by Andrew Westermann
The pirate Zeng’s final words echo through his scrap-metal haven, hanging at the edge of space: “It’s your turn.”
Through seams in the woven metal walls, I watch the gas giant roll over languidly, far enough I may never get back. I twist my neck, trying to reseat my helmet; this hand-me-down never fit and my breath keeps fogging the visor.
Deeper in Zeng’s shifting orbital megastructure lies the ancient Forge, the interface to control everything in orbit. Where I’ll cut out his connection and fuse my own instead, taking on the curse he’s borne for so long. Sentencing everyone in orbit to five more decades of slavery. The part of me molded by life with the Ods—orbital debris scavengers, scrap-rats living in everlasting free fall—wants to let it happen.
Keep your head down. Do what you’re told.
When I learned that lesson, its price scarred me forever—a knot of regret in my chest colder than vacuum.
#
A skull looms up from the dark, gleaming white with reflected sunlight. NO SIGNAL flashes across my HUD. My ears ring with the scream sealed in my helmet.
“Scrap, kid,” comes a staticky voice. “If you’re going to wet yourself, cut the mic first.”
As my spasm sends me cartwheeling slowly in the void, the rest of the skull—and the helmet it’s painted on—come into view. One of the older Ods, Buron, laughing hard enough his suit thrusters kick in. Soon the comm’s roaring with everyone’s laughter.
Everyone except me.
“Lighten up, Airo!” Buron clamps a hand on my leg and drags me over to the salvage rig, where I finally stop myself spinning. “Just a joke, a joke, ota.”
I dial up the tint on my visor so he can’t see my face, cursing myself for being a coward. But for the next hour, as my hands sift through debris looking for anything of value, the others retell their favorite pranks from over the years. Every one stitches a smile on my face. This is my crew. Wouldn’t trade them for the galaxy.
Cella floats past me on her way to the rig, flipping mid-flight with the confidence of a lifelong Ods. She tags my comm to move to a proximity channel. “Hey, Airo. How goes it?”
“Bad.” I toss the fused circuit board and watch it fall into a lower orbit. “This place is picked clean. They put me on busy work while everyone else gets to prep the haul.”
Cella grabs a battery off the rig’s charging racks, taking the time to smile at me. She always does. “Stick with it. You just gotta prove you’re ready, then you’ll get the bigger jobs.”
As she kicks off and zips between debris clusters, firing corrective thrusters in tiny bursts, I admire her helmet again: jet black, with luminescent angel’s wings wrapping around the back. I would do anything to earn my helmet design. Only problem is, no one gives me the chance.
“Kid—’ey, kid.” Buron, on the main channel. “Get over here.”
Sixteen people in today’s crew—I’m the only one they call ‘kid.’ At least it’s better than ‘boy.’
I float over to the rig, towing my bag, sighing at the pitiful salvage inside: a banged-up memory cell, a length of copper wire, and some kind of power pack that may or may not be a hundred years fried. I don’t even want to log this stuff; I’d rather open my hand and let it drift off into the void.
As I stow my salvage in the rig, my eyes catch sunlight glinting off Zeng’s megastructure beyond. It hangs at the edge of space, so massive you can see its sinister spiderweb lattice from our vastly inferior orbit. What would Magnarus look like from up there?
“Dammit, kid, haste haste!”
“Yeah, just refilling my air.”
When I see where Buron’s sent me, I get jittery enough my HUD warns me, HIGH O2 USE. I ignore it and stare ahead. Are they finally letting me work on something important?
Ahead waits one of the targets for the haul. A giant cable, silvery in the sunlight, stretches in a perfect straight line back to our clan ship, the Bellow. I speed toward the cable’s endpoint—what looks like an entire building blasted out of the ancient habitat, miraculously still in one piece. My mouth goes dry.
I flip my comm to a proximity channel. “Buron, what is this? What’d you find?”
“Not me, ota. One on B-crew, few days ago.” He swings out from behind the debris gripping the cable, looking like an old-Earth ape I saw on a feed. “Here here, Airo. Need help.”
When I make it to him, he shows me a weld someone rigged up, hooking the tow cable to the huge debris chunk. “Look here—little sketchy, eh?”
