Date: August 16, 2026
The crew left Prospero’s Dream several days behind schedule and several thousand credits lighter, cargo hold packed with cryo-stored apple trees and a nail gun’s worth of new confidence. Days into the drift toward the Lagrange Point, the proximity alarm cut through the quiet — something metallic, tumbling wrong against the stars. Carl brought them in close on a careful flyby, and the shape resolved into the unmistakable silhouette of a ship torn in half. No atmosphere left inside. Combat scarring scored across the hull. And painted in red, faded but legible, two words that made the bridge go quiet: MARTIN RAYNE.
Nobody wanted to pull it in. Whatever had happened to that ship, none of them wanted to meet it in the dark holds of a wreck with no power and no answers. They marked its drift and its vector instead — a grave marker left spinning behind them, worth a return trip and two thousand credits in scrap, if anyone ever worked up the nerve.
The jump to hyperspace went smoothly enough, once Bennett II talked the ship through it. Three days folded into nothing behind a shimmering tear in space, and they came out the other side in a system none of them had seen before, home to a planet nobody back on Prospero’s Dream seemed to think much of: Siddhartha’s Peace.
The planet announced itself with two signals before they’d even made orbit. One was slick and looping and utterly inhuman — an animated fire and spear, and a voice inviting them to dock with the station overhead for “purification and genetic enhancement,” all in the name of something called Bishamonten. The other was rough, garbled, unmistakably a real person: a man in a rebreather mask, warning them off the station entirely, begging them to land on the surface instead. When Carl tried hailing back, he got only the same message on a loop. Whoever had sent it wasn’t listening anymore, if they ever had been.
They almost didn’t get that far. An unfamiliar ship, the Iron Cross, intercepted them on the approach, hailing for a shipment the crew was never planning to hand over — the second half of the trees, promised in passing to the Shears back on the station. Ron talked them down without missing a beat, insisting their transponder had glitched, that they weren’t the Second Chance at all, they were the Second Choice, some unlucky ship that had scraped its hull on debris and come out the other side misread. There was a long, disbelieving silence on the other end of the channel. Then the Iron Cross peeled off toward one of the planet’s moons and went dark, and didn’t come back.
Down on the surface, Siddhartha’s Peace turned out to be smaller and more fragile than any of them expected — a scatter of maybe a thousand colonists clustered around the base of a space elevator, breathing through rebreathers under a sky that never quite gave them enough air. They landed the shuttle at the ramshackle starport, left Weaver behind to watch it, and went looking for the man they’d come to find.
They found trouble first, in the shape of a smiling trader named Ensho, who peddled black-market goods out of a warehouse and swore up and down that the colony was already doomed — that everyone would be better off doing business with him while there was still a colony left to do business with. He wore a pin shaped like fire and spear, the same symbol from the ship’s broadcast, though he brushed off any questions about what it meant.
Tenka — the colony’s entire security force, as far as anyone could tell — walked them the rest of the way in, past ocean-tide generators patched together with scavenged parts and desperation, past a desalination plant working overtime for a colony that couldn’t spare the water it made, past a temple standing alone on a ridge above streets that felt one bad day away from breaking. Along an alley near the colony office, something small and wrong caught their attention: a dead rat, twitching, its insides replaced with crude mechanical parts that clearly hadn’t taken. Whatever experiments were happening on this planet, they weren’t confined to any lab.
Inside the colony office, incense burners and anti-corporate propaganda posters gave the place the feel of a recruitment center dressed up as a temple. Jian, half-asleep behind the front desk, perked up at the sight of actual visitors and nearly signed them up as new colonists before catching himself. Then the Abbot arrived — Ben Shirayuki, resplendent in gaudy priestly robes, relief plain on his face at the sight of off-worlders who weren’t there to leave.
The story he told them was not a happy one. The colony’s power was failing, its terraforming station locked down and unreachable, its only real export — water — barely making a dent in a debt owed to the corporation that had bankrolled the whole venture, Straylight. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, his old coworker and the colony’s co-founder, a man named Genma, had simply vanished — right around the same time the station overhead had gone dark and started broadcasting whatever it was broadcasting now. Genma’s lab sat out in the ocean on an old rig, and nobody who went looking for him out there had ever come back. The Abbot didn’t want anyone else to go, but he needed the power converter only the station’s printers could make, and that meant someone had to get up there. He offered the crew a deal worth double what they’d already been promised: fix the power problem, and the salvage rights to the station were theirs.
They delivered half their cargo to the Agrodome, where a xeno-soil biologist nearly wept at the sight of apple saplings, and quietly decided the rest could wait — kept in reserve, unspoken, in case the Shears needed convincing of something later. On their way through the market, a family found them first: Franco, his wife Sasha, and their small son Joe, begging for passage off a planet they were certain wouldn’t survive the year. The crew made no promises they weren’t sure they could keep, but they took the man’s contact chip anyway, and didn’t quite forget about it.
At the Blossoming Lotus Teahouse, business finally got done. Behind a bead curtain and a dropped act of frailty, the old tea-master Rogen took payment for a shipment of something considerably less legal than tea, counted it twice, and told them, once his hands stopped shaking, what he knew: the broadcasts, the doomsday cult symbol spreading through the streets at night, and a falling-out — he thought — between the Abbot and Genma, not long before Genma disappeared for good.
The opportunity came when the Abbot marched out with ten armed monks to deal with Ensho personally, clearing the colony office out behind him. Bennett II slipped up to the second-floor comms room while the rest of the crew kept Jian occupied with an in-depth tour of Neo-Buddhist philosophy, hacking straight into the cybernetic optic nerve of the technician working there so thoroughly that the man never registered another presence in the room at all. The listening device went in clean. Angus’s job, done.
Night came on fast once the sun started dropping behind the salt flats. The crew bedded down in the shuttle at the landing field, and that’s when the colony’s monitors lit up all at once — that same fire-and-spear symbol, and a voice that wasn’t quite human anymore repeating the same line over and over into the dark: that in this place, only Bishamonten cared for the flesh of men. Torches started moving through the streets below, colonists drawn out of their homes to walk in step with the broadcast.
And then, before anyone could decide what to do about it, the colony office erupted — an explosion, gunfire, more than one kind of weapon by the sound of it — and the crowd surged toward the smoke and the noise, torches and all, just as the session cut to black.