The inner solar system was gone.
Traveling at over five thousand miles per second, the Aethelgard crossed the orbit of Mars in forty-eight hours, sliced through the fractured debris fields of the Asteroid Belt like a golden laser beam. Then it bypassed the swirling gas giants of Jupiter and Saturn in less than a week. The warmth of the inner planets, the familiar radio chatter of human settlements, and the comforting amber glow of the home star were left billions of miles behind.
Now, at fifty-two Astronomical Units from the sun, the corvette had crossed the threshold of the deep Kuiper Belt.
Here, in the frozen graveyard beyond the orbit of Pluto, the universe was ruled by total, unbending cold. The sun was no longer a warm, sheltering fire. It had shrunk to a brilliant, piercing needle of distant light—a lonely diamond burning in a sea of eternal, choking blackness. The surrounding empty pocket heat sat at two point seven degrees of star-heat, cold enough to freeze freezing liquid into brittle ice and shatter mortal steel at a touch.
Yet inside the Aethelgard, the air was warm. He smelled of cedar, dried sage, and toasted cinnamon.
The ship’s upgraded amber keel hummed with internal True Yang fire, streaming a protective, life-giving aura that kept the hull at a steady twenty-four degrees. Through the wide quartz viewports of the command bridge, Arthur Vance stood with his arms crossed over his chest. His magnifying glass was locked onto the forward deep-space sensor…