Takes me a second, but I see what he means. The pillar they welded onto is strained, pulling away from the wall like the blast that killed the habitat couldn’t quite blow it off.
“Yeah, got it,” I blurt. “Brought my tools.”
“Tools? No tools, ota. Just ride it in. Flag us if it looks bad.”
Half an hour later, the comm comes alive with pre-op traffic. The haul’s starting. I grab a handhold.
A mile higher, the Bellow lights its engine, and what little slack’s in the cable goes taut. Thrusters attached on claw grips activate, shooting puffs of near-invisible nitrogen to keep the debris on course as the ship tows it.
A vibration wracks the building, thrumming into my palms. It’s the pillar—the force yanked it away from the wall another few centimeters. Seems like it’s holding now, but…
I chin the comm switch. “Hey, uh—the weld’s looking like it might break.”
“Where you at, kid?”
“G-2.”
Another voice drowns the channel, “G-2? Naw—Did that one myself. It’s good.”
Buron cuts in, voice laced with static from the ship’s drive. “Airo, just sit tight. We’ll make it, yeah. Don’t try anything.”
Why the hell am I riding the haul if they won’t listen to me? Just more busy work. Let little Airo think he’s helping. No—I’m done being the crew joke. I have to show them I can handle myself or they’ll never trust me.
I swing around the wall, linking my suit thrusters with data from the Bellow to match the debris, then kick off hard for the straining pillar. On my way, I unfold the micro-welder from my hip pouch. It’s not meant for big jobs like this, but it’s what I have. I work around the ends of the pillars, trying to fuse it back to the wall with the small alloy strips I have on me.
It’s only when I finish the fourth strip, and look back at my work that I realize what I’ve done. Tiny hairline fractures radiate out from each weld, spidering across the pillar’s surface. I touch the pillar near my last weld—and it flexes under my palm.
Too soft. Too thin.
I never should have been heating this thing. I cooked it brittle.
Instantly my world is white haze, like the universe emptied out. Thunder roars through my head so loud it must kill me. Am I dead?
The white starts to dissolve, and a pounding headache bleeds in. When the world finally comes back, I’m staring dazed at the visor of my helmet—and the jagged diagonal crack running across it. The fractured composite is frosted, but what I can see stops my breath.
The cable is gone. The pillar with it. I’m crammed into a corner of the debris while the thrusters try to stabilize its orbit. Something must’ve slammed me into the wall; my ribs feel like loose scrap. When the ringing in my ears starts to die, it’s replaced by frantic comm traffic.
Staticky screams. Sobbing.
My hands are shaking. I did this. Why didn’t I shut up and wait, like Buron said? I mute my mic. Let them think I died too.
By the time the death count comes in—eight—my throat feels full of broken glass, and I can’t see anything through the tears.
#
Nine years later, I sit in the cafeteria while the Bellow burns for a higher orbit, scraping the bottom of my bowl for the last grains of rice. My stomach begs for more, but I won’t ask. Save it for one of the better Ods.
I’m just back from the salvage op, and didn’t bother stopping at my room. My helmet sits on the table in front of me. Every helmet is a hand-me-down now. This one was Cella’s. Usually an Ods redesigns a helmet when it comes to them, but I didn’t touch Cella’s—the shimmering angel wings remain, now dusted black with old blood I never wipe away.
I didn’t earn a design. Especially not Cella’s.
“Hey, Airo.”
I look up to see Ria, another Ods from my crew.
“Hi, Ria.”
“Join me? A few of us are celebrating the memory cluster we pulled today.”
A memory cluster. Ten years ago whoever found it would’ve thrown it back into the void. But good scrap’s getting hard to come by. What’s in orbit is all we have. All we’ll ever have. No one comes to Magnarus—
And no one leaves Magnarus. Not anymore.
Half a century ago, the infamous pirate Zeng came to our system, back when the orbit was rich with salvage—and rich with scavenger clans, too, picking at the bones of the massive orbital habitat. Zeng found something in the wreckage, something that gave him control of every old tech remnant still circling Magnarus. Now they call him the lord of orbit.
No one can fight him. No one can leave.
When I look up at Ria again, her smile flickers like she expects me to say no. People always do now. I don’t prove her wrong. “Thanks, I’m finishing up.”
