Book 5: Chapter 52: Re-Arrival
Icarus
July 2337
Hub Zero and Roanoke
The trip back from Centaurvania to the closest wormhole had taken another eight-year bite out of our schedule, to the extent we even had one. We decelerated into the Hub Zero system at a leisurely pace, scanning ahead as we went. There was no reason to believe someone was suddenly lying in wait for us, but Gunther and the sentries had shown that there was still the possibility of activity in this ghost town of an empire.
The wormhole gates in this system were arranged in several concentric orbits, obviously not astronomically stable; there simply weren’t that many Lagrange points. There had to be a mechanism that kept the gates evenly spaced.
We coasted into a random orbit, and I invited Dae over. He popped in immediately, grabbed Spike, materialized a coffee, and plopped into a patio chair.
“I guess we need to talk about what we do next,” I said, pointing to the map of the system. “So far we’ve just established locations and done flybys of some planets.”
“You’re right. We’ve been creeping through the walls like rodents, being careful not to disturb anything—”
“Fat lot of good that did,” I interjected with a snort.