Chapter 2 – On a Whisky and a Prayer

 

Orbitalfreighter Bethany — August 5, 2280
Shyla

The Bethany groans.

Not the kind of sound you can ignore. A deep, throaty rumble—metal straining against metal, mass pushing back against the false stillness of orbital mooring. Spacers call it harbor singing. The dirge of freighters and forgotten ships. The lullaby of steel and tension.

That’s what you get when you dock a quarter-million tons of cargo in microgravity. Nobody really lands a beast like the Bethany—not even on the Moon. The Lunar Docking Station just floats above Lunar Landing, dangling in orbit like a rust-streaked chandelier. Close enough to touch, too far to trust.

Normally, the cranes would be moving already—steel arms whirring, hydraulics sighing, cargo drifting like obedient whales into the gondolas of the Lunar elevator. Time is dollars. Every idle hour bleeds green.

But not today.

Today, there’s silence. Heavy. Unnatural. Like even the Docking Station is holding its breath.

I try to smile. Pretend calm. The air hisses as the pumps equalize pressure between the station and the ship. On ships like the Bethany, we fly undercut—thin air, less oxygen. Not enough to be dangerous, just enough to cut costs. High-altitude simulation, they call it. Legal. Efficient. A spacer’s trick. Run light, save a few thousand a year.

The forty pallets in LH-4518-B?

Different story.

Five thousand bottles of contraband whisky. Hidden in plain sight. Camouflaged by forged manifests, outdated shipping codes, and a prayer.

My stomach knots.

That’s the part that’ll break me.

I bite my lip hard.

Fuck.

Of course I know what a drone suit is. Everyone does.

Modified spacesuits, rigged for perpetual labor—where prisoners serve out their time in the mines of the Ganymede Colony. Twenty-four hours a day. Seven days a week. No breaks. No parole.

It's the kind of horror story you tell kids to make them finish their broccoli. Or the kind the dean of your school uses to spice up his lectures when you're failing math. Drop below Blue Karma, and you’re done. You’ll end up in the suit, scraping ice and Ignis for the rest of your life.

Fuck you, Mr. Peabody.

If that smug bastard could see me now, he’d be grinning from ear to ear. Wearing that same “I told you so” smirk that made me want to break his nose back in tenth grade.

For most people, the drone suit is a distant nightmare. The ultimate “game over” if your Karma score hits zero. Or if you’re dumb enough to get caught smuggling three times.

Which, let’s be honest, is the same thing.

Zero Karma means your SoulLight shuts off. No more rights. No more protections. You're state property. They own your ass and seal you into the fucking suit like spoiled tuna in a tin. No way out. You can´t take it off. Not a single second. Not unless the Commonwealth decides you’ve suffered enough.

You live in it. Sleep in it. Eat in it. Shit in it.

You become it.

On a moon where only one city—Port Thialy—has even halfway breathable air, it’s cheaper to entomb prisoners in personal survival suits than build heated cells with oxygenated cafeterias.

The Bethany’s airlock hisses.

Soft. Precise. Like the old ship can feel my nerves vibrating through the deck plating. Both the inner and outer bulkheads retract at once—and just like that, I’m staring into the icy gray eyes of a UCSN officer.

Blank. Flat. Colder than the vacuum beyond the hull.

He's not just wearing the uniform—he owns it. Like it grew on him. Like the medals and rank pins are part of his DNA. And behind him, shadowed in the corridor, are four spacemarines. At least. Maybe more.

Their railguns are down. Not stowed. Not idle. Ready.

My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. My throat clenches like a vice.

There’s a lump there.

Bigger than the fucking Moon.

Or Ganymede.

They call them Steeljacks.

Not just because of the armor—though that matte-black exo-plate could probably handle a Sunday stroll on the surface of the sun—but because of the way they move. Like machines wearing the memory of men.

“Greetings, citizen,” the lead one says, his voice clipped, professional. “Lieutenant Commander Sanders, UCSN. Requesting permission to board and conduct an inspection of your vessel.”

My smile spreads, bloodless and brittle. Reflex. Instinct. Survival.

“Of course,” I say—or something that sounds like me says it. My voice comes out wrong, like it belongs to someone else entirely. Someone less terrified. “Please… come aboard.”

He ducks slightly, as if the Bethany’s airlock is too cramped for his regal posture. The same airlock I shoved Torley through.