She shrugs. As she walks on, the overhead speaker fizzles in: “Everyone in A and B-crew come up to the gathering hall. Haste haste.”
I’m one of the first to make it there. The Bellow was built for a crew of five hundred—now it’s just a whole lot of empty space. My steps echo on the hall’s high walls as I make my way between two dozen rows of bolted-down chairs that never see use anymore. Buron’s up front talking to our aging leader, Wusata, squeezing his fists until his knuckles go white. I claim a lonely seat on the side and wait for the others to saunter in. With just the top two crews, it makes for a small party. Eventually white-haired Wusata faces us and speaks.
“We’re not giving Zeng any more salvage.”
Silence. But the kind that comes before a gunshot. Wusata waits, tired eyes scanning us, but nothing rises above a murmur. All the Ods look at each other with apprehension; it’s a look you don’t usually see on people who spend life hurtling through space at fifty k-m per second. I can’t help but wonder what this meeting would have looked like nine years ago, before the best of us Ods got cut in half by a cable.
“The good scrap’s been thinning for years. Now, we know you’re all doing your best out there—”
Those of us who’re still alive, anyway.
“—but we ain’t getting enough back from Zeng anymore. Not enough supplies and sure as scrap not enough food. We have to take a stand. Someone’s going over to tell him we want more, or we’re done working for him.”
Ria steps forward. “I was talking to one of the engineers yesterday, and he thinks with a few parts he can rig up the interstellar drive, get us outsystem. I’ve got the list here, there’s a good chance most of this stuff is floating out—”
Buron’s grim head shake smothers her words. “No chance, ota. Zeng did something, long long time. Broke interstellar travel, for all ‘cept his own ships. One of the other clans—Windfall I think—put their drive back together. Wouldn’t fire.”
Ria’s eyes drop to the floor.
“Look.” Buron sighs, heavy as a ship undergoing sudden decompression. “We’re stuck here. Gotta make the best of it. Carve out a bigger piece.”
I can tell the others are thinking the obvious—if we don’t pay Zeng, we’ll starve. And that’s if he doesn’t obliterate us first. They’re all just waiting for someone to say it. To tell Wusata he might as well vent the ship now, get it over with. Used to be you couldn’t stop me from saying it, and I want to, except…
If I argue, someone else will go, get themselves killed. Someone without eight ghosts hanging off their shoulders. Better me than another Cella. Better me than someone with a future.
I stand. “I’ll deliver the message.”
Heads turn, but no one objects.
I earned this job nine years ago.
#
I start to regret volunteering when Zeng’s ship looms up in the monitor. The shuttle’s braking burn pushes me down into the seat as if to say, too late.
Zeng must already know I’m here, could kill me at any moment. I’ve seen other ships annihilated by structural beams sent on kill trajectories no one could ever see coming. With access to thousands of sensor modules floating in the debris, he might as well be a god to us Ods.
The shuttle’s proximity alarm starts blaring. Every monitor shows what I at first take for dust swarming the ship. But the swarm takes shape as it nears, starts circling in patterns.
Drones. Dented, burnt, beat half to hell, but still flying. I spy a cutting laser welded onto one, its thrusters firing constantly to keep it stable. My heart pumps in my ears, waiting for the swarm to vent my cabin. But then a shape flies into view ahead. A cargo can, braking to stop in front of me. The door swings open, showing its dark interior.
An invitation? More likely a command.
I guide the shuttle in manually and engage the tethers. While I wait in the dark, listening to the muffled thrusters firing spontaneously, I close my eyes and picture Magnarus from my favorite orbit. When the sun’s just barely behind, lighting up the storms in glowing ribbons. My breathing steadies.
With a rumbling hiss, the back of the can pops off and my monitors come to life. A square of light waits for me outside. Zeng brought me into his ship. The engines must be off—no thrust gravity’s kicked in. I slip my restraints and float through the shuttle’s rear, and pull myself hand over hand out of the cargo can. There I find two security turrets looking down on me. They straddle what I can only think of as a tunnel formed from welded scrap. It tightens in the middle, winding deeper into the ship. It’s the only way forward, so I take off Cella’s helmet and pull myself through. Wondering what the hell I’ve gotten myself into.
