STARDUST, aurora rising | f. de seel

□ Chapter Sixteen

“Auri, are you ok?”

Aurora and Kaliis have just marched through the door. Aurora looks all shades of ill even in monochrome, and Kaliis on the other hand looks oddly troubled. They make an odd duo.

Aurora’s gaze slowly travels to Scarlett, who had been the one to ask the question. Her lips barely manage to form a smile. “I'm ok.”

The answer is good enough for Tyler, apparently. He turns to Catherine. “Cat, show them.”

“Roger that.”

Catherine casts her work that she had been pouring over into the main holographic display over the central terminal. Aurora has confusion written all over her face. Our resident Ace had laboriously compiled all the locations of the stars featured in the Trigger’s starmap.

“What am I looking at?” Aurora asks.

“The map inside your Trigger highlighted twenty-two stars in total. I've plotted those systems onto the known segments of the galaxy.” Not even Catherine can withhold the pride from her tone.

“Took her a while,” Finian muses. “She couldn't tell just by looking at them.”

“There's around two hundred billion stars in the Milky Way, Skinnyboy,” Catherine retorts dryly. I imagine if she wasn't so tired, she probably would have hit him with whatever resources were around her. “I don't have all of ‘em memorized.”

Finian sniffs. “I thought you were supposed to be good at this.”

“Shut up, Finian.” Catherine spins back around in her seat, fingers skimming over controls. Twenty-two points of red flare to life amongst the sea of stars. “Most of the systems highlighted on the map are unexplored. And a lot are a deep trek from here, even Folding. But it turns out every one of them sits on a known weak spot in the Fold.”

Kaliis tilts his head, arms folded firmly over his chest. “They all have naturally occurring gates?”

“Looks like, yeah. And you're never going to guess the closest system to our current coordinates.”

Catherine replaces the starmap with a holographic display of a flickering planet. Aurora doesn't even have to read the sprawl of glowing info beneath it to breathe it's name out, as if it was an old friend she hadn't seen in years.

“Octavia.”

Silence chokes the room in a stifling blanket. I have about a million questions racing through my mind, all moving too quick for me to place just one.

“So riddle me this, legionnaires,” Tyler announces. “Say you're the GIA and there's a system you don't want people visiting. And say you just can't lock its gate down because it's at a naturally occurring Fold spot. How do you keep folks from poking their nose in?”

“Maybe you make up a story about some deadly atmospheric virus,” Scarlett mutters, grimacing at Octavia.

“Get the planet put under Galactic Interdiction,” I add with a nod.

“Maybe it's no story,” Catherine reminds. “Zila said those colonists in the GIA uniforms were dead before Kal got to them. Maybe they were infected with the virus this Interdiction is warning us about.”

“So why change the records to point toward Lei Gong?” Aurora raises. “Why delete any record of the Octavia colony existing? Why chase down the last person with any remaining link to this place.”

Tyler doesn't tear his gaze from the holograph, but does fold his arms. “I don't know about anyone else, but I'm getting the feeling there's something on Octavia that the GIA doesn't want us to see. Or more importantly, something they don't want Auri to see.”