The crew of the Borrowed Time arrived at Mining Station 44 — an orbital platform circling a dead star that was mined out years ago. Nobody bothered to decommission the station, so it lingers: cramped, smelly, and full of people who are broke and bored. The crew needed work. Their last job had barely covered fuel.
Alden stayed behind on the ship, communing with the engines and running diagnostics. The other three — Captain Garibaldi, Yolanda, and Lui — headed for the station's job board in the central hub.
Most postings were local busywork: fix a toilet, swap rations, the usual desperation economy. One listing stood out — the only job requiring actual interstellar travel. It read: "Crew needed for very legal and very normal transport job." The pay was suspiciously high.
The contact was a Dr. Fructus Ventriss.
Nobody on the crew recognised the name. Yolanda ordered a drink louder than necessary and caught the attention of an old racing rival named Bob, who confirmed Ventriss was a xenobiologist with a lab on the station — "brilliant but unhinged" was the consensus.
Ventriss walked into the bar in a lab coat with more patches than original fabric. Garibaldi approached with all the subtlety of a man who has never once kept a low profile. The doctor laid out his pitch: he needed them to transport "quantum ashes" — residual material recovered from a null zone boundary — to his colleague Dr. Sarah Chen at Kepler Station, two months away. First physical evidence that Resonants leave something behind when they die. He was offering 1,000 credits, which was more than three times what their last job paid.
Alden, who had finished his engine rituals in record time and rejoined the group with a wrench in hand, talked the doctor up to 1,100 by burying him in a blizzard of kilowatt-hour calculations and fuel cost projections, with Garibaldi backing him up on the "basic cost of doing business." Ventriss crumbled — the man is a terrible negotiator.
They shook on it. Ventriss shouted this across the bar, because apparently volume control was not included in his doctorate.
A very clean, very well-dressed man walked into the bar and came straight to their table. He knew all their names. He knew Ventriss. He knew about the cargo. He knew about Garibaldi's outstanding warrants.
He introduced himself as Kragg Dulton of Helix Dynamics, a megacorporation with its fingers in everything from weapons systems to the station's elevator maintenance. He didn't make a direct offer or an explicit threat. He simply made it known that Helix was "aware of the cargo" and would "love to discuss alternatives at some point." Then he mentioned Garibaldi's legal troubles and Helix's excellent lawyers — framed as a friendly observation, of course.
Garibaldi stared him down and refused to be rattled, spending a fate point to shrug off the compel. Lui attempted to intimidate Kragg by cataloguing exactly which of his 206 bones could be broken to prevent him from ever leaving the station. Kragg didn't blink. "Mr. Sci Fier, it takes considerably more anatomy than that to frighten me." Lui's threat backfired — hoisted by his own petard — and Kragg walked out with a smile, leaving the crew unsettled and eager to leave.
The crew rushed to the docking bay to load Ventriss's cargo: a coffin-sized metal cylinder covered in monitoring equipment, warm to the touch, humming at a frequency that was almost musical. Ventriss wheeled it in on a cart. Alden examined it carefully and earned the aspect "I Know What Makes It Tick" — he understood its power draw, its resonance patterns, and where to secure it aboard the ship.
Six station lowlifes emerged from behind cargo crates. They'd overheard Ventriss in the bar — because of course they had — and wanted the cargo and the crew's money.
They did not get either.
Garibaldi moved first. Two quick steps, a zigzag, and a devastating uppercut to the nearest thug's jaw. "You don't mess with Captain Garibaldi." Three shifts of damage. The first group went down in one punch — one knocked out cold, two fleeing in terror.
Yolanda grabbed a cargo crate and hurled it at the remaining three like a bowling ball. She rolled a four against their one. The crate caught the first thug, who toppled into the second, who toppled into the third. Domino effect. They scrambled to their feet and ran.
The fight lasted two actions. Ventriss was duly impressed.
A five-person Helix Dynamics security team appeared at the docks — not attacking, just... present. Running a "routine cargo inspection." Checking paperwork. Being aggressively bureaucratic.
Three exchanges followed:
The document check. The team demanded cargo manifests. Garibaldi went to the ship and returned with forged documents, using his criminal expertise and his new stunt (Forger) to produce paperwork so clean that even the dimensions of the containment unit were estimated by eye. He rolled a four against their two. The Helix team checked the documents three times and found nothing wrong.
The tracking tag. While the containment unit passed the security team, one operative tried to covertly attach a magnetic tracker to its underside. Alden, who had been watching the unit like a hawk, spotted it — he used a fate point to boost his Careful roll — peeled it off with a wrench, and flicked it under the loading ramp. Click, click, click.
