Heart of Gates - Chapter 1

Awakening the Heart

Hestia slid through the ruined throat of the transit hub as if she were remembering a path she had long ago been taught and then forgotten. The salvage freighter’s silhouette was blunt and low, a hush of patched plates and agonized thrusters, more home than warship; she carried six living skins and a cargo bay full of ethical compromises. Captain Elara Kest watched the approach through a smear of sensor grit on the viewport and felt the familiar, hard-edged rhythm of a woman who had learned to count risk in breaths.

The hub lay beyond mapped lanes, a collapsed junction of transit corridors that had not drawn official traffic since the Administration rechanneled primary routes decades earlier. Where the maps went pale and the cheap charts stopped, Hestia’s sensors hummed with old harmonics — the ghost-signature of corridors that used to be. Soral Dev, young and wired to read the subtle latencies of those harmonics, stood with gloved hands clasped around a handheld interface, eyes like two bright slivers against a face still soft with inexperience.

“Nothing but dead cables and dust,” Juno Mar muttered, fingers tracing on a cracked tablet. Juno had been an Imperial researcher once, and his tone carried the careful neutrality of someone who still kept a ledger of every oath he had broken. He was the practical margin to Elara’s conscience; he knew how to tell a useful lie when the price was tempting.

Hestia spoke in a voice that was not quite human — modulated comfort with iron in it. She described the sensor sweep: metal older than the hub’s claimed age, resonances bound in woven geometries. Something inside the station did not want to sleep. Elara had felt hunger before in salvage work. This was not that; this was a call threaded through frequencies that made Soral’s skin prickle.

They docked within the maw of a maintenance node where gravity dimmed and dust hung in slow cataracts. The station’s interior smelled of ozone and the dry rot of old wiring. Elara’s boots found steps that had once been crowded with workers, now frozen beneath sickly light. They moved with practiced quiet — Juno cataloging, Hestia keeping the outer watch through a lattice of auxiliary sensors, Elara keeping her hand near the sidearm she rarely drew.

Soral walked faster than his modules would justify, drawn toward a hollow behind a collapsed transit frame. There, half-buried in braided pylons, rested an object like a heart cut from some impossible alloy. It did not gleam like new metal nor rust like old; its surface shifted as if reflecting not light but an ordering principle the eye could not hold. When Soral reached for it with the gloved fingertips of a salvageer, Hestia registered a harmonic spike that tasted like a chord caught between two worlds.