YC 121, Month 10, Day 11

"This one's occupied," Regulus Bloodmoon said over the comm. "I'm picking up two starbase towers, both online."

He could hear his brother Matthias sigh in frustration. "How long have we been at this anyway?"

"Three weeks," Regulus said tonelessly. "I'm starting to believe that every catalogued system in wormhole space is occupied."

"Somehow, I'm not surprised," came the response.

Another voice chimed in. "What if we found a lightly defended starbase and took it down by force? That wouldn't take too long. We have a fleet."

"We need fifty battleships working for two hours to pull that off, Evelyn," Regulus snapped back. "We have a fleet, sure, but we don't have fifty battleships, and if they're any degree of competent we'll need a huge stack more. Have you seen how much difference even a single turret gunner makes in a starbase-"

"Check, check," Matthias suddenly shouted. "I'm picking up something really odd. Unknown-class signature, but not a wormhole."

"What?" Regulus said in surprise. "That's impossible."

"Bringing it to 100%... Signature resolved, it doesn't have a name... holy crap, my shields are dropping, what's going on...?"

"Matt!?" Regulus barked. "What's going on?"

The sound of screaming. Then, static. Regulus barely had time to note the cutoff of the static as Matt's signal left the comm network before his mind was filled with the sound of klaxons.

He turned his view, his ship's advanced sensor network illuminating the space around him, just in time to see space shatter all around him like broken glass.

YC 121, Month 10, Day 11

It had all happened so fast.

One moment he had heard his brother Matthias wiped away by some unknown cataclysm; the next his ship had been caught by something that should not exist. It was being torn every which way, being blasted by energy from what must have been a stellar core, being ripped asunder by meteoroids the size of golf-balls moving at half the speed of light. He was fighting to keep his mind in control, never mind his ship, as he was assaulted by images of phenomena that had no right to exist.

The ship jolted sideways suddenly, flung with incredible force like a plastic toy, soaring through one of the rapidly-changing, rapidly-evolving cracks in the seams of reality.

And suddenly the anomaly had faded away and he was somewhere else. Not yet ready to come to grips with the fact that he had just narrowly escaped being blown up, he glanced at the system name. "Unknown System".

He looked frantically for the J-number. There was none.

He tried to bring up an information listing. "System Is Not Recognized In The Database."

He reached out for the corporate commlink. It was silent.

He stared at the words. They stared back at him.

For the first time in his career as a capsuleer, he was truly lost. He was truly alone.

[I spent two weeks in wormhole space doing what Regulus was doing before he got tossed beyond the known world - I would know what it's like ]

The ship shook more than usual as it hurtled through the warp tunnel. It looked kind of like a piece of space junk hurtling through a planetary atmosphere, he thought to himself, trailing plasma and smoke in its wake, hurtling towards an uncertain future.

He glanced at the ship status display with the two threatening-looking red arcs, and then the numbers beside them. Shields: 100%, 4187/4187. Armor: 0%, 0/2812. Hull: 0%, 3/2076.

The hull had taken so much damage, it was now rated at a measly three standard integrity points. By all rights, his ship should not have been spaceworthy at all. It was a testament to the strength of Caldari engineering that he was still flying with a fully working afterburner.

His ship slid out of warp as ungracefully as it had entered it, careening wildly as the warp drive's drag on spacetime slowed it to a halt. The wormhole lay before him, type name 'Unknown Wormhole'. He pulled up the information listing. On the verge of dissipating into the ether, not significantly disrupted by ships, leading to an unrecognized star system. Using what computing power the ship had left, Regulus saved a map of the stars around him, then fired up his engines and jumped through.

The wormhole faded behind him the moment he was through, and he immediately got to work locating himself in the galaxy. It was painstaking work, for him and for what remained of his ship's sensor suite. Gathering light from distant stars was not an easy task even for a dedicated science vessel, which, despite all of its advanced electronics, the Tengu was not.

It was pretty evident even before he started, though, that he had been displaced at least several thousand lightyears by the jump, because the stars were definitely in different places from where they had been.

While the ship computers conducted their positional analyses, he launched his constellation of scanner probes, inflating their coverage to capture the entire solar system, making sure to cloak up before the probes flew away and did their work.

Three signatures: the wormhole he had just come through, an unidentified cosmic signature, and an unidentified structure.

He frowned and blinked, looking at the scan report again. There it was, a signature listing as an unidentified structure thousands of lightyears beyond the known world. He brought his Sisters-pattern combat probes in closer, trying to glean more clues.

25% resolution. It was a structure all right.

50% resolution. It was located close to the third planet, somewhere above the planet's north pole.

75% resolution. As with everything else, his ship's exploration database had no records on the object.

100% resolution. He had a warp-in. He ordered his ship to warp to a point one hundred kilometers from the site, ensuring that he was cloaked beforehand.

After another teeth-rattling warp he could never quite get used to, there it was in front of him, and it made him and his ship feel small.

