"Tanya Furrow."
The voice echoed clean and clear across the amphitheatre, caught by the acoustic curve of the ceiling and sent down over the crowd. Tanya stood, brushing non-existent dust off her jacket, and climbed the ramp to the stage with long, confident strides.
The dean, who was visibly on autopilot, extended his hand. "Congratulations," he said with practised ease, lips curling into the thousandth polite smile of the day.
Tanya took the handshake and gave a nod, already moving on as he handed her the decorative certificate, which was just paper. The real thing had been uploaded the moment the ceremony began, encoded into her citizen profile, stamped by three government ministries, and quietly approved by the interstellar Guild of Shipwrights. Bureaucracy in the Hallow Empire was a machine, efficient and low-friction.
She stepped offstage and took her seat again, letting the rest of the ceremony pass in a blur. Her eyes wandered upward to the glass ceiling, where the spires of Barth City scraped the stratosphere, flanked by sky-rails and automated traffic. Barthfellow University sat at the heart of it, a jewel in the Empire Core, where sunlight filtered through a clean atmosphere and even the pigeons were tagged and tracked for migratory optimisation. The Hallow Empire prided itself on prosperity, and it showed. Education was state-funded. Healthcare was automatic. Unrest was rare, and when it sparked, it was usually over parking regulations or drone delivery etiquette.
Tanya didn't belong here, not permanently. She had known that since day one. But she had also fallen for the place, with its invigorating energy, its rhythms, its skyline. Barth was the kind of city that wrapped itself around you until it felt like a second skin.
She had had her first kiss on one of its aerial trams, cried after her first heartbreak on the rooftop of the dorms while watching fireworks glitch across a celebration holo. She had met people she couldn't imagine forgetting. Made friends she swore would be lifelong, but deep down, she knew better. They would scatter now, following jobs, contracts, star-charts. Out of sync and out of touch. That was the rhythm of this city, too.
Tomorrow, she would leave. A private shuttle would take her off this high-tech marble and back to Eden-Five, her homeworld, a designated agriculture planet known for wheat, sugar, wine, and a complete lack of anything taller than a grain silo.
But tonight? Tonight was for living.
The afterparty had that wild, desperate energy that only comes when everyone knows it's ending. Music pounded from hidden speakers embedded in the walls of Michael's off-campus flat, the bass line vibrating through the floor and into Tanya's bones. Someone had rigged the apartment's smart-lighting to pulse with the beat, casting everything in shifting blues and purples that made faces look alien and beautiful.
Tanya arrived fashionably late but not because she was trying to make an entrance, but because she'd gotten distracted watching the city lights from her dorm window and lost track of time. That was Tanya in a nutshell: easily distracted by beautiful things, chronically optimistic about how much time she had left.
"There she is!" Kevin's voice cut through the noise as she pushed through the crowd. He appeared at her elbow with two drinks, his face flushed from the heat and alcohol. Tall, square-jawed, and perpetually hovering in that maybe-space they'd occupied for two years. Tonight, his maybe-energy felt different. More urgent.
"Thought you weren't coming," he said, pressing a glass into her hand.
"And miss all this?" She gestured at the chaos around them. Someone was doing shots off a replica of the university's founding charter. A group near the window was taking turns trying to identify constellations through the light pollution, getting progressively more wrong and more confident with each guess. "Wouldn't dream of it."
The drink was strong and sweet, probably hiding cheap alcohol behind expensive flavouring. She knocked it back anyway and felt the warmth spread through her chest. Kevin watched her with that look, the one that said he was building up to something.
"Want to dance?" he asked.
The makeshift dance floor was packed, bodies moving with the kind of abandon that came from knowing nothing mattered anymore. Grades were submitted. Futures were decided. This was the space between times where consequences felt distant and possibilities endless.
They found a spot and fell into the rhythm. Kevin was a decent dancer, better than she had expected, and for a moment, she let herself imagine what it would be like if things were different. If she were staying. If he were leaving. If the universe had arranged itself to give them more time.
But that wasn't how the universe worked, and Tanya had never been one to fight the current when it was easier to swim with it.
"I'm going to miss this," she said, leaning close to his ear so he could hear her over the music.
