Kerr’s fingertips barely brushed the blue dagger tucked in the crack of the starship wreckage’s energy pod🔹, when the vital sign monitor on his wrist let out a sharp warning beep⚠️. It was his third year as a star scavenger on the edge of the Orion Arm in 2197, and this was the first non-human standard weapon he’d ever touched. The hollow blade of this ‘Star Remains Sky-Rending Dagger’ hummed with imperceptible subspace energy🔮, and the geometric patterns on the grip were designed for the arthropod limbs of alien creatures—suddenly he remembered the federal classified files mentioning the missing ‘Void Hunter’ squad in the border war a century ago, whose standard weapons were exactly these daggers capable of tearing through subspace barriers, and his sister, who had been missing for five years, was the vice-captain of this squad. Kerr had just clipped the dagger to his waist when a non-human hiss echoed from the wreckage’s ventilation duct🦗. The metal deck began to tremble, and when he looked up, he saw three pairs of glowing blue compound eyes flickering in the darkness. The dagger at his waist suddenly vibrated violently, and the hollow part of the blade revealed a star map identical to the tattoo on his sister’s neck, a coordinate of a star field he had never seen in any star chart archive, pulling him toward an unknown and dangerous path...