Desert moons always smelled like rust and regret. CL-9C—if the nav log could be trusted—hadn’t seen rainfall in over thirty years. Perhaps longer. The air shimmered with heat rising off the cracked concrete surface, dust swirling in a suffocating haze that clung to my skin, my teeth, my memory. The steady hum of Indira’s engines reverberated through the floorplates—a steady heartbeat in the desolation, a reminder that we were still alive, still anchored to something real. Our descent had been slow, deliberate. The atmosphere here was thin, brittle, like it might crack under too much pressure, a fragile veil over a dying world.
The ship groaned in protest as it settled onto the uneven landing pad, the jolt sharp enough to churn my stomach. Dust billowed up around the struts, swallowing the view in a brown, choking blur. The heat hit like a fist. It pressed against every surface, filling my lungs like steam from a dying machine. The loader drone's motors began their familiar whine, its mechanical precision slicing through the stillness with a too-eager urgency.
“The gravity’s off,” Jaime muttered, his voice low, tinged with something approaching genuine concern. “Compensators are whining louder than they should. This place is draining us.”
Vos descended from the upper deck, his flight jacket half-zipped, engine grease smudged across his collarbone like a badge of inevitability. The datapad in his hand looked heavier than it should have, his fingers drumming against it with barely restrained agitation. His face was all strain—no wry smile, no muttered commentary. Just quiet calculation. He scanned the horizon. Then me. Then away again. His jaw clenched. This is a bad idea, his eyes seemed to say. But we don’t have a choice. This is a trap. He gripped his stunner tighter, the knuckles white.
“This is another closed delivery,” Vos said flatly. “In and out. No questions. No contact. Thirty-six crates. No complications. We’re done in under an hour.”
His gaze swept across them. When it landed on me, it lingered a moment too long. His hand tightened again around his weapon, a silent threat I understood all too well. Jaime stretched, deliberately slow, as if trying to pierce the strain with movement.
“Any idea what’s in the crates this time, Captain?” he asked, his voice light yet edged with a subtle challenge. “Spare parts or spare propaganda?”
The words hung there like a challenge.
“These last few stops are really giving me the creeps, Cap,” Jaime added, his eyes scanning the barren horizon. “Even for a backwater moon, this one’s got a particular brand of dead no better than our last stop.”
Vos didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. He was already turning away, focused on loading. The drone's whirring filled the oppressive quiet.
“Jacobs, assist on the ramp,” he said without looking back. “Don’t stray.”
The word stray clung to the air like a warning, a chilling echo in the silence. I nodded, even as the knot in my stomach tightened. The ramp dropped. Heat blasted up, stealing the breath from my lungs. Dust swirled around my boots, clinging to my coveralls in thick, abrasive layers. The concrete shimmered in the haze, like the world itself was holding its breath. My pulse kicked up, not from movement—yet from instinct. Something was profoundly wrong. Indira’s engines thrummed behind me, its low thrum anchoring me in the moment. Yet the air felt... charged. Off. A premonition of danger.
The settlement wasn’t much—a half-ring of prefab units clustered at the edge of a crater. Their windows were dark, glass smudged and lifeless like old eyes. Paint peeled in long, curling strips. A single comms tower leaned at a precarious angle, its rusted frame blotched with decay. Near it, half-buried in the dirt, sat a small plastic spaceship. A child’s toy. Cracked, forgotten, a poignant symbol of lost innocence. The workers moved with slow, practiced resignation. Dust and grime stained their uniforms. Shoulders slumped. Faces hollowed by fatigue and sun exposure. Eyes that had long since stopped hoping flicked toward the guards, then quickly back to their tasks. Every motion was calculated, careful. Too careful. As if they feared what might happen if they moved too fast—or too slow. Their very movements were a silent scream of despair. This wasn’t just oppression. It was trauma, calcified into routine.
Guards patrolled in staggered intervals, their stunners gleaming far too bright against the dust-choked backdrop. Their expressions were blank, yet their eyes flicked constantly between the workers—nervous, alert, anticipating something violent. The whole atmosphere hummed with strain, dense and heavy like the dust that coated every surface. This wasn’t a mining operation. It was a prison, a silent, suffocating trap.
