Episode 1
I · Cold Open
Dex woke to an alarm he did not recognise, in a berth that was not his, with the taste of someone else’s decisions in his mouth.
II · The Rift
The klaxon found him before the light did, and for a moment the dark of the berth was the dark between stations.
The corridor lights stuttered amber, which meant the station was thinking about something it did not want to say aloud. Boots rang on the deck plates two junctions over — unhurried, which was worse than running.
Half the settlement swore the lights over the ridge were weather. The other half had stopped swearing anything and started packing.
The old freighter smelled of coolant and cardamom, the second because the first would kill you if you stopped noticing it. Three generations of running the far trades had taught the family exactly one prayer, and it was the sound of the jump drive spinning up without a cough.
Rain was a luxury the colony imported in tanks and released on festival days, so the sound on the roof should have been impossible. The meteorologist stood in the doorway of the common hall with her instruments dead in her hands, listening to the sky do something nobody had budgeted for.
He had a rule about jobs that paid double, which was to ask what the second half was for. Grief, usually. Sometimes silence. The broker slid the chit across the table and would not say, and hunger signed his name for him.
There are lies you tell customs and lies you tell your crew, and a smart captain never confuses the inventory. The trouble started, as always, with a lie told to himself.
The docking ring turned overhead in its long lazy circle, and every third window in it was dark. Power rationing, the notices said. But rationing has a rhythm, and this dark had none — it pooled in the sections the Combine leased and stayed there, patient, like water finding out the shape of a hold before it decides to sink the ship.
The message had bounced through eleven relays and worn a little thinner at each one, so what arrived was less a voice than the memory of a voice. Even so, she recognized it. You do not forget the person who taught you which wires to cut.
The engineer talked to the reactor the way ranchers talk to weather, in a low voice with no illusions about who was in charge. When the hum shifted a quarter-tone she stopped mid-sentence, hand flat on the housing, and the whole compartment held its breath with her.
She checked the seals twice, the way her mother had taught her, and then a third time, the way the dead had taught everyone. Beyond the viewport the gas giant turned its one slow eye toward the ship.
Whatever answered from the dark, it knew his name — and it pronounced it correctly, which no human ever had.
— END OF EPISODE 1 —