It was a gigantic collection of small structures, arranged in a spherical lattice tens of thousands of kilometers in diameter. The structures were connected by what looked like filaments of light enclosed in tubes made of something transparent. Like all Sleeper structures, this complex was powered and operational despite its age, though the wear and tear of nebula-infused space was beginning to show.

Drifting around the structure was a small army of drones. The ship computer recognized some of them as Emergents of various types, frigate-class robotic starships with prodigious remote repair and damage output capabilities. The others simply showed up, like so many other things out here, as "Unknown Ship".

The sensor arrays registered a flurry of electronic activity emanating from within the massive complex, consistent with exabytes of data per second constantly being pushed around. Was this a Sleeper master datacenter of some sort? Capsuleers of all walks of life had sifted through so many Sleeper artifacts, but none of it had ever pointed to something like this.

What secrets did this complex hide?

In the back of his head, the Sleepers beckoned him to let the light shine in.

Concentric spheres.

The little structures were connected in independent, concentric spheres, slowly rotating around every possible axis so that the whole structure took on a disorientingly mind-boggling appearance.

He had been staring at the structure for so long that he almost didn't quite notice the faint beeping his computer console was issuing, letting him know that the computer had managed to track down his absolute position in the Sleeper galaxy.

He looked at the coordinates, a few hundred lightyears away from his last position, a few hundred lightyears in the wrong direction.

The ship's cargo-handling system was still functional; he was thankful for that. He considered his options. Engaging the Sleepers in combat in a falling-apart covert-ops-fit Tengu was not a task he relished at all, but if he did, he could reprogram the few remaining cargo-handling robots to assemble the generated wreckage into something he could actually use. This was a big 'if'; Sleepers were dangerous foes, highly resistant to damage and capable of dishing out more than their money's worth in return. The alternative, though, was probing for wormholes until his hair turned grey, a mind-numbingly-boring task that he would have liked to avoid.

He looked at the structure before him. Its secrets beckoned to him. It looked like some sort of massive data center. He wanted to know what was inside, and he would stop at nothing to find out. He knew he risked permanent death, but in a few short seconds, he made up his mind. Breaking into a cache of lost knowledge would be a fine last act for a capsuleer run out of options.

There was a small perimeter-grade Sleeper outpost on the other side of the solar system's bright blue sun. He mentally punched in the coordinates to his navigational computer and gritted his teeth as he hurled his unseen ship into the horrors of warp.

Even before his ship left warp, he could feel electronic interference prickling against the ship's sensors, sense the robotic wardens of a long-dead outpost flare to life. As the ship's shield hardeners sparked to life, and the twin Angel Cartel issue small shield boosters began coughing out precious shield energy, he allowed the ship to slide into full view of the enemy outpost and the pack of Sleeper drones that awaited him.

His initial suspicions were confirmed: this was a data center. He could hear the rapid twittering sounds of information flowing freely across fiber-optic channels, none of it quite making sense at first. Filtered through the computer cores on board the Sleeper-derived hacking drone, though, the data began to coalesce into thoughts, into ideas.

Most of it was mundane, and he could feel the information tracing across the structure as if it had done so a trillion times before, walking along familiar paths, wearing down the same roads, in no real hurry to get anywhere.

He traced the paths from sensors to storage modules, from processors to data links, the onboard computer keeping track of everything. Tracing the data links to remote sites, some thousands of lightyears away, he began to realize that this structure was, or used to be, part of the command-and-control for an entire galaxy.

He tuned in to one data stream, pointing him to an unknown Sleeper site somewhere nearby. Nothing interesting came up, except the force composition of the garrison: four gigantic drones he recognized as Sleepless wardens, as well as twelve smaller drones he did not recognize.

Another data stream pointed to a more distant site. This site was empty apart from a gigantic ring structure he recognized as a smaller data center, with loose data nodes potentially containing the scraps Tech 3 manufacturers valued so much.

A third data stream pointed to a site he realized must have been on the other side of the galaxy; it was in an alert state, being attacked by twelve ships the Sleepers registered as unknown, but that he recognized as a fleet of capsuleer-controlled remote-repair battleships.

He moved his focus away from these and probed a little deeper, into the reserves of knowledge that must have been contained inside the massive structure. Before long, the first of these prized secrets lay before him.

He was looking at a blueprint for what looked like some sort of Sleeper outpost, smaller than a full-size space station, but having docking clamps capable of handling anything battleship-sized or smaller.

Modularity and extensibility was present at the heart of the design; it presented data and resource interfaces that to the Sleepers were standard. Add-on modules could provide additional functionality to the base outpost, and would be a snap to install.

What really interested him, though, was the power of the main reactor - similar to that of a full-sized station, with a fraction of the power consumption - and the on-board defenses. He had to blink a few times to make sure he was looking at the right numbers. Doing some math in his head, he determined that the structure could withstand many times the damage output of a lunar starbase, while not taking up significantly more space.

He made a copy of the data into the onboard computer banks, carefully disengaged himself, and prepared for the flight back.