On the other side, I come out into a room the size of the gathering hall on the Bellow, lit by flickering overhead lamps that never seem to work all at once. The left half of the room is smothered beneath a mountain of scrap that makes me gape. It’s hard to tell how much of it’s valuable, but it’s more than we’ve shipped out in the last year. A thin man in baggy clothes floats near the bottom. He tosses a hunk of metal at the scrap pile; it sticks like it’s magnetized.
A raspy voice calls to me from beyond the scrap. “Have you come to die by the lord of orbit’s hand?”
I swallow hard and pull myself toward Zeng. Somehow I don’t think it’s a good idea to shout back from across the room.
He’s lounging on a tattered couch, somehow staying stationary as he crosses his legs. Then I see them—microthrusters spurting air to keep him stable, sewn into his clothes.
“Faster, boy—before I cut you up.”
Beside me, the scrap pile blinks to life. Thousands of tiny green and red lights like eyes wake, ancient components with unknown uses strewn across the heap. I engage my suit thrusters to redouble my speed.
I brake to stop beneath the stairs leading to Zeng and look up at him. He’s so damn old. He must be seventy-five, eighty, with thin, ghost-white hair and cloudy, drooping eyes. But behind those eyes, a dangerous, hateful man watches me.
“Congratulations,” Zeng spits. “Now you can tell your friends you met the mighty Zeng—when you get to Hell.”
I clip Cella’s helmet to my belt to give my hands something do. Otherwise I’m afraid they’ll shake. “I’m from the Bellow. I’m here to negotiate for fairer trade.”
Zeng raises one rail-thin arm, and the scrap pile behind me starts to vibrate. I spin to see little drones lifting off on unsteady thrusters, flying in wild arcs toward me. I throw my hands up to shield my face, but they only swarm me in a cloud of hissing propellant, bumping off my suit, clattering against the helmet on my belt.
Through the swarm I see Zeng rise into the air. He rasps, “Fair? Let me show you what fair looks like.”
A ten-foot monitor in the wall behind Zeng blinks on. I fight to get a look but the swarm tightens around me. Can’t stop myself flinching. Through the chaos I see—my ship. The Bellow. Hovering against the orange backdrop of Magnarus.
“Wait—” I shout. But it’s too late.
A round shape half the size of the Bellow slams through it, too fast to really see. It tears the hull apart, showering space with millions of shimmering fragments. Atmosphere rushes through the wound, clouding white as it cools in the vacuum.
I drop my hands. Drones nick my face, nudge me off the floor. I hardly notice.
My clan. My family. All gone. I feel numb. Why didn’t I argue, back on the Bellow? I knew Wusata was making a mistake. I should have done something.
The drones around me part, fly back to the scrap heap. Above, Zeng watches me. I see something pass behind his eyes, a thought he can’t quite grasp. He floats down and stares at me through those murky eyes. I don’t turn away.
Zeng says, “You’re staying here.”
#
On the second day as Zeng’s hostage, I try the door leading out of my quarters and realize it was never locked at all. I spend an hour floating about the ship looking for a way out. Knowing an airlock is the farthest I could hope to get.
Eventually Zeng must’ve gotten tired of my wandering, because a drone—a small, blank-faced sphere buzzing softly—comes to lead me back to my quarters. But when I follow it through a doorway and see Zeng waiting for me, surprise locks me in place.
“You good in those quarters?”
My brain refuses to process his words. Zeng’s white hair, now let down, dances as he moves about in zero g.
“You afraid, boy? What should I call you?”
“Ai—Airo.” My tongue is a thick useless clump in my mouth.
Zeng’s lips pull back to show his withered gray teeth. “Coward. You make me regret sparing you.”
When I wrestle my nerves into control, I say, “Why did you keep me alive?”
“You’ve seen the ship. You know why.”
“There’s hardly anyone here. You need me to—be on the crew?”
Zeng humphs.
He turns to reach into a drawer, and his hand comes out holding a long knife. The world suddenly sharpens. I grab the doorway’s corner and coil myself to launch down the hall.
Then I see the disgust on his face, and he says, “I won’t kill you yet. Can’t. Hold on.”
A muffled rumble starts, stutters, vibrating through the wall into my fingers. I realize what’s happening too late—the ship’s engines kick on and I slam into the floor. When I scramble to my feet, Zeng is fishing for vegetables in a white-paneled fridge, preparing what I fear is a meal for two.
