Peer Review

You build a hull like this when the job is to vanish. One pilot, a fuel reserve that laughs at distance, and instruments sharp enough to read a wormhole's pulse from a system away — that is the whole of it. The Rim crews who fly the Peer Review go out past the last charted gate and stay out, weeks at a stretch, drifting through the deep frontier on a tank that never seems to run dry, logging anomalies nobody back home has names for yet. It hauls almost nothing and it would not survive the first thing that decided to shoot at it, which is exactly why it is fast and why it carries no guns to slow it down. It does not bring back cargo. It brings back the map. The crews who come home say the silence out there is the part you never get used to.