The expired license. The team found that the Borrowed Time's registration had technically expired. Lui, channelling his annoyance at the entire situation, tore the expired document in half in front of them, told them to send the fine to Kepler Station, and Forcefully rolled a seven. The security team stepped aside. The ramp closed — catching one operative on the chin on the way up.
Alden put his hand on Lui's shoulder and called down to the retreating Helix team: "Watch out, the door might hit you on the chin on the way... oh."
Kragg would have to pursue blind.
Ventriss stayed behind — too well-known to travel without attracting attention. His parting words, shouted from the dock: "Don't forget to plug it into ship power! The batteries won't last!"
Yolanda settled into the cockpit, stroked the flight controls, and murmured sweet nothings to the ship. Alden ran diagnostics. Lui patrolled the corridors. Garibaldi put on music. The Borrowed Time cleared Mining Station 44 and set course for Kepler Station.
In the quiet, Alden noticed the containment unit was drawing eight kilowatts — not the six Ventriss had promised. And the draw was climbing. Slowly. 8.01, 8.02, 8.03...
Lui examined the cylinder. It hummed at shifting frequencies, almost like music. The monitoring readings fluctuated in patterns that weren't random but weren't recognisable either. The unit was warm, vibrating faintly, and had no visible seam or opening.
Alden asked Yolanda to push the throttle so he could check whether engine output correlated with the unit's power draw. She obliged — but Yolanda doesn't do anything by half. She blew past Alden's 80% safety limiter and slammed it to 100%.
The containment unit screamed. Not an alarm — the metal itself resonated, a harmonic frequency that climbed and climbed until it passed beyond hearing, though they could still feel it in their teeth. Every display on the ship flickered and died. The unit's power draw dropped to zero. It went dark. Silent. Cold. The entire ship lost power — lights, engines, life support, everything. They drifted in darkness, lit only by distant starlight through the viewports.
Then the ship came back.
Lights on. Engines humming. Displays nominal. But the containment unit remained dead — an empty metal shell. Lui went to check it and found it open, split cleanly in two as though it had always been made that way. The interior was hollow. No ashes. No residue. Nothing. The cargo bay camera showed the unit simply falling open. Nothing came out. Nothing was visible.
But nothing was right, either. The lights pulsed slowly, rhythmically — brightening and dimming like breathing. The navigation display occasionally flickered to show a position three light-years away before snapping back. The crystal drive diagnostic reported resonance at 340% of theoretical maximum. Yolanda, who knew the ship's responses like her own heartbeat, could feel that it was handling differently — still obeying commands, but with something subtly changed in every response.
Garibaldi walked up to a pulsing light and asked: "Is someone there?"
Alden answered from across the room: "What do you mean? Of course there is. It's the ship. She's always here. She listens."
Garibaldi clarified that he meant someone with actual logic.
The crew called Ventriss. The conversation was tense. The doctor admitted he hadn't been entirely honest — the material was "more active than initially indicated" — but swore he had no idea it could do... whatever this was. He was as bewildered as they were. His best advice: continue to Kepler Station and find Dr. Sarah Chen, the foremost expert on Resonant phenomena in the cluster. "If anyone can help you, it's her."
There was some discussion of renegotiating the fee. Ventriss pointed out that they had technically lost the cargo.
Then the navigation display cleared itself. Every readout, every overlay, every status indicator vanished. The screen went black.
One word appeared in the standard diagnostic font:
HELP
Then the display returned to normal. The lights stopped pulsing. The engine readings stabilised. Everything looked perfectly ordinary.
Except the ship's internal occupant counter now read 5.
There were only four crew members aboard.
A twitchy, brilliant xenobiologist who smells faintly of ozone and regret. Forty years of obsession have left him gaunt, wild-eyed, and prone to muttering equations mid-conversation. His lab coat has more patches than original fabric. He speaks far too loudly for a man who claims to be keeping secrets.
A 'freelance acquisitions specialist' (corporate mercenary) working for Helix Dynamics. Shaved head, cybernetic left eye that glows faintly amber, wears an expensive tactical suit under a cheap station poncho. Polite in a way that makes your skin crawl. He knows your names, your debts, and your ship — and he hasn't even introduced himself yet.
Corporate security contractors in matching black tactical gear with the Helix Dynamics double-helix logo on their shoulders. They move in crisp formation, communicate via subvocal comms, and file incident reports IN REAL TIME during combat.
The usual assortment of station lowlifes who hang around the docking bays looking for easy marks. Mismatched gear, terrible dental work, and a surprising talent for being in exactly the wrong place at the wrong time. They overheard Ventriss talking too loudly in the bar.