The moment the ship reached Zoma's coordinates, the engines went offline, and red lights flared down every corridor while alarms pulsed through the metal halls. Youri, standing at the console in the control room, turned to everyone and spoke as calmly as if he were ordering a drink. "Don't worry. I just switched on the Daitron drive. If there's Tarcl out here, it'll take us back into the corridor."
Bjorn looked at him with a frown. "And once we're inside the corridor, how do we get back to our own time? Is there some kind of destination code we need to enter?"
"Don't worry, Bjorn," Youri said with a faint grin. "Once we're in the corridor, the ship will take us back to our own timeline automatically. It'll trace the gap our absence left in our world, follow that path, and take us straight home."
Everyone stared at him in confusion. No one really understood what he meant, but there was no time to argue about it, because an orange glow washed suddenly across Youri's face as the terminal began to pulse. The Daitron was active. Zoma's coordinates had been right.
As the ship began to crack open the fabric of existence itself, Youri leaned over the console and called out to the room. "Alright, everyone, get ready — and please don't haunt me if this goes wrong. I've only done this once before, so I'm about as clueless as you are."
Chuckles echoed faintly around the ship, a thin shield of humor against the rising tension, and then the void in front of them began to warp. One by one the stars went out, swallowed by a widening tear of darkness, until a vast hole had opened ahead of the Tartarusios, bending the starlight around its edges and pulsing like a heartbeat. Everyone felt their breath catch. They had crossed the corridor once before, and it had nearly destroyed them. But there was no turning back now — not if they wanted to go home.
The Tartarusios moved forward slowly as her engines hummed back to life, and then she plunged into the rift.
The corridor opened around them again, an endless expanse of drifting fog and fractured light with colors folding and unraveling in every direction. The hull groaned under its strange pressure and the instruments flickered wildly. Through all of it the crew held on to their faith in the ship and their longing to go home. But this time, something was different. The ship dipped suddenly, pulled by some unseen current. Outside the viewports a shape flickered in the mist — faint and vague, but unmistakable. It was another Tartarusios.
Nobody said a word. Was it from another time? Another reality? The sight lingered for only a heartbeat before it vanished back into the fog, and nobody ever spoke about it afterward, though every one of them would remember it for the rest of their lives.
The crossing went on for another twenty minutes. Then, with a sound like glass fracturing, the corridor split open, and the Tartarusios shot out into the void once more.
They were home.
The ship came out of a Baraka Ring in the Bermuda Galaxy — the ring nearest their base. Before they had been thrown back to 4832, Zoma had set the return destination to that exact ring, the closest one to Antia. With the navigation systems restored, they set their course at once. Antia was five days away, and after everything they had been through, five days felt like a whisper.
On the last day of the journey, a few million kilometers out, their home came into view. At first glance it looked like any other barren world, another forgotten rock drifting in a quiet corner of the galaxy. But for those who had wandered too long or fought too hard, or who simply had nowhere else to go, Antia was far more than a planet.
Its surface stretched out endless and scarred — gray-brown plains broken by black mountains and canyons so deep they swallowed the light. The wind there never stopped. It carried the sound of the planet's loneliness through hollow cliffs and across the beds of rivers that had not seen water in centuries. The sky was a faded copper, dim even at midday, its small, tired sun hanging low on the horizon. At night twin moons rose slowly and washed the jagged landscape in pale silver.
Settlements were rare: clusters of outposts built from rusted alloy and old shipwrecks, and domes of reinforced glass scattered across the plains, each one housing a handful of wanderers, traders and outlaws who had escaped from somewhere and no longer cared to go back. The air was thin but breathable, heavy with a dust that clung to everything. Inside the domes the smell of oil and recycled air never quite went away. No one ruled Antia. There were no flags or emblems or borders, only the silent agreement that everyone kept to themselves and didn't ask questions. The only law was survival, and even that was negotiable.
Near the equator lay the Basin of Trass, a colossal crater from some ancient impact, wide enough to hold a city, and that was where the Tartarusios made her home. A vast hangar carved straight into the rock served as her resting place, hidden from orbital scans beneath layers of mineral interference, so that from above it looked like nothing but a scar, and from inside it was a fortress. Rust-red lights glowed along its tunnels while engineers and drifters moved through the base patching hulls, trading fuel, swapping stories of the void. Every sound echoed — footsteps, laughter, the hiss of machinery that never truly slept.
To the crew of the Tartarusios, Antia was a sanctuary between wars, the one place where they could rest without looking over their shoulders, where no empire's reach could follow them. The planet was harsh and unwelcoming, but there was a strange peace in its silence, a reminder that even the most broken worlds could still harbor life, and even the most hunted souls could still find somewhere to breathe.
They called it the Rock of Ghosts, because every soul who ever landed there carried one.