The sky above Jupiter's moon Europa shimmered with artificial light. Aurora fields danced unnaturally—less a product of nature, more of engineered magnetic disturbances from a deep-space mining base long abandoned, yet still pulsing with stolen energy. Inside a buried observatory dome, five men sat around a makeshift table. Dust floated in the low gravity. A cracked wall screen flickered with encrypted trade routes and gravitational bypass maps.
They weren't supposed to be here.
Not as fugitives. Not as thieves. And certainly not as traitors to the very laws of science they once helped define.
Ishan, the quiet mind behind the original collapse equation, adjusted the cracked lens on his HUD and looked around at the others.
> "We proved the universe could fold. That you could leap across light-years without a ship. Now we're using that to steal antimatter and sell it for crystals. This isn't what we imagined."
Next to him, Pulse leaned back, twirling a glowing cube of compressed dark matter.
> "We imagined Nobel prizes. The universe imagined profit. And Earth? Earth tossed us out the moment we got too close to real power."
Ravi, the molecular coder who once built medicines out of plasma, looked up from his holographic scanner.
> "And now we build silence. Because silence doesn't ask questions."
On the far side of the room, Vian was scanning the asteroid belts near Zeta-5. His voice was calm, calculating.
> "They turned science into currency. We're just... making withdrawals."
The fifth, Sairaj, the youngest of them, watched a flicker of light pass across the dome's cracked ceiling. He didn't speak much anymore—not since the Titan job.
Outside, the stolen quantum core blinked. Stabilizing. Ready for jump.
Suddenly, the room lit red. A ripple through the FoldNet—a silent alarm sent across the quantum mesh that monitored forbidden dimensional travel. Someone knew they were here.
> "They've tagged our signature," whispered Ravi.
Ishan stood up, his eyes sharp.
> "Then we jump. New planet. New laws."
Pulse grinned. Vian initiated the fold.
The observatory cracked with light—and vanished.
All that remained on Europa was silence… and a fingerprint of bent spacetime.