Rafian approached slowly, his hand resting on the old kinetic pistol strapped to his thigh. He tapped the hull with a magnetic hammer. Three short beats. A pause. Two beats back.

He pulled up a chair. He was exhausted, hungry, and fifty years old. But as the storm raged outside and the woman slept, Rafian Kael felt something he had not felt in a very long time.

“Please,” she whispered, barely audible through the suit’s pickup. “The beacon… they’ll kill me if they find me.”

Juno was the platform’s AI core—or what was left of it. Most of her memory banks had been scavenged years ago, but the fragments that remained were fiercely loyal. She was less a computer now and more a ghost with a schedule.

He was tired of running.

“I know, Juno.”

“Juno,” he said, keying his comm. “Prepare medical bay. And wipe the last six hours from the local sensor logs.”

His breath caught.

He was fifty years old. He had spent half his life running from ghosts—his own and others’. But standing here, at the edge of a frozen chasm on a moon a billion kilometers from home, he realized something.

Rafian stood on the observation blister, his scarred face reflected in the thick polycarbonate. Beyond the glass, the Scar stretched into blackness, its walls glinting with veins of frozen ammonia. This was the edge. Fall here, and you’d tumble for three minutes before the pressure crushed you into diamond.