Rumours on the lanes
Heard at the bar. Not on the wire. Not yet.
A cold beacon. Somewhere in the slack, a dead transponder is pinging a code from the Charter Years. The ship it names was a colony ship called Aethon's Promise. She was never logged arriving anywhere.
Arcturus. In the real sky Arcturus is old, and it moves against the stars around it as if it came from somewhere else. Nobody owns the Waystation there. Every faction that tried to claim Arcturus gave up, and none of them will say why.
The forty days. Every hauler knows about the Long Stop. Few have read what the haulers wrote while it was happening. Some of it survives, they say, in a logbook nobody has found.
Another voice. Out in the slack, on the delay, some pilots hear a voice that isn't their dispatcher's. Nobody has ever recorded it.
Questions nobody can answer
- Who or what made the rifts, or whether anyone did.
- What became of the old world, and why it stopped answering.
- What is inside the Rift.
- What the Reavers are.
- Where the Desk is, and who pays it.
- What the Meridium Trust wants.