The drop out of warp was gentle. Parr’s Valkyrie shivered once and the tunnel of starlight collapsed. She realised, belatedly, that she had issued no commands. The controls sat under her hands, dormant and dark. Her display repainted itself: warp vectors fading, local space resolving into a clear, sparse field of stars and one massive object directly ahead.

A jagged, irregular silhouette hung in front of her, blotting out a slice of the starfield. As the Valkyrie’s sensors clawed at it, the outlines firmed: an asteroid, perhaps thirty kilometres across, its surface pitted and scarred, dusted with the faint silver of old ice and ancient debris.

There were pinpricks of light scattered across the dark rock. Thin lines of illumination traced paths along the surface, picking out straight edges that had no place in geology. Near the asteroid’s equator something gleamed: a ring structure, metal grafted into stone, anchored into the rock with metal spines.

“Computer,” she said. Her voice sounded very small in the narrow cockpit. “Report location.”

“Uncharted system,” came the reply, bland and unconcerned. “No matching stellar or navigational references.”

“Of course not, that would have been too easy,” she murmured.

Her hands were resting lightly on the controls. The Valkyrie was still turning, very slowly, aligning itself with the largest of the illuminated structures. Somewhere beneath the gentle susurration of power systems she could hear something else. A rhythm. A pressure just at the edge of hearing. Home, something whispered, pattern to pattern.

“Shut up,” she said, too loudly.

A flicker – irritation or amusement – passed along the inside of her skull as the Valkyrie’s course correction completed. Her fighter settled into a descent vector.

Below, the structure revealed itself. The ring encircling the asteroid’s equator was not a single piece of construction: it was a grafted thing, built from sections of different ships and stations all knitted together. She recognised the bones of an old ore processing plant in one segment. Adjacent to it, a chunk of what looked suspiciously like a Federation-designed comms relay, its dishes repurposed to point inward instead of out. Further along, something that might once have been part of a Cardassian design, with the hard, sharp angles softened by time.

Between these major elements, finer structures linked them: cables grown stiff with vacuum, narrow gantries crawling with tiny moving dots. The dots resolved into small craft, some obviously shuttles, others more improvised. Pilgrim vessels, in miniature. If you squinted, the whole construct looked like a crown hammered into place around the asteroid.

Her sensors pinged quietly. Her comm panel crackled once, twice, then steadied, bypassing any further commands from her.

“Welcome, sister,” a voice said, warm as a hand placed on her shoulder. “We have waited long for you.”

She swallowed. “That’s very flattering,” she said, trying not to let the tremor reach her tone. “Who am I talking to?”

There was a soft huff of air that might have been laughter. “We are many voices,” the speaker said. “Today, you may call me Guide.”

“Guide, right,” she said. “You people and your mystical titles.”

“You are tired,” Guide said, as if that were an answer. “Come. We have prepared a place.”

The Valkyrie’s thrusters pulsed. The fighter dipped toward one of the ring’s inner surfaces where a docking nest had been cut directly into the encrusted hull of an old station module. Lines of light chased along the walls, illuminating approach vectors. She could feel the ship adjusting attitude without her input, making minute corrections.

I could fight it, she thought. I could switch to manual, break this path, flip the fighter around and burn hard. The thought felt like pushing against a door with a very heavy piece of furniture on the other side. The controls under her fingers seemed a fraction heavier. The hum in her head rose a note.

You have run, the other voice observed. We have indulged you. You have tasted resistance. Now you will sit.

“You don’t get to…”

The docking clamps caught with a heavy, final thud. The cabin vibrated once, then went still.

Emilia blew out a long breath. “Fine,” she said. “We’ll sit. For a bit. Then I’m leaving. That’s the deal.”

No-one answered.

The docking umbilical extended with a slow, mechanical grace, locking onto the fighter’s port side. Status lights flicked from red to amber, then to green.

“You’ll go out there, then,” she muttered to herself. “Talk to the nice cult. Learn what the nice cult is building. Try not to get killed.”

She unsealed her helmet, felt the cool, slightly stale air of the cockpit wash over her face. For a moment she sat there, eyes closed, listening to her heartbeat and the distant rumble of activity on the other side of the canopy.

Then she stood, grabbed the phaser from its compartment and keyed the hatch.

The umbilical corridor was narrow, patched in places, but someone had made an effort to make it welcoming. Soft strips of light ran along the floor, guiding her forward. The metal was warm under her gloved hand, faint vibrations travelling through it.

Midway down, she realised the hum in her head and the faint throb under her palm were syncing. For a moment, it felt as though she were walking along the inside of her own veins.

“Stop that,” she said, more sharply than she’d intended. The hum dipped, sulking.

The inner hatch cycled. The door opened. The space beyond had once been an industrial cargo bay, she could see the old lines of it beneath the changes. High ceilings, gantries, a grid of floor markings half-polished away. Now it had been reworked into something between a receiving hall and a chapel.

Soft fabric hung in long strips from the overhead beams, dyed dark blues and greys, threaded through with strands of reflective wire that caught the light and turned it into faint, moving constellations. Along the walls, panels from a dozen different systems had been bolted into place and repurposed as quasi-decorative objects.

