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  Chapter 1

  It took me two days to realise what was wrong with the counterweight.

  The light of the distant sun cast ever changing shadows across the boulder’s rocky surface. They never seemed to be the same twice, so I rarely saw the same, oddly oblong, outline I’d seen on the very first day of my voyage back to the Maw. And that was after staring at it for several hours a day. I confess there isn’t much to do in the tractor’s cramped cabin.

  “Shit,” I said when I finally caught a glimpse of it again. Of course it was gone as quickly as it came, lost as the counterweight span around the tractor, casting it into shadow once again.

  I wasn’t mad. It was definitely there. An oblong shadow. Like a doorway. On a rock hundreds of millions of kilometres into space, orbiting the cold gas giant Oberon. The light so thin it barely brought any warmth with it.

  Impossible. Absolutely absurd. Yet there it was.

  Unless I was mad. I had to concede that possibility. A week of staring at the arse end of the roid I was shepherding to the Maw, with nothing but the slow wheezing of ancient air scrubbers for company, would drive anyone mad. And the counterweight, don’t forget that. True, the view of Oberon was awe inspiring. It was a giant swirl of oranges and yellows, the odd purple blemish toward the poles. Tute and Sweet came into view ever now and then. The giant planet’s closest and largest moons. They were little more than faint dots against the clotting black of space. Besides that was the Shatter, the ancient debris of two other, unnamed inner moons that had collided a very long time ago. Breaking apart to form a ring of rocks varying in size between a mountain and my fist. The very reason I was here, as harvesting it for precious minerals was very lucrative.

  OK, there was a lot to look at. Still, few tractor drivers lasted long out here. I’d been here longer than most. Two years. And in that time I’d seen two drivers head off into the black never to return. Their tractors discovered weeks later, abandoned. Their interiors smeared with blood, faeces and who knew what else.

  Losing one’s log was common amongst drivers. Perhaps it was just my turn.

  “Bollox.” I pulled myself up to the stern observation hatch and stared at the counterweight. I was effectively hanging from the ceiling here, my arms quickly shaking from the exertion. The oblong shadow didn’t return.

  I cursed again as I let myself down clumsily against the driver’s couch. It didn’t take me long to contemplate my next course of action. In fact I was doing it before I came to a decision. I was slipping into my air reclaimer when I realised I couldn’t let this lie. I simply had to know what the shadow was. There was no way such a regular shape was natural. Next came my helmet and then my gloves. Fortunately I pretty much lived in my pressure suit. Every tractor driver did. These machines were old and often sprang leaks. If it took me too long to get into my suit I was dead. It was as simple as that.

  The tractor was too small for an airlock. I depressurised the cabin and clumsily yanked on the hatch’s locking handle. Something flapped past me as the last of the cabin air dumped into empty space. I didn’t see what it was. Clearly something I hadn’t secured properly. I clipped an impact drill to my belt and followed it with a bag of carabiners. Once I was on the other end there would be nothing to hold onto.

  I didn’t come out here often. There was no reason to and hanging on the side of the tractor in mid space was risky. One small mistake and I could become detached. Then I could take my time watching the tractor slowly recede into the distance. I clipped onto a railing and crawled clumsily towards the tow cable. Once I’d clipped to that I balanced myself and looked upwards.

  The cable was as thick as my wrist, made up of hundreds of steel wires twisted together. As old as it was some of those wires had split, springing loose from the cable. Any one of them would rip a hole in my suite. So, I had to make my way across the eighty or so metre span without making any contact with it, apart from the carabiner I had clipped to it. If I did, I was very likely dead.

  Yep. This was a very bad idea indeed. Still, if I arrived at the Maw with something dodgy in tow there would be questions. The Jane had no sense of humour. They had the power to imprison and interrogate me at whim. Or, at best, to remove my tractor licence. Once that happened back to Reaos I went. To my family and cheating spouse. I’d rather stay here in this horrible place.