My gut twists.

Without thinking, I step back into the corridor, half-hiding in the ship’s shadows. I don’t want to remember the look on Torley’s face. Don’t want to ask myself if he’s still alive. Back at HQ, I’d killed the comm the second I heard his voice, shut him out before he could speak. Before I could give in to the pull—to the words clawing their way up my throat.

Words like I’m sorry.

Words like I love you.

But if I’d said them, I might as well have handed him over gift-wrapped, with a big red sticker: Fugitive Smuggler—please arrest.

The Bethany shudders under the S

teeljacks’ boots. Not four. Eight at least. Maybe more. Sanders scans the corridor with a gaze that slices everything it touches—peeling paint, flickering lights, worn anti-slip flooring. To him, the Bethany isn’t a ship. She’s a floating dump. A filthy outhouse in low orbit.

“Thank you for your cooperation, citizen,” he says, the words as cold as his eyes.

I nod. No words. Just the stiff twitch of my neck.

He raises his left arm. A HoloPad flickers to life above his wrist, cool blue against the scarred bulkhead.

“Crew manifest?” he asks.

My throat is raw. Dry.

“None,” I whisper. “Just me. I’m alone.”

He looks up from the pad, studies me with narrowed eyes, one brow lifting with surgical precision.

“I’m alone,” I repeat, my voice scraping out like rusted metal. “Captain and pilot.”

He doesn’t blink. “The ship’s registry still lists a Mr. Torley Legrande as chief mechanic.”

“Torley… no, I—” I shake my head, too quickly. Too visibly. “He’s co-owner, that’s all. Technically. And… you can’t fly solo, not legally. Guild rules. It voids the insurance if you do…”

The lie stumbles out, threadbare and desperate. His fingers begin dancing across the HoloPad—fast, efficient, silent. Not a word. Just inputting whatever data confirms I’m screwed six ways from orbit.

Guild fraud.

Not as bad as smuggling. Not quite. And technically, it would be my first strike. But bad enough to drop my karma like a stone in the deep. Probably straight into Purple.

Still better than Zero.

“Torley…” I start again, “he’s mostly on Earth now. Probably drunk out of his mind while I’m—”

“Manifest.” The words are sharp, snapped out like an order to fire.

I flinch.

Then dig into my jumpsuit pocket, fingers closing around the smooth cylinder of my HoloPen. It’s sleek, silver, no longer than a stylus, with the barely-there insignia of the Merchant Guild etched into one end.

I press my thumb to the sensor.

A shimmering grid of shipping data unfolds above the pen—organized by color, container ID, and storage zone. All freshly tweaked. Torley’s handiwork, down to the last decimal.

Maybe I should’ve used the originals. Played the naïve card. Prayed for mercy in a uniform that doesn’t believe in it.

But Rule #1 of forging anything: never keep the originals. They’ll always come back to bite.

Sanders swipes his hand through the projection. It vanishes. Transferred directly to his pad.

No password prompt. No clearance check.

Just... gone.

I swallow hard.

The message is clear: you have no rights here.

Sanders begins scanning the document, fingers twitching over the text like he’s flipping through someone’s obituary.

“Why did you tamper with the shipping documents?”

Sanders’ voice doesn’t change. No accusation, no judgment. Just a data request. Like he’s asking for the Bethany’s hull specs, not the reason I’ve essentially confessed to smuggling.

My mouth opens.

No sound comes out.

There are stories. Whispers, passed from spacer to spacer over lukewarm synth-beer in orbital dive bars. Stories about watermarks buried deep in shipping records. Invisible unicodes embedded by the Guild. Tracer signals and checksum traps—tiny digital ghosts, engineered to snitch the moment a manifest gets touched by unauthorized fingers. Officially, they’re myths.

But the Navy? They’ve got descramblers. They always have descramblers.

And Torley? He’s doctored more manifests than I’ve had bad hangovers. Probably a dozen forged manifests are floating in Lunar Dock right now. But they’re not the ones the UCSN’s warship Toledo is hunting.

I am.

Sanders is still looking at me. Patient. Silent. Waiting for a confession I don’t want to give.

Not yet …

I swallow, throat dry as reactor dust. “There was… a power failure. Between Earth and the Moon. The file got corrupted. I had to… restore it.”

“A power failure,” he repeats, tasting the words like vintage scotch.

