Chapter One: Every Satellite Forgot It

The silver edge came from starlight bending around it. Then it stopped. It fell from 7.9 kilometers per second to zero in eight-tenths of a second. If the acceleration was real, any creature made of flesh would have become a stain. Unless the craft was not controlling velocity, but space itself. “Save recording,” Zhou said. The computer failed to respond. The stream went black, then returned. The viewers were asking why he had stopped talking about the weather satellite. The ship was gone from the replay. Two seconds of impossible footage had been replaced by an undisturbed sky. Database logs vanished. Even the designation Zhou had typed became blank spaces.