Maven’s voice dropped to a whisper. “There’s another way. The old Phase-Shift Buoys. They generate a temporary local distortion—not FTL, but a fold. One jump. One chance.”
“What is it?”
The Blocker was beautiful. A perfect obsidian sphere the size of a city block, orbiting a dead ice dwarf. Its surface rippled with captured light—light that had tried and failed to go faster. Trapped photons screamed in frequencies no human ear should hear. lightspeed blocker