Signals in the Dark
The threshold had no color. That was the thing nobody warned you about in the charts, in the briefings, in the dry academy lectures on deep-space boundary phenomena. They gave you coordinates, gave you hazard ratings, gave you the long dull lists of ships that had entered the Threnody Expanse and simply stopped transmitting. What they never told you was that the edge of the Expanse looked like nothing at all — no shimmer, no membrane, no visible seam between known space and whatever waited beyond it. One moment the stars held their ordinary places. The next, Mara Voss watched them lean, very slightly, like reeds bending from a wind that didn't exist.
She stood at the center of the command deck with her hands clasped behind her back, a posture she'd practiced so long it had stopped being a performance and become simply how her body held itself under pressure. The deck hummed around her, the Erebus Wake's old bones groaning faintly as the ship adjusted to the thinning gravitational fabric. On the main viewport, the starfield rippled once, like a reflection disturbed by a dropped stone, and then settled.
"There it is," Dorian Ilic said from his station, not looking up from the…