A gust of wind kicked up dust, scraping grit against my face. Figures moved at the perimeter—guards. Maybe six. Maybe more. Faces blank. Movements tight. Their gear was corporate-issue, flight vests emblazoned with a mining conglomerate logo. Yet their stunners—those were new. Polished. Precise. Too clean for this place. One of them kicked a loose piece of piping, the sound echoing through the stillness like a warning shot, a prelude to violence. I moved to the crates. They weren’t right. Too squat. Too dense. Their mass was wrong—too much shielding, not enough volume. The kind of specs I’d expect for secure transport, not mining gear. One of them bore a bulge where a compact lock housing sat, recessed beneath a welded plate. A scratch caught my eye—a faint scrawl beneath a layer of dust. A stylized eye. Not regulation. The disquiet in my chest blossomed into certainty. This wasn’t a delivery. It was a setup, a carefully orchestrated trap. The air thickened. The faint floral scent I’d first caught back on CL-9A surged now. It curled around my thoughts like smoke, a poisonous gas. My breath hitched. The loader drone beeped, oblivious. The drone’s hum deepened, now sounding more like a warning than a function. Then I saw them. A woman—late thirties, maybe. Lines of exhaustion carved into her face. She clutched something close to her chest, half-hidden behind a stack of crates. Her clothes were threadbare, sun-bleached, patched with care and desperation. Her body showed strain, yet also fierce protectiveness, a primal instinct. A younger figure, too still, was partially obscured by her side. Her limbs too thin, her gaze too tired, too quickly averted. In her hand, a jagged scrap of metal—a weapon or maybe just something solid to hold in a world where nothing felt safe. I felt the memory of my children like a punch to the chest—her hollow eyes, her too-thin frame, that strange intelligence in her stare. She'd seen too much. More than I had, perhaps. Still almost a child. So terribly vulnerable. So tragically accustomed. I stepped back, heart pounding. Not food. Not medicine. And definitely not mining equipment. The shiver beneath my boots intensified. Faint. Steady. Wrong. A storm was coming. I just didn’t know yet if it was buried in the crates, or already standing among us.
* * *
The loading process felt like a strained ballet of precision and suppressed panic. Mik’s drone hummed, its smooth, mechanical grace a jarring divergence from the crumbling edges of this colony. I focused on its steady cadence, an accustomed comfort in the unsettling air. Dust swirled around my boots, clinging like ash, settling into the creases of my uniform and the corners of my mind. The heat shimmered in ripples off the concrete, turning the air into a distorted mirage where outlines blurred and clarity felt just out of reach.
The only real sound was the drone’s low keen, steady and insistent, emphasizing the silence like a heartbeat. That, and the occasional rasping cough from somewhere out beyond the landing zone – a human sound, frail and desperate, that pulled at something inside me. The guards kept their distance, yet not out of laziness. They watched everything, their gazes constantly drifting back to the woman and the figure she guarded—too often, too long. There was strain in their stillness, a strain I recognized from my old life, from the faces of people waiting for something to go wrong. They weren’t guarding the crates. They were waiting, like vultures circling their prey.
Jaime cracked jokes, low and offhanded, yet his usual charm rang hollow here. His sarcasm was brittle, each line more forced than the last, a thin veneer over a growing unease. He kept glancing at me, tracking my gaze as it drifted toward the woman and the hidden form.
“Feels like they’re cooking the workers slowly,” he muttered, loud enough for me to hear.
“Something feels off about this, Rae,” he said, his voice subdued. “It’s more than just the dust.”
His eyes lingered on the pair again, his jaw tightening. The sweat on his brow wasn’t just from the heat; it was from a cold, creeping dread that resonated with my own.
I tried to focus. On the manifest. On the crates. On the work. Yet my eyes kept drifting. A woman, not unlike the one that I saw back on CL-9A, stood near the edge of the loading area, arms wrapped protectively around a smaller figure. Her face was drawn, lined with fatigue, the kind of exhaustion that came from too many nights of fear and too few meals. Her clothes were worn nearly translucent, dust-bleached, and threadbare. Her body showed strain, yet also fierce protectiveness, a primal, unwavering bond. That protectiveness, fierce and desperate, was a language I knew deeply. It was the same fierce, desperate love I’d once felt for Maya and Eli, a pang of loss echoing in my chest. The smaller figure, unnervingly motionless, clutched a small doll, like a talisman, its knuckles bone-white. Its face was gaunt, hollow-eyed, the shadow of something terrible reflected in eyes that should have been playing, not surviving. So malnourished, it was hard to figure out the child's gender. A haunting image I knew would never truly leave me.
