ruins seem to know that. Nothing about the layout is careless.

Behind you, something red is waking up, and the clock on it doesn't stop for you. It's patient. It's smarter than you'd like. It has one weakness, and that weakness is out near the dark, in exactly the place you'd rather not fly.

The gate in the far corner only opens once your hold is full.

You put your hand back on the throttle. Your pulse picks up, the way it always does.

Somewhere under the nebula, the ruins finish counting. Then they start.

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