"Miss what?"
"All of it. The noise. The chaos. You." The last word slipped out easier than she'd expected, carried by alcohol and honesty.
Kevin's face did something complicated. Hope and resignation wrestling for control. "Tanya—"
"Don't." She pressed a finger to his lips, smiling. "Don't make this harder than it has to be. We both know how this ends."
He caught her hand, held it for a moment longer than necessary. "What if it doesn't have to end?"
For a heartbeat, she almost let herself believe it. Almost let herself think that love could overcome logistics, that wanting something badly enough could make it possible. But Tanya had learned long ago that the universe had its own plans, and fighting them usually just left you bruised and bitter.
"Then we'd be different people," she said, and pulled him back into the dance.
They stayed on the floor until her feet ached and her hair stuck to her neck with sweat. They drank more than they should have and laughed at jokes that wouldn't be funny tomorrow. When someone produced a bottle of something expensive and clearly stolen from a professor's private stash, Tanya raised her glass with the rest of them.
"To graduation!" someone shouted.
"To the future!" called another.
"To right now!" Tanya added, and meant it.
Later, much later, she found herself on the apartment's tiny balcony, looking out over the city one last time. The party had wound down to a core group of diehards, their voices a comfortable murmur behind her. Kevin had passed out on the couch, one arm flung over his eyes. Sweet boy. Maybe in another life.
The sun was starting to rise, painting the sky in soft pastels that would have looked artificial anywhere but here. In a few hours, she'd be gone. Back to golden fields and endless horizons and a life that felt both too small and perfectly sized all at once.
But that was Future Tanya's problem. Present Tanya was exactly where she wanted to be.
She woke late, groggy and dry-mouthed, with the sense that her body had aged ten years overnight. The ceiling of her room blinked at her with gentle ambient lighting, the smart-glass windows filtering sunlight to an acceptable level for the hungover. Somehow, she had managed to get her back to her own dorm. Her boots were still on. The fake diploma had made it back, too, shoved under her arm like a shield.
"Well," she muttered, voice raspy, "that could've gone better. Or worse."
A quick rinse, a triple-shot caf, and a half-hearted attempt at packing later, Tanya found herself at the spaceport, standing in front of a departure board that had no patience for the obscure. Eden-Five didn't show up on standard transport lists. Too small. Too out of the way. The Empire ran its space ferries and trains like it ran its cities. Streamlined, efficient, and not particularly sentimental. If your world didn't have a large population, you were out of luck.
So she booked a private drone taxi. Expensive, sure, but she had budgeted for it. Not much choice when the alternative was hitching a ride with a sugar or wheat freighter and hoping it didn't smell like dust and regret.
The craft that met her was small and stubby, the kind of design that screamed function first but still managed a certain elegance in the way its curves met the engine casings. As she stepped aboard, Tanya caught herself staring at the ship, fascinated with the design. This was her domain now. She saw it all with new eyes.
She ran a hand along the inner bulkhead and smiled. Most passengers wouldn't notice the gentle give in the plating, a design choice to reduce structural stress during atmospheric reentry. And that bump under the port side strut? It wasn't an error, no it was a junction node, balancing energy draw across the twin drive lines. She'd studied these schematics, crawled through simulations, built scaled models in the lab until her fingers were black with synth-oil.
Now, it wasn't theory anymore.
The seat molded to her as she settled in. A calm female voice greeted her. It was the standard Empire AI assistant, friendly and forgettable.
"Destination confirmed. Estimated travel time: sixteen hours. Vortex access stable. No anomalies in current weather cycle."
Tanya gave a soft nod of approval. The Vortex was a dimensional space and stabilised into lanes by ancient tech the Empire barely understood it was the secret to humanity's expansion across the stars. A trillion credits of infrastructure and no one really knew how it worked. But it worked. And that was enough.
She watched the city shrink below as the shuttle rose. Barth's towers faded into clouds. Clouds vanished into the shimmer of upper atmosphere. And then with a small shutter, they slipped into the Vortex.
