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wormhole.
    “I want status reports from every ship. Keep to the IR. The fleet is on silent running until I say otherwise,” Makarov said. The vid screens surrounding the bridge showed the void beyond the hull, stars stretched to infinity. “Conn, are we where we’re supposed to be?”
    “Looks that way…pulsar triangulation puts us just outside Barnard’s Star. You can see it on screen two, deep red star to the bottom left of the screen,” Calum pointed.
    Barnard’s Star, a mere six light-years from Earth, was invisible to the naked eye from the Earth’s surface. This close, the star looked like a ruddy dot with a fuzzy halo of light around it.
    “What’s wrong with it? The halo?” Makarov asked.
    “Wait one…” Santiago turned his attention to the screens around his workstation. “The team in astrometrics thinks the distortion’s from a comet swarm passing the star or an ice giant broke up somewhere in the solar system.”
    “Barnard’s Star wasn’t like this before we left…the time dilation.” Makarov felt a ribbon of fear unfold in her chest. The light from the star was several years old by the time it reached Earth. Jumping close to it closed the delay from what they saw and what was actually happening to it. She tapped her fingers against her armrest in frustration.
    “Roger, Admiral. On Earth, the Barnard’s Star we saw was years old. We’re a hundred light-hours from the star now, almost real time by astrophysics standards,” Santiago said.
    “Let’s not pretend this is some sort of coincidence,” Calum said. “The Xaros own that star. They must have done something.”
    “I want a full scan on all mathematically possible routes from that star to ours,” Makarov said. “Pull the fleet into a lens formation, front to Barnard’s Star. We stay on combat alert until we’ve got the lay of the land.” She unbuckled her restraints and went to the engineering pod.
    “Status on the jump engines?” she asked.
    “Fully charged, but we can’t jump back to Earth for another twenty-eight hours, ma’am. Our arrival sent a wave of quantum flux through local space-time and the engines can’t—”
    “Twenty-eight hours, thank you,” Makarov said.
    “Ma’am.” Captain Randall, standing next to the conn station, tapped two fingers against his thigh once Makarov turned and looked at him, a signal that something needed her attention immediately.
    “We’ve got a mass shadow on the scope,” he said. Information had a way of leaking off a command bridge and morphing into a rumor. Her staff knew better than to make offhand comments that could metastasize into something that would worry or otherwise distract the crew.
    Makarov tapped a button on her gauntlet and put up a cone of silence around her, just large enough for her, Randall and Santiago. With the bridge at zero-atmo, the three could speak through IR without eavesdroppers.
    “What?” she asked.
    Santiago, his face pale, motioned to a screen with trembling hands. A smooth sphere punctuated by dark circles the size of cities filled the screen, great brass-colored rings around the equator. The pale white surface looked like a black net of thin filaments covered it. The perimeter wall of a great crater surrounded silver doors marred by swirling patterns.  
    “That…is not what we’re expecting,” Makarov said. “Ibarra’s probe said the Xaros travel from star to star in a maniple, like a school of fish made up of individual drones. This is…”
    “It’s on course for Earth,” Santiago said. “Mass and circumference are about equal to Luna, accelerating at almost one gravity. Should reach the outer solar system in…four years, maybe add a month for deceleration.”
    “That’s too soon. Way too soon,” Calum said.
    “That’s why we’re out here,” Makarov said. “To slow them down. We could launch every last round of ordnance into that moon and it would make absolutely no difference. But these…” Makarov zoomed in on