  I could cut the counterweight loose and coast the rest of the way to the Maw. It was only a few more days. Which would, in itself, raise questions.

  I crouched on the tractors dented yellow hull, gauging my leap. Simply jumping wasn’t going to work and I knew it. The tractor and the counterweight were spinning around each other, held together by the cable. That spin generating artificial gravity on either side. The only thing that made this trip even slightly tolerable. Still, there were complex forces at play. Which, as I’d set up the dance, I was very familiar with. A tractor driver did need to have at least a rudimentary knowledge of trigonometry.

  There’s a trick to this.

  I leaped in the direction of the tractor’s travel, allowing my tether to snap me back to the cable. I met it with the soles of my boots, and ran up it. Grunting with concentration I kept the cable underneath me, well aware that one slip could snag my suit on the ancient cable. It was hard work.

  As I neared halfway the pressure against my boots faded and I found myself floating away from it. The tether snatched me back again and I allowed my momentum to carry me the rest of the way.

  “Shit.” I landed awkwardly, banging my helmed against hard stone. My breath knocked out of me I waited a moment, half expecting alarms to sound in my helmet. There was nothing but the slight hiss of air from the rebreather.

  Lucky.

  There was gravity here too. The same force I was accustomed to on the tractor. I sat down for a bit, looking up at my trusty vehicle hanging overhead. Shadows were twisting around it now. It was an ugly affair. Thick drive unit with a simple cabin bolted to it between two stubby fuel cells. All this sat on the two grappling arms, which were folded beneath the tractor out of the way, their claws hidden from my perspective. All of this had been painted yellow once, with black lines and lettering. All of that was long faded and scratched, revealing stark steel beneath. I didn’t know how old it was, nor who had built it, but that was a long time ago. If you were to say it was a hundred years old I wouldn’t be surprised. No one built these things anymore. I don’t know when they ever did. They had simply always been there, servicing the Maw, shepherding roids from the Shatter into its processing fields.

  It was home. As near as anywhere was.

  The counterweight itself was simply a rock. One I’d chosen with two criteria in mind. Firstly, it had the correct mass to offset the tractor. Secondly, it looked like it would stay in one piece when I tethered the two together and set them spinning. Other than that it was of no interest to me. When I reached the Maw I would simply let it go on its way. It was far too small to be worth feeding into the processors. It would need to be a thousand times the size to be worth that. Something like the rock I was shepherding towards the Maw, its own orbit of Oberon broken when I set carefully positioned charges on its surface. Giving it the odd nudge from the tractor to fine tune its trajectory. Nudge. I’d used the grappling arms to secure the tractor to it before lighting the main drive, leaving it running for twelve hours before shutting it off. That was how much force it took to nudge something of this size.

  My magnetometer claimed there were some juicy metals in that roid. Well worth the trip. Maybe sixty or seventy thousand C’s. Enough to pay off the lean on the tractor and fuel for the next trip out. With that lean gone everything I earned from then was pure gravy.

  If I could steer clear of the Jane. If they took any interest in me all of that was at risk. So, I needed to know
what was off about this counterweight.

  It looked like a rock. No different to the other billion or so others out here. Grey and boring. Some jagged edges I had used to anchor the cable. It also had some sheer faces, probably from the catastrophe that ripped the moons apart all those centuries ago. As a result it had a relatively high albedo, making it easy to spot out here in the dark. All in all pretty mundane. Apart from that odd shadow.

  I drilled in some clips to attach the carabiners to and started making my way around it. The further I moved from the tethering cable the steeper the side became until I was clinging to a near vertical cliff. Nothing but emptiness beneath my boots. I slipped more than once as I made my way around the counterweight, searching for the elusive shadow. Every time I did I decided this was a really stupid idea and should go back. But every time I found myself continuing. Perhaps I was just stubborn.

  And then there it was. A regular shape against the jagged edges of the counterweight. A shadow deeper than it should be. Depths impenetrable to the feeble light from the sun. I steadied myself with a few extra clips drilled into the rock and slid down towards it.

