A burst of ripples came into being in the darkness a light year or so away from the inside-facing entrance of Path T2-316. The disturbance soon translated into the appearance of the cause of everything.
It was a few spaceships, a small detachment of half a dozen space vessels, each less than two dozen meters long. They appeared silently, like ghosts whose sole proof of existence was the ripples fading away as reality smoothed the folds that had appeared in that infinitesimally small part of itself.
No spaceship could survive out in the vacuum without a shield, not if the cost had to be slashed to make production pass the feasibility analysis phase. But those vessels, while protected by energy shields like any other, had shields that looked dim, faded into a color that looked more like the desolate purple of a dying celestial body in its last moments, compared to the usual vibrant blue of energy.