Mik was quieter than usual, his gruff demeanor edged with distraction. He checked and rechecked the manifest, fingers jittering. He didn’t answer when I asked what was taking so long. His eyes weren’t on the numbers; they were on the crates. On the guards. On the guarded figure. He bumped into one of them—too close—and neither acknowledged it. Yet the moment hung between us like a fuse waiting for a spark, a quiet strain that promised an explosion. Mik’s loader drone’s whir grew louder, more insistent. The motors cut through the oppressive quiet, a sound too alive in a place so close to collapse, making the hairs on my arms prickle. Mik wiped sweat from his brow, revealing the faded glint of a ring worn almost to smoothness. He adjusted his grip on his datapad, jaw tight, and glanced at me. You know, his eyes said. You see it too. Then I saw it—a shift. Small. Faint. One of the guards brushed too close to the woman. Her body flinched, barely perceptible, yet real. Her eyes went wide, flicking from the guard’s weapon to the figure by her side and back again. Her grip on it tightened. The small figure didn’t move. It didn’t look up. It clenched the doll in its hand a little harder, shrinking into her without a sound. The drone’s rhythm stuttered—for a beat. And then I heard it. A faint click. Soft. Mechanical. Deliberate. My head snapped up. The sound could’ve come from anywhere—a servo shifting, a crate locking. Yet it didn’t belong, a discordant note in the oppressive silence. It was too precise, too planned. The drone paused. The silence rang. And underneath it all, the ground trembled, a soft scream of impending disaster.
A deeper tremor resonated through the ground, more insistent than before, making my teeth ache.
Vos’s voice cracked through my comm, low and sharp.
“Finish the job. Get out.”
He didn’t wait for a response.
“We’re not here to play savior.”
His voice was cold—colder than usual. A warning wrapped in command, a disquieting premonition. He feels it too, I thought. Yet he didn’t want to know. Not really. I swallowed hard, the grit burning my throat. He didn’t know. Or maybe he did. And didn’t care. The drone’s whir intensified, now more like a siren than a heartbeat, a frantic warning. The woman looked at me. For a second. Her eyes met mine—a quiet plea, a mirror of my own unspoken fears. Then she looked away. She pulled the smaller figure closer. Its small hands trembled around the scrap of metal. The guards shifted. One reached for his belt. Another tapped the butt of his stunner. Their movements weren’t coordinated. They didn’t need to be. They were ready. The crates were wrong. The labels were wrong. The contents were wrong. And this moment—this still, charged instant—was a lie. A performance, waiting for its cue, a quiet, deadly ballet. My skin prickled. My breath caught. That accustomed scent, faint but suffocating, rose around me, clinging to the dry air like a poisonous memory. This is it, I thought. It’s happening. And I wasn’t ready. Yet I was here, standing on the precipice of a decision that would change everything.
* * *
A desperate, gaunt colonist—his eyes hollow, his movements erratic—stumbled toward a crate marked Medical Supplies. He wasn’t lunging. He was collapsing. The air snapped taut with a sudden, charged silence, broken only by the continuous buzz of Mik’s loader drone, a relentless mechanical pulse against the stifling quiet. Dust swirled at my boots, coating my clothes in a second skin. The heat shimmered off the cracked concrete, distorting the air into wavering illusions. A metallic scent—burnt, bitter—filled my nostrils. My pulse quickened. This wasn’t just a delivery. It was a pivot point, a flashpoint in a brewing storm. Indira’s engines hummed, a steady, grounding vibration that now felt more like a countdown.
The guard didn’t react immediately. He hesitated, a flicker, yet enough. His face was unreadable, his stance tight. His eyes darted to the others, a silent question passed in silence. Then came the click—sharp, metallic, final—as he activated the stunner. It echoed like a gunshot in the oppressive heat. His movements were stiff, robotic, almost unnatural. His eyes locked on the colonist, breath hitching as he raised the weapon. The grip on the stunner tightened, white-knuckled. There was aggression in his posture—yet also fear. And not just of the colonist; a deeper, unvoiced fear that I instinctively recognized.
