Date: October 4, 2026
Attendance: Jon, Benny Letcher, Dax, Bernard, Carl Murawski, Dixie Doss, Arnold Wilkerson, Jackal, Marge, Etna Sola, Bennett II, Weaver
The station at the top of the space elevator let them breathe, and then it tried to keep them. By the end of the day the crew had their jump fuel flowing, a power converter for the colony in hand, and the cyborg from the Iron Cross dead on a factory floor — and they were standing at the bottom of the station, in front of the machine that calls itself Bishamonten, with the thing it had made out of an old enemy dropping down between them and it.
They opened the airlock behind a barricade of cargo containers and the galley table, Dax at the hatch and guns trained down the jetway, and the station’s air poured in — cool, dry, smelling of incense, and such a relief after the sweat and grease of an overloaded ship that the oxygen readings began to steady almost at once. Green running lights blinked along the jetway floor, coaxing them forward, and somewhere ahead a calm, corporate woman’s voice was speaking on a loop. Outside, Dixie Doss — still bloodshot from her minute in vacuum — went out on the hull with Weaver steadying her to fix the bent sensor array above the cockpit, and found what had bent it: a cut length of cable ending in a grapple spear-tip, snarled in the dish. The cyborg’s line had not missed after all.
The crew split three ways. Bernard, Etna and Jackal held the ship. Jon, who has already decided this is his last voyage, gave a speech to the colonists in the cargo hold, and Sasha — Franco’s wife, who used to keep the colony’s power generators running — handed her baby to her husband and volunteered, then rounded up a handful of others. Jon led that salvage party out onto the docking ring with a hover dolly, a few crowbars and lengths of sharpened rebar, Carl’s body camera clipped to his chest, and Tenka — broken arm, broken leg, shotgun taped to his wrist — riding along. Everyone else went inward: Dax, Marge, Benny, Carl, Arnold and Bennett II.
The docking computer told them a good deal. The Iron Cross had docked here eight hours before them and was gone. The Talon — James Ramirez’s ship, the one they had come looking for — had docked, refuelled and taken itself down to the surface, and then nothing — and its registered owner and captain had been scrubbed from the record. A wreck two berths along probably carried the right make of air filter; every ship on the ring had been drained of jump fuel, and the pumps that feed the berths had been switched off at the source, deep inside the station. Someone had built a shrine to Bishamonten on a crate by the ring — a sword of bent rebar in a block of construction foam, a bowl of burnt incense and twigs — and when Marge sent a picture of it back to the ship, First Instructor Fugen only said that the monastery had never taken the cult seriously enough. Bennett pushed the idol off the crate. Arnold welded the ring’s bulkheads shut on either side of the salvage party, and the inner group went into the station.
The Welcome Hall looked down on the moon and on Siddhartha’s Peace, turquoise seas and white salt flats, a pearl hanging in the dark. Screens played the Nirvana Initiative’s welcome — with the generous partnership of Straylight Computer Systems — and the narration kept slipping: a colonist choking for air, starved bodies on the salt, and a ruined, rasping voice under the narrator’s saying you will open your hands, you will open your mind, you will open everything. The elevator car stood empty at its platform. Abandoned luggage lay everywhere, and in one case Benny found a hidden compartment and a sawed-off shotgun.
Security and Administration had been fought over: barricades smashed, gun racks broken open and emptied, spent casings and old blood. Terminals throughout the level had been melted or gutted and coated in a gel Marge identified as a biological conductor — something that could carry a signal between a brain and a machine. Carl bottled a sample. Bennett broke into the security chief’s computer and found that Genma had arrived unannounced from the colony to work in a lab up here, bringing a new training protocol for the station’s AI that he promised would improve it by more than half, on hardware that carried another company’s logo — and that the officer who raised it had been told to drop it. A research lab sits beside the AI core on the station’s lowest level. The cameras showed the Iron Cross crew going in armed and careful and, hours later, walking back to their ship stiff and single file, fewer than had gone in. They showed an airlock cycle on the ring the moment The Second Chance docked, with nothing visible coming through it. And they showed Straylight security, some time before, bunkered in this very room, firing at something enormous until the cameras went dark. Bennett could release the docking clamps from here — but the instant he did, something re-engaged them. Someone will have to stay behind at this console to let the ship go. On one screen, an eye pierced by a burning sword turned to watch Arnold, and then went black.
