Prologue- Nova

The report that Commander Rael filed that evening was fourteen pages long.

Twelve of those pages were standard incident documentation — fleet designation, coordinates, timestamp, casualty figures. The kind of paperwork that wrote itself after enough years in the Concord's service. He had filled out forms like these more times than he could count, in the aftermath of border skirmishes and Igo encounters and the dozen other flavors of catastrophe that came with patrolling the outer sectors.

The last two pages took him four hours.

He sat alone in the shuttle's small cockpit, the debris field visible through the forward glass, and tried to find language adequate to what he had witnessed. Outside, what remained of the seventh patrol fleet drifted in slow silence — fourteen ships reduced to geometry, to quietly spinning fragments that caught the starlight and threw it back in pieces. No distress signals. No emergency beacons. Just the debris and the dark and the distant hum of his own shuttle's failing secondary engine.

He had been late to the rendezvous. That tardiness, which he had spent three years feeling quietly ashamed of, had kept him alive.

He wrote: The entity arrived without detectable approach vector. Deleted it. Tried again. The entity was present before instruments registered its presence. Deleted that too. He stared at the blinking cursor for a long time.

Outside, a piece of hull plating from the flagship drifted past the cockpit window. He watched it go.

What he wanted to write was this: that the fleet had been there, fourteen ships and their crews and all the noise and light that came with them, and then something had arrived and looked at them, and then the fleet was not there anymore. That it had happened the way weather happened — not with malice, exactly, but with the same fundamental indifference to what you wanted. That the thing which arrived had stood in open space without a suit, without a ship, without anything between it and the void, and had seemed entirely comfortable with that arrangement.

That it had looked small from a distance. That this was the worst part. That it had looked, from far enough away, like a person.

He wrote: The entity designated as "Nova" was present at coordinates — and filled in the numbers — at 0400 station time. The seventh fleet did not survive the encounter.

He submitted the report. Then he sat in the dark with the debris field and waited for someone to come and tell him what to do next, because he found, for the first time in a long career, that he had absolutely no idea.