  It was oblong all right. It wasn’t natural either.

  “Shit.” I hung next to it, all my weight on the line, staring at it. It was a doorway. A door in a rock a million kilometres from anywhere. “Shit,” I said again.

  I swung in, grabbing hold of an ancient locking handle to steady myself, my headlamp bright on the metal. It felt brittle, like it would come away in my heavy gloves if I pulled too hard. There were some markings on it. Impossible to read now. And a symbol, barely visible. A circle inside a triangle. Other than that nothing but for tarnished metal.

  I could open this and see what was inside. Something long lost. From before the Fall perhaps. That was two thousand years ago. A long time for secrets hidden behind doors lost in the Shatter.

  I turned and looked behind me. Not an easy task in a restrictive suit. There was no one else out here. No one would ever know what I did here. The Maw was still days away. I could take a look.

  I had to take a look. I couldn’t enter Maw space with this door closed and the tractor still attached to the counterweight. Perhaps the Jane would never see it, the counterweight lost to space when I set it free. But what if they did? What if they did and there was something …. illicit behind here? It was very possible someone was using the Shatter as a place to hide smuggled goods. Banned technologies. Secret information. It could be anything. I mean, it had to be secret, right? Otherwise why would someone put it out here?

  It was only then it occurred to me someone other than the Jane might take an interest. Someone who had put this door here. Someone who would want to know why their asteroid had moved, and who had moved it.

  Double shit.

  I ran my gloves around the door jamb. It seemed to be sealed tight. But, I discovered as I tried the locking mechanism, the handle was loose. It wasn’t secured. It was unlocked.

  I hesitated still. My mind in turmoil. But then, I realised, it was too late for all this indecision. My mind had been made up the moment I depressurised the tractor. I hadn’t come all this way to leave the door closed. Was I going to turn around and go back? Leaving it like I found it?

  Like hell.

  Careful of the brittle metal I took a firm hold and turned. It stuck for a moment before swinging free. I yelped, catapulted into space, the handle still in my hand.

  “Bloody shit.” I steadied myself against the counterweight and peered into darkness.

  There was light coming from somewhere. Reeling out the line I ventured in, my headlamp casting weird shadows into the oblong passage beyond the door. There was a little bit of dust here, coating the walls and floor. Whichever they were, it was impossible to discern the passage’s orientation. That light was not a light as such. More like a patch of slightly less dark darkness. It was down the passage, as if it opened up into a dimly lit room.

  Or, I realised, the other side of the counterweight. An opening in the other side of the rock out of view from the tractor.

  I wedged myself against a wall to steady myself and studied the light. The counterweight’s motion threw me to the side slightly. It took no more than a few seconds for something to swing into view. A tiny moon. Toot perhaps.

  Well, that was disappointing.

  I let out more cable and ventured further in. There was an indistinct shape on the floor. (ceiling?)

  “Ah, shit.”

  It was a corpse. Long desiccated by exposure to hard vacuum. I couldn’t tell if it was a man or woman, its skin was sunken until it was little more than a skeleton tightly covered by brittle leather. There was no hair. It had either fallen out or the person had been bald. No eyes. Just dark sockets where they had once been. It was dressed in some kind of coverall. Grey perhaps. Or it had been once. No insignias of any kind.

  Shit.

  Tractor drivers tended to be a hard, unimaginative bunch. We had to be. Still, I didn’t like this. Dead bodies in space, floating around for who knows how long. It wasn’t right.

  I nudged it with a boot. It was surprisingly light. With nothing to keep it in place it was a wonder it was still there. There was nothing to stop it from sliding out the opposite end of the passage to vanish into space.

  It was only when I started searching the body in earnest that I discovered a metal pin protruding from its chest. It looked like a very large nail. It was this pin that kept the corpse motionless. Someone had nailed the body to the wall.

  I cursed for a moment before continuing my search. Whoever that killer was they were not here anymore. They were probably long dead themselves. Still, I checked over my shoulder again. No one.