Soon he carries over two plates, and not knowing what else to do I slide into the seat across the table. Squash, half burnt, and a slurry of undercooked eggs lie heaped on each plate. My whole body shakes with hunger.
“Eat something. You’re skinny.” Zeng ignores his fork and scoops with his hand. “This is the good stuff. I don’t share it with the scavs.”
I eat. Then the tears come, falling to mix with the eggs on my plate. What would my clan think, seeing me sitting with Zeng, enjoying a meal?
“None of that. I’ll space you.”
It’s the only thing said for the rest of the meal. I try to taste every bite, not letting myself think of the Bellow again, whose death tore a ragged gouge in my stomach. Sitting with Zeng hurts, too—but it’s a quieter kind of pain.
Near the end, I risk a glance at him. He looks pathetic—an old man slurping eggs like a child—and for a moment the fire smoldering in the center of my chest burns right through the fear.
I lunge across the table, swinging the fork for his neck. I brace for the blow—
But a wobbly pressure pushes my fist away. The fork glides through the air, a foot off target. The swing throws me to the table where my elbow crashes into his dish, shattering the ceramic and splattering eggs across the wall.
I watch in horror as the surprise on Zeng’s face slowly dies to rage.
His fist strikes my jaw. My ears ring.
“You cannot kill me, boy!” Zeng rises, actually growling.
The thrust gravity vanishes, and the remnants of our meal float into the air, forming a nebula of wet eggs. On Zeng’s way out, he turns back to me and says, “Clean this up,” then disappears around the corner.
Over the next two weeks, Zeng alternates between hate, sometimes banishing me to my room for days at a time, and cold companionship. During these stretches, he makes me follow him, or sit and listen to rambling stories from decades ago that never seem to have a point. Sometimes we just exist in tense nearness until he sends me away.
One day Zeng pushes me into a room that’s more like a nest of scrap, and starts showing me how to calibrate thrusters on his orbiting cargo cans, using a manual interface. I watch, wary of his sudden mentorship. I don’t know what sets me off—maybe it’s that his lesson is proof he plans to keep me here. But something in me breaks. I feel a shudder in my chest and clamp my jaw tight so he won’t hear. But he does.
Zeng says without turning, “Stop that. Crying is pointless.” And then, mumbling, “No one listens when I teach.”
And somehow his contempt steadies me. The pain narrows, becomes more distant. I wipe my eyes before he can see, and I don’t cry again after that.
#
I find a guilty satisfaction in Zeng’s lessons when I finally get a feel for controlling orbits. Nothing’s math with him, which is fine because I probably wouldn’t grasp it. It’s just curves on a screen and intuition. I’m good at it now, and I hate that.
I watch as he grows older, and slower, falling ill multiple times a year. He tries to hide it, but I know he’s afraid of being vulnerable. But every time my heart lands on trying to kill him, or escaping to another ship, he senses it and reminds me, “I can always see you.”
Until one day I look back and see five years have drifted by like scrap in a stable orbit.
Today’s payday. We’re both strapped into chairs that hemorrhage stuffing in fatal amounts, sitting in front of interface stations. The room would be big, if it weren’t strewn with piles of trash and scrap stuck to the walls.
Zeng doesn’t need an interface, but we’ve grown accustomed to working together and he likes to watch my progress on a mirrored monitor.
“Airo,” Zeng says, “watch that outer can. It’s coming in too fast. You want to kill the scavs?”
I fix it, but a menacing growl tells me I’ve got another problem. I spot a second can drifting away from its Ods ship. I fix it before he makes me regret the mistake.
An hour later, all the cans are back and being unloaded by teams of drones and a few crew members—some willing, some not. We’re shutting down the stations when a sudden alarm blares. I look back to the monitor, where I see one of the clan ships only twelve kilometers away, on a hard burn that will swing them by us.
I know that ship. Zeng never calls them by name, but it’s the Windfall. We used to meet up with them sometimes, back on the Bellow. To hang out with their crew, trade things.
“Fool!” Zeng shouts. “Why weren’t you watching them?”
A wave of desperate anger flashes over Zeng’s face. His right hand trembles. Just for a second, before he curls it into a fist.