And everywhere, on every flat surface, were squares of black.

Reliquaries. Some the size she knew – a palm’s weight of impossible density – others larger, blocks the size of a small crate. A few had been embedded into the walls, sinking deep into the metal as if the station had been grown around them.

Her mouth went dry. A group of people waited for her at the far end of the hall.

They were dressed more simply than some of the pilgrims she had seen. Dark tunics, serviceable trousers and simple boots. A few had scraps of armour, shoulder plates, forearm guards. All wore the cubes on chains around their necks.

One stepped forward.

He was in his fifties, perhaps, human or a a species with a similar appearance. Tall, lean, with weathered skin. His hair was cut short, silver at the temples. The reliquary at his throat was larger than the others, and its surface flickered faintly as if something beneath were restless.

“Emilia Parr,” he said, and the sound of her name in his mouth made the fine hairs along her arms rise. “You have come far.”

“Longer than I’d have liked,” she said. “I wasn’t exactly a willing passenger on this trip.”

He smiled. It was a good smile. It would have been charming, once. “We rarely plan the important journeys,” he said. “I am Corin, once of this rock. Now something more.” His eyes gleamed. “We welcome you to the First Temple.”

She glanced past him. “First Temple?”

“The first place we built that was not borrowed,” he said. “This rock carried a listening outpost once. A forgotten ear turned outward, for a war no one here remembers. We took its bones and turned them inward.”

“First Temple,” she repeated.

One of the younger converts, a girl of maybe seventeen, hair shaved down one side of her head, growled at her. Corin’s eyes slid sideways in gentle reprimand, then returned to Emilia.

“You are not like the others we have touched,” he said. “You hear and speak back. You carry the shard and yet remain yourself.”

“Most days,” she said lightly. “Depends on the hour.”

His gaze sharpened. “You resist?”

“I negotiate,” she said. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t roll over simply because someone dropped a talking square in my lap.”

The reliquary at his throat pulsed once. The others in the room stiffened almost imperceptibly, as if listening to some internal whisper. A faint pressure built at the base of her skull.

Careful, the not-voice inside her said.

“Of course,” Corin said, after a thoughtful pause. “Every pattern needs friction, or it is merely repetition.”

He gestured to the hall. “Come. See what we build here.”

Her instincts screamed no. But the rational part of her mind pointed out that she was very much docked inside their structure, ringed by their ships, with no immediate manner of escape. Walking with them and watching might be the only advantage she could squeeze out of this.

She forced her shoulders to relax. “Lead the way,” she said.

They showed her the gardens first.

“Everyone is very keen on making you lot sound like horrors in the darkness of space,” she said, as they walked along a curving corridor whose walls were studded with riveted plates from half a dozen salvage jobs. “I’ll admit that your first impression has been unexpectedly botanical.”

Corin smiled. “We eat,” he said. “We are not so changed as in the stories that people tell.”

The hydroponics ring had been grafted onto the asteroid’s inner curve, a series of cylindrical modules connected end to end. Inside, rows of green grew under strips of full-spectrum light. Leafy things. Vines curling around metal trellises. The air smelled of damp earth and fertiliser, a rich, living scent that contrasted with all of the ramshackle metal.

“You took this from a colony?” she asked.

“From three,” he said, not unproudly. “Pieces that were going to die when the co-ops pulled out. We offered them a place and they accepted.”

The workers here were a mix she recognised from the hall: some in simple pilgrim attire, others wearing the remnants of different lives: overalls with faded agricultural or commercial insignia. They moved with the quiet efficiency of people who believed in what they were doing.

At one end of the bay, nestled between two nutrient tanks, a reliquary had been set into the wall. It sat flush with the metal, slightly larger than most, its surface humming faintly. Tiny conduits radiated out from it like the roots of a tree, vanishing into the surrounding machinery.

“It manages the cycles,” Corin said, following her gaze. “Water, light and the chemical balance. Better than any corporation’s algorithm. It knows how things want to grow.”

“Does it,” she said.

It does, something inside her murmured, pleased.

He took her on, through corridors where the metal of old installations met newer grafts, through a small, neat medical bay where a woman used instruments that hummed with an unsettling harmony. In each place, the pattern repeated: careful endeavour overseen by some black cube.

Every time they passed one, the shard in her own mind tugged.

You are late, a new voice said once, cool and assessing, when they walked past a particularly large reliquary embedded in what had once been a reactor housing. But you came. That is something.

“Why first temple’?” Emilia asked, to drown it out. “You’ve got shrines all over the Expanse by now. Why is this one special?”

“Because this is where we stopped pretending,” Corin said. “We have people on worlds that still pretend they belong to others. Or stations, like Orantei was, that claim old allegiances while the song eats their power. Here, we are honest. The pattern is obeyed.”

“And the pattern is?”

He paused beside a viewport. Through it, she could see the spine of one of their docks stretching away, Pilgrim ships moored along its surface.