I nod, too fast. Too eager. We both know it’s bullshit. Shipboard power failures don’t touch the cargo manifest—it’s redundantly stored on every major drive and backed up hourly in the ship’s blackbox.

Even a fresh recruit would know that.

The holo dims and vanishes from his wrist. Sanders’ expression doesn’t change.

“Show me container KM-8351-B.”

My pulse spikes.

That’s one of those containers. The ones Torley had… creatively redistributed. And just like that, Sanders vaporizes my last desperate hope—that they’d get bored, get reassigned, or hit quota before opening that particular crate.

250,000 register tons hang in the rig. The Bethany’s dumbbell spine stretches from the engine core to the cockpit module, every inch crammed with freight—containers locked in a dense lattice, a metal forest suspended in vacuum. Thousands of them. Ten Steeljacks on board. It should take days to search them all. Weeks. That was the plan. That was the hope.

But Torley, in all his digital finesse, left a breadcrumb trail straight to the prize—forty pallets of bootlegged whiskey buried in container KM-8351-B.

I clench my jaw, push back the panic.

“Can we talk, Commander?” I ask, voice tight.

And for a moment—just a flicker—I see something shift in his expression. Not warmth. Not sympathy. Just… pity. The kind that says you should’ve come clean when you had the chance.

“I’m sorry, citizen,” he replies quietly. “But that opportunity passed eight standard hours ago.”

He straightens. “Please show me container KM-8351-B.”

I hesitate.

“And if I—”

“Please,” he cuts in, firm now. “Don’t make this harder than it already is. Cooperate.”

His eyes are void-cold again.

I nod, throat burning with the weight of inevitability.

I’ve kept a United Commonwealth warship circling for over eight hours, dancing it in circles, stalling every step of the way. That kind of defiance doesn’t go unnoticed. Someone wants to make an example.

Tit for tat.

The Toledo probably has my name etched into a cell plate in the brig by now. But Sanders? He’s taking his sweet time. Wants me to sweat. Wants me to open container after container—draw out the inevitable. This isn’t protocol. This is theater. And I’m the fucking mouse in their little stage play.

There’s nothing I can do. Not with the Toledo parked so close above us it’s practically breathing down the Bethany’s neck. Not with ten Steeljacks flanking me, visor-dark and silent, like they’ve already picked me as their play bunny for tonight’s evening.

My stomach tightens, a solid knot of dread. But I don’t show it. Sanders already claimed his first small victory—a crack in my voice, a stammered plea for understanding. I won’t give him another.

I turn without a word, duck through the bulkhead. “This way.”

No need to look back. I can feel them. The weight of ten armored giants, boots hammering the deck behind me like the drums of war. I catch the side rail, swing into the Nohlan tube, and let gravity vanish. The spine of the Bethany swallows me whole—narrow, cold, and dead silent.

I descend slowly, drifting down the zero-g shaft that runs like a lifeline between cockpit and engine. And for a desperate brief moment, everything feels like an ordinary day. No Steeljacks. No sound. Just me and the echo of the ship.

Deck Zero isn't even a real deck. It’s where the Nohlan Ring clamps on—the skeletal loading ring that rides the outside of the rig like a ghost, sliding over container racks, lifting or locking freight into place. An autonomous crane. A necessary evil. And now, the stage for my final act.

A few years back, a Nohlan Ring was standard on most long-haul freighters. Back when orbital docks appreciated a little self-sufficiency. You rolled in, parked clean, and helped unload your own rig—stations were grateful, captains were proud. That changed the day Lunar Trading Corp opened its first express terminal on New Washington Space 2. After that, loading rings became obsolete. Expensive dead weight.

But the Bethany? She’s old-school. And cheap.

One of the last dumbbell-class haulers where the ring isn’t just a luxury—it’s critical. Part of the stabilizing system for rotational gravity. You remove it, and she doesn’t just rattle—she falls apart. That’s why we got her at a price. And why no one else wanted her.

Torley called it a steal. I called it a deathtrap with vintage flair.

I wait until one of the Steeljacks seals the bulkhead behind us. Then I hit the console. Cold holoscreens blink to life. Motors grind awake. The Nohlan Ring shudders like an old dog in winter, then glides along the rig’s spine, scanning container IDs.

“KM-8351-B?” I ask, not looking at Sanders.

“Yes,” he answers, clipped. Tight.

