The black and gold Praetorian-class cruiser hovered over the QRT Station, its massive orbital ring dwarfing the planet in the background. A smooth artificial intelligence cooed various security protocols being run through the ship.

Romulus relaxed with his feet up on the dash, his leather boots scuffing the console. His leather armor squealed as he leaned up to check the status of the background checks. He was a Hunter of the Empire of Sol, a sort of spy for the Legion. He was on a special assignment from his Proconsul to return a certain book he had scalped from a ruin deep in Citadel space.

He took the book up in his blue, ghostly hand and toyed with its ornate black and red cover. It was written in a language he didn’t understand.

Romulus was a Wraith. As such, he had been alive for many millennia and remembered his life on the Moon of Terra—the day Malak blew them all to Tartarus. It was rare for there to be anything he didn’t know, so this artifact intrigued him. In all his ghostly second life, he had never seen such an item.

Being a Wraith came with certain advantages and made him particularly adept at getting into places long lost to time. However, his peculiar form did seem to draw unwanted attention in civilized space—especially outside the Sol Empire.

A clatter of noise resounded from behind him. His pet cackled silly gibberish and gnawed on books further back in the ship. The moment he left the rock he found this book on, this thing had found its way onto his ship. It was about 25 millimeters tall and covered in fur. It could float and seemed to pop in and out of real space like a quark, though it was friendly enough.

“Access granted,” the smooth robotic voice called out as the ship began its automatic docking procedures.

Romulus decided it was time to get ready. He took a moment to attune his Affinity-weave cloth to his soul signature. This light protective nanotech mesh was actually a lightweight device that tethered his person on a quantum level, allowing him to shrug off light attacks from echo-blades and other affinity weapons.

But this wasn’t his only vestment of protection. He took a moment more to calibrate his Echo-tech raiment. It was leather armor vibrating on a subatomic level to displace other energy signatures—something that would have rendered him almost invincible in the ancient past of the Terran race. However, in this day and age, weapons had escalated to match the protective gear.

He held such weapons and prepared them as well. He sheathed his dual echo-blade throwing knives—set to disrupt echo-tech armor with their own vibrations—and tested the firing mechanism on his gravity-draw crossbow.

It wasn’t a normal crossbow. Those were archaic and extinct. This weapon fired a bolt with a micro-acceleration lattice on an echo-blade broadhead. The machine could increase the density of the projectile, allowing it to strike not with the illegal speed of a singularity pistol, but with the impact of a meteor at a regulated velocity that wouldn’t risk collapsing spacetime.

All prepped, Romulus draped his invisibility cloak over his shoulders, reversing it so that the cloaking systems hid his weapons instead of his form. He grabbed his Citadel credit chip, an item provided for his travel in this sector. It was a token of allegiance to the Citadel, worth whatever was allotted to the average citizen in this communist system.

When he made his way back to the Empire, all he would have to do was flash his symbol of authority, and a thousand microtransactions would trade hands invisibly in the background between bureaucratic gold standards.

He whistled and clicked his tongue as he exited his ship, and the pet floated after him.

He decided he would call it Constantine.

“Come along, Constantine—but stay hidden.”

With an energetic “Whip-whoop,” Constantine gave a verbal salute and blinked out of existence.

Romulus would need to stall a solid day here at the QRT while he waited for his turn to travel back to the Empire. The QRT—Quantum Ring Transit—would allow him to pilot his ship into the center of the ring along with any other ships going his way.

This QRT would link with another in the desired sector, and then both inner rings would establish a quantum superposition where the travelers would exist in both places at once.

Travel this way was not guaranteed by this process alone, and there would be a good chance that everyone in the center would be ripped to shreds. However, each QRT was also fitted with a quantum supercomputer that utilized Quantum Immortality processes to sift through an infinite multiverse of outcomes and ensure only the successful transport remained.

At that point, the QRT would power down, and the voyagers would find themselves in another sector of the galaxy with minimal time loss.

While he waited, Romulus decided he would skip booking a room. Citadel space operated on a universal basic income, and as such luxury was in short supply—but at least they had caffeine. Or something close to it.

They called it “Comrade-Caf,” which was re-caffeinated beverages that probably some Archon had already sipped and spit out.

In the café, Romulus sipped his lackluster mud while he faintly heard Constantine babbling somewhere invisibly nearby. He couldn’t help but thumb the book curiously in his bag.

What was this relic?

That’s when Constantine noticed it.

A slight hum in the air. The smell of ozone. His ghostly affinity pulled toward danger.

Romulus looked up to see a man dressed in ragged burlap—but underneath, Affinity weave and two echo-tech daggers of his own. A red amulet with the black emblem of a tentacle-faced demon hung from his neck.

This was an assassin of the Eldritch Cult.

And the writing on that amulet matched the book in Romulus’s possession.

And then the lights died.