Science Fiction

by James Collins

At the edge of charted space, in a canyon settlement built on the galaxy's most valuable mineral, no law holds. No council governs. No authority has teeth. What The Notch has instead is Cael Morrow — the man who runs its only gathering house, extends its credit, settles its disputes, and has spent eleven years ensuring that when order comes to this place, it arrives on his terms. The order arrives on a morning ship. A Vaurn incorporation delegation has come to absorb The Notch into galactic governance — terms that sound like legitimacy and function like annexation. With them: Davan Reyes, a former colonial compliance officer carrying the wreckage of a career spent proving what institutions already knew and chose to ignore. He has come to The Notch because the mineral in the rock beneath it is the same mineral that killed thirty-one people at Vorth Station, and because someone has buried something in the incorporation's language that is designed to go unread. He reads it. What he finds — a provision that strips protections from the settlement's most vulnerable workers — sends him to the one man with the leverage to act on it. What he finds in Cael Morrow is not an ally. It is something more useful and more dangerous: a man who already knows, has been sitting on what he knows, and has not yet decided what it's worth. Their partnership is forged on that ground — neither man deceived about the other, neither willing to pretend the difference between them is reconcilable. Cael operates in calculation and control. Davan operates in principle and cost. The settlement needs both. The settlement may not survive both. Then an Ossori worker — the first person who spoke honestly to Davan, the man who told him how power actually works in The Notch — doesn't show up for his shift. And a miner who has been underground too long surfaces from the deep rock speaking in a language of absolute clarity, saying things he should not be able to know. And at the edge of every gathering, something extraordinarily still is watching — something no species will name, something that has been here longer than anyone suspects, and that has, after years of silence, begun to speak. The vote is in thirty days. The Bleed runs in the deep rock below. And the question The Notch must answer is not whether it can survive incorporation — but whether the men who are trying to save it can look at what it costs and know the choices were theirs.