“Connection,” he said. “Completion. Someone long ago built a net across the darkness, so that thought could travel without the crude machinery you bind into your hulls. Something broke it. The reliquaries are the pieces. We are reconciling them.”

“You’re fixing someone else’s technology,” she said. “Have you considered that whoever destroyed it might have had a very good reason?”

“Yes,” he said evenly. “We considered that. We listened. The truth was more obvious, it was broken by simple error and has no nefarious intention.”

Her laugh came out too sharp. “You’re listening to voices from boxes.”

“Voices that remember how much better the galaxy was, and will be again,” he said.

They looked at one another for a moment.

“Come,” he said. “It is nearly time.”

“Time for what?”

“For council,” he said. “For planning. You are part of this now, Emilia Parr. Better to hear the song in the place it is loudest.”

She wanted to say no. To ask to be returned to her ship, to demand they uncouple whatever invisible hands they had sunk into her mind. Instead, she found herself following him.

The council chamber had once been a control room. The shape of it was still there under the changes: a wide, tiered space with a central command console and banks of computers facing inward. Now the central area was filled with a lattice of black cubes, stacked and interlocked in a three-dimensional pattern that made her eyes water if she looked at it too long. Lines of light ran between them in slow, looping circuits.

Around the edges of the room, Pilgrims and converts sat or stood, watching her as she entered. She saw a dozen different species, some of which she recognised: Human, Andorian, Bajoran, a wiry Tellarite with a scar through one ear, a Caitian whose fur had gone thin at the muzzle.

As she stepped down onto the lowest tier, the lattice stirred. The cubes did not move, not physically, but the light between them tightened. For a moment, a pattern flared – lines connecting nodes, nodes clustering into shapes – and then it relaxed again.

“Breath in,” Corin said softly. “Breath out.”

“We are gathered,” intoned another voice from her left, a tall woman with a shaved head and a reliquary half-sunk into the flesh at her collarbone. “Node one is secure. Node three, compromised and then silenced. Node five: awakening. Node seven: resistant. For now.”

Emilia’s stomach clenched. “Node three,” she said, before she could stop herself. “Orantei.”

Heads turned. Corin’s eyes flicked to her, then back to the lattice.

“A test,” the shaved-headed woman said. “A hymn begun too early. The pattern adjusted and we will learn.”

“And nodes one, five, and seven,” Emilia said carefully. “What are they?”

“Pieces of the net,” Corin said. “Places where the shards have sunk deep. Worlds and stations and machines where the song can be made loud enough to vibrate and begin to remake the galaxy.”

“The Federation has its subspace relays,” said another Pilgrim, a thin, intense-looking Vulcan. “The co-ops have their freight corridors. All of you think in simplistic terms of common space, subspace, gravity, linear time” He lifted his hand. “Our masters thought in terms of resonance. When the net is complete, a thought here” he tapped the side of his head and then gestured toward Parr “will be felt there,” he gestured again, expansively “with no need for your crude machinery.”

“And by thought,” Emilia said, very calm now, “you mean, what? Mind control? Control over machines?”

“It is not about control,” the Vulcan said, almost impatient. “It is about opening the galaxy to the light, to the song, to the realisation that death is not what we think it is. Once the net sings again, everything else will follow.”

“We have slept in a lonely universe,” the shaved-headed woman murmured. “It does not have to stay that way.”

“What happens,” Parr asked, “if the net wakes and the thing on the other end doesn’t like us?”

Corin’s smile was sad. “Sister,” he said, “it built the net. We are the ones breaking into its silence. We are restoring it to grace and greatness.”

A murmur of assent ran around the room. The lattice pulsed once, hard enough that she felt it in her bones.

“The Pilgrim cell at Pala Reach reports success,” someone else said. “The farmer minds are slow, but the technology in the soil speaks clearly.”

Corin lifted his hands. The room quietened.

“The time of scattered song is ending,” he said. “We have hummed to ourselves at the edge of hearing for too long. The net is ready to feel itself again. The masters’ work is ready to be restored.”

He turned his head, and for the first time she felt the full weight of his attention settle on her.

“We have the shards,” he said. “We have the temples. We have the hymn. What we lack is only the necessary amplification.”

The Vulcan stepped forward, fingers moving through the controls of a battered, repurposed Starfleet console wired into the lattice

“We will use theirs,” he said simply. “When the next node sings, the surge will ripple through their network. We will ride it. Every node, every reliquary, every shard will feel the same pull in the same instant. The net will close. The pattern will be complete.”

“And all of the people, in all of those places,” Emilia said, her voice sounding hoarse. “What happens to them?”

“They become part of something larger,” Corin said.

“Some of them will break,” the shaved-headed woman added. “Some already have. But the pattern does not mourn individual notes. Only the song matters.”

In the back of her mind, the shard hummed with a rising, eager anticipation. At last, it breathed. At last. All at once. No more fragments. No more tiny, scared, separate things. Whole.

She bit the inside of her cheek until she tasted blood.

“And when do you plan to do this?” she asked.

The lattice brightened.

“The next sequenced alignment of your relays,” the Vulcan said. “Twenty-one standard days from now.”

The reliquaries pulsed, as if in applause.