Chrono-Wing: Attack of the Interstellar Thing!

August 6th, 2026

Chrono-Wing: Attack of the Interstellar Thing!

By Connor Upton | InTheAtticDev

This short story first appeared in InTheAtticZine #2 on June 8th, 2026, as the issue's cover story. More fiction, games coverage, and the full zine are available to download free over there.

Two hundred and eight launches were marked in Lance Concord's logbook, yet not one of them had taught his stomach to believe the magnetic rail would actually let go at the end.

The clamps released, the rail kicked, and three gravities pressed him into the seat for the four seconds it took to clear the quartz-glass tube. The vibration ran through his head with a rumble he stopped worrying about years ago. The inner wall of the tube was a smear of guidance lights until the dome of Cabeus City passed on all sides. In the half-instant before the starfighter cleared it, two hundred meters of hexagonal glass held the city visible. For as long as a blink, the crater floor lit gold and white beneath the lattice, cradling a thousand windows and a hundred thousand people.

Life on Luna, for all the grey, was never dull.

Lance pulled up past the shell of the outer dome and into the nothing. Earth hung enormous off the port quarter, blue and white and detailed enough at this range to read the weather over the Pacific. From this altitude Cabeus City was a glow at the bottom of a bowl.

Around the bowl, the rest of the moon's habitation made itself visible, a sparse scattering mostly in the form of flat buildings and antennas. Three other domes, holding similar cities, existed within his line of sight if he wanted to look for them, yet most of the moon lived below the rock still. The invention of the domes only became feasible in the mid 2700s, and even two centuries later, the development efforts were slow. And, of course, after the Impact of 2449, citizens of Luna still held a long history of weariness of surface life.

However, Lance had spent enough time in the corridors of Shackleton to know this region would be safe under the watch of the Solar Federation.

"Concord, you're clear of the port corridor. Sector nine, standard sweep. Nothing for you."

"Confirming nothing," Lance replied. The voice was that of Srita, his ground control handler. He meant it. Sector nine had been nothing for years. Lunar patrols flew to catalogue the rocks– ice and iron on slow ellipses, derelicts tumbling out of decayed parking orbits, the occasional unflagged hauler. Anything that might, given enough time, decide to fall on a dome. And, usually, that was it.

The Sun & Star Force had not waged war against anything since the Plutonian war, and even that had been a quarrel between a shipping cartel and the customs office, fought at vast distance over two years. The conflict settled in a courtroom the year after the Kuiper lanes reopened and fizzled out after the resignation of officials Lance could no longer name. He had been a cadet through it, and what he remembered was not much, which likely had something to do with the fact no starfighters were deployed during the conflict. Just slow, shambling tankers that maybe could maneuver enough to blockade the escape trajectory of a cargo ship. Boring… just like this flight.

Sector nine in this leg of the rotation cut Lance through the long debris field off the L1 lane, where for nine hundred years humans had been losing things into orbit. Cracked solar panels, spent boosters, the skeletal structure of a rather ancient NASA Lunar Gateway Module. The field hung in his canopy like the shallows of a coastline; only around Luna could you see relics from hundreds of years past floating like junk.

Near Earth was always busy. Further out it thinned, and past the Kuiper belt it thinned again, until the dark between waypoints went on long enough to forget what other ships looked like. Pure space. Interstellar space. Here, in the space above Cabeus, you were never alone.

A cargo-class wreck came up on his right, big enough that the sun caught it in slabs. QUWAT SHIPYARDS, it read, in faded paint across the broken flank. Half the hull was opened to vacuum, ribs exposed, a long buckled curve where the spine had given. Lance laid the fighter into a turn and threaded it through the gap between the hull and a drifting cargo spar, exit clean, the maneuver finished before he registered making it.

"Concord," Srita said. Lance smiled when he heard her.

"Copy?"

"It's not a joyride."

He took the fighter up over the next satellite station he saw, buzzing close enough that the solar arrays flickered as he passed, and a blaring tone in his cockpit registered. That meant, somewhere in Cabeus Southern Flight Tower, Srita had decided to pull the flight data. Probably already drafting a sentence to put in his record.

Except, the comm tone broke. His eyes caught the sensor pane. Something was glowing on the frequency readout where the tower's call-sign should have been. A glyph, soft and unfamiliar, the shape of it sitting just past what his eye could finish reading. It went.

"Srita?" Lance called. "Srita, did you see that?"

"Yes, your tricks aren't impressive anymore, Concord."

"No, not that!" Lance looked back at the scanner as he steadied the starfighter. "That wasn't you scaring me with the flight report scanner, was it?"