It’s not my job to keep track of the Ods. Never has been. But I buckle myself back in and call up whatever sensor data we have on the approaching ship.
“It looks like…”
“Out with it, boy!”
I swallow. “It looks like they’ve built some kind of gun.”
He swings into the seat beside me and closes his eyes. I know he’s getting some kind of data feed directly to his brain, siphoned through whatever implant lets him control the ancient habitat’s debris.
“Idiots,” Zeng says, pulling his lips back in what might be meant as a smile. “I’ll show them what standing up to me gets you.”
On my monitor, I watch with my heart thumping in my ears as debris around the incoming ship coalesces, forming a cloud of dull metal scattering the sunlight. It’s thin, but as the cloud presses in around the Windfall it attaches to every square inch of the hull. Thousands of thrusters kick in, fighting the ship’s engines to steer it off course.
I check the estimated orbits—it’s not enough. I open my mouth to tell Zeng—then my breath catches.
If I keep quiet, we may die. This stagnant existence would end, and all the clans still left in orbit would be free. They could send messages, ask for rescue. Rebuild their interstellar drives. Decades of servitude would end.
No. Not likely. Zeng will kill them anyway, then kill me for betraying him.
The comm crackles with static. Then a voice bleeds through. “Zeng! We’re done being your slaves!”
My chest tightens, fingers gripping the interface as a memory tears through my mind—the pillar tearing off, the screams on the comm. Eight dead because I didn’t do what I was told.
“Zeng.” I hate how fast the words come. How easy they are to say. “You need more. Now!”
“Shut up. I know what I’m—”
His abrupt silence is all the praise I’ll get.
Outside, more debris lifts out of the orbital ring, bombarding the Windfall. Their front gun fires. I feel the grazing shot shudder through our ship’s bones, rattling my teeth. Then a massive ball of scrap lances the Windfall, sending it tumbling, spewing atmosphere.
My hands fall to my lap. I can’t turn away from the monitor, and all the people I just killed. Mostly I feel sorry for them—they brought this on themselves, the moment they decided to step out of line. I ball and unball my fist, staring through the floor. Why couldn’t they just shut up and listen to Zeng?
“Good work.”
His hand comes down on my shoulder. It’s all I can do not to flinch but… Those words make the skin on my scalp rise in goosebumps.
“That ship was a good earner. The others—”
Zeng’s raspy voice is cut short by sudden gasping coughs. My head snaps to him. He’s doubled over, choking for air. Tears flood from his eyes and pool around his head. He grabs at the chair below him, but his spasming limbs are pushing him into the air.
“Zeng. What is it?”
One hand shoots to his chest, clutching his shirt in a tight ball. Through coughs he manages to choke out, “Quiet!” But the light goes out of his eyes, and then he’s unconscious, floating like a baby in a womb.
By the time I get him back to his quarters, he’s come awake. His usual fury is gone. Now I see an urgency that scares me.
Zeng says, “You’re not ready. Just an ignorant fool.”
“Ready—for what?” I ask as I ease him onto the bed, sliding the pressure covers over his legs.
“The Forge,” he spits. He’d hit me if he had the strength. “You’re supposed to take over for me. Inherit my power.”
My shoulders slump. I grab a handhold to float beside his bed, where he lies staring at me with obvious loathing. I don’t have any words for what he just said.
“I chose the wrong successor.” He looks at the ceiling. “You’ll do it anyway. Go to the Forge. Activate the interface there.”
I shake my head. End up like Zeng? Alone, barely clinging to sanity? “I can’t.” But I know he’ll kill me if I don’t obey. And obedience is the only thing I’m good at.
He lashes out with a hand, grabs me behind the neck. His long nails dig into my skin. “You will do as I say. It’s your turn.”
He lets go of me and closes his eyes, pretending I’m not here. I pull myself out of his room. Wishing things were different. Maybe that I’d died all those years ago, when I killed eight of my friends, so I wouldn’t have to do what Zeng makes me do now. But I didn’t die, and now my head is filled with his order. I don’t disobey Zeng’s orders.
