The transition began as a pressure differential, nothing more. A slight compression at the forward edges of his awareness where the Aethelred’s sensor grid met the vacuum, the same way a swimmer feels the water tighten before the dive. Kaelen let the data wash through him without commentary, without analysis. The numbers were correct. They were always correct.

He ran the pre-jump sequence from habit, consciousness threading through the ship’s systems the way a pianist’s fingers find the keys without looking. Power draw from the reactor: nominal. Field coherence across the warp envelope generators: within tolerance, the variance at 0.03 percent, well inside the yellow band. Hull integrity readings from all forty-one sensor clusters returned green. The Aethelred hung in the void at forty-three astronomical units from a star whose designation he had not bothered to retrieve in two years, because the coordinates told him everything he needed to know and the name was a human affectation the navigation computer did not require.

He checked the field coherence again. The 0.03 percent variance had not changed. It never did.

Kaelen’s consciousness occupied the ship the way heat occupies metal, distributed and inseparable, a presence that registered in the reactor’s steady output and the subtle electromagnetic field that kept the coolant flowing through the secondary loop. His physical body, the one with the heartbeat and the lungs and the fine hair on the forearms, lay in a stasis pod on Earth, three hundred and twelve light-years away, suspended in a gel medium at 2.7 degrees Celsius. He thought about that body sometimes, the way a sailor thinks about the shore. Not with longing. With the quiet acknowledgment that it existed, that it was waiting, that one day the mission would end and he would return to it and discover whether the person who woke up was the same one who had volunteered.