The Lumen Gambit - Chapter One

The auction hung over the orbit like a polished crown, a loop of platforms and glass that glittered with the collected appetites of a dozen systems. They called it an auction of lost things not because everything sold there was gone but because the vendors trafficked in absence—objects that carried other people’s silences, memory-worn trinkets that smelled of foreign dust and old promises. Sera had seen the ring from a Conspectus catwalk years ago, when the uniform sat right and the insignia said she belonged to a machine that called itself order. She watched it now from the hull of a freighter that kept its head down and its engines ready, a canvas sack at her hip and a crew who knew the price of risk. The Dasha drifted in the shadow of a service barge, paint rubbed thin so it looked like any other workship from the correct angle. From here the auction’s lights looked like constellations gone domestic: private drones stitched the dark with threads of blue and amber, displays swam with the faces of collectors who never slept. A Lumen shard had turned up in a shadow lot—half a relic that some curator claimed could hum with old concordances, a fragment of a network once used to soothe masses into remembering the same past. In the right hands, that kind of fragment paid well and bought space on charts where no patrols set course. Eli Sun squatted in the hold and ran solder over a small dampener coil, his fingers nimble and cursed with the sort of optimism that fixes things because it can’t bear to let them fall apart. Tamsa checked the skiff’s control surfaces with a stare that made the metal answer back; she moved like someone who preferred actions over questions. Sera strapped the pump of her prosthetic atrium under her jacket and felt its faint mechanical tick; it was an odd, private reassurance. The plan was lean: a low-profile burn into a maintenance bay, a skiff ride through service conduits, a quick in and out to the lot, a velvet shell and a status on a manifest that read like a routine transfer. The Dasha’s approach path was a gutter of shadow between two cargo stacks. Eli would sew a signature mask into their comms, Tamsa would fly slow enough to look like a delayed maintenance crew, and Sera would be the one who stepped into the ring and trusted she could move through people’s greed without being noticed. For a while the crew rehearsed the minute details like a prayer—windows, timings, the number of steps down from the promenade to the lot, the angle at which security drones made an overhead sweep. Sera reminded herself to breathe, to treat the job like work, to keep the ledger in her head clean. It was a small job with a big payout. They needed the credits more than they needed the memories that haunted old things. Or that was what she told herself as the Dasha’s silhouette folded into the carousel of the auction and the ring swallowed them into its light.