HAWK

CHAPTER FOUR: SELVA (1/7)

The Calista was running beautifully. Whatever the noise was that had tormented Kas on her trip to Chantos, it had apparently been left behind there.

The call had come in no more than thirty seconds after she'd left Chantos's atmosphere. Kas hadn't been surprised; she'd counted twenty-two missed calls during her time on surface, one for every hour, but now she was back in the Black, she would expect one per minute until she gave in and answered.

The message filled the entire width of her viewport.

INCOMING CALL FROM SELVA

Kas looked at the words and leaned back in her chair. She had no interest in talking to the Federation again. They were snoopers - had to know everything that was happening the moment it happened. All planetary and lunar activity, including records of incoming and outgoing ships, were forwarded to Selva directly, meaning they knew Kas was in transit the moment she was cleared for departure. It wasn't enough that she'd caught the X1 and was on her way to return it, they wanted a full debriefing. There'd be questions, hundreds of them, an inquisition that would last her practically the entire journey. And for what? Whose benefit really? Certainly not hers.

She bit off one of her cuticles.

Sorry guys, I'm busy...

The message blinked one last time and the call terminated. Kas had no doubt they'd try again in a moment and she'd already decided she would ignore that call too. She didn't appreciate harassment, which is exactly what it was. Nobody else had the power the Federation had, the ability to call whoever they wanted, whenever they wanted. If Kas wanted to get in touch with a buddy back on Holgar - not a great distance away, relatively - she was required to go through Selva who would then have to approve the call before connecting her to the recipient. Kas enjoyed the privacy of space, but the Federation was that creep outside the window, always trying to peer in through the curtain.

They hadn't always been there, of course. Once upon a time, almost a century before Kas had been born, there had been no such thing as the United Galactic Federation. The day they turned up was the day that everything changed.

Of the hundreds of billions of galaxies in the known universe, the Asiman galaxy was not particularly special. It wasn't the oldest or the youngest, the biggest or the smallest - it was just one of many common spiral systems, with two long purple arms that wrapped themselves around each other in a perpetual embrace. The Asiman galaxy consisted of over 150 billion stars. Each of those stars had an average of one-point-six planets in life-sustaining zones, and of those planets, little under one percent were actually inhabited. That amounted to just under two-point-five billion planets, all teeming with alien life.

It didn't take too many millions of years for some of those planets to start venturing out into space, investigating their own solar systems the way a dog sniffs around its backyard, oblivious to the countless other dogs simultaneously lazing around their gardens. But they could not meet each other. Interstellar space separated them like a tall fence, far too large for any of them to jump.

Eventually though, one of those solar systems cultured a very smart dog. That star was called Kiko.

After enough time, Kiko discovered it didn't need to jump over the fence, but that it could crawl under it. The secret to interstellar travel wasn't just to try and travel really fast, but to create 'rifts' in space - wormholes that allowed it to take enormous shortcuts across the galaxy. Once it could do this, Kiko began exploring Asiman like a dog unleashed in a vast neighbourhood. It came across other dogs, though none quite as smart as itself, and not in every solar system, but in enough that they began to form a pack. With Kiko as its leader, suddenly there seemed to be no limit to the scope of Kiko's expansion.