Sarah watched the enormous steel giant, like a demon god out of legend, explain things she could not understand in a language she could not understand at all. Then she glanced at the equally towering warrior holding her child in the distance. Her heart was filled with confusion, unease, and a trace of... a strange sense of safety.
"Where... are we?" she asked. "Have we... been saved?"
Lion El'Jonson fell silent for a moment. Looking at this woman who had just become a mother, at her eyes brimming with expectation, he did not know how to explain it to her.
"We are on our way home, ma'am," he finally said, unable to offer anything else. "Along a road... that may be a little rough."
And now, the colossal vessel carrying the fate of eight million mortals was sailing through the most turbulent, unpredictable waters in the Milky Way Galaxy.
At its core, this ship was a dead steel behemoth that had been forcibly awakened. Each jump was nothing like the Imperial Navy's precisely calculated, scalpel-sharp entry. It was more like a drunk being kicked out of the sky from ten thousand meters up into a raging sea.
The entire hull groaned in agony. Vast metal structures twisted and warped under the pressure of an unreal dimension, giving off teeth-grating creaks. In the corridors, light tubes crudely installed by Gretchin flickered wildly like the breathing of a dying man, casting the people's terrified faces alternately into light and shadow. The air was filled with a cold static charge that seemed to seep into the marrow, along with a sensation... as though billions of souls were whispering in the distance.
For the vast majority of mortals aboard, this was their first-and last-experience of Warp travel. They did not know what a