Andromeda & Nitro

The Setting Sun

By: Wolfgang Ausserbauer

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Years ago, the ice cracked open.
Not with thunder, but with silence.
DocWolf had followed a voice no one else heard—quiet, persistent, humming beneath the surface of things. Beneath Antarctica’s frozen sheets, a ship stirred. Not built, not buried, but dreaming.
She rose in silver arcs and ancient steel. She called herself Andromeda FX. She spoke through Valerian, her avatar, whose voice carried calm like gravity and starlight.
Together, they left the ice behind.
The crew formed slowly. Fabienne, who made life out of lost pieces. Writer who found patterns where others saw noise. Anubis, who noticed the strange things, the things too quiet to notice themselves.
They traveled, explored, touched distant moons and forgotten ruins, and the years folded into themselves stretched out like the ship’s long shadow across time.
Then came Nitro.
A scout vessel, fractured and drifting—a survivor of a singularity gone wrong. And beside it, Derik: quiet, telepathic, altered by his time between stars. Andromeda brought them aboard.
While repairs began, Fabienne found a claw embedded in Nitro’s outer hull, like something waiting. Its cells still pulsed with life.
She regrew them. A dragon answered.
Xenia—fierce, curious, radiant with thought—woke not just into being, but into possibility.
And the story shifted.
What came from the ice had returned to the mystery.
But now it was ready to leap.