“We don’t know anything for certain,” her father reiterated. “I’ve sent Jason to interview the survivor of the attack, to learn what he can about what we may be facing.”
Raena sincerely hoped that he was wrong about all of it. Revisiting an ancient feud with an advanced alien race wasn’t in her five-point plan for the year.
“All right, and if the attack is connected to this broken treaty and Jason’s vision?” she asked.
“Then we might be going up against an enemy we can barely see, let alone have any way to fight.”
“How do you mean?”
He looked off-screen for a moment. “I’d rather not get into the specifics until I hear from Jason. I’ve already said more than I should.”
She nodded reluctantly. “Thanks, Dad. I appreciate the heads up.”
She knew he wouldn’t have shared the information if she wasn’t his daughter. Still, there were times she wished she didn’t need to navigate the political nuances between the TSS and Taran government—that she could just be a nobody living with her parents in her childhood home on Earth again. Everything had been a lot simpler back then.
“I know this information is worrying, but I didn’t want you to be caught off-guard.”
“Yeah, thanks. You know how I’m good at compartmentalizing.”
“Which is why I knew you could handle it. How are you doing otherwise?” he asked. There was no mistaking that it was a question from her father, not the TSS High Commander.
Raena tried to quiet the thoughts swirling in her head. “Things are pretty good. Ryan and I have been busy getting the new DGE shipyards up and running. We also started a new scholarship program for technical studies that’ll feed into a job placement initiative.”
“That’s a great idea. And I heard the ship leasing program got rolled out.”
“Yeah, we’re still working out the kinks with that one. It sounds straightforward enough to hand a wanna-be captain a starship and guaranteed cargo transport contracts, but we’ve had issues with some of the dealers.”
He smiled. “I heard that, too.”
“I guess everyone would run a galactic corporation if it was easy, right?”
“Very true. I think you’re handling everything brilliantly, from what I’ve seen.”
“We’re trying, at least.”
Her father nodded. “Well, it’s good to see you. I wish this call had been under better circumstances. It’s been too long since we’ve spent time together.”
She smiled at him. “It has. You should come to the island. I think you’ll be impressed with the transformation.”
“I look forward to seeing it. We’ll schedule a trip after this situation is resolved.”
“I’d like that.”
He looked away from the camera again then back at her. “I’ll let you return to your day. Give our best to Ryan. Love you.”
“Love you, too.”
When the call ended, the viewscreen briefly changed to the SiNavTech logo before automatically turning off.
Raena slouched in her seat. Everything always comes back to the Rift.
Even though it had been years since she’d visited it, she could still feel the pull of its power like she was there—intoxicating, addictive. The way it heightened abilities was both a blessing and a curse to Agents and others with Gifts; they could be stronger there, but too much time spent in its exotic depths made being in normal space feel empty. She didn’t want to imagine what kind of entity might permanently dwell in such a place of pure, unmitigated power.
She reached out telepathically to Ryan on the other side of the estate. “An invasion might be coming. We need to be ready.”
CHAPTER 3
Under the best conditions, Jason found it difficult to sleep on a spacecraft while traveling through subspace. After seeing the image of the leviathan wrapped around the Andvari, there was no way he could nap.
He stared through the side viewport as the mesmerizing blue-green light of subspace swirled around the ship like flames in a campfire. How much is out there that we don’t know about?
Since learning about the Taran Empire, he’d believed that the civilization had things pretty well figured out. After all, they had mastered gravity manipulation, spatial jumps, and planet bio-optimization. But the prospect that there was another race out there that dwarfed them in both scope and ability was beyond terrifying. And if there was this one race, then how many others might be lurking in the shadows?
Following the meeting in the wee hours of the morning, he’d quickly packed a travel bag and then hopped on a TSS transport ship to the other side of the galaxy. The fact that Tarans possessed technology capable of traveling such a vast distance in a matter of hours still astounded him, even after all of these years—a feat he’d loved in books and movies as a kid but that seemed like an impossible reality. Of all the things that had become available to him upon being inducted into the Taran Empire after his childhood on Earth, subspace travel was among the most thrilling.
Since sleep was out of the question and real-time communications were impossible during a subspace jump, he spent the duration of the five-hour journey reviewing all available information related to the attack on the Andvari. The events seemed routine enough at first, but it quickly devolved into a bizarre account of a seemingly haunted ship and crazed crewmembers. Given the outlandish claims, it made sense that his father wanted a firsthand reading of the key witness. Unfortunately, it appeared that the witness had, in fact, been unconscious for most of the alleged events. Jason tried to force back the sinking feeling that the trip might be a fruitless exercise.
When the transport ship reached its exit beacon, time seemed to elongate
