Frontier Command does not publish predictions. What follows are the questions its analysts are asking, drawn from classified assessments that the Record makes available to licensed commanders.
The star. Aurelia is dying. The Long Flare was a symptom, and Technocrat Union models agree that there will be another. They disagree only on whether it comes in a century or in a decade. The Solar Empire forbids the question in the Ring. The Celestial Order is preparing for it with open joy.
The signal. Every harvested civilisation in the artifact record reached the same threshold before the Tide came: it began to burn antimatter at scale. The Cradle had just lit its first antimatter drives. The Rim Burning followed the construction of the first antimatter condensers on the Rim by less than a decade. Frontier Command has not concluded that antimatter calls the Tide. It has noted that no one is willing to stop using it.
The count. Explorer cryptographers have found one pattern repeated in every artifact from every precursor civilisation: a sequence of marks, each civilisation's one mark longer than the civilisation harvested before it. No one knows what is being counted. The Deep Space Explorers have found no sequence that is one mark longer than the longest they know. They have stopped saying out loud what that implies.
The Overmind. Every Tide swarm observed so far has been a harvest swarm: Harvesters, their escorts and the Guardians that coil around the precursor sites. The great bio-ships that the artifacts depict at the end of every harvest, the ones Frontier Command designates Overmind class, have never been seen in the Frontier. Either the Tide does not think it needs them, or it is not yet time.
The Cradle. In 409 AL a long-range probe of the Deep Space Explorers reached the coordinates of humanity's homeworld. Its last transmission was a single image. The Explorers have not released it. Frontier Command has classified it at the highest level the Record allows. Those who have seen it say only that the Cradle is not dead.
“We were not the first. The question is whether we are the last.”
— Fleet Admiral Selene Voss, "The Tide Rises" briefing