#
It takes a couple hours for my shuttle to reach the megastructure, six hundred kilometers above Magnarus, where it reigns over all the ships in lower orbits. It grows in the monitor, a massive lattice of scrap metal hanging alone in the void, unfurling like a flower at my approach.
The shuttle bumps through drones floating dead in space. Farther off I can see others still functioning, but poorly, limping on thrusters that fire erratically. A few swivel to watch me with glassy black optical sensors.
Cella’s helmet sits beside me, out of my closet for the first time in years. Now staring at it, covered in dust that mutes the angel wings’ luminescence, shame pulls a dark curtain across the world. I’ve lived a life since I knew her, and the others, but their voices still find me in dreams, always cut short by a sky-splitting snap. The old blood is just a faded hint on the visor now.
When the shuttle arrives at the megastructure, I tug on the helmet and seal it, then open the door to vacuum. The walls are pure scrap—junk metal fused together, wrapped into a shape like a tube, tightening as it stretches to the structure’s center three hundred feet in. I get the feeling Zeng didn’t build this place consciously. The design is too perfectly symmetrical.
Through gaps in the wall I watch Magnarus, a dreamy orange marble so far below the fear I’ll be flung away into space grips my chest.
As I move deeper, the tunnel gets tight enough I can reach out and touch it with either hand—then it begins to branch and twist, and my suit’s light becomes my only guide. My labored breathing the only sound in the world. I do my best to stay on a straight path, but soon I can’t tell which way is down. I’m certain the tunnels are shifting around me. On the walls I see scrap that’s frayed out, tattered; it reminds me of a disease chewing through flesh.
My air gauge is a growing black spot in my gut—I passed the halfway mark ten minutes ago. Finally the tunnel before me telescopes out, scrap grinding on scrap, opening on a tiny room. The faint hiss of decompressing air rattles against my visor.
This room wasn’t built by Zeng—its walls are smooth composite, not fused scrap. A lone door stares at me from across the room. No idea what it’s hiding. The tunnel closes behind me, weaving shut in a shower of sparks, and I’m left in this tiny, dark room with motes of dust drifting by like snowfall. I take a breath and turn the door’s latch.
The door flies open and I’m sent tumbling back. When I stabilize myself, my HUD’s ATMO indicator blinks on. I unclasp the seal on Cella’s helmet and pull it off slowly, as if that would make any difference to my soft body tissue if the reading’s wrong. But the air’s real—and it tastes clean, in a way the stale air on Zeng’s ship never did. Through the door, my light reveals only hints of a vast, dark place. I cross the threshold.
Then the lights come on. An atrium as big as the Bellow comes to life around me. Four stories of storefronts built along platforms and stairways, under arches and fabric awnings, painted by colorful strips of light. Windows display statues of people in clothing that looks brand new, appliances and furniture floating motionless inside the depths of the stores.
When I look up, I can’t help but laugh in awe. Far above, a blue and white cloudscape running the length of the atrium flickers on and off, glitching into fragmented nonsense in places. Everything is seen through a haze of dust and debris, eternally trapped in this tomb. No one has set foot here in over two hundred years—apart from Zeng.
A voice startles me, resonating through the cavernous hall. “Welcome, survivors—”
It’s coming from speakers along the atrium. It dissolves into garbled static, then cuts back in.
“—new life begins here. We’ve built—” A blast of static for a microsecond, then silence.
Survivors. The habitat was built for refugees.
I make my way across the atrium, drifting between fountains gone dry, torn buntings reading Welcome fluttering in the breeze I make as I pass. I move past a mural showing a faceless figure framed in sunlight, hands spread in welcome. Beneath, it reads, Your Custodian has given everything for your future. Their sacrifice sustains us.
No answers. Only more questions.
A pillar beside it holds a tiny sculpture of a ship, and a plaque that reads, Only our unmanned supply ships can achieve interstellar travel to and from Magnarus while the Custodial link is active. You are SAFE here with us.
I stare at the sculpture—it looks just like the ships Zeng uses to trade with other systems. The lockdown wasn’t Zeng’s doing, not on purpose anyway. It’s how the system was designed.
When I reach the end of the atrium, I push off to higher levels. It takes a full loop around the fourth floor for me to find a passage marked Custodian. As I float through the passage, a soft heat touches my face, and the air takes on a metallic taste. Behind the walls, I hear a faint humming, some ancient machine still half-alive out of sight. It grows dark.
