In memory of all those lost along the way.
Most people go through life not knowing who they are or what they are meant to be. They spend their years searching for ways to add meaning to their existence, desperate to find a purpose that justifies their existence.
I have never had that problem. I have always had a purpose. I was born into it. It is the very reason I came to be.
My name is Ezra. I am a Mah'Abeu. An envoy. A problem solver.
This is my story, at least, as much as any story can truly belong to one person. But to tell it properly, we must go back to the beginning. We must start before I was called upon to play my part, to where all of this started, in the cold, silent dark of a restricted orbit.
KHATSEY COLONY: RESTRICTED ORBIT
TIME: 23:47 SET
The shuttle drifted through Khatsey's orbit like a dead thing.
Every onboard system had been purged of power, leaving the vessel cold and lightless. No heat. No electromagnetic trace. No engine signature. To any passing scanner, it was just another irregular shape tumbling slowly in the planet's gravity well, one of a thousand chunks of ore and rock shed from orbital transits originating from the mining operations below, dragged inevitably toward the atmosphere.
Inside the shuttle cockpit, the only sounds were the soft creak of the hull and two people breathing carefully in the dark.
Mayvheen spoke in a whisper, as though the vacuum outside might carry her voice to the wrong ears.
"We're drifting towards the blind spot." Her eyes were fixed on the passive sensors, her voice tight with the effort of keeping it calm. "Are you ready to power up and fire the engines?"
Veera sat in the pilot's chair with her hands hovering just above the dead controls, close enough to feel the cold radiating off the console without touching them. Not yet.
"I'm ready."
"Just–"
"I know." Veera's jaw was set. "Too early and they detect us. Too late, and we burn up in the atmosphere. I've got this."
Mayvheen said nothing more. There was nothing more to say.
Veera kept her eyes on the wrist console strapped to her forearm, watching the silent countdown tick toward the all-clear notification. The threshold of the blind spot crept closer on the passive display, a narrow shadow cast by a derelict freighter long since abandoned to Khatsey's orbit, large enough to swallow them whole if they hit it right. Hit it wrong, and they'd turn to actual debris themselves.
The display pinged.
Veera's fingers slammed down on the ignition sequence. The ship's consoles flickered to life all at once, bathing their faces in a pale, clinical blue light. She was already reaching for the engine controls when the sound hit them.
A shriek of metal on metal! It was a massive screech that made Mayvheen flinch and close her eyes. The shuttle lurched hard to one side, and for one terrible second, Veera felt the controls go slack in her hands as the vessel began to tumble.
"What was that?!"
"We collided with something– mining debris, or a large piece–" Mayvheen's hands were flying across her station, pulling data from the passive sensors. "It pushed us off course."
"I know it pushed us off course." Veera was already fighting the stick, trying to arrest the tumble, but without the engines, the controls were barely useful. "How bad?"
"Worse than I thought." Mayvheen's voice climbed a half-octave. "We're heading toward the atmosphere. Veera, we don't have much time. Correct the course. Fire the engines."
"No. It's still too soon."
"If you don't fire now, we won't be able to correct our orbit in time. We'll burn up."
"Not yet." Veera's eyes were locked on the orbital map, watching the edge of the blind spot. They were still outside it. They were still visible to the Cephilusk scanners. "We're still outside the blind spot. If I fire now, the engine signature will ping the entire blockade. The squids will know exactly where we are."
"Veera– we only have a few seconds–"
"I know."
"Veera–!"
She ignored Mayvheen. She ignored the hull beginning to groan as the first tendrils of the upper atmosphere clawed at the underside of the shuttle. She ignored the heat beginning to build at the edges of the viewscreen, ignored every instinct screaming at her to fire, and she watched the threshold crawl closer on the display.
Almost.
Almost...
The hull moaned. Something deep inside the hull popped.
Now!
Veera slammed the thrust control forward.
The engines caught with a roar that filled the small cabin completely, G-force pressing them both back hard into their seats. The shuttle shuddered against the planet's gravity, resisting its grip, groaning along every weld and seam. For a moment, it seemed like it might not be enough, like the numbers were wrong or they'd miscalculated, and then the trajectory levelled, and they slipped sideways into the shadow of the derelict freighter, tucked neatly into the blind spot, invisible among the garbage of Khatsey's orbit.
Veera cut the thrust. The silence that followed was enormous.
Mayvheen exhaled in a single, shaking breath.
"Is there any movement from the blockade? Did they detect us?"
Veera ran her fingers across the console, pulling the passive scan results. Her hands were steadier than she thought they would be. "No." She scanned further, cross-referencing the impact data. "But we took damage. We have a minor fuel leak. Some structural dents." She checked the atmospheric integrity readings twice before she said it. "We're holding."
"Praise be." Mayvheen pressed her fingertips to her temple, closing her eyes for just a moment. "It could have been much worse."
Veera leaned back in her seat. The adrenaline was receding now, leaving behind the flat, hollow feeling that always followed. She turned her attention to the fuel readout.
"May." She kept her voice level. "The collision. The leak... It's slow, but if we land this shuttle, we won't have enough fuel to get back into orbit." She studied the readout in silence for a moment longer, looking for an alternative. "We're stuck."
Mayvheen opened her eyes. She looked at the display for a long moment, and Veera watched her process it, the younger woman's face cycling through the options quickly, methodically, the way she did everything, and coming to the same conclusion as Veera.
"We can't open a communication channel. The Cephilusk fleet would have our position in seconds."
"What about a Drop-Drone?" Veera said. She'd already been turning the idea over. "We send me down with an old longwave comm-kit. Even if the blockade picks up the radio chatter, they'll assume it's local transmissions from the planet's surface. They won't look twice."
