The Cygnus Gate
The Silent Flash Space is not silent; it hums. To the uninitiated, the cosmos is a vacuum devoid of sound, but to Dr. Aris Thorne, it was a symphony of radio waves, gamma bursts, and the low, steady drone of cosmic microwave background radiation. For three years, Aris had monitored the deep-space telemetry from the Artemis II Lunar Observatory, waiting for a whisper in the dark. Most nights, the universe only offered static. Tonight, it offered a flare. The anomaly registered on the primary terminal as a sudden, intense spike in the X-ray spectrum, originating from coordinates that made Aris lean so close to the monitor his breath fogged the glass. "Cygnus," he muttered, pulling up the visual feeds. The image that rendered on the screen was breathtaking. A perfect circle of ionized gas, glowing an ethereal blue, had expanded into the void. Caught precisely on the edge of this luminous halo was a white dwarf star, blazing with unimaginable intensity. "It looks like......