When I round the next corner, I know I’ve found the Forge.
A dozen bundles of cables run along the ceiling to join at a thick central pillar. It’s covered in old components whose function I can’t guess at, and copper wires stripped out and hanging in frayed clumps. Across its surface a few tiny green lights blink weakly.
The base of the pillar forms a chair, and half in the chair, half on the floor—
A corpse. Incinerated, fused to the chair by its arms.
I choke on air that’s suddenly too thick. My mind conjures the other corpses I’ve seen—Cella front and center—and I puke. The sound fills the room.
The corpse is mostly skeleton now, but in horror I see tiny twitches in its legs and arms. It’s so faint at first I strain to confirm what I’ve seen—when a thin arc of blue electricity dances over the skull.
The Custodian. The habitat’s controller, hooked in to exert control over every sensor, every light, every door and maneuvering thruster.
Zeng stood here, sixty years ago. Right here. And he never left. I can feel my heart thumping my ribs.
I glide to the pillar, careful to avoid the corpse. Beside the chair an access panel stands open, revealing a black screen, and a lonely blinking cursor. I tap once, and text fills the screen:
TRANSFERENCE OF CUSTODIAL ACCESS –
PLACE HAND IN
INTERFACE TO PROCEED
Lights flick on, and a deep hum like the station coming alive. The corpse on the floor jerks once. A panel slides back to reveal a console etched with the outline of a hand. With a nervous sigh, I plant my hand on the console.
Three stiff coils shoot out of the compartment wall, piercing the top of my hand. I scream, reach for the coils—then a diagnostic screen lights up next to me.
WARNING
CURRENT CUSTODIAN ACTIVE –
DISENGAGE WILL
RESULT IN DEATH
Death. The text stares back at me, burning itself onto my retina, and Zeng’s sad, sixty-year rule suddenly makes sense.
He can’t leave. Never could. I glance to the corpse. Neither could they, whoever they were. Whatever this place does, it’s permanent—leaving orbit would sever the connection, killing Zeng. The pain in my hand feels distant now, the blood trickling down my wrist forgotten.
If I don’t do this, Zeng will kill me. His constant reminder—I can always see you—plays in my head. Becoming Custodian will trap me in orbit like he was—but I’ll be alive. Safe.
Somewhere in the back of my mind the cable snaps again. And again. Static-filled screams. Zeng’s fist against my temple. His rage. His punishments for disloyalty.
A burst of electricity surges through the coils into the back of my hand. It’s beginning.
I clench my jaw against the pain and think of the Windfall, of all the people I killed by helping Zeng. How many hundreds will I trap here another fifty years by reactivating the orbital lockdown?
I won’t put anyone else through what happened to me. Let Zeng kill me for my disloyalty.
I wrap my other hand around the coils stuck below my knuckles. They vibrate against my palm. The screen flashes an angry warning:
DO NOT DISCONNECT DURING UPLINK
FATAL SYSTEM ERROR WILL OCCUR
“Cella—everyone.”
I squeeze a fist around the coils.
“I’m sorry.”
When I rip the coils from my hand they leave gaping wounds and blood comes, splattering the console, my suit, my face. The lights flicker, the distant machine hum rumbles with uncertainty then builds to a threatening whine. The screen blinks uncertainly:
WARNING –
CRITICAL ERROR
INTERSTELLAR BARRIER FAILURE
I unclip Cella’s helmet from my belt. The angel’s wings sparkle, and the old blood is invisible in the dying light. I wipe my bloody hand across the visor, smearing it crimson. It’s not a design I would have chosen when I was fourteen on the Bellow, but it seems fitting now.
The habitat groans. The Forge sparks and burns. Somewhere out in the void Zeng dies quietly, and decades of slavery end.
I pull on my helmet. There’s no way out for me. The Bellow didn’t make it out, either. Or the Windfall. I could have done something about that, but I didn’t.
I hope this makes up for it.
#
© Andrew Westermann 2026
Andrew Westermann lives in St. Louis with his wife and daughter and two too many cats. His fiction explores the edges of consciousness and identity, imagining the strange futures we build when we forget what we used to be. Find his short fiction in other magazines, with more on the horizon.