The Stray Starfarer

Lieutenant Owen Mercer had always trusted his gear. The reinforced latch on his tether, the oxygen recycler humming in his helmet, the thruster pack calibrated to the millimeter—every piece of his deep-space rig had been tested a thousand times. But space doesn’t care about tests.

One moment, he was repairing a solar array on the ISS Horizon, orbiting Pluto’s frost-bitten plains. The next, a micrometeoroid sheared his tether clean off. His thruster pack sputtered, its fuel line cracked. Owen spun into the void, watching the Horizon shrink to a speck as Pluto’s gravity abandoned him. His last transmission was static.

Then the wormhole opened.

It wasn’t a swirling sci-fi portal. It was a rip—a jagged fissure in the fabric of reality, glowing like a dying ember. Owen’s thruster pack, short-circuiting, hurled him straight into it.

——

He woke to the sound of rain. Actual, liquid rain, drumming against his visor. Owen gasped, clawing at his helmet seals. The air was thick with oxygen and something else—ozone, maybe, or alien pollen. He rolled onto his knees, vomited, and looked up.

Two suns hung in a lavender sky. Between them, a city of floating crystal spires pulsed with bioluminescent light. And surrounding him were the aliens.

They were tall, their skin shifting between opalescent silver and deep cobalt, their six-fingered hands raised in cautious greeting. Their faces had no mouths, just a cluster of luminescent nodes where a human’s jaw would be. When they spoke, the nodes pulsed in sync with a voice that echoed directly into Owen’s skull.

<<Query: You are damaged. You are lost.>>

Owen’s translator patch spat gibberish. He tapped his chest. “Lieutenant Owen Mercer. Earth. Home.”

The aliens exchanged glances. One touched his helmet, and the nodes flared violet.

<<Query: Home is… a deathworld?>>

——

They called themselves the Va’thari, a civilization older than human agriculture. Their planet, Kaelis, orbited twin stars in a globular cluster where black holes waltzed like old lovers. The Va’thari had long ago mastered gravity, folding spacetime to build their floating cities, but they’d never encountered a species like Owen—a creature of “violence and nectar,” as they called him, whose blood carried the iron scent of war and whose dreams leaked images of nuclear fire.

At first, they feared him. Their scholars argued in humming chambers, debating whether to exile him to Kaelis’s moon. But Elder Vysha, a philosopher with nodes that gleamed like molten gold, intervened.

<<He is a child of chaos,>> she pulsed. <<But chaos births stars. We will teach him peace.>>

They gave Owen a home—a domed habitat in the Library of Ages, where holographic archives held the histories of extinct civilizations. They taught him their language through neural symbiosis, letting biotech mites rewire his synapses. He learned of the Va’thari’s Great Pacification, how they’d purged aggression from their genome millennia ago.

But Owen’s human heart still ached for Earth.

——

Vysha took him to the Edge, a plateau where Kaelis’s crust had been split open by ancient weapons. Below, a chasm glowed with unstable wormholes, flickering like broken film reels.

<<Your arrival was an accident,>> Vysha pulsed. <<But we can build a door.>>

The Va’thari worked for months. They forged a ship from self-repairing alloys, its core powered by a captured singularity. They mapped the wormholes, calculating a path to Owen’s solar system. And they gave him a gift—a biolume seed, a living crystal that could grow into a Va’thari communication node if planted on Earth.

<<When you are ready,>> Vysha said, <<show your people the stars are not cruel.>>

——

The launch nearly killed him. The wormhole was a storm of distorted physics, crushing the ship’s shields. Alarms screamed as Owen wrestled the controls, his human reflexes outperforming the AI’s cautious algorithms. He burst into realspace just beyond Mars, his ship’s beacon pinging the Horizon’s dead receivers.

Then, a miracle—a deep-space hauler, the Marlin, picked up his distress call.

——

Back on Earth, Owen was a ghost story made flesh. Scientists dissected his ship’s tech, finding alloys beyond periodic table logic. The biolume seed, when planted in the Sahara, grew into a shimmering tree that broadcast Va’thari harmonies on every radio frequency.

At night, Owen stares at Kaelis’s coordinates, etched into his palm by Vysha’s farewell touch. The Va’thari are waiting.

And this time, humanity won’t be alone.