Kali stood in the modest gear bay he'd rented, just a compact suite nestled into the side of the Caladrian market tier. The walls hummed faintly with recycled power, and the lighting was dim, utilitarian. He placed his satchel on the steel bench and began unpacking the equipment he'd just acquired.
First came the armor. It wasn't top-of-the-line, but it was well-balanced for mobility and protection. Gevryn-flex weave overlaid with hexcarbon plating, modified for silent movement. He adjusted the underlayers, ensuring the biofeedback mesh rested against his spine and wrists.
Then the rifle. A refurbished VHX-93 Longneedle, chambered in collapsible rail rounds. It wasn't a god-tier sniper relic, but it was dependable, and modded for vacuum stabilization. He'd also picked up a micro-gyroscopic stand, a smart scope with thermal overlays, and an old-fashioned analog sight for backup.
Rizen murmured in his spine, "You should recalibrate the scope when you land. Atmospheric composition differ."
"I know," Kali replied, already removing the lens array to install the filter compensator. He handled the pieces with the care of ritual, each part had its place, each click and seal was a kind of prayer.
Sidearms and support gear followed. A compact pulse pistol with anti-shield rounds. Three concussive grenades, one grav-surge mine. A field knife made of blackglass alloy. Not the most graceful of weapons, but it could cut through most materials and bones without much fuss.
He pulled on his lightweight infiltration cloak, dyed a dull neutral gray that would mimic background textures in multiple spectrums.
Once everything was packed and secured into the drop-pack and rifle sheath, he sat on the bench. Took a long breath.
Rizen broke the silence. "You're nervous."
"I am. Also excited, it's a new world after all."
Kali stood and glanced around the small room, ensuring he left nothing behind. He pulled the hood of his cloak up, concealing most of his face, and locked the gear case with a disposable seal.
Then he stepped into the corridor of the station, the dull clang of his boots echoing under his cloak.
Dock Bay 14 awaited.
By the time Kali reached Dock Bay 14, the rest of the team was already suited up and prepping for departure. The shuttle before them, a matte-black, angular vessel labeled Helion-9, gave off a low hum from its active stabilizers, sleek and grim like a weapon in flight form. The hangar reeked of ship grease, pierced with the familiar staccato clank of cargo loaders locking in final supplies.
Brann stood near the boarding ramp, checking a datapad. He gave Kali a brief nod of acknowledgment but said nothing. Kharv was leaning against the side of the ramp, mouth busy with what looked like a ration stick. The Myrsian woman, Sarra, was running a diagnostics check on her scatter rifle, muttering to herself in a clicking language Kali didn't recognize.
Kali climbed aboard and found a seat along the shuttle's interior wall, magnetized clamps locking his boots in place. Kharv slid in beside him, strapping himself in with casual ease.
Once the doors hissed shut and the launch sequence began, Brann stepped forward to address them, voice calm but sharp. "Mission brief. Our destination is Obrex-3, a moon inside the Arixon Dead Zone. Our target is one Nikola Diens, former Synesthetic Specialties geneticist, now classified rogue. He's gone off-grid, and sources say he's hiding in one of the research ruins in Obrex's equatorial basin. Our orders are to recover him, dead or alive. Preferably alive. He knows things."
A soft vibration began under their boots as the shuttle detached and pulled away from Caladrian gravity well. Brann's tone dropped slightly.
"Now, here's the complication. The Arixon Dead Zone has a history of dimensional instability. There's a high chance we'll encounter what are known as fade anomalies."
Kali's brow furrowed. He turned toward Brann. "Fade anomalies?"
Brann nodded, glancing toward Kharv. "You've got the gift of overexplaining. Walk him through it."
Kharv grinned and leaned closer. "Way back, long before the collapse, when Homo Deus were running the show, they started probing dimensions beyond the known physical frame. Curiosity mixed with hubris, as always. One of their experiments cracked open a portal into what they called the Fade. Think of it as a chaotic dimension, no rules, no physics, just… raw entropy. Eldritch space. Mutagenic, corrosive, reality-eating. It's not just that things are hostile there, the laws of reality don't hold. Even time stutters."
Kali's fingers tightened on his lap straps. "And now there are rifts to it? Open ones?"
Kharv nodded. "Wounds in space-time. Sometimes they flicker like ghost-light. Sometimes they gape wide open. And when they do, things come through. We call them Fade Entities. Some are beasts. Some are worse. Sentient. Hungry. Wrong."
Sarra looked up from her weapon. "If we're lucky, we'll only run into residue zones. You don't want to see what happens when a full breach opens."
Kali turned his thoughts inward. Rizen? he called silently.
There was a flicker, static, like a radio half-tuned. Then the Machina's voice emerged, thinner than usual. "Dimensional research… was still theory when I was sealed. We knew of fractures, but they were microscopic, quantum-level events. To open a rift large enough for passage…"
A pause.
"That technology didn't exist back then. Or wasn't supposed to."
"Great," he muttered. "So we're walking into a cursed science experiment in a haunted moon."
Kharv chuckled and slapped his shoulder. "Welcome to real merc work, fringe boy."
The launch sequence concluded with a deep thrum that reverberated through the hull of Helion-9. A final hiss of compressed air sealed the cabin, and the interior lights shifted from amber to cobalt blue, signaling full systems go.
Sela, their pilot and the only one silent up until now, stirred at the helm. Her hands danced across the console with fluid precision, fingers tapping sequences faster than most could follow. The shuttle veered upward, angling into a controlled climb toward high orbit.
Through the reinforced viewport, Caladrian Station fell away—a sprawling web of metal and light receding into the dark, its docking pylons illuminated by the ambient shine of nearby Dyson swarms.
