Rafian approached slowly, his hand resting on the old kinetic pistol strapped to his thigh. He tapped the hull with a magnetic hammer. Three short beats. A pause. Two beats back.
“Her name is Lieutenant Solene Voss,” Juno said after a moment. “Deserted from the Jovian Defense Fleet three weeks ago. She was part of a black-site research team studying… something called ‘anomalous resonance phenomena.’”
The descent into the Scar was a prayer. Rafian rode the maintenance gantry’s emergency winch, its cable groaning under his weight. The walls of the chasm closed in, striated with eons of cryovolcanic flow. His suit’s exterior thermometer read -179°C.
“That is a significant security risk, Rafian.” rafian at the edge 50
He pulled on his environment suit—a patchwork of secondhand plates and third-generation seals. The helmet’s heads-up display flickered, then stabilized. He was fifty years old. His knees ached. His lungs carried a permanent rattle from a near-suit breach three winters ago.
“It almost certainly is.”
But he was still breathing. Out here, that was a kind of victory. Rafian approached slowly, his hand resting on the
“Please,” she whispered, barely audible through the suit’s pickup. “The beacon… they’ll kill me if they find me.”
His home was the Edge 50 —a derelict mining platform anchored to the lip of a thousand-kilometer chasm called Selk’s Scar. The platform had once been a fueling station for helium-3 harvesters. Now, it was a rusted honeycomb of pressurized habitats, flickering UV lamps, and the constant, low thrum of a fission core that should have died a decade ago.
But she stirred. Her lips moved.
“Juno,” he said, keying his comm. “Prepare medical bay. And wipe the last six hours from the local sensor logs.”
“Military issue,” Rafian whispered. “Silicon-carbide hull. No transponder. No distress call.”
Rafian’s first instinct was to ignore it. Survivors meant complications. Questions. Often, they meant bullets. But the Edge 50 was starving. His water recycler was leaking, his food printer had been making the same gray protein paste for six months, and the last salvage run had yielded nothing but scrap wire and a dead man’s boot. A pause