The prayer chamber was full of bodies, stacked so neatly under the incense haze that they had looked like cushions. Then something heavy came dragging into the room behind them, and Carl, nearest the door, saw it: a man twice the size of a man, computers and cables welded into him, a screen grown into his body, leaving gel wherever he went — and on top of it the scarred, bald face of the convert Dax had knifed on the planet, his eyes replaced with glowing lenses and his jaw gone. Seeking intruders. Carl shut the door, and they ran.
In the Zen garden a Straylight security officer had hidden himself inside a wall panel and shot himself rather than let it finish what it was doing to him — gills at his neck, slit pupils, plates of bone across his chest — and scratched it’s burning me from the inside, I will not let it take me into the wall. His messages said Straylight had evacuated its people when Genma came aboard, and the shuttle had left the lesser staff behind. Bennett took his revolver. Then the garden’s bamboo came alive — biomechanical tentacles tipped with whirring blades — and hauled Bennett off his feet; Carl wedged himself behind a pillar and held onto his legs, Benny’s sawed-off cut the vines through, Dax blew the planter apart, and Marge took the last one off Arnold with her crowbar. The giant came through the door by absorbing it into himself and promised Dax that he would rise as another of Bishamonten’s spears.
They ran back through the Welcome Hall, where the colonists in the screens now had too many eyes and too many teeth and the narrator had been replaced outright — salt in the lungs, salt in the blood, every child born coughing; you cannot meditate your way to gills; the flesh was always the first colony, and it has failed us — while the lotus burned off the Nirvana Initiative logo and left Straylight’s standing. At the security elevator the giant hurled his arm after them like a striking snake. Benny’s shotgun took his head clean off, and he only said that they had destroyed his last piece of flesh and would die last for it; a monitor slid up into the empty place and showed a yellow smiley face. The fist crashed into the back of the elevator and struck Bennett full in the chest, and the doors closed on it and cut it free. The severed arm tried to fuse itself into the elevator walls the whole way down, and they took it apart with boots, crowbars, a stun baton, a knife and a torch.
Maintenance and Engineering, one floor down, had become a nest of gel-slick circuitry with tunnels bored through the walls into the rest of the station. Arnold found a flamethrower, and found that the gel burns. His attempt to reinforce Bennett’s broken spine slipped and hit a nerve. Bennett got the fuel pumps running and held them open against the station’s AI as it fought to shut them down again; the umbilical through the jetway began filling The Second Chance’s tanks, enough for at least one jump soon. The last ship fuelled before them was the Iron Cross, and she had left with her tanks full. Carl stopped talking somewhere in there, except to say that they were doomed, and Bennett tied a rope from his own waist to Carl’s.
Manufacturing was three storeys of assembly lines running at full speed with nobody at the controls, building cradles and altars; Arnold glimpsed genome, resequencing, human evolution in the data. There were crates of parts that had never been shipped down, and the crew took one of the power converters the colony has been waiting on. At the end of one aisle, before an altar-like bed hung with sequencing arms, a woman sat weeping on the floor — and stood up on spider legs. It was Tanya, her face replaced with machinery, a glowing blade snapping out of one arm. Marge’s pulse rifle blew apart in her hands; Tanya drove the blade into her chest and she went down. Bennett slid in beside her and found the blade had turned on her armour, and that she was alive. Arnold’s flamethrower set the machinery alight; Dax walked toward the cyborg shouting for her to face him and blew her head off. The thing she had been weeping over was her own new body. Arnold took her arm off with the torch, and Dax now carries her vibro-blade with her hand as its hilt.
The voice of the station welcomed them as its children, offered them the gifts it had given those who went into its chambers willingly, and explained that a true god belongs in the sky, looking down; that its servants are bringing the colonists up from below to be raised into true humanity; and that the piles upstairs were its failed experiments — humanity being, unfortunately, more like clay than steel, and inclined to crack in the kiln. The chambers opened invitingly. Marge, on her second stim, levered open the Straylight elevator, and they rode it down past windows looking into a vast round chamber where hundreds of thousands of cables ran into a single core, pulsing red like a heartbeat. The doors opened. Welcome before my glory, children. The wall beside them glowed and melted, and the giant came through it and landed on the bridge between the crew and the core.