  There was a bulge in a pocket. Something square and hard. I hesitated for a moment before trying to pull it out. My gloves were too big to get into the pocket but a utility knife quickly parted the material.

  A box. Also metal. Square, about three or four centimetres to a side. I pocketed it and turned the corpse over to see if there was anything else of interest. There wasn’t.

  I ventured further into the passage. There was nothing else there either. Just more passage. This had clearly been part of a larger complex before the moon it was built on was ripped apart.

  I had decisions to make. What now?

  Which was no decision really. I yanked on the desiccated corpse, trying to free it up. After centuries exposed to vacuum the material of its clothing was brittle, tearing easily.

  “Shit damn.” I fell backwards as it came free suddenly. Almost tipping me out of the doorway. A long dead face banged against my visor as it passed me by. It had already vanished into the darkness of space by the time I twisted around to look behind me. I was about to wave it farewell when I realised some of it remained behind.

  I might have sworn then. The ancient body had torn in two, leaving its pelvis and legs stuck to the floor. I used a boot to kick it free. Disrespectful perhaps, but I wanted as little to do with this thing as possible. Like a piece of old driftwood it was stiff and brittle. One of the legs seemed to snap as I kicked it. Still, it slid free and started skittering down the passage towards open space at the other end. Happy to see the last of it I aimed my lamp down the passage to ensure it kept on going. It did, quickly vanishing into darkness like its upper half had done.

  I saluted it jerkily. It was the least I could do. Probably more than had been done for it in a very long time.

  Chapter 2

  The rest of my journey back to the Maw was uneventful, if slow. I was used to that though. That was the nature of the business.

  I didn’t look at the counterweight again. There was a small nag of guilt over how I had unceremoniously tipped the body into space. It deserved more than that. We all did. I’d lost companions before – tractor drivers all – who had disappeared into the Shatter. Their bodies never found. Who could say that wouldn’t happen to me one day? My body left to orbit Oberon forever. Frozen and timeless. Still, I’ll admit the Jane scar
ed me, and what they would do when they discovered I had been hauling an ancient corpse around. In honesty I didn’t know what they would do, which made it worse.

  Comfortable in the driver’s seat I put the box I’d fished from its pocket onto the controls before me and studied it. It opened easily, displaying some very odd contents. A small sphere, about the size of my little finger’s knuckle. Glass perhaps, with the slow swirl of something inside. It glowed eerily. A faint bluish light from a power source I couldn’t discern. It wasn’t natural, it was a made thing, using a technology I couldn’t guess at.

  I scooped it up carefully and weighed it in my palm. It felt light. Almost as if it was hollow. Even if I kept it, hiding it from the Jane when they inspected the tractor, what would I do with it? Sell it? Who would have an interest in such a thing? And for how much? What was it? It was an exquisite bauble, that was true. But what then? Someone could keep it on their desk to look at perhaps.

  Still, it was important. That … person had thought to keep it on them when catastrophe overtook the moon, that was clear. No one built random passages in asteroids, one end sealed by a door, the other open to space. Why should they? No, I believed that passage had been built when the asteroid had been part of something much much larger. A whole moon. Before the collision that created the Shatter. I didn’t know how long ago that was. Thousands of years. Before the Fall certainly, and that was two thousand years ago. That people had lived here, colonising this moon so far out on the edges of the system, was a miracle. Who would have believed it? True, we knew little of those times, all that knowledge was long lost. What else had there been out here? Certainly a far larger installation. A city perhaps. Destroyed when the moons ripped each other apart and cast rubble into space.

  This jewel, or whatever it was, came from a time before that, which would make it precious to the right people. Whoever they were.

  The Meranti Familia perhaps. They collected ancient curios dating to before the Fall. Art works. Ceramics. Those kinds of things. People did also find the odd piece of technology from time to time but the Jane soon confiscated them. Pre-Fall technology was proscribed. The penalty … well, who knew what that was? The penalty was disappearance.