Chapter 1 – Smuggler’s Orbit

 

Your Karma Defines Your Life
Sungold – 4,000 Lux          Pillar of Society
Green – 2,000 Lux          Trusted Citizen
Blue – 1,000 Lux          Monitored Tier
Purple – 500 Lux          At Risk Tier
Zero – 0 Lux          Subject to Social Correction
— Bureau of Social Correctness and Karma, New Washington —

---

Cape Neweham, Alaska — August 26, 2280
Torley

The thunder of rocket engines fades slow between the cracked edges of Baluka Hill. The heat still clings to the air like an aftershock—ash, fire, and the metallic sting of thrust. The Lawgiver Mark IV has punched another hole into the sky.

Even here, high above Cape Neweham—Cape Jail, as everyone calls it—the heat tingles on Torley Legrande’s face. The last trace of her.

Shuttles rarely launch from Earth anymore. Not with the Skyrails running freight and personnel from the orbital gates. But there are exceptions.

Hazardous cargo. Government ghosts. And prisoners.

Especially prisoners.

Nobody wants to send felons up the Skyrail alongside a school field trip. The gates are closed to anyone with Karma below Blue. And prisoners no longer have Karma. Not one single lux. Their Soullight remains extinguished until they have served their sentence.

Or until they are dead …

“She’s gone,” Torley murmurs, eyes fixed on the vanishing needle of steel. He takes a long pull from the bottle—some gut-rotting blend hillbillies sell as whisky at the local Walmart.

Iron Brandy. Only real with the handcuffs on the label. Probably intended as a souvenir. Something to put in a corner at home. Proof you were there. That you saw Cape Jail. Looked lawlessness in the drooling eyes.

He takes a deep sip. Doesn’t flinch.

You shouldn’t drink Iron Brandy. Absolutely not. At least not if you don’t want to go blind in the near future.

He takes another sip.

“You don’t know that,” says Trisch.

He doesn’t look at her. Just at the darkening sky. “Yeah, I do. I can feel it.”

Trisch and Shyla—sisters in blood, opposites in soul. Trisch, the wild one. Laughing eyes. Laughing mouth. She’s studying law in New Washington. Ninth semester, give or take. He lost track somewhere between the bachelor’s degree, the LSATs, and now—bar exam prep.
What a gloriously stupid name.

He could’ve asked how much longer she had to go. For a heartbeat, the question sits on his tongue—tickling his lips like a last-ditch grasp for humanity in an inhuman moment.
But he doesn’t really care. Not tonight.

Maybe it’s just that he never liked Trisch much. No clue why. The chemistry never clicked. With Shyla, it was gravity. With Trisch? Static and sparks.

Thanksgiving last year. Shyla’s birthday. The Christmas party where Trisch almost strangled him with fairy lights.
Unintentionally. Of course.

The list is long. The fact that he’s still breathing is a minor miracle.

Torley sighs. Maybe he ran over her cat in a past life. Or maybe some bored god cast them as opposite poles of a cosmic relationship magnet—forever repelling.

He’d almost apologized once. New Year’s. She’d handed him a drink. Said nothing. He’d said nothing back. But the silence had done what words couldn’t—it was a fragile peace, brittle and half-drunk, but it built a bridge. A bridge that somehow led them both to Cape Jail, to this moment, to one last farewell for Shyla …

… the other sister. The different one. Always was. Quieter. Sharper. The kind of woman who held herself together like cracked glass under pressure.

Now all he has left of her is memory.
And Trisch.

Another swig. He’s lost count of the bottles. Or the days. They’ve been camping for a week or longer on this slope above Cape Jail. Watching that gray sprawl of fences, towers, and stacked barracks.

Earth’s largest penal camp. But only a stopover.

Everyone sent there is outbound for Ganymede.

The great terraforming effort. The shining new world.

Built on prisoners’ bones.

And now Shyla’s one of them.

Because he failed her.

He drinks again.

“You think she’d want this?” Trisch asks.

“What?”

“This,” she snaps, nodding to the bottle. “When did you last eat something real?”

He doesn’t answer.

“Or showered?”

“Really?” He clenches his jaw. “I need a way to get her out, not some damn detox plan.”

“There’s only one way,” Trisch says, tone tightening. “I finish my degree. I reopen every charge that cost her Lux. One by one. Until what you two did doesn’t condemn her anymore.”

“And how long will that take? Ten years? She’ll be dead by then, Trisch,” he hisses.

“Got a better plan?”

She crosses her arms, looking down at him. “Found divine inspiration in the bottom of that bottle?”

“No,” he admits.

“She’s not just your loss, Torley,” Trisch says, eyes hard. “She’s my sister. You don’t get a monopoly on missing her. I want her back too.”

Torley’s lips twitch.

“Maybe she wouldn’t be rotting in a cell if—”

“Don’t,” Trisch cuts in. “Not unless you want us both saying things we’ll regret.”

He breathes deep.

... and nods.

“Does she even know?” he asks after a moment.

“Know what?”

“About your studies. That you’re doing law.”