We’re not going to be friends. Not in this lifetime.

Outside the viewing port, rows of containers pass beneath us like the ribs of a sleeping metal beast. Thousands of them. Full of everything from antibiotics to alloy chips. Mars digs the ore. Luna breaks it down. That made them rich. But nothing grow in Regolith or Red Dust. No living soil. No sun. No hope. Food’s synthetic, brewed in vats and sprayed with flavor code. You order coffee on the Moon, you get brown bitterness that only dreams of being mocha. I’ve tried. Several times. Still tastes like defeat.

Torley drinks it like it’s ambrosia.

Twelve thousand containers clamped in radial stacks along the rig, and it’s still not enough. Not to cover fuel. Not to beat the debt clock.

Not without slipping in a few hundred liters of contraband.

Yeah. That sucks.

Time crawls like syrup.

No one talks. Not the Steeljacks—those towering silence bricks in armor—and definitely not Sanders. There are jokes about them. Old spacer bar lore. Like:

A Steeljack walks into a bar and says, “Whiskey.”

That’s it. That’s the whole joke.

It’s one of Torley’s favorites. I always laughed. Never meant it.

I sure as hell don’t feel like laughing now.

I take a breath. The kind that tastes like recycled air and regret. Below, the rig stretches into steel infinity. Between each row of containers, a gaping black slit—pitch dark, just wide enough for the loading platform to slide through. It’s like floating above a chasm that wants to eat you. No lights. No edges. Just void.

Finally, the Nohlan Ring slows. The control arm with the side-grip module lowers like a patient guillotine. I press the manual overrides—Bethany’s old enough to still have them—and the hiss of pneumatics answers as the bulkhead lines up with container KM-8351-B.

Medical supplies.

And, yeah… some personal … erotic gear. The kind marketed for pleasure.

I exhale.

Of course they’d start with the fun stuff.

“KM-8351-B,” I say, gesturing toward the access hatch. Sanders gives a curt nod.

I stay in the control module, which means two of the Steeljacks stay with me. Honestly? I almost feel bad for them. Almost. Full-body armor doesn’t pair well with prying open boxes of... specialty merchandise. It’s not the stuff I want to dream about.

They take their time but finally, they shuffle back through the bulkhead, Sanders at the rear. KM-8351-B is clean. Mostly. Though I’m guessing the owners won’t be thrilled when they file that insurance claim.

“BR-3686-X,” Sanders growls.

I nod.

By the time we crack open the third container, time has stopped meaning anything.

Container XW-9926-D almost killed us.

Because it’s never a good idea to breach a bulk wheat container without proper prep. Grain’s heavier than it looks—and once it starts flowing, it doesn’t stop. It pours like dry quicksand, fast enough to bury a man in seconds. Took three Steeljacks and a cargo hook to dig one of their own out. He’s still coughing up wheat kernels.

HG-7018-T? That one was worse.

Hydrofluoric acid. Nasty stuff. Eats through just about anything—including the reactive plates in a standard-issue SpaceMarine suit.

Why that idiot decided to dip his glove into the sampling valve is beyond me. The warning labels glowed bright enough to burn a fist sized hole into his visor. Still, Sergeant Baines is one lucky bastard. The Durexsteel in his gauntlet held just long enough for us to strip him out of the armor. Mostly. A few minor burns, some scorched dignity, and a first aid kit that expired four years ago. Vintage Commonwealth healthcare.

Somewhere between containers KG-4920-V and JY-8374-U, I met the business end of a Steeljack shock baton.

The Nohlan ring’s control module has a tiny utility head—less toilet, more thunderbolt-to-space. When I told Sanders I needed to relieve myself, he insisted on sending a marine with me.

To prevent an escape.

I wasn’t cuffed at the time. But that little gesture—like I’d vanish into a vent with ten Steeljacks watching—was enough to make me snap.

One slap.

Maybe two.

Hard to remember, but the violet bloom on his cheekbone is definitely sticking around. After that, they put me in restraints. Tight ones.

Now I can’t feel my fingers.

Totally worth it.

And then we reach container LH-4518-B.

My own personal black hole.

The clamps groan as they engage the container, the sound low and pained, like Bethany herself is mourning. The bulkhead hisses open. Cold air spills through the gap.

Sanders turns toward me, lips curling into the sort of grin predators wear before they pounce.

“Shall we?” he asks.

