A map projected from the terminal, showing not stars, but a path. It led deeper into the subterranean complex, toward a room that wasn't on any blueprints. Kaelen followed, the air growing colder, until he reached a chamber containing a single, humming crystalline pillar.

Kaelen knelt, brushing dust from a console that had been dormant for five hundred years. He initiated the sequence. The terminal flared to life, not with green code, but with a warm, amber glow.

was the coordinates in the sunken ruins of the Old Earth data center.