Chapter 1: Hesperia

Deep space between Uranus and Neptune felt like the loneliest stretch in the system. The stars glittered against black nothing, each point a diamond no one would ever touch. And somewhere in that emptiness lumbered the Hesperia — freighter-class, thirty years old, a patchwork of repair plates and rust-colored hull. She was on a long-haul transport job, ferrying industrial components and sealed cargo crates through the vast shipping lanes of the outer system.

Inside, the deck vibrated with the pulse of aging engines. The air smelled of oil and metal, lights flickered overhead, and rust streaked the seams. Pipes hissed in the distance, and every surface radiated heat—as if the ship itself was straining to stay whole.

Chief Engineer Mara Lin leaned over the diagnostic console, dark circles under her eyes, hair twisted into a messy knot. A single yellow warning light pulsed on the panel, bright as a wound. After sixteen hours on her feet, the last thing she needed was another problem bleeding yellow light into her retinas.

FUEL PRESSURE WARNING.

Mara’s fingers flew across the controls, summoning data streams. "No… no, no, no, no, no—"

The overhead speaker crackled.

“Mara, You seeing these numbers?”

Captain Torres. Solid, no-nonsense, voice like gravel scraping steel. Damn, how was he always so on top of everything? She’d only just spotted the anomaly herself—and it was her job to catch this stuff.

“Yeah,” Mara shot back. “We’re venting fuel. Fast. Either a blown seal or a crack in Tank Three. If it’s external, we’re dumping propellant into vacuum.”

Silence. Even the ship seemed to hold its breath.

“How bad?” Torres asked.

Mara exhaled. “If I isolate the leak, maybe thirty percent fuel left. If it’s the main feed, we’re screwed.”

“Nearest help’s Saturn,” Torres muttered. “That’s what… twenty AU?”

“Eighteen-point-six,” Mara said. “And comms barely work out here. We’d burn half our reserve just changing vector.”

Jax, the cargo master, broke in, his voice tense. “Hell. We’ll be dead drift. You know what happens to ships drifting out here? They find ‘em years later, crew frozen like popsicles.”

“Stow it, Jax,” Torres snapped.

Mara kept staring at the readings. Flow rates kept dropping. Pressure bleeding away. Her pulse thudded with each flicker of the warning light.

“Options?” Torres demanded.

Mara inhaled. “EVA. Somebody goes outside, finds the breach, patches it if possible. Otherwise… we ration everything and hope for rescue.”

The silence deepened. Metal groaned around them, the sound of the fuel tank buckling under pressure, straining to stay intact.

Then the hiss of escaping fuel grew louder—sharp, insistent, everywhere at once.

Torres turned pale. “Oh god. That’s the main feed.”

A cold certainty seized them all. In that instant, they knew. No rescue was coming. No clever patch would save them.

They were doomed.

Torres drew a slow breath, shoulders sagging as he began to gather his thoughts, ready to say aloud what they all already knew—that they were dead. He was an old hand, a veteran of countless crises, and though he’d been close to catastrophe more times than he cared to remember, in all his decades out here, it had never been this bad. Never this certain.

Suddenly, the proximity alarm screamed to life. Jax lunged for the viewport.

“Mara—Torres—look!”

Outside, in the ocean of stars, a shape appeared. Sharp-edged, unfamiliar, catching the faint glimmer of sunlight across its hull. A ship. Out here, where no ship should be.

Mara tore her eyes from the console and crossed the deck to the viewport, breath stuck in her chest. Torres’ voice came low, tight with suspicion.

“That’s not one of ours.”

Jax swallowed, eyes wide. “Who the hell is that?”