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Salvage tech Rhea Solano steals a humming canister as corporate security sweeps her orbital scrapyard. With an old navigator, a stubborn drone, and a mythic “Lightseed,” she slips into hidden lanes, finds rogue scientists, and faces a principled adversary. A new kind of sail decides whom to trust. Windows open, kitchens fill, and air changes hands.
Rhea Solano steadied her boots on the scabbed hull and breathed, tasting metal through the suit filter. Saffron light from the gas giant poured over everything, turning the torn wreck into a cathedral of burnished bones. Her tether clipped against a broken rib of plating. It rang once, thin and bell-like, and the ring’s thunder of distant collisions rolled through her bones a beat later.
“Whistle, give me a panel map,” she said.
The little maintenance drone, no bigger than her forearm, nosed out of her tool pouch. Its fan hummed. A line of blue dots sprang up on her visor, tracing a safe path across the ship’s exposed midsection. Whistle burbled a descending arpeggio, shy and proud.
“Yeah. Good job.” She grinned. “Let’s see what’s worth keeping.”
Pier Cerulean’s salvage claim was stamped in flaking paint along the spine. The derelict had drifted in from the outer lanes during the night shift, a courier gutted by pressure loss. Her employer’s tag meant security would be thin. Rhea liked it that way. The fewer eyes, the more room to breathe.
She cut a wedge in a panel seam and pried it back. Her gloves scraped grit. Inside lay a nest of fiber bundles hardened with frost, shattered by vacuum into glistening straw. She searched by touch. Her fingertips found smoother plastic, round and stubbornly intact. A canister. Rhea braced and worked it loose.
Static crackled in her ear. “Dock to Solano. Bringing you home in thirty. Storm in the southern bands is ramping up.” Tamsin’s voice came bright and annoyed. “We need intake. Don’t get picky.”
Rhea leaned the canister against her hip, gaze sliding across the planet’s bands. A square of deeper amber swam in the haze, and lightning stitched that square with white thread. “Copy,” she said. “I found a sealed unit. Lab-grade.”
“Then don’t crack it open. We got flagged last month.”
“I remember.” Rhea anchored the canister to her belt. “Whistle? Tag two more compartments. Quick.”
The drone chirped and blinked green. They crossed a stretch of hull pocked with micrometeorite bites and reached the courier’s cockpit. The canopy had blown; the pilot’s chair was absent, ripped away with the rigging. Rhea scanned the dust-lined controls. Nothing moved. A torn glove hung like a dead bird in a corner. Her stomach pinched. She cleared it with a swallow and backed out.
By the time she reached the tether reel, the ring’s low thunder had thickened. Shrapnel shadows skated across the wreck, sliding like the bars of a cage. Rhea thumbed the retract. Her body lifted, turned slowly, and the wreck fell away beneath her boots until it was just another jagged tooth in Cerulean’s endless mouth.