My gut twisted. This wasn’t about bravery. It was about damage control. Instinct took over. I moved forward—not to interfere, yet to intercept. To shift the axis of control. The air grew colder, the mirage of heat fractured. My thoughts flicked to Xylos, to warzones and bad calls. The woman and the small, concealed figure pressed against the wall—her body coiled in fear, its face buried in her shoulder—snapped into focus. My heart slammed in my chest. Move. The colonist wasn’t stealing. He was reaching. Something inside the crate—small, obscured by the packaging—had drawn him. His hands trembled. His skin glistened with sweat. Each breath was ragged, like he was breathing through glass. Weak. Dehydrated. Desperate. Yet not dangerous. He didn’t even look at the guard anymore. Only at the object.
“Wait,” I said.
My voice cut through the strain like a wire snapping under pressure. Calm. Controlled. Measured. I planted my feet, hands loose yet ready. The stance was deliberate—defensive, not aggressive. This is a gamble. Yet I won’t watch this man die for trying to survive. I owed it to Lena, to Maya, to Eli—to not waste the life I still had. To do good, even when it hurt, even if it meant exposing myself.
The guard paused. A flicker of uncertainty crossed his features. His jaw clenched. Shoulders tensed. His grip slackened on the weapon, barely. The loader’s thrum rose, steady yet insistent. Mik didn’t move, yet I felt his attention sharpen. His hands rested on the loader controls, casual only in appearance. His eyes flicked between us, reading every breath, every twitch. A tension gathered around him, as if he sensed something was deeply wrong, that this wasn’t a mere drop but a powder keg.
“The crate isn’t what it seems,” I said.
No accusation. No emotion. Just fact.
The guard blinked. Confused. Suspicious. I didn’t give him time to think twice. I reached for my multi-tool, knelt, and cracked the crate. The lock yielded with a hiss. Inside—no medical gear. Vials. Clear liquid. Dozens. Neatly stacked. Each labeled with the same symbol I’d seen before—stylized, circular. Clinical. Cold. Neuropathic sedatives. Enough to silence a district. Maybe more, enough to quell a rebellion. My grip on the tool tightened. My knuckles burned. Dust swirled. Heat pulsed. The loader’s whine deepened. The guard stared down. His face went slack. Then tightened again—not with anger, yet with realization. The fire drained from him, replaced by unease. By shame, a silent weight. His eyes drifted to the woman and the concealed figure. Then to the colonist, now slumped to his knees, clutching his chest.
The colonist didn’t resist. He backed away, shaking, retreating in defeat. Not saved. Not shot. The smaller figure peeked out from behind its mother’s legs. The woman met my gaze for a split second. Gratitude. Then fear. Then they were gone, swallowed by the swirling dust. Tala watched from a distance. Her stance shifted, eyes scanning, as if already calculating the implications. Her expression suggested she understood this wasn’t a delivery, but a setup, a message, or perhaps even a trap, a dangerous web slowly ensnaring us all. Her fingers twitched at her side. Cold sweat traced down her spine, a shiver of shared apprehension.
Vos arrived minutes later, his steps hard and fast. His face was thunder.
“What the hell were you thinking?” he barked.
He wasn’t yelling at the guard. He was yelling at me. His hand tightened around his stunner, his shoulders squared, jaw like iron. His eyes locked on mine, searching, calculating, accusing, conveying a clear message of "Damn it, Jacobs. What have you done? You’ve made it worse. Maybe fatally worse."
“We don’t have to be monsters to make a delivery, Captain,” I said evenly, my voice a quiet challenge.
My gaze didn’t flinch.
“Those weren’t medical supplies. And those people are starving, dying.”
My hands stayed loose at my sides. Defensive, not challenging. Yet firm, unyielding.
He stared. Silence. Only the loader hummed on, a rising stress in mechanical pitch. The heat pressed in. The dust itched at the corners of my eyes. The engine’s hum drilled into the base of my skull. Then Vos exhaled. Rough. Resigned.
“Get back to the ship.”
No reprimand. No apology. Not yet. Retreat. The guard watched us, unreadable. His posture rigid with unease. The woman and the small figure had vanished into the shadows. Somewhere, a worker whispered to another—too soft to catch, yet sharp enough to prickle my spine. Something had shifted. The shudder under my boots returned. Insistent. The moment had cracked. And something was waiting to break through, a new, dangerous reality.