Darkness

Darkness.

It stretched endlessly beyond the viewport of Voyager 4, a vast ocean of black velvet pierced by the faintest pinpricks of distant stars. Those distant suns shimmered like fragile promises, scattered beyond the outer boundary of the solar system. Symone knew better than to take comfort in them. Between her ship and those lights lay distances so immense that the human mind struggled to comprehend them: drifting debris, frozen gas clouds, rogue bodies of rock and ice, and the vast invisible shell of the Oort Cloud, where gravity loosened its hold and the solar system slowly surrendered itself to interstellar space.

Her breath fogged faintly against the glass before the environmental system whisked the moisture away. The cockpit of Voyager 4 remained perfectly regulated: temperature steady, oxygen levels ideal, the faint scent of sterile metal lingering in the recycled air. Yet Symone shivered anyway. It wasn’t cold that crept along her spine. It was pressure.

The crushing weight of the void pressed against the hull, silent and patient, like an ocean waiting for a crack in the glass.

Voyager 4 had been built for this frontier. The ship gleamed with reinforced alloys engineered to withstand cosmic radiation and micrometeor impacts. The cockpit was compact but elegant, with curved displays embedded seamlessly into the console and the hum of integrated AI whispering quietly beneath every system. Behind her, narrow crew bunks lined the inner corridor like metal shelves: functional, efficient, and barely large enough for a restless sleeper. The ship bore the name of an ancient probe that had once carried humanity’s curiosity into the dark. This vessel carried something far more dangerous.

It carried humanity itself.

Symone hugged her arms around herself and leaned closer to the console, eyes scanning lines of telemetry.

Where are you?

Coordinates flickered across the display as she overlaid multiple tracking models. The object had entered the heliopause two years ago, a silent intruder slipping through the invisible boundary where the solar wind died against the pressure of interstellar space. The calculations came from two sources: the recently released paper by Dr. Zane Cleobald and Dr. Addison Lybrand, who were still tracking the anomaly from Earth on behalf of the Space Authority, and the independent research conducted at Kuiper Station One on behalf of Space Solutions, a private entity composed of representatives from all of the off-Earth settlements and stations throughout the solar system. All of them were trying to answer the same question: What was coming toward the Sun?

Her fingers danced across the controls, cross-referencing trajectories, filtering gravitational anomalies, calculating the drift of surrounding debris. Her mission in this reality was complete. Everything she had done here—the alliances, the lies, the relationships she had built, the betrayals to all those things—had all led to this moment. Now it was time to begin the next phase. They had already failed twice. She swallowed hard.

Maybe this time will be different.

You couldn’t break the laws of physics, but if you understood them deeply enough then you could bend them. The previous loops had proven that much.

A soft chime broke the silence.

The ship’s AI projected a new navigation vector across the display, the path angling diagonally along the starboard axis.

Symone groaned quietly.

Emersyn.

Even with advanced navigation systems, Emersyn still thought like a human raised on a planet with gravity and direction. Forward. Backward. Up. Down. Concepts that meant nothing out here. In the outer solar system there was no horizon, no sky, no ground, only infinite directions in an infinite void. Humanity had reached the late twenty-second century, yet they were still toddlers learning how to walk in space.

Unfortunately, this mission had no time for learning curves. That’s why Symone had quietly sent a command to the crew’s neural implants after they left Kuiper Station One. Her eyes flicked toward the corridor leading to the bunks.

Camryn.

Dain.

Sulien.

Three of the brightest minds in astrophysics and engineering. They were the best in this reality and had helped her get this far. Now they slept. Their neural chips had released a carefully calibrated dose of melatonin, guiding them gently into unconsciousness shortly after departure. They would never know what waited at the heliopause. They would never see what existed between space and time. Exposure to it would destabilize everything.

Symone hated herself for doing it, but she hated something else more. She hated running out of time – again.

Her chest tightened as another face surfaced in her thoughts.

Kylan.

The ship’s designer. The head engineer who had poured years of his life into the vessel she was now stealing. She had left him behind on the station, lulling him into sleep after comforting him from the argument with Captain Solon about this mission being denied. The captain was right about one thing – it was too dangerous for them to go. She hated betraying Kylan but was relieved that he was safe on Kuiper Station One, deep in the sound sleep of innocence.

She couldn’t enjoy such a privilege. She hated risking these three lives, but with some luck and ingenuity, she could quietly finish her mission here and wake them to discover that the object was gone in the nothingness of deep space. They would retreat to Kuiper Station in failure, but the ultimate victory of preserving their lives – and every other live in this solar system – would be quietly preserved.

Symone blinked hard and forced the memory of love and friendship away.

Stop.

Getting attached was dangerous. Necessary, but dangerous. You couldn’t save reality without people but loving them made the mission unbearable when you eventually had to betray them so you could move on to purposes bigger than their small part in the story. She rubbed her tired eyes. How many times had she lived through this moment? How many versions of herself had already died trying to fix it?

The console glowed softly in the dim cockpit light. In the glass of the viewport she caught her reflection: pale skin stretched over sharp cheekbones, bright blonde hair hanging loose around her shoulders, and eyes so bloodshot they burned. Her uniform hung loosely on her frame. She looked like a ghost piloting a machine, which was exactly how she felt. Appearances were accurate reflected against darkness.

