“I saw something in the æther, some strange entity showed me what was going to happen,” you say.

“Hmm, it sounds like you must have had some underlying suspicion, and the æther manifested that to you as a hallucinatory scenario based on your unconscious fears,” Synth says. “Stranger things have happened down there. Unless it was…no, I’m sure it was just a hallucination.”

“What?” Vik says.

“Look, you two haven’t even begun your training. I’m not about to lecture you on the nature of the æther, that’s Professor Kitov’s job. I’m just another student, after all…” Synth says.

“You did very well in there for untrained students, though.” Ana says. “You’re both going to be fine technopaths. I’ll take care of getting K to the admins when we arrive, and they’ll deal with this.”

“Yeah, you two just worry about learning to walk,” Synth says. What could they mean, the higher G at TLA? How bad could it be?

Still relaxed from the dissociative medication, you climb back into your pod and into your seat to rest up for the next few hours, watching the stars and the Moon go by as the shuttle rolls slowly on its PTC program. The Moon, your home, gets smaller little by little each time it passes your window. The thought crosses your mind that your path to an L2 halo orbit might take you beyond the Moon’s diameter and allow you to see the Earth, if briefly. But you have no such luck, the path was too straightforward from Korolev City.

After a few hours rest, the red light turns on, telling you to strap in for a maneuver. You feel the pull of angular acceleration as the shuttle neutralizes its roll, then a stronger force pulling you into your seat as its engines burn, inserting you from your transfer orbit into a halo orbit.

As you’re laying strapped to your seat and coasting through space, you get your first glimpse of your new home. Coming into view in your window, Translunar Academy is halfway illuminated by the Sun. It’s a tiny colony, even a large station, you could say. That’s to be expected for a private colony that exists solely to house the Academy. The largest part of it is its huge cylinder, half glass and half metal, with the two materials wrapping around each other in a diagonal line across the wall. This maintains an even balance and also allows sunlight to reach each part of the land inside equally as the cylinder rotates. Attached to the habitable section, and rotating in the opposite direction, the smaller cylinder looks like it is wrapped in shining gold foil. That would be the service module, housing all the life support and cooling systems, as well as the massive reaction wheels needed to maintain a perfect rotation, and of course the nuclear reactor powering everything.

Here is your home for the next three years.

END CHAPTER ONE

✴

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