Eridani - The Mayor’s Town
An Additional "Heart of Aletheia" Chapter
Part I: Emergence
Chris exits the corridor into Epsilon Eridani space. Carla confirms geometry is still clean. He identifies the colony as Ferro Hestia and prepares to hail them.
The shimmer collapsed.
Not with a jolt or a burn, but with a sigh — a soft rejoining of curvature and stillness. The stars stopped bending. The corridor faded.
Chris leaned forward, eyes narrowing as the cabin lights adjusted and the sensors re-stabilized. Jemima’s core spun steady beneath him, the harmonizer dimming to a low, golden pulse.
Outside the viewport, a red‑orange glow bloomed — Epsilon Eridani, a young orange dwarf star just over ten light‑years from Sol. Around it stretched dusty debris fields and the scattered geometry of a broad asteroid‑like belt, remnants of a system still settling into order.
“Carla,” Chris said. “Confirm location.”
“You are in stable insertion orbit at 0.18 AU from the Epsilon Eridani primary. Local frame matched. No active traffic. Time elapsed since solar departure: seven days, four hours.”
He nodded. “Ten light-years in just over a week.”
“Corridor integrity remains stable. Harmonics within threshold. Geometry unchanged. 8 hours till destination.”
8 hours later, He checked the rhythm manually. Cadence geometry hadn’t collapsed — the stretch field was still holding. Jemima’s cadence had carried him, not just cut through.
Below, one of the asteroids rotated lazily, maybe seventeen kilometers across. Its surface showed hex-cut vents, thermal panels, mining scars. Antennas swept its night side in long arcs.
“Carla, confirm that body.”
“Ferro Hestia Mining Complex. Colony chartered Earthside, 2286. Current population estimate: 1,200. Primary operations: nickel, cobalt, and silicate extraction. Next scheduled supply run: one hundred ninety-four days.”
Chris nodded. “So they’re not expecting anyone.”
“Correct.”
He adjusted the trim on Jemima’s rotational bleed and eased the ship into a closer orientation. Ferro Hestia’s geometry felt lighter than it looked — low gravity but dense enough to register.
“Let’s say hello.”
“Channel open. Broadcasting on regional emergency band.”
A beat passed. Then:
“Unregistered transmission acknowledged. Incoming handshake request received.”
Part II: Contact
The signal moved ahead of him, bending slightly as the corridor’s residual geometry peeled away. Within ninety seconds, a reply came back — narrow-band, no encryption, just a voice running hot on gain:
“Unidentified vessel, this is Eridani Base Control. You’re… you’re not arrival schedule. Please identify and repeat origin.”
Chris keyed the mic.
“Eridani Base, this is Lieutenant Commander Christopher Moyer, Earth Space Agency. Vessel Aletheia. Launched from Moonbase. Departure: seven days ago.”
The channel stayed open.
He heard papers shuffle, boots scuff. A voice, off-mic: “Did he say seven days?”
The same voice returned, slower this time.
“Say again, Aletheia. Confirm launch origin and timing.”
“Confirmed. Earth-origin mass-frame vessel. First operational Light Frame corridor skip. Arrival time is seven days and four hours shipboard.”
“Mass drive? You’re serious?”
“Dead serious.”
A longer pause.
“You understand we haven’t received any notice. You’re not on the manifest. There’s no cryo record. We haven’t had a manned ship since—”
Chris waited.
A second voice took over. Older. Calm. The kind of voice that didn’t like to be surprised.
“Aletheia Actual, this is Ferro Hestia Mining Authority. You’re not in our registry. No plume. No wake. You’d need to be pushing near light speed for a week to reach us. We’d have seen your burn ten years ago.”
“I came in clean,” Chris said. “Frame-held the corridor through solar descent. We used the Sun. Transit was continuous.”
Silence.
“You’re claiming seven days from Earth. Without cryo. Without signal lag. Riding a geometry we’ve never seen.”
“That’s correct.”
“Stand by.”
Carla’s voice came in soft, just beneath the cabin’s fan hum:
“Secondary routing detected. Internal comms grid active. Command authority in motion toward surface access. Cross-referencing profile… Mayor Talden.”
Chris sat back, folding his arms loosely across his chest.
