Chapter 1. The Road
In the year 11,402 of the Common Calendar, the galaxy was, more or less, a highway.
Sounds like a joke. But it is not a joke. When people got cheap small ships — the size of vans, which could be parked in a garage like a car — the map of everything changed. A planet became a city. A star system — a country. A galaxy — a continent. Nobody said “I am going abroad” anymore; they said “I am going to another continent” and meant another spiral arm or even another galaxy, in a ship no bigger than a kitchen.
I am telling you this because it helps explain how an ordinary person like me ended up where I did. My name is Milo. I am an engineer — not a particularly prestigious one. I work with cooling systems for medium orbital factories that produce boring plastic parts for other, larger machines. I do my job well in the same way a plumber does his: reliably, without drama, and that is exactly why nobody notices when everything works. I am thirty-four. I have a small ship called the Kindly, paid off over nine years. I have a sister on the wet planet Lirio and a mother on a station orbiting a gas giant; she sends voice messages that are always too long.
And I was tired.
That was, basically, the beginning. I was tired, saved up my vacation, and booked a small house on the planet Verde-Sol, famous for exactly nothing except silence, warmth, and a sea the color of old glass. For four months I had looked at the brochure and could draw the house from memory. I was going to spend three weeks there doing nothing — they were supposed to be the best three weeks of my life.
The route was simple. The Kindly was supposed to travel along Sintur — the great ring highway going around the outer edge of the system and connecting the intersystem routes. Then I would turn onto the slow lane, pass two junctions, and enter the straight line to Verde, ending at Verde-Sol. Sixteen hours from door to door. I had a packed lunch, a playlist, and a thermos of coffee, and for the first time in a long time I was in a good mood.
The traffic jam started two hours before the junction.
A space traffic jam is a special kind of suffering. You cannot roll down a window, you cannot get out and stretch your legs. You sit in a small can of air and watch the navigation beacons slowly blinking ahead — red, red, red — understanding that someone ahead did something stupid, and now forty thousand people will be late together. The radio reported: a merging conflict at Junction 9, a transport ship had tried to enter Sintur against the flow. Twenty minutes of delay. Then forty. Then, with the characteristic cheerfulness of traffic radio: “indefinitely.”
I sat in the Kindly, looked at the red beacons, thought about the house on Verde-Sol, and did the thing I should not have done.