Trisch smiles faintly. “She still thinks I’m chasing the art school dream she gave up everything for. But dreams change.”

He nods slowly, eyes still lost in the sky.

“She doesn’t need a dreamer. She needs the best lawyer she can get.”

A bitter smile flickers on his lips. Shyla sacrifices her soul to finance Trisch's studies. And Trisch sacrifices her dream to save Shyla.

What a beautiful, stupid world.

He finishes the bottle. Doesn’t look at Trisch.

But then he does. He lifts his eyes. Opens his mouth.

And stops.

“Your Karma... since when are you purple?”

 

---

 

*** Three weeks earlier***

Orbitalfreighter Bethany — August 5, 2280
Shyla

“This is UCSS Toledo. Slow your flight and rotation. Prepare for inspection.”
The voice crackling through the comms is sharp, sterile — unmistakably pissed. The kind of voice that thinks its badge is bigger than physics.

Behind the pilot’s glass of the Bethany, the moon hovers like a shadow of my future. Dark, distant, and full of teeth. A void dressed like a promise.

My finger hovers over the “Send” button. I take a slow breath, exhale through my teeth, then press it.
“I’m sorry... I really am,” I say, pitching my voice into something halfway contrite. “But we’re pushing 250,000 register tons. I can’t slow that down with a kiss and a prayer.”

Technically true. Physics is a bitch. The Bethany is no sleek asteroid yacht. She's thrust, burn, and rust. An old ironclad—half engine, half cargo clamps—sputtering her way between Earth and Luna. Beautiful as a kicked-in trashcan. She’s a whale with ion burns and a hangover.

“Just slow the rotation,” the officer sighs. “That won’t help. You’ll only make it worse.”

No shit, genius.

I grit my teeth and say nothing as the Bethany rolls into her next arc around Luna. It’s not like he’s the one perched over forty pallets of smuggled whisky, hoping the seals hold and the manifests hold up. It’s easy to judge when you’re not one shipping code from a drone suit and a life sentence mining Ignis.

Three hours, I tell myself. Maybe four if I fake something ugly. Flu, radiation, plague, jammed bulkhead — pick your lie. Doesn’t matter.

None of it will save the whisky.

“We’re fucked,” I mutter under my breath.

Torley doesn’t answer. He’s behind me, hammering the holokeys like he’s trying to reprogram time.

“Slow your rotation and prepare for inspection!”
Same voice. Same demand. A little more steel in it this time.

“Go to hell” I snap. “The fuck I will do.”

The Bethany’s rotation — a lazy roll along the longitudinal axis — gives us just enough gravity to keep our boots planted and coffee in the cups. More importantly, it’s a bureaucratic shield. A rotating ship is still technically dockable, but it’s flagged in every protocol manual from here to Mars as a high-risk maneuver. Inspections fall under “non-essential operations,” which means they have no justification to sync movement and override our spin without cause.

So most haulers keep spinning. It’s the deep space equivalent of hanging a “Do Not Disturb” sign on your door.

Most Navy ships respect it. Most of the time.

But times are hard.

Since Earth and Mars started slapping each other with tariffs, interstellar trade’s taken a 30% dive. The big players — Lunar Trading Company, New York Stock House — adapted fast. Bigger freighters. Skeleton crews. Fewer runs, heavier loads.

But folks like me and Torley? We’ve been chewed up and spit into vacuum. Every run is a fistfight with solvency. We haul whatever we can and pad the books with just enough legal freight to pass at a glance.

Everyone does it. All the small-time runners. The Navy knows.

And they also know we’re irreplaceable once the dust settles and some smug suit signs a new trade deal over iron ore and coffee beans. If they pull us out now, the system will stutter later.

There’s no official memo. No blanket immunity. Just discretion.

And someone on the Toledo is clearly chasing stripes.

“I’ll get it in a minute!” Torley barks. “They’ll never find it.”

I nod. I know exactly what he’s doing. Scrambling the manifest — falsifying cargo entries, reshuffling ID tags. He’s turning LH-4518-BFG-2Y into a digital matryoshka of legitimate goods. On paper, that container now holds medical supplies, protein synths, atmospheric calibrators.

In reality? 5000 bottles of eighteen-year-old Duhain whisky, sealed tight and worth more than our ship.

It might survive a shallow scan.

But not a boarding party.

Not if they start cracking open crates.

Not if that voice on the comm keeps coming.

And it will.

I lurch to my feet. “Come on.”

Torley glances up from the console, confused. “Shyla?”

But I’m already through the bulkhead, boots ringing against the corridor plating.

“Come on,” I say again, over my shoulder. “You need to suit up. Now.”

“What?” I hear him stumble, mutter a curse. “Wait a fucking minute!”

I pass one of the corridor-high portholes. My reflection catches me: dark-ringed eyes, clenched jaw, a blonde ponytail that’s been marinating in engine heat and recirc air for days.

Yep. I’m fucked.

What’s the penalty for smuggling again? Twenty years? Life?

