Chapter 13

The ship touched down in a cloud of silica, grit abrading the hull with a sound that reminded Cyrus of the sandblasters on his first deployment—a memory, perhaps, but more likely a parallel. Helios Minor presented itself as barren, an open pit of a moonlet scored with mining cuts and scarified by generations of extractive violence. The landing pad was a rectangle of stamped alloy, already discolored by the iron-rich regolith that the surface storms drove in sheets across the horizon.

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