The distress call had been short. A prison ship, carrying some of the most dangerous criminals in the sector, had been on its way to the prison colony on Purgatory. Until the prisoners revolted and took over the ship.

Forge team leader, Axel Van Meter, led the scrambled response force to the distress signal, only to watch it flee into the heart of a massive nebula.

“Sir, we have comms coming in from supply escort Badger Three,” said the communications operator.

                  Major Sims stepped up to the navigation display, watching the images of the two Falx SC-41 Escorts blip along, protecting the cargo transport vessel.

The tall, gangly Xendarin took the podium, two hands placed on the edges of it, while his other two arms expanded the holographic image of Odin’s Belt.

Nova stood at the edge of the endless sea of grain, next to the patched together, modular collection of nodes that they’d built their tractor out of. It was the third time this month that the thresher’s reactor cores had just up and quit. Faulty wiring and failing vents made it a miracle if they could even complete one pass through the fields. But hey, these were gen-1 tech and, as Pa was fond of saying, they were lucky to even have that.

Venri checked the manifest list for the third time.

                  “Tell me they sent us more than one reactor cube this time,” said Raven, pulling her gloves off and tying her hair back out of her face.

                  “What do you think?” Venri asked, swiping through the itemized list of supplies.

                  The crew was just detaching the clamps from the orbital tug that had steered the shipping container down into the receiving bay. Shipments from back home, from the Sol System, had been coming every eight weeks.

Major Cam Branson stood at the observation window, staring out into deep space, into the nebulae of the Oort Cloud’s hazy murk, watching the scientific and engineering ships skirt around the rift anomaly they’d designated the “Turing Tunnel” – a quantum pathway that, in theory, could provide faster than light travel to a remote system.

You stand in the massive docking bay, marveling at the deconstruction process as A.I. driven, robotic arms move about the half pulled apart Sabre; picking at it like old world vultures stripping the meat from the bones of a dead deer.