"You know I stopped filing them after the twentieth one got ignored, right?" Srita said. There was a pause. "What did you see?"

"I saw some sorta… like a glyph?" Lance said.

"A… glyph?" Srita asked.

"I heard this tone, I thought it was you being… you… but then I looked at the scanner and saw this– thing."

"Me being me?" Srita replied.

"You know, I meant–"

"Mhm, well, Concord, let me check in with Luna Control about this strange blip. I'll be right back any moment."

The line went dead and Lance was alone in the cockpit. He thumbed the sensor controls and pulled the scan in tight, a ten-kilometer bubble around the canopy. Nothing. He widened it to fifty, two hundred, then the full operational radius, and still the readout came back the clean fuzz of empty space.

He sat with it for a second before having an idea. The flyby of the satellite station, the UV light from the solar arrays could have interfered with his scanner– or gave it a boost to see something. He flipped the sensor over and ran the bubble out again.

There it was. Curved this time like a hook lying on its side. It was holding steady on the readout off the bow, high and out. It flew away as soon as the ship got a clean lock on the sensor. Lance did not call Srita back.

He pointed the nose at it and opened the throttle to begin chase. The X-6 took it. Hundreds of miles per second, then thousands. The acceleration signal climbed two octaves and stayed there, and the stars off the canopy began to show the faintest trail behind them. Not streaks yet, only a smear at the edge of each pinprick, like smudged ink that had not quite dried.

Lance had not flown this fast in three years– possibly six if you did not count the simulators on Titan. A console light came up amber to tell him he had crossed out of Earth's gravitational influence, and he dismissed it without looking.

The glyph was moving on the sensor itself. On the readout the shape kept rebuilding itself, the edges flickering, the curve trying on and discarding three forms a second as if the computer were guessing and rejecting its own guesses. Lance had been flying with this targeting system for nine years. It could read a live transponder off a freighter most of the way to Saturn. It was practically a small telescope wired into an artificial brain. He had never once seen it stutter.

Lance pushed harder. The throttle was past the stop now, into a band that lived behind a warning he had never bothered to read– something about the dangers of overloading. Likely not important.

Soon he was going hundreds of thousands of miles per second. Now the stars had tails. Lance kept the pressure up and watched the gap close, degree by degree, until the blip on the readout sat directly along his bow, and the speed counter held near a number once thought impossible: ahead of light itself. Way ahead.

He had heard the warp engineers talk about the X-6 at briefings. There were a lot of big words like relativistic frame, isolated space-time curvature and several others that meant nothing to him. Lance asked 'relative to what?' once and was looked at like he had five heads. What mattered was they figured out how to make a fighter bank and brake at such a speed without tearing itself (or the pilot) apart.

Lance let science do its work and got on with the lock. He flipped the auto-flight on, watched the stick begin moving by itself with small adjustments, and pulled up the targeting computer. The camera came up first. He pulled the long lens, dragged it to where the blip sat, and waited for the optics to settle.

The thing was there.

It was not a craft. He could see that much before he could see anything else. There were rings (three or four of them, he could not be sure) turning around a center, each on its own plane, the way the diagrams of an atom had looked in his school books. The center was a sphere of green light. Lance leaned forward in the harness without meaning to.

He had no word for what he was looking at, so he used the one that made sense: Thing.

Closer in, the carving showed. A symbol along the outer ring, cut into whatever the ring was made of, the lines catching the green from the core and seeming to deepen and shallow as the ring turned. Lance was reaching for the zoom when every alarm in the cockpit broke open at once.

Lock and proximity warnings. A red bar across the threat panel he had never seen lit before, scrolling with so many words his eye could not keep up with. The targeting computer was guessing and rejecting itself again, three guesses a second, and the only line on the display that stayed put long enough to read said HIGH MAGNETIC SURGE INBOUND.

Then the rings fired. Green came off them in spokes, the same color as the core, and Lance had pulled up the stick before he registered touching it. The auto-flight kicked off the moment his palm closed on the grip. He rolled the X-6 hard and the first bolt passed where his canopy had been a half-second earlier, close enough that the cockpit lit emerald for an instant and went dark again.

"What the hell is that thing?" Lance said to himself. He ran. Two more bolts came after him.

It seemed this Thing came after him too.

He saw it on the rear sensor. The blip that had been ahead of him was now behind him, then beside him, then ahead again, the shape rebuilding itself in some incomprehensible way. Whatever it was, it had decided he was the one to chase. Lance pulled the fighter into a long looping spiral and threaded the next pair of bolts past each other. He felt the wash of them on either side of the canopy, and on the aft sensor watched them meet somewhere behind him in a small green smear the readout did not know how to render. He thumbed the cannons and laid a spray across the bow.