“Colony’s run by a mayor,” he said. “Sera Talden, right? I’ve heard stories. One of those low-oxygen survivors — meditated for a week under a collapsed dome, if I’m remembering right.”
“Confirmed. Mayor Sera Talden. Third elected term. High Providential population index: 87 percent.”
Chris remembered the Providential town from Earth and exhaled through his nose. “That’s going to make things interesting.”
Part III: The Mayor
The pad lights cycled down, the micro jets providing the final thrusts.
Aletheia sat silent and coiled, petals dimmed, no plume, no heat wash. Nothing familiar.
Sera Talden walked out alone — no escort, no entourage. Her boots locked softly on the deck in 0.08g. She wore a pressure-rated flight jacket, low-g gaiters, and a steel service band worn to matte. No insignia. Just experience.
She stopped four meters from the bottom of the ramp.
Chris held posture.
“You’re early,” she said, deadpan. “By about ten years.”
“No cryo,” he replied. “New drive geometry. Light Frame skip. Seven days from Luna.”
“No warning. No burn trace. And no telemetry.”
“You are not set up to see me. Basically I drop out fairly close to mass.”
She studied him for a long second, then turned without comment.
“Follow me.”
Her office was carved into the internal rim of the rock — reinforced bulkhead walls, mineral charts, a timer ticking in hard vacuum units. No screens. Just a cracked leather chair and a steel crate doubling as a second seat.
Chris stood while she sat.
He gave her the mission summary. No pitch. No theory. Just the chain of operations:
Launched from Moonbase.
Dropped through solar descent.
Held corridor geometry clean.
Corridor didn’t break.
Decided to overshoot and visit Eridani.
When he finished, she didn’t speak. She reached into the drawer, pulled out a black-glass bottle, and set it on the desk with two dented steel cups.
“This is local,” she said. “Fermented in micrograv. No filters. High proof. Sometimes mildly hallucinogenic.”
She poured.
Chris, looking rather pleased, took the cup and drank.
She didn’t touch hers. She just watched.
Then:
“Well. I never thought I’d see this day.”
“A Providential, flying for the WSA? No Obligate would drink that stuff.”
Chris gave a tired half-smile. “Yes. It made the news back then. That I got in. But it’s been less than ten years. Only seven… maybe eight.”
“So you’re from the future.”
He glanced at the empty cup. “From the future and right on time.”
She slammed her own drink down.
Then stood.
“Come on,” she said. “You’d better tell the town.”
Part IV: The Celebration
The drill hall had been carved into the inner arc of the rock — structural ribs visible in the walls, steel truss beams painted with hazard bands, everything repurposed. Old mining lights. Unused docking netting along the ceiling. It looked like it was built to take a blast and then host a wedding.
Half the colony was already inside by the time Chris arrived. The other half were watching through internal cam feeds. Sera Talden led him to the front and stepped up onto a grated platform someone had bolted into the deck years ago. She rang the wall bell once.
The room settled fast.
“You all saw what parked on the pad,” she said. “You know that ship didn’t use a fusion stack. You know it didn’t drop cryo pods or signal six months out. This man—” she gestured toward Chris, “—left Earth just over seven days ago.”
A low murmur swept the crowd.
“He flew here. Not frozen. Not simulated. He flew. Light Frame corridor geometry. Experimental mass-drive. Earth will tell us they built it in about a decade.”
Chris stepped forward. He didn’t climb onto the platform. Just raised his voice enough to carry.
“My name is Lieutenant Commander Christopher Moyer. WSA Astronaut. First pilot assigned to a mass-frame corridor vessel. This wasn’t a planned stop, the theory played out better than expected. Cadence geometry held. I had fuel, I had harmony, and you were in range of the mission parameters. I had two weeks to spare and I used it”
He paused.
“I wanted someone to see it. Not on a data feed. Not ten years late. Right now.”
There was silence for a beat.
Then someone near the back said, flatly: “You crossed ten light-years in a week.”
Another voice: “You’re from Earth.”
And a third: “Holy hell, it’s real.”
The cheer came slow, then fast — like a seal breaking. It wasn’t organized. Just noise, boots clanging, someone slapping the side of a drum that probably hadn’t been used in five years. A few miners pushed forward, offering flasks, tins of food, sealed packets of vacuum beer.