Outside the window, the stars stretched sideways, like someone had tugged space like warm taffy. The Vortex was quiet today. She checked the forecast, it was a stable phase on all fronts, minimal turbulence, direct path confirmed. She'd be home before sunset.
Home. Eden-Five. She tried to remember the dusty old plains, the smell of tilled earth, the sound of wind through golden fields. It didn't quite feel real yet. She had left and was now returning. She could have taken a job elsewhere, but first, she wanted to return home and help with the farm. She had already come up with many different ways to improve the crop freighters.
Tanya leaned back, arms behind her head, the soft vibrations of the shuttle filling the cabin like a lullaby. She was a shipwright now. A builder of dreams. A licensed cog in the Empire's endless machinery.
She felt it, before she saw anything, a change in vibration of the ship.
Tanya quickly looked at the display. A tremor in the subspace stream. Minor fluctuations at first and then a sharp spike, like a heartbeat skipping a beat.
"Vortex anomaly detected," the AI said calmly, far too calmly for what followed.
She blinked. That wasn't possible. The Vortex didn't do that. It was the single most stable travel lane in human civilisation, it had been mapped, monitored, and redundantly reinforced across the whole Core. You could set a watch to it. Weather patterns were slow, predictable, and forecasted weeks ahead. Spontaneous storms were like spontaneous black holes: theoretical, absurd, and career-ending if you suggested them in class.
And yet, the turbulence hit like a slap from some beast.
A jolt rocked the shuttle sideways. The inertial dampeners caught most of it, but not all, Tanya's teeth clacked together. Lights flickered. The interface blurred into static before rebooting. Outside, the Vortex twisted violently, bands of warped starlight snapping like angry tendrils against the hull.
She gripped the armrest, more curious than afraid. "That's... new."
"Stability loss critical. Emergency vortex ejection initiated," the AI informed her, still infuriatingly neutral.
The shuttle peeled sideways, spit out of the Vortex like a seed from squeezed fruit. Tanya barely had time to brace before the sky changed to a smear of darkness, solidifying into clouds, wind and gravity.
And ground.
The drop wasn't long. But it was low. Too low.
She felt the impact ripple through the cabin, it was hard and unforgiving. The sound of metal and dirt disagreeing. The shuttle's belly scraped across uneven terrain before jolting to a stop, half-buried in what looked like black soil and fractured stone.
For a moment, there was only silence.
Tanya unbuckled herself and ran a systems check. Bruised shoulder, pounding heart, minor headache. But nothing was broken. The shuttle was another story. Structural integrity compromised. Power fluctuations. Port-side engine offline. And worst of all, the Vortex drive was inert. The emergency reentry wouldn't have been a problem if not for this strange planet.
She climbed to her feet and peered through the cracked viewport.
That… wasn't Eden-Five.
It wasn't even space.
She should've been floating in the vast corridor between systems, lightyears from any celestial body, surrounded by empty dark. Instead, she was on a planet. A whole planet, with gravity, atmosphere, and a dead horizon stretching in every direction. Pale mountains in the distance. Dust is settling over some jagged ruins. And the sky was dark, thick with cloud cover that didn't match any she had ever studied.
"Where the hell did you drop me?"
The AI didn't respond.
Sensors were still working, if only barely. Tanya brought up a local scan. The readings made her frown. No biosigns. No active energy sources. But there had been life here once. That much was clear from the broken architecture scattered around the crash site—towers worn down to nubs, shattered walkways, strange structures half-swallowed by sand. She didn't need advanced scanners to tell this world had once been home to something.
And now?
Now it was a ghost.
A rogue planet. That was the only explanation that fit. A world adrift, severed from its original orbit, drifting through deep space like a lost coin in a bottomless well. They were rare—dangerously rare. And they weren't easy to find within the vortex.
But apparently, today was full of things that weren't supposed to happen. She found the emergency evac suit and put it on over her clothes.
Tanya exhaled slowly and popped the hatch. The ramp groaned as it extended into dust and silence. She stepped out into the unknown, boots crunching against broken stone. Her head lamp illuminated the ship.
She looked up at the sky, then back at the ship, now leaning at a precarious angle. Surveying the damage done by the landing.
"Well," she said to no one in particular, "I guess we're doing this the hard way."