Rafian smiled, a rare and crooked thing. “Objection logged. Now patch me through to the surface telemetry.”
Out on the edge, where the dust never settled and the dark was infinite, he had finally found a reason to stop running. rafian at the edge 50
Rafian stood on the observation blister, his scarred face reflected in the thick polycarbonate. Beyond the glass, the Scar stretched into blackness, its walls glinting with veins of frozen ammonia. This was the edge. Fall here, and you’d tumble for three minutes before the pressure crushed you into diamond. Rafian smiled, a rare and crooked thing
The descent into the Scar was a prayer. Rafian rode the maintenance gantry’s emergency winch, its cable groaning under his weight. The walls of the chasm closed in, striated with eons of cryovolcanic flow. His suit’s exterior thermometer read -179°C. Rafian stood on the observation blister, his scarred
But she stirred. Her lips moved.
He called himself a "salvage ecologist." Others called him a grave-robber. The truth, as always, lay somewhere in the frozen permafrost between.
He should leave her. He knew that. The military would come looking. They would scan the Edge 50 , find his illegal modifications, his unlicensed reactor, his decades of unclaimed salvage. They would take everything.