A tiny pulse of light appeared ahead.

Symone froze.

There.

A small light had blossomed directly along her trajectory. It pulsed gently—bright, dim, bright again—like the slow beating of a heart.

Her breath escaped in a long, shaky exhale. Relief washed through her body so suddenly her shoulders sagged.

“You finally showed up,” she whispered.

She leaned forward, studying the glow. This was where the object entered the solar system. It was hiding here somewhere, lurking in the strange folded geometry of the heliopause where physics sometimes behaved differently. She uploaded the pre-arranged message into the AI transmission queue. Breaking into Kylan’s security systems had been one of the hardest technical challenges she had faced in years. He was brilliant enough that he should exist in her universe.

Symone clenched her jaw.

Focus.

The AI began scanning the surrounding space. Soft beeps filled the cockpit. Minutes passed. Then something changed. Symone opened her eyes slowly.

The ship had gone quiet. No soft hum of the reactor. No rhythmic blips from the sensors. No life-monitor tones from the crew bunks.

Her heart skipped. She sat upright. The displays around her glowed faintly, but the data streams were gone. Every screen showed flat lines. Her pulse began to race.

“No!” She jabbed at the console. Nothing responded. The AI was gone. The signal was stopped. All tracking, all scanning, all of it stopped.

Worse of all, the monitors for Camryn, Dain, and Sulien were silent.

A creeping cold slid through her chest.

“What’s going on?” she whispered.

The anomaly ahead shrank slightly, its pulsing light weakening.

An explosion erupted off the bow. The blast slammed into Voyager 4 like a hammer. Metal screamed. The ship lurched violently, spinning as fragments of debris clanged against the hull like shrapnel in a drum. Symone was thrown across the cockpit and crashed hard into the floor.

Pain exploded through her back. She scrambled up, grabbing the console as the ship rotated slowly through the void.

“Stabilize… stabilize…”

The systems flickered back to life. Red emergency lights flooded the cockpit. Alarms wailed. Then another sound cut through the chaos. Three long, continuous tones.

Flatlines.

Symone froze.

“No.”

Her hands trembled as she initiated a sensor sweep. Data flooded the screens.

Gravitational distortions.

Thermal shadows.

Then—there.

A shimmer in space directly ahead.

“Gotcha,” she hissed.

Her finger slammed the weapons trigger. A missile streaked forward. The distortion rippled and suddenly resolved into the shape of an oblong ship forged from a dark alloy that swallowed the starlight. It was far more advanced than Voyager 4.

Symone frowned as her stomach dropped. The object they were tracking wasn’t shaped like that. It was spherical.

Behind her, space shimmered.

She turned too late. An Indian woman stood in the cockpit doorway with dark eyes, black hair falling neatly around her shoulders, and a compact electric pistol pointed directly at Symone’s chest.

“I found your ship,” the woman said calmly.

Symone’s blood ran cold.

“You,” she whispered. “You’re supposed to be on Earth.”

The woman smiled faintly. “And you aren’t supposed to be here at all.” She gestured toward the captain’s chair with the gun. “Sit.”

“No.”

The pistol flashed. White-hot pain exploded through Symone’s shoulder. Symone screamed and collapsed into the chair, clutching the smoking hole in her uniform.

The woman walked forward and sat beside her, tossing four small objects on the console. The neural chips left bloody splotches and streaks across the console.

“Like I said, I found your ship, along with the people in it,” she said quietly.

Symone stared at them. Her vision blurred. “Why?”

“Because their presence was destabilizing this universe.” The woman leaned closer. “You knew that.”

Symone’s voice cracked. “I need to check on others.”

“Don’t bother.” The woman lifted the gun again. “They’re dead too.”

The words fell like stones.

“At least you left Kylan behind,” the woman continued calmly. “Otherwise he’d be dead too.”

Symone shook with rage. “You killed them!”

“Seven lives, to save trillions.” The woman pressed the pistol against Symone’s forehead. “So now we reach the important question. Do I kill you too, or do you still want to help me save reality?”

Symone stared at her. “Zane sent you.”

The woman nodded. “Just like he sent you.”

Behind them, the strange oblong ship suddenly exploded in a bloom of silent light. The shockwave rocked Voyager 4 once more. The woman didn’t even flinch.

“It’s a shame that Voyager 4 was destroyed on an unauthorized mission.”

Symone slumped back into the chair. “Why?”

“Because sometimes you have to erase a universe before it contaminates everything else.” The gun remained steady. “What will it be?”

Symone looked through the viewport. The singularity ahead was shrinking. Time was closing, trapping them both. “Can we still save it?” she asked quietly.

The woman nodded. “If we do it right this time.”

Symone closed her eyes briefly. How do I untangle you from me?

She already knew the answer. She couldn’t. The trap was already set. But maybe…

Maybe she could still change the ending.

Symone leaned forward and activated the engines. “Then let’s try again.”

Voyager 4 accelerated into the darkness.

What happens next? Find out in Exile, Book One of The Dark Mirror Trilogy, releasing May 5, 2026.