"Approaching Jump Gate 7," Sela said flatly, her voice modulated and emotionless, as if she'd fused with the ship itself.
Ahead, the jump gate came into view: a massive hexagonal ring floating like a mechanical halo in the void, its inner lattice pulsing with pale blue light. The gateway was anchored by a series of kilometer-long struts, lined with stabilizer nodes that shimmered as they calibrated the next jump trajectory.
"Brace," she added, almost as an afterthought.
There was no further warning. The Helion-9 surged forward, swallowed by the gate.
Instantly, the shuttle was hurtled through chaotic spacetime, a maelstrom of fractured light, broken laws, and wrenching inertia. For a brief moment, up had no meaning. Reality bent. Outside the viewports, the universe shimmered like oil on water, each instant folding into the next in a kaleidoscopic blur.
Then, without ceremony, they were through.
The Helion flickered into existence well beyond the local relay station on the outer rim of Arixon Sector, a lifeless region colloquially referred to on star maps as the Dead Zone. The stars here looked different: colder, more distant, and tinged faintly with green.
"Jump complete," Sela said, already turning the ship. "Setting course for Obrex-3. We'll enter the Dead Zone in twelve minutes."
She pulled the ship into a new vector, and the Helion's engines hummed louder as the forward thrusters kicked in. Kali could feel the subtle shift in gravity as the artificial dampeners struggled to compensate.
"No relays past this point," Brann reminded the crew. "We're on blackout once we cross the zone perimeter."
Kali leaned back, eyes on the dark expanse through the viewing glass. Mostly empty space on the other side.
The Helion-9 sliced through the final veil of dark matter haze, its hull wreathed in spectral ionization as it entered the atmosphere of Obrex-3, a fractured moon cradled in the skeletal orbit of a collapsed gas giant.
From orbit, Obrex resembled a shattered mirror, a broken world suspended in gravitational limbo. Jagged continents floated like drifting icebergs above a mist-choked core, bound together by unstable tectonic links and ancient, half-forgotten technologies still humming in the deeps. There were no cities, no lights. Just ruins swallowed by fog, and cratered stone laced with veins of violet ore that pulsed faintly like a dying heartbeat.
"Initiating descent," Sela said, her voice calm. "Scanning for an intact LZ."
The shuttle's engines flared, compensating for the moon's thin and erratic gravitational field. Outside, the atmosphere was a shifting soup of pale clouds and drifting ash, threaded through with lightning. A sudden jolt rocked the cabin as atmospheric turbulence struck.
Kali gripped the armrest instinctively.
"Hold tight," Brann barked from the co-pilot's seat. "Weather's got a mind of its own down here."
Through the viewport, shadowed mountains loomed like frozen titans, their peaks scorched by past orbital strikes. Glimpses of crumbled outposts flickered past, scars from another era, swallowed now by the creeping fog.
Then they saw it. A clearing, barely the size of a shuttle pad, carved into the flank of a dead valley. The remains of an old SynSpec relay tower leaned crookedly to one side, half-swallowed by lichen and time. It was a ghost of civilization, but it would serve.
"Touchdown in thirty seconds," Sela said. "Powering up terrain clamps."
The Helion-9 tilted gracefully, retrothrusters firing in sequence. The landing struts unfolded with mechanical efficiency, their baseplates glowing red-hot from re-entry friction. With a final hiss of hydraulics and a deep mechanical thunk, the shuttle landed.
Dust and ash plumed around the ship as the stabilizers engaged, anchoring them to the fractured earth.
Kali unbuckled his harness and stood, his breath visible in the cold recycled air.
"Masks on," Brann ordered. "Atmosphere's breathable but laced with nano-decay agents. Don't take chances."
Helmets locked. Weapons were checked and secured. The loading ramp descended slowly with a hydraulic groan, revealing a blasted valley veiled in fog and lit only by the flicker of a dying sun low on the horizon.
A sudden chill crept into the air.
Brann and Kharv were already strapping into their exosuits, pale ash-colored, reinforced with syntherite plating and lined with skeletal servo-tendons that flexed as they moved. Each was custom-fitted, built to match their physiology and combat style. Brann's suit bore deep etch marks from prior engagements, a silent archive of battles survived. Kharv's was bulkier around the shoulders, hinting at the heavy weaponry he preferred.
Sela, in contrast, wore standard-issue recon armor, sleek, minimal, and nearly identical to Kali's. Both were designed for agility and long-range engagements, matte black with faint blue tracer lines that pulsed softly when active.
"Hey," Kali called after Brann, who was suiting up. "You got any reliable mechanic back at Caladrian?"
Brann paused mid-motion, turned slightly. "Yeah. Old Man Turner. Cranky as a rustwyrm and smells like ion grease, but he knows his circuits. What are you looking to fix?"
"An exosuit," Kali replied.
Brann gave a thoughtful grunt, his exosuit letting out a suit as it powered up. "Alright. We'll pay him a visit when we get back. Might cost you a few creds, but he'll make her run like she's off the line."
Satisfied, Kali adjusted the magnetic lock on his rifle holster. The air outside the shuttle hissed faintly through the decompression seals.
Brann turned to face the crew, his helmet visor retracting just enough to reveal his eyes.
"Alright," he said. "Visors down. Weapons hot. We're hunting a rogue geneticist on a haunted moon with rift scars. Watch the ground, the sky, and each other."
The boarding ramp groaned as it lowered fully. Steam from the pressurized cabin spilled out into the fog like ghost breath.
"Let's move," Brann ordered.
One by one, they descended into Obrex-3, boots striking the ashen rock with dull thuds. The air was thin and bitter, thick with the quiet static of a place long abandoned. Above, torn skies bled faint auroras of unnatural color.
The mission had begun.