The Zariman Ten Zero

The Zariman Ten Zero was a colony vessel of the Orokin age, dispatched toward the Tau System, the empire's great terraform designate. It attempted the crossing by Void jump. Something failed.

The ship was lost with all hands, and then, impossibly, returned. What the recovery teams found aboard was sealed by Orokin decree, and the empire wrote the Zariman out of its own records. Erasure, in Orokin practice, was not concealment of failure. It was containment of consequence.

The adults of the Zariman did not survive the Void, not in any way that mattered. The children did. They came back changed, carrying something the Orokin could neither explain nor extinguish, and every attempt to treat them as a hazard failed in ways that frightened the treaters.

It was the Archimedian Margulis who refused the obvious conclusion. She sheltered them, sang to them, and taught them to hold the change instead of being held by it. The empire rewarded her mercy as empires do. But her work outlived her sentence: the children of the Ten Zero became the Tenno.