LOCATION CLASSIFIED
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Stealth.
The art of not being seen; it is, on most battlefields, the key to staying alive. If you can't be seen, after all, your enemies don't know you're there to kill.
Most battlefields.
But in the depths of space, the rules change. Being seen is inevitable.
Even the dullest objects reflect light.
Even the coldest radiate heat.
Against the perfect black and absolute chill of the universe, everything is visible. Stealth, goes, as they say, out the airlock. Staying alive then becomes a game of distance, of being so far away that, by the time your image meets a waiting observer, you are no longer there.
But in an age of instant detection and an environment of permanent visibility, stealth loses its relevance.
Or does it?
Designed by minds that had dismissed it as impossible, constructed by hands that had laughed at the very idea, and launched by a people that had never seen the need, a new predator prowled the skies.
An impossibility born of necessity. Perfectly visible to even the most mundane of civilian sensors, against any enemy it would have been asked to face in the past, it would have been laughably visible.
Built as it were around stealth, its armaments were piteous, its defenses lackluster, and its engines were good for little beyond setting orbits.
Against the enemies it would have been asked to face in the past, it would have been dead in the blink of the metaphorical eye.
Against an enemy that tossed the laws of physics out the window, however, old ideas became new again. The impractical became feasible, and the impossible looked more likely by the second.
Enter the Trespasser heavy corvette Dusk.
Equipped with thermal/optic camouflage technology repurposed and scaled up from the technology employed by infantry special forces, it could appear to fade away against background, invisible save for the shimmer of refracted light.
Equipped with the most advanced cooling technologies its designers could procure, its hull could be chilled to near-absolute-zero. Coupled with dozens upon dozens of internal heat-sinks, it could maintain near-invisibility to infrared sensors.
With engines that could maneuver the craft without propellant, and a hull coating not too dissimilar to that on the outside of ancient stealth aircraft, it could fly, unseen, right next to, astronomically speaking, the enemy
It was hoped.
Like many before her, the mission set before the Dusk and her sister ships was one of exploration.
And also like so many before her, peace was the last thing on her crew’s minds.
It would be fitting that a craft that would have been at home in speculative fiction would be crafted to face another element of the same, one that had haunted her masters’ dreams, and their nightmares, for centuries.
Dusk, her sisters, and their crews, flung themselves into the night, searching.
Searching for an intelligence not their own.
An intelligence that had not come in peace.