She looked at the stars from her observatory pod, not as a stargazer who was happy with how they looked, but as a dreamer who wanted to know why people had come so far yet were afraid to go farther. Eron-7, her guardian, was a sentient interface that used to mine the moon but was later given the job of teaching and acting as a father. He constantly admonished her not to dig up data without permission. Lyra, on the other hand, was able to get over boundaries and see restricted records because of her custom-coded neural sleeve. She found pieces of data from Project Nocturne, an old project that was supposed to colonize deep space.

These data suggested that a mission was lost on its way to the edge of the Orion Halo. There were no public records of it, just a few energy signatures and a status of "terminated." Lyra was more interested in the note that said, "Dormant beacon activated: 2186," not the failure itself. "Await response protocol." It had gone off a year ago, and no one in the Accord had answered. Maybe they didn't notice it. Or maybe they did and then buried it again. She didn't know, but she felt a fire in her spirit that gave her a feeling of purpose.

It was more than a desire to travel. It was as if some deep evolutionary code in her cells reacted to the quiet broadcast. Solara Ridge was a quiet place, but there were old transit systems that had been utilized during the relocation period that were still working. Lyra followed the ancient mag-rail lines and found one that still led to Zenith Prime's substructure. Deep under the shiny surfaces of the Accord's capital was an old transport ship that the Ardent Wisp used to employ to move freight quickly between planetary orbits. It hadn't flown in decades, but with Eron's guidance and some careful improvements utilizing recycled skycore modules, Lyra brought the ship back to life.