Life as a Traveler is unique – your world is the stars, and your daily tasks are always changing, depending on where you are headed or what you are hunting. Home and heart become distant echoes. Your pursuit of Remnants, relics, and weaponry that can support the fight for humanity drive your logistics and your livelihood.
Thrilling. Challenging. Invigorating. That’s life as a Traveler. But it’s also isolated. And lonely. Years – or even decades – spent away from friends, family, and home. Each Exodus introduces the risk that you may never return. Who would come looking for you? Who would have any idea of how to find you? A Traveler’s journey is often urgent, to locations unknown.
But in the solitude of your calling, there is one connection that transcends both space and time: the eternal bond you share with other Travelers. As you embark on each Exodus, you know there are others like you out there. Compatriots and competitors, all on similar missions across the stars. And though they are rarely close at hand, they are always close in mind.
Every now and then those moments that live in the darkest corners of your thoughts spring forth. You could get stuck, in a place or time that is so random and remote it defies all logic or common sense to go there. In those places you can’t help but wonder, who would find you if something goes wrong?
You may find the answer where you least expect it. Even in the vastness of space, the tie forged between fellow Travelers endures; cutting through the ravages of time and the scars of old betrayals. It is what unites us. Binds us. Makes us Travelers.
She’d been five days on the moon – Elequeri standard, so seven by Earth reckoning –before she activated the beacon. Grudgingly, because she’d never called for help before, and it ate her up to have to do it. Hopelessly, because who’d even be listening?
Eliase Quento, the great explorer, raider of tombs, destroyer of ghosts, speaker to the crumbling minds of remnant tech, was going to die out here.
This moon was on nobody’s radar, but she’d followed maps unearthed in Elequeri dig sites. The culture that had left its ruins across that now-humanized world had a handful of sites out in other systems. Pilgrimage destinations. Their civilization had been stable enough, and they’d been long-lived enough, that the distances were trivial to them. For Eliase, it meant a change of faces, city plans, geopolitics, but that was how it went the moment your yearning to wander took you beyond a single sun. You learned not to get attached to what you left behind.
Just as well, seeing as I’m not making it back. Nobody would mourn her. Nobody would raise a glass. They’d always assume she’d be back in a year, a decade, a generation. Everyone who knew her would grow old and die in the assumption that she’d return any day.
Nothing in the files she’d scavenged had suggested the ancient pilgrimage site would be defended by some serious laser batteries. Her ship’s counter-ordnance had taken them out, but by then her vessel was drilled full of holes and she’d been struggling into her suit, then wrestling with the controls to turn a catastrophic crash into a mere hard landing. At which she’d been only passably successful.
After that, five days of salvaging every possible part that could be repurposed. Working on repressurizing at least part of the ship, then life support, then the engines. Which was when she ran out of parts and possibilities because she wasn’t ever going to be able to fix them.
There was no human presence in this system. Some of the other worlds had a Changeling population, maybe a few Celestials getting away from it all. But none of them were here and none of them would care.
I’ve seen so much. She was struck with a sudden need to record it all, set down her life for posterity. But the ship kept glitching and who would get to read it anyway?
Beside her crashed vessel, a vacuum-blasted palace kept silent vigil, open doors styled like a great cat’s mouth. She’d ventured within on the second day, finding a complex that stretched deep into the moon’s interior. There were lights down there, and she glimpsed the stilting movements of ghosts going about age-old errands. The motherlode of ancient tech, but she and all her gear were far too beat up to do anything with it.
Perhaps one day the last dregs of her beacon would bring someone else here, and they could make good on the promise of this place. Perhaps they’d spare her withered body a thought.
On the seventh day there was a hail, but that was worse. Because it was Solaire Misza.
Eliase’s screens were cracked across, the image of the woman appearing jigsaw fashion with a scatter of missing pieces. Solaire was dark, flat-featured, hair cut into hedgehog quills. There was more warmth in her mechanical eye than in her living one. Probably because Eliase was the reason she had it, just as Solaire was why Eliase’s right leg from the knee down was mostly artificial. Just as Solaire had destroyed Eliase’s previous ship, and Eliase had killed Solaire’s lover back on Elequer, ten personal years and an Elequeri century ago.
“You followed me,” Eliase accused her.
“Did I now? I followed a trail. Old records, star maps, references in dead gazetteers.” Behind Solaire a porcine figure drifted in the zero-G. The woman’s sole crewmate, an Awakened pig, the size of a small vehicle, attended to the running of their ship.
“Looks like you cleared out the defenses for me,” Solaire noted. “Fancy that. Butting heads on Elequer over three generations and you finally did me a favor.”
“Come down here, I’ll do you another,” Eliase growled.
Solaire gave her the smile of a woman with the definitive upper hand. “I’m not sure whether it’s better to leave you there, or just drop a rock on you to put you out of your misery. You remember Camp Banderai, when I was deep under the ice, and you cut my lines?”
Eliase nodded. “Wish I’d waited around to be sure of you. You remember Tzarkov Orbital? You killed my date. We were dancing. You had that damn Celestial gun with the bullets that dodged through crowds.”
“Technically, you dated my target,” Solaire pointed out. “She had it coming. I mean, you must have known she was a tyrant. She’d just had eleven thousand people shot in that uprising.”
Eliase frowned, recalled, nodded. “I guess that was big news at the time. History now. But I’d have liked to finish the dance.”
Solaire’s face was expressionless. Her metal eye revolved, clicking into focus. It was a Changeling piece, never meant for humans. Back when she’d been screaming and kicking with half her face shot off, her then-crew hadn’t had many other options.
“Desiran,” she said.
“This again,” Eliase complained. “Whole human lifetimes have passed, Solaire. Get over it.”
“I had settled down,” Solaire said. “I was out of the game. And you still had to come after me.”
“I didn’t kill him.”
“You didn’t have to. After what you told him, about me, I had to kill him myself.”
“All of it true.”
Solaire nodded. “And that helps how? And I wanted to tell him, it doesn’t matter. One trip, one different star, and when we come back everyone who remembers what I did will be in their dotage. But for him it was fresh wounds, and he couldn’t forgive me. And who even cares, now? It was a century ago. There’s a mall built over where all that blood was shed.” A sudden switch of topic. “I’m picking up energy readings. I guess you found the motherlode. What a shame you won’t be able to fill your boots and get rich back on Elequer.”
“I hope the ghosts get you,” Eliase told her.
Solaire nodded absently, face still unreadable. “I’m sending down a new drive core,” she said. Behind her, the boar snorted in question and then set about the task.
“What?” Eliase asked.
“For your ship. I trust you’re still mechanic enough to install it. Won’t be pretty but you’ll be able to limp home.”
Eliase stared at her. “You hate me. I hate you and you hate me.”
“That’s a fair summation of our history, yes,” Solaire agreed.
“So just gloat and get it over with.”
Solaire looked old, just for a moment. Not even her own age, but all the years that had passed back on Elequer while she and Eliase had chased one another from star to star, relativity come home to roost.
“I will never hate another human being as much as you,” she told Eliase. “You took so much from me, as I have from you. But you’ve always been there to hate. All the others, whether I loved or hated or didn’t spare them a thought, they died. They got old. They weren’t there when I returned from this mission or that one. Time got them, time and planetbound living. The one thing I still have is you. So, fix your ship, come back to Elequer, and we can get on with hating one another.”