The Thing was not where the spray went. It had moved in a direction the readout had to remap the grid sideways then down to describe, and Lance pulled the X-6 up into a climb that should have torn him in half. The G-meter jumped and the harness bit into his shoulders, but the fighter held like it always did.

The question Lance had came back. Relative to what? He was soaring exponentially past Earth's influence and still accelerating. What did those lab guys say? Right. Relative to the frame the engine made for itself. Going at these speeds the normal rules of physics became a suggestion. The engine was relative to the destination. And, here, that would not be the planet behind him nor the moon. That would mean interstellar space. It would mean Lance was sparring with some interstellar… Thing. There was still no word for it.

Two more bolts cut across his bow and he lost the thought.

Lance took the fighter wide. He was working blind on heading now, the sensor giving him directions in a coordinate system the screen kept rewriting, and for ten seconds something enormous and banded swung across the canopy on the port side. Jupiter– close enough to read the storms. Whatever bubble of warped reality the X-6 was carrying him in, the Thing was riding the same one, and they had crossed half the system inside it without either of them being there in a way that meant anything.

Lance used what was in front of him. He laid the fighter into the well of the planet's gravity and let it pull, riding the curve like a sea wake, and the Thing's next salvo went wide of him and into the pull as well. He came around the limb of Jupiter in a drift so long his teeth ached, swung the X-6 hard, and pointed the nose back where the Thing should be. Its bolts were coming around the planet behind it on the same curve, late by the seconds it had taken him to clear.

The optics held the core in the center of the canopy in the half-second before impact. Lance saw inside the sphere of green light. Something paler moved in it, tracking, the shape almost that of a pupil sliding in an eye. He swore it was looking at him. The bolts hit.

The Thing disappeared. A new tone came up on the dash. The threat panel cleared itself and a single line wrote across the display. LARGE EXPLOSION DETECTED 1 SEC– 30 MINUTES– 15 MINUTES AGO– 2 MINUTES- 1 MIN-

The canopy lit white, and Lance felt the shockwave he should not have been able to feel at this distance, and the counter on the display began ticking up from zero, confirming what had already happened. He watched the seconds climb.

Lance was not sure they were counting the right thing.

The office was small but the wood was real, at least. That told Lance most of what he needed to know about the man behind the desk. He sat across and gave the report the way he had rehearsed it on the flight back, which was to say it plainly. Lance knew he was respected despite the showboating from time to time. They would believe what he saw: A craft on a course. It had even fired on him. It flew maneuvers no human-built fighter could match, including the one he had been flying. If something could outclass the X-6, the command needed to know.

Lance was aware of the public record. Bacteria at a dozen sites. Microbes in the ice. But it was nothing on a heading and certainly nothing that fired–

"Unless, sir, with respect, someone knew something else," Lance said.

The colonel listened without writing anything down.

"At those speeds, Concord, the X-6 is known to do some odd things." He let that sit. "Are you sure it wasn't something you thought you saw?"

"Sir, I drifted around Jupiter."

The colonel wrote something on the pad in front of him and set the stylus down.

"Lance," he said. "You are a good pilot. And an even better man. The Federation will remember how you handle this."

Lance understood. He nodded, stood, and walked out.

A petty officer was waiting just outside the door, hands behind her back, eyes on the wall. Lance nodded to her on the way past. She nodded back and went into the room he had come from. She came out a minute later with the report folder under her arm.

She walked it down a corridor Lance did not see her take. At the end of the corridor was a room with a tube– a smaller cousin of the rail he had ridden up that morning, the same quartz glass, the same magnetic clamps in miniature. She slid the folder into a cartridge, sealed the cartridge, and set it in the cradle. The clamps released. The cartridge went.

Somewhere else, a clerk took delivery from a chute in her wall. He opened the cartridge, slid the folder out, and stood with it under his arm and walked the length of the room. Long rows of shelving ran down both sides, holding longboxes labeled in the same hand and the same ink. XYLOSIAN SWARM. XYLOSIAN SWARM. XYLOSIAN SWARM. He passed several thousand of them without slowing.

At the back wall, a smaller bank of shelving held boxes with a different label. He found the one the Federation listed. SERPENT SCOUT SIGHTINGS. He set the folder inside, slid the box back into the row, and turned for the door. The light in the room clicked off.

In the darkness a ringed Thing watched.

Lance Concord's story continues in Chrono-Wing, where the Swarm arrives and a time rift drops him between 1943 and 2945, and then in Cosmic Collector, set four years after the war. Both are playable free on this site.