Mayvheen considered it. "It could work." She nodded, slowly. "But you will need to be careful, Veera. We don't know what to expect down there."
Veera understood. She was already unstrapping from the pilot's seat.
The storage module was a few steps aft, and Veera was glad for the brief solitude.
Mayvheen was younger than her, significantly younger, and despite this, she outranked Veera, a fact Veera had made her peace with a long time ago. She trusted Mayvheen's commands without question. What she trusted less was Mayvheen's instinct, not because it was bad, but because it had never been properly tested. Mayvheen had studied the manuals. Veera had lived the situations the manuals were written about.
Her instincts told her that whatever was happening on Khatsey was not a diplomatic misunderstanding.
Colonies did not simply go dark.
She began prepping the Drop-Drone. The pod was small, designed for emergency supply drops, fitted with a personnel transport module that could accommodate a single passenger in its current configuration at a squeeze. She had four, maybe five supply crates of space if she stacked and secured them carefully in the centre.
She thought about it for a moment, then began pulling crates.
Medical supplies. If the colony had gone dark, there was usually violence involved. She gathered heat-wands and nano-gel packs, synth-skin sheets for burns, adrenaline injectors, painkillers, anti-bacs... Anything that might be the difference between someone living and someone dying, small enough to fill a crate without wasting the space. She caught a brief glimpse of the emergency food stores as she worked, the nutrient packs and the water purifiers, and moved past them. Food kept you alive in the long run. Medical supplies kept you alive now. She packed for the immediate problem.
Once the crates were full and locked into the drone, she strapped the longwave radio backpack to the top of the stack and lashed it down.
Then she walked to the armoury.
The security lock opened with a soft click at her palm. She stepped onto the assembly platform in the centre of the room, a raised circular dais, ringed by the articulated arms of the automated suit system, and began stripping down. Her jacket first, then her boots, her uniform, her undergarments, until she was standing bare on the cold metal of the platform, arms and legs spread to give the system clearance. It was not a moment of immodesty. It was a practical thing. The suit required full surface contact for accurate fit calibration, and she'd been undressed by stranger things in stranger circumstances.
The automated arms woke with a low hydraulic hiss and began their work.
Re-graph metal came first, dense, dark plates articulated at every joint, snapping into place around her shins and forearms, then her torso, then her upper arms and thighs. The suit had weight to it. She'd worn this particular model during her years as an assault marine, and it still fit the way it had then, automatically adjusting for the small changes a body accumulates over time.
The finishing touch was a small laser unit that tracked over the shoulder plate at the top of the assembly sequence. It engraved her name and rank into the re-graph metal in a clean, precise line, the smell of heated metal cutting briefly through the recycled air with a faint trace of burnt ozone.
She knew that smell.
Always reminds me of home.
She sealed the helmet. The HUD flickered on, overlaying the room in soft amber data. She took one breath through her nose and tasted the faint metallic tang of the suit's interior, grease and old air and the memory of the person she'd been when she'd last worn it.
She collected a rifle from the secured container, checked the charge, slung it, and returned to the cockpit.
Mayvheen was bent over the scanner console when Veera returned, her face pale in the glow of the display. She didn't look up immediately.
"Drone is ready," Veera said, her voice carrying the flat, slightly metallic quality of the suit's external speakers. "Did you find a landing spot?"
"Veera." Mayvheen's voice was quiet. She looked up. "I discreetly scanned the colony."
Something in her tone made Veera pause.
"Something is wrong."
"What is it?"
"There aren't many people down there." Mayvheen turned the display so Veera could see the results. "I could only detect thirty-seven life signs." She paused. "There should be several thousand."
Thirty-seven. Out of several thousand.
Veera stared at the number on the display for a moment. "Do you think the Cephilusks–" She stopped. Tried again. "Did they eradicate the colony?"
"I don't know." Mayvheen's voice was calm and rational. "Attacking a human colony would be suicide for their Concordat membership. The Cephilusks aren't stupid. If they did this and it came to light, they'd be expelled."
"What if they thought they could get away with it?"
"Even then– what would they gain? The politics alone–"
"I fought them in the Discovery War, May." Veera's voice had turned harder. "In close combat. On the ground." She looked at Mayvheen directly. "They are a cruel species. For them, inflicting pain and suffering would be motivation enough."
Mayvheen sighed quietly. "It was war, Veera. I've read the reports. I've seen the documentation." She met Veera's eyes. "We weren't any less cruel."
"It's different."
"How?"
Veera growled. "We acted in self-defence."
"And each time we retaliated," Mayvheen said, her voice level and without heat, "they acted in self-defence. Violence begets violence, Veera. That's the nature of it."
"You weren't there." There was no anger in Veera's voice now. "You weren't on the ground where it was happening. It is different when you are safely aboard a starship, worlds apart from the carnage." She looked away, back at the scanner display, at the thirty-seven lights scattered across the empty readout. "You didn't see the horrors I saw. The horrors I experienced..."
"Veera." Mayvheen's voice was gentle. "We need to stay focused. We have a job to do."
"Fine."
"What supplies did you pack?"
"Medical. With that many people missing, there will be injuries." She adjusted the rifle strap across the shoulder plate. "There are always injuries."
Mayvheen nodded. "Good thinking."
They went over the Drop-Drone's prep list together one more time, checking each item against the manifest, methodically running through the launch sequence.
Then Veera secured herself in the strapdown, and the shuttle's bay doors hissed open.
The Drop-Drone was spat out into the void, a tiny spark of metal swallowed almost immediately by the dark, falling toward the cold, quiet surface of Khatsey far below.