[capnq]

Even after almost eight years in command of the _Speculation_, Rerta Malre still enjoyed the spectacular color displays of a wormhole transit. Most of the original crew was gone, having left the ship's company to spend their newfound wealth, when they returned to Eifral space to refuel. Malre had stayed on, even after the payoffs for the ship's journeys had dropped to almost nothing. Most of the systems they'd visited recently either had no colonizable worlds at all, or had already been colonized by the Tyreans, like Ursula, the system they were about to leave. After this jump, they were headed back to the refuelling station on Fypxu in Mamor.

The crew of the _Speculation_ never even saw the Katana warship that pounced on them as they emerged from the wormhole in the Bellatrix system. The first salvo took out the bridge and engines, leaving a crippled hulk for the second salvo to vaporize. There wasn't even time to send out a distress signal. Eifra's first interstellar spacecraft simply disappeared in a hail of anti-protons, its fate a mystery to everyone but the Katana.