‍Eyes open, pilot… 

No reanimation nausea, no alerts wailing, no lurching sensations to indicate combat acceleration. Just the smooth one-gee standard of a normal shipboard deceleration. My aching muscles told a different story; clearly we’d been in some kind of sustained high-gee burn. The Balkis had the drives and facilities for that, but most of our GuardCorps flotilla didn’t. Which implied our response squadron had been detached. It happens, but seldom while your pilot is already juggling slip coordinates. Threading a needle that’s moving a percentage of c is hard enough at the best of times.

The suspension fluid had drained away, leaving me in a spherical carbon chamber a few meters in diameter. Something approximating daylight diffused from the walls, and an amber icon pulsed slowly in front of me. Questions could wait; there were protocols to follow. 

I fell into my regular grav-maga exercises, pushing my complaining muscles to check their function. The medical system would already know if anything was wrong, but part of being a good pilot is being in tune with your body. If you haven’t got that, then massively magnifying your weight and strength isn’t going to go well. 

After raising a good sweat, I sank down into a yoga pose and began my breathing exercises. Mental kata, designed to test for cognitive problems such as abnormal impulses, memory gaps, or emotional instability. Nothing, except for that phantom-limb feeling of incompleteness every pilot gets when they’re not connected to their zeoform. The weakest spot on any zeo is always the kilo or so of gray matter between the pilot’s ears.

Satisfied, I rose to my feet. “Pilot functional.” Abruptly, the icon changed to an inviting green, and the pod wall slid away to reveal the passage to our common room. Sutler was already seated, a drinkbulb of cold fruit juice pressed to her forehead and a look of misery on her face.

“The job or the burn?” I asked, helping myself to another bulb from the table.

She regarded me with bloodshot eyes. “Can’t it be both?”

“Bad, then?” I sipped the juice, tangy with electrolytes. 

“See for yourself.” She flicked files to my neural implants, where they began to unpack.

I scanned them, flipping between images and analyses. Hundreds of pages, most of it centering on some kind of huge railgun facility dug into the surface of a moon.

“Somebody planning to blow up a planet?!” Nobody actively uses that kind of hot-war tech in this day and age. The zeo-pilot in me shuddered at the inelegance of the idea.

“No such luck. Can you imagine the bonuses? This thing just launches micro-sats. Tens of thousands at a time.”

I sighed. “Okay, give me the highlights. We can simplify it again for the boys when they bother to surface.” I love the twins like brothers, but “single-minded” doesn’t even begin to cover it when you’ve literally had your brain rewired for combat.

“We were thirty-six days out when we received a Unitas Offer Adjustment diverting us to a heliosphere out on the fringes. Seems the allied government of planet Jinda were having trouble with Pact-backed rebellion—mainly drone attacks, guerilla strikes, that kind of thing. Jinda’s rugged and sparsely populated; government troops weren’t having much luck finding the rebels. So they made the smart play and issued a GuardCorps bond. Ended up hiring the 23rd Idrani GuardCorps detachment to deal with the problem.”

I nodded along. “So far, this is sounding like a million klicks below our pay-grade.” No shade, but the Idrani are…shall we say, the budget choice as far as GuardCorps outfits go. Not terrible, but definitely a “no-frills” operation.

“It was, at first. Until this damn thing started firing off from one of the planet’s moons. Locals call it ‘The Saltshaker.’ Roughly every eleven standard hours, the Saltshaker shakes, launching swarms of microsats into orbit around Jinda. The Idrani fleet blasts the damn things out of the sky as quickly as they can, but it takes several hours and all their z-processing. Meantime, the rebels use this orbital blind spot to move around, hit targets, and generally make life miserable for the 23rd. They’ve lost three zeoforms and are a month behind clearance schedule.”

“And they can’t just blast this ‘Saltshaker’ to atoms because…?”

“It’s a Pact observation facility, yes, but it’s leased in neutral territory. The feeling was that bombarding the moon would very definitely push the orbital government into the Pact’s arms. Technically, none of these satellites are carrying weapons. Of course, the Idrani can’t take that chance.”

“So it’s our job to resolve this? I take it we’ll count as ‘OBR?’”

Sutler nodded, looking even more sour. “The bonuses are stratospheric, but yes, we’ll be Operating Beyond Remit as far as GuardCorps Haine is concerned. In the event of our capture, all repatriation bonds will be voided and we’ll be denied as ‘rogue elements.’”

I sighed, grabbed another bulb, and dug back into the data. About halfway through my power-skim, another hatch opened and two familiar figures fell through in a tumble of limbs. I’d call it friendly rough-housing, even though it involved a lot more eye-gouging and kidney punches than that might imply. At least it was unarmed this time.

“Think fast, dork!” William slammed his brother’s shaved head into the bonded carbon-floor with an audible thunk before springing to his feet.

Sutler turned a jaundiced eye on their antics. “That head contains a lot of valuable tech, William. I assure you, you can’t afford to replace it.”

Will managed to look abashed for a second before his brother lunged at his legs, bringing him down again with a meaty smack.

“Benjamin, could you please release your idiot sibling. We’re discussing the job.”

Ben looked up, a trickle of blood in his teeth as he grinned, “Aw, shucks, sounds like the moms are getting divorced! I hope we get to stay with Maze. She lets us have junk food and stay up late.”

“Yeah, but we both know that Sutler would get all the good toys in a breakup.”

I lobbed them a drinkbulb each. “Cut it out, you knuckleheads. Get hydrated and then take a look through the data.”

They duly began chugging juice, managing to sit while only inflicting minimal tissue damage on each other. Exercise and genetics kept them in peak physical condition, but implants pushed them way beyond that. Having been raised in a Citadel orphanage, the boys had limited grasp of social niceties, but they understood the chain of command.

“This thing is dicey as hell, Sutler.” I had finally finished wading through the briefing, which was more inference and projection than solid data.

“It came right from the top. Would you have wanted me to say no? I presume you do enjoy having a career?”

“Yeah, I also enjoy being alive to collect a paycheck. This plan has more holes than a kilo of aerogel. Especially the exfil. All it will take is one enemy gunboat getting lucky and those booster drones we’re relying on will get shot to shit.”

Sutler gave me a hard stare. “You’re not hearing me, Maze. I said it came right from the top.”

“The top? Like, from the top top? The board? Why would they care about this backwater?”

She sighed. “Not asking questions like that is a life skill in my line of work. But if I had to guess, I’d say that some analyst wonk calculated a cascading series of outcomes based on events in this heliosphere. Hence we’re being sent in to put our fingers firmly on the scale.”

She was right; you don’t say no to the board, no matter how your contract is worded. Not when you’re Citadel, anyway. We would just have to hope that whoever pulled this op together knew what they were doing.

Sutler shrugged. “You’ve got two days. Go over it, make it work.”

“I want a paid vacation when this is done. I want to sit on a beach for two weeks like a normal goddamn person.”

“Normal? You wouldn’t last two days without a zeo-link. You’d be climbing the walls.”

“Not kidding, Sutler.”

She held up her hands. “Sure, whatever. I should have plenty of suction with command after this.”

Token grousing and we both knew it. Enough to make it obvious we weren’t happy with the situation, not enough to have anyone questioning our loyalty.

Two days to polish this turd.

Part 2 coming on April 22nd, 2026!