Chris tried to demur. He really did.
But they were grateful. Not just for what he’d done — but because he’d brought it to them. First.
Someone handed him a tray of flatbread with sealant wax still steaming. Another passed him a can labeled “GRAVITY’S LIAR” in handwritten marker. A third gripped his shoulder and whispered, “I thought I wasn’t going to make it out here. You brought us back in.”
He wasn’t sure how long the party lasted.
At some point, a band started playing. One of the electric violins was jury-rigged through a signal converter and sounded like pure static, but nobody cared. The lights dimmed, then cycled through old docking sequences. A toast was made to the corridor. A toast to the ship. A toast to the man.
Eventually Chris found a quiet edge near the storage wall and let his head fall back against the cool steel.
It wasn’t the alcohol. It wasn’t the music.
It had been so long since anyone had looked at him and appreciated an accomplishment as miraculous.
He closed his eyes for a moment. Just long enough to hear someone start singing — off-key, off-rhythm, but sincere.
He smiled. Only a little.
And then the world swayed gently under his boots as the low gravity reminded him: you’re not done yet.
Part V: Departure
Chris didn’t know what time it was — only that the music had looped at least three times and the woman who’d taught him how to dance in 0.06g was definitely no longer wearing boots.
Someone had drawn a constellation across his forearm in silver marker. The beer in his hand had changed brands four times, and he couldn’t remember finishing any of them. The air buzzed with warm, low-gravity laughter — as if the whole colony was bouncing at once.
A miner in a dented pressure vest tried to rope him into a game of zero-g cards. Another pressed a fifth of something called Godspeed Fuel into his hands. A third just grinned, hugged him tight, and shouted, “You’re staying the night, Moyer!”
The room roared with approval.
He tried to pace himself. He really did. But the drinks came faster than his refusals, and every miner had a reason why this one mattered. A toast to the corridor. A toast to the ship. A toast to the man who brought the future ten years early and didn’t ask a damn thing in return.
After a while, he stopped arguing.
Eventually, he found the edge of the hall — quieter, darker — and leaned into a cold girder for support. Across the room, Mayor Sera Talden stood with her arms crossed, watching everything, saying nothing.
He caught her eye. She read his condition before he could say a word.
“I think I’ve hit the limit,” he said quietly. “Not the ship — me.”
“You good to fly?”
“I’m counting on the ship to be better than I am.”
She didn’t nod. Didn’t smile. Just turned and walked toward the platform.
She rang the hall bell once. That was all it took.
“Party’s still on,” she said. “But Commander Moyer’s heading back to orbit. No dramatics. Let him walk. He’s not gone for good.”
A few looked disappointed. One old salt saluted. Another miner stuffed a vacuum-sealed sausage into his flight jacket and whispered, “For luck, hero.” Most just continued the party to the dock.
They walked the corridor in silence.
At the pad, Aletheia pulsed with quiet light — petals folded, corridor field coalescing again. The harmonizer had begun its slow readjustment. A subtle hum of geometry tuning itself.
Sera handed him a hard-packed crate. Miner rations. Wrapped flatbread. A couple more for the moment unappealing six packs of beer.
“Don’t ration it,” she said. “You’re not in cryo.”
Chris nodded, too tired to speak.
She walked him the rest of the way to the cradle.
Carried might be a better word. She left him in a similar state in which she often returned miners to their homes.
The hatch sealed behind the Mayor with a soft hiss. As she departed, she considered that Eridani had made this astronaut an outer miner after all.
Chris had fallen into the seat like it had been waiting for him.
“Carla,” he said, half-slurred. “I’m at… maybe sixty percent mental integrity. Can you fly us?”
“One doesn’t need a bio implant to see that Commander,” she said. “Please remain seated.”
“Love you too.”
The cradle tilted gently as Aletheia lifted from the pad — no thrust, no burn. Just geometry.
Through the viewport, Ferro Hestia shrank into black. The lights in the drill hall were still on. The music hadn’t stopped.
Chris let his eyes close. Not because he meant to sleep. Just because he’d done what he came to do.
And the ship knew the way home.