The screen shimmered to life with a sound like metal breathing.
The conversation died mid-syllable. Even the air seemed to hesitate.
Then-he was there.
The Admiral.
Rendered in the unnervingly flawless fidelity of Zypherian broadcast tech, he didn't appear so much on the screen as through it, as if the universe had been peeled back to expose something vast and inhuman beneath. The light around him bent a little wrong, like gravity itself was paying attention.
Every time I saw him, I understood why even the other Zypherians hesitated before addressing him. He didn't need to raise his voice or move a muscle to command a room. He just existed, and the rest of us aligned ourselves around that fact.
The Admiral didn't need volume. His stillness was the command.
And when his eyes-those molten gold eyes, utterly still-swept across the unseen audience, I felt them pass through me.
My breath caught.
For a split second, I wasn't in the commons anymore. I was back in my quarters, pressed against the cupboard, his lips against mine.
I could still taste him on my lips. Still felt the ghost of his touch.
But here, on this screen, he was something else entirely. Untouchable. Unknowable.
"This is a navigational update. What follows is not negotiable."
That was the first sentence I caught.
I'd been half-running to the commons when the broadcast began, shoving through the corridor traffic. By the time I made it inside, the place was already packed-a dense crowd of bodies.
I was pressed shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers, a river of humanity flowing toward the hub's main viewing screen. The word had rippled through the sector in whispers: an unscheduled, mandatory broadcast.
The main screen dominated the room, its glow bleaching the crowd into shades of gray-blue. Every flicker of static threw light across pale faces, hollowed eyes.
An old man with a faded Earth tattoo on his forearm stared at the monitor with the grim patience of someone who had seen worlds end before. All of us, waiting for the gods of this new world to speak from their digital mountaintop.
"As of zero-six-hundred hours tomorrow," he said, "this vessel will exit the observable universe as charted by human cosmology. We will cross into regions your kind has not seen, has not mapped, and, until this day, has not survived reaching."
A murmur rippled through the room, but it died before it could breathe.
Kridura's voice didn't allow noise to coexist with it.
"Our original timeline," Kridura continued, "is no longer acceptable. We will initiate spacefold at dawn-cycle."
There it was. Spacefold. The word dropped into the air like a metal object into water-no splash, just weight.
Around me, people shifted, glanced at one another.
A holographic star-chart flared into being beside him, glittering lines of light mapping the ship's route through the galaxy. Our old path curved in wide, safe arcs-routes tested, charted, dull. He extended one taloned hand. With a single motion, he folded the projection in on itself, bringing the start and endpoint together until they touched.
It was elegant. Brutal. Beautiful in the way lightning is beautiful when it hits too close.
"Think of it not as traveling through space," he said, "but as a folding space itself-bringing our destination to us. The maneuver will consist of three short-range jumps-stabilization leaps through intermediate gravitic strata-followed by one final fold into target coordinates."
"There is no cause for alarm," Admiral went on, each word falling like a lock sliding shut. "But there is cause for preparation. We will reach the rendezvous coordinates in significantly less time
....half probably than initially projected."
The words should have sparked relief. Half the travel time. Half the waiting. Closer to the world we'd been promised-a place, the new lives we'd been sold. But what spread through the commons wasn't relief-it was dread. Thick and quiet.
A sudden change like this didn't feel like progress.
It felt like a pursuit.
"Sector leaders have been briefed and provided with contingency protocols. Medical teams are on standby. All personnel are advised to follow containment procedures during fold-transit. Noncompliance will not be tolerated."
The way he said it-clinical, certain, like the decision had already chewed through every objection and spit out the bones-it didn't sound like an update. It sounded like an edict. A door closing.
Someone behind me whispered, "Why the change? What's wrong with the initial route?"
No one answered, but the question hung there, sharp and restless.
"Remain calm. Adhere to your duties. Our ship is designed to withstand the pressures of the fold. Survival is assured."
And just like that, he was gone.
The feed cut. The screen went black.
The room exhaled as one, a long, shaky breath that didn't quite settle.
No one moved immediately. No one spoke. Everyone was waiting for someone else to make sense of it.
A voice at the rear muttered, "He didn't even explain why the route changed."
"Why the fold now?" another asked. "Half the travel time... that's not efficiency. That's stress on the ship and us."
"Yeah. What about us?" A young technician's hands trembled. "Is it safe for us? I mean, really? We're fragile compared to them. Hull strain, gravitic shocks, neural fatigue... We're not made for this."
The gray-haired officer near her sighed. "We don't get a choice. The Zypherians calculate risk differently. Survival for them isn't the same as survival for us."
The old man with the Earth tattoo shifted, his voice rasping like old paper.
"Doesn't matter. What humanity knew ends here. All we've got left is faith."
A younger crew member laughed, short and bitter.
"Faith in what? In things that don't die the way we do? Don't feel or bleed the way we do?"
Nobody answered.
Why the rush? The long route was slow, yes-but it was stable. Predictable. Folds were risky, resource-heavy, and they required the kind of energy output that put strain on everything from the hull plating to human bodies caught in the ripple. You didn't fold unless you had to. Unless you were trying to outrun something. Or get ahead of it.
We're resisting.
And now this. A sudden route change. A fold sequence. Leaders briefed beforehand-which meant the decision had been made days ago, maybe longer, and kept quiet until it was too late to argue. The floor felt less solid under me.
What if they knew? What if the resistance-whatever Elara and Manav were building-had been flagged, tracked, traced?
This wasn't logistics. It was strategy. A countermove.
Zypherians knew-or they suspected-and they were closing the fist before the resistance could open their hand.
Or worse-
What if the resistance knew this was coming, and the fold itself was the window they'd been waiting for? Chaos makes cover. Systems under strain don't see everything.
Either way, the timing reeked.
My throat went dry.
A brush of contact startled me-a hand, quick, at my elbow.
A woman stood close, mid-thirties maybe, dark hair tied back, eyes darting.
"You're Ruby, right?" she whispered.
I hesitated. "Yeah."
"Manav said you'd be here." Her voice barely carried. "Don't react. We need to talk. Not here. Not now. Later. Keep your comm on. You'll see a signal."
Before I could reply, she was gone-absorbed into the shifting crowd.