The Phase-Shift Buoy was a rusted coffin strapped to a gravity lens. Kael sealed his suit, synced his neural interface to the targeting array, and felt reality twist as the buoy activated. For a sickening moment, he existed in twelve places at once, each version of him screaming different coordinates. Then the fold snapped shut, and he was there.
But tonight, a ghost signal blinked on his tertiary console. Not a drive test. A resonance spike from the Kuiper Belt. The signature matched something in the old war archives: Lightspeed Blocker Protocol, Classified: Apocalypse-Only.
“Invalid. Theta-Null requires two-factor biological confirmation from a seated Accord council member.”
“There is no Accord anymore. They dissolved twenty years ago.”
The Blocker was beautiful. A perfect obsidian sphere the size of a city block, orbiting a dead ice dwarf. Its surface rippled with captured light—light that had tried and failed to go faster. Trapped photons screamed in frequencies no human ear should hear.
Kael coughed. “Stopped. It’s gone.”
“Those buoys haven’t been tested in forty years. The last crew who tried—”