His eyes gleam. He’s already savoring the moment—just seconds before he finds out whether I’m a criminal… or just unlucky.

I give him a thin, joyless smile, dip through the bulkhead, and a few steps later, I’m wrapped in the utilitarian gloom of a freight container.

The air hits me like a wall. Stale. Close. Heavy with malt, machine oil, and something else—something rank and chemical that twists my stomach into knots. I press my lips together, swallowing the sour heat crawling up my throat. Blink against the sting.

The metal walls are scratched and bruised, the floor warped by decades of cargo. Guild-mandated strip lights cast more shadow than illumination. But the crates stacked before us are impossible to miss.

Real wood.

Not composite. Not printed. Actual handcrafted oak, each crate a unique artifact in a universe of mass replication.

Duhain whisky isn’t just made. It’s honored. Fire-distilled over peat, aged in barrels for decades until time itself steeps into its golden bones.

This isn’t cargo.

It’s contraband poetry.

I exhale.

One of the Steeljacks brushes past me and pries open the nearest crate. The sound—splintering wood and groaning nails—shudders down my spine. He turns, holds up a bottle.

Blue-labeled Duhain. A single glass could buy a week on Mars.

Sanders glances over it, then back to his HoloPad, fingers slicing through the manifest.

“I can’t find any record of this section of cargo,” he says, cold and clinical. “No documentation. No customs clearance.”

I take a long, slow breath.

It’s over. We both know it.

“Can’t we just leave it?” I murmur. “We both know the papers don’t exist.”

He raises an eyebrow, eyes flicking from the glowing holodocs to me. For a split second, the blue wash of the hologram flickers across his face—and for the first time, he doesn’t look like an officer. He looks disappointed.

“Are you implying, citizen...” he begins, voice as even as glass, “that this shipment is contraband?”

My jaw tightens. I nod.

Sanders doesn’t blink. Just taps something into the HoloPad. “Then I must inform you that anything you say from this moment on may be used as evidence against you. Do you understand?”

The cuffs tighten around my wrists. Steel bites deep. I nod again, throat dry.

Helpless.

I’ve never felt this helpless.

No. That’s a lie.

I have. Once.

But I don’t let myself remember that.

Sanders speaks again, fingers moving like a conductor over the holo’s surface. “Please confirm—clearly—that you’ve been informed of the legal consequences of further statements.”

Gods, I want to scream.

But I don’t.

“I understood,” I say, my voice catching. I clear my throat, forcing it stronger. “I have been informed.”

He records it. Another flick of his fingers.

Then, calmly, he adds, “Please state clearly and in full sentences—”

“Damn it!” I snap. “Yes, I understand I’m fucked. And yes, the whisky is illegal. No cargo papers. No customs clearance. Nobody paid a credit of duty—not the bastards who hired me and definitely not me.” I raise my cuffed hands. “You think I do this for the thrill? For fun? I do it to survive. Because 250,000 tons of legal cargo barely keeps my ship fueled and my lungs full.”

There’s a pause. A faint shadow of empathy crosses his expression. “We know that, citizen. Everyone in the Navy does. And maybe, fourteen hours ago, you might’ve found someone aboard willing to listen.”

My breath catches.

That’s when it hits me—like a railgun to the gut.

This wasn’t about justice.

It wasn’t about duty.

And it sure as hell wasn’t about some captain gunning for a promotion.

The Toledo didn’t chase us down to uphold the law. They chased us for green. For some fucking damn Dollar …

Sanders doesn’t let it linger.

“Citizen Vanderwood,” he says, voice hard again, “as this is your third recorded offense, you fall under Criminal Justice Act MXVII § 219. You are hereby stripped of 5000 Lux. Your SoulLight will be deactivated. Effective immediately.”

My blood goes cold.

“You will be processed for sentencing” he finishes. “Trooper Martinez—apply the silencer.”

“No,” I whisper, shaking my head. “Wait. Please—”

But Martinez is already moving. The Steeljack produces a flat, metallic disc from his belt—the same pouch the cuffs came from.

It hums to life. Unfolds like a spider. Metal bands bloom outward, a polished muzzle cone rising from its center like a flower of restraint.

“Prisoner,” Martinez barks. “Open your mouth.”

“No! Please—don’t—” I twist, glance at Sanders. “It’s not necessary! I—”

I don’t get a chance to finish.