Doesn’t matter. I shove the thought aside and swing into the Nohlan tube — the gravity-light spinal shaft connecting the decks. I launch from the handrail and drift, slow and silent, toward Deck 2 and the airlock.

“Shyla!” Torley’s head bobs into view above me, floating upside-down. “What are you up to?”

“I told you already,” I say. “You’re going outside.”

He hesitates. Then follows. “You want me to go out and dump the container?”

I take a deep breath. Close. Too close to the truth. And suddenly I regret everything I never said to him.

Torley is… Torley. The twinkle in his eye that short-circuits my pulse. The jokes that make hours disappear. Yin and Yan, he once called us. Perfect together, but never actually together.

Because I never dared.

Because kissing someone you spend eleven months a year trapped with in a tin can sounds like either a fantasy or a disaster.

“Later,” I always told myself.

There will be no later.

I slam the red panel beside the airlock. The locker hisses open. I haul out a suit.

“This could work,” Torley says behind me, excitement rising. “No, this is brilliant! If I drop the container over Mare Tranquillitatis, they’ll never find it!”

I nod. Weakly.

He’s right. The Mare Tranquillitatis is a cosmic junkyard. Meant to be the second cargo terminal after Lunar Landing. They even had a name for it: Tranquility Base.

But then Earth and Mars fell apart — over funding, over staff, over standards. And, of course, the direction of traffic. Mars runs left-hand. Earth runs right-hand. The moon?

Let’s just say it’s best not to meet anyone on a lunar highway.

Construction halted. Tranquility Base died in the crib. Now it’s a half-finished dome over busted concrete and frozen dust. Anything dropped there would vanish into the ruins.

No commanding officer is going to waste a crew crawling through ghost steel for contraband.

Normally...

But either I ran over the Toledo captain’s cat in a past life, or he’s really gunning for that next star on his collar. Either way, he’s not letting us off the hook easy. His crew will comb the Sea of Tranquility until they find every single goddamn bottle.

Torley grins wide. That spark in his eyes? It’s hope. I gave him that. And it burns through me like acid.

My stomach does somersaults as he peels out of his shipwear, and I start helping him into the suit. He talks nonstop. About the Toledo. About how a black hole should do the galaxy a favor and eat it. About how to spell “NAVY” wrong just to piss off inspection clerks.

The words wash over me like static. I just nod. Smile. My hands move on instinct, checking seals, tightening clamps, running the motions I’ve memorized from a hundred drills. Autopilot. Anything to keep from thinking.

“How long till Tranquillitatis?” Torley asks, voice almost giddy.

I check the chest display. Oxygen: 100%. Power: 89%. Fuel: 85%.

Shit.

My pulse stutters.

When was this suit last used? When was it recharged? Did we even check it after the last run?

I have no fucking idea.

“Shy!”

I flinch.

His voice cuts through me. Sharp. Grounding.

“We’ve got this,” he says. “Don’t panic. Your plan’s solid. I can handle it. Everything’s gonna be fine.”

He looks at me with those steel-gray eyes, and it hits like a punch to the ribs. He believes me. Believes in me.

My mouth goes dry. I can’t speak. I just snap the glove onto his left hand.

He smiles.

I open my mouth. Nothing.

“So, how long?” he asks again. “When do we swing past Tranquillitatis?”

I lick my lips.

“Forty minutes,” I whisper. “Maybe forty-five.”

And then I kiss him.

God, I kiss him.

He’s warm. Solid. A spark of life in the cold dark. I feel his breath hitch, taste his fear, his hope — stubborn and stupid and beautiful. My arms lock around him, holding on like I could fuse us together. For one stolen second, the universe goes quiet.

No whisky. No Toledo. No ship, no sin, no sentence.

Just us.

Then it ends.

We pull apart, and he grins — that boyish, ridiculous grin, like he just smashed his neighbor’s window with a soccer ball and got away with it.

“What did I do to deserve this?” he asks, full cat-with-the-cream.

“We’ll talk about it later,” I murmur, and snap the helmet over his head.

“Promise?”

“Promise,” I nod, swallowing the lump in my throat.

I lower his visor. Push him into the airlock.

He raises a thumb. I smile. The kind of smile every man wants to believe.

He says something. I see his lips move. But I can’t hear it — the suit’s sealed, and I’m not wearing comms.

I press the control. The bulkhead slams shut.

Next button. Pumps roar to life, draining the chamber. My eyes stay fixed on his.

But I’m not looking at him.

I’m looking past him. Through the porthole. Into the silence beyond.

And just as the starless sky of space gives way to the pale, cratered skin of the moon below, I kill the decompression early.

0.3 bar.

The gust of air pulls him out. Let´s him spin towards the surface. Gently. Like a leaf in the wind. The suit's thrusters are too weak to bring him back to the Bethany, but they're enough to give him a soft landing on the moon. That bastard from the Toledo is going to catch us.

At least one of us.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper.

He'll make it. He'll reach Lunar Landing Station. It'll be a close game, but he should have enough air in the spacesuit's tanks.

At least I hope so …