CHAPTER 1 — Damian
The first thing Damian remembered was the sound of metal creaking around him, a low groaning echo that vibrated through his bones. It wasn't a battlefield, or a bunker, or the familiar hum of Earth air recyclers. It was the thin, hollow breathing of a station built with just enough material to keep people alive and nothing more.
He opened his eyes to a dim apartment barely larger than the room he used to store equipment in during his old life. The walls curved slightly inward from pressure stress. The lights buzzed—cheap, inconsistent LEDs that flickered like they were deciding whether to work today or not.
He didn't recognize the body he was in, not at first. Long arms, slim frame, joints that flexed a little too easily. Pale skin with a bluish undertone from chronic low gravity. A Belter body.
He sat up slowly on the narrow cot, breathing in the recycled air. It tasted like metal, coffee grounds, and a hint of mold.
"Okay," he muttered to himself. "Not Earth. Not dead. Somehow… this."
He didn't get answers that morning. Or the next day. Or the ones after that.
He adjusted. He adapted. That part came naturally; engineers were good at making broken systems work.
The new name—Damian—felt strange on his tongue at first, but it stuck. A cleaner start.
Ceres Station became his home, or at least the closest thing someone in his situation could call home. He picked up the local creole fast, mixed with old habits from his past life. People noticed sometimes, wondered why a young Belter spoke like he'd been drilled by multiple types of command structures. He shrugged it off by saying he worked cargo. Belters didn't question hard work if you showed you could do it.
He found jobs—small ones at first. Fixing broken pressure seals, patching up pipes in half-abandoned modules, recalibrating tools for people who didn't have the credits to buy new ones. He never bragged about what he could do. He learned early that being too skilled only made people ask questions.
When credits were short—and they were short a lot—he turned to the darknet. On Ceres, the darknet wasn't really "dark." It was just another hallway. The black-market nodes were open secrets, running through old mining shafts and unregistered server stacks welded to the backs of support pillars.
Damian didn't hack for glory or ego. He hacked because he needed to eat, and because making systems bend to his will was the one thing he could still rely on. He siphoned tiny, careful amounts from corporations that wouldn't notice a few thousand vanishing. He made sure his footprints were as scattered as the station's gravity drift.
He kept to himself. Mostly.
The cracked tablet on his desk flickered with system error messages as he soldered a power connector back into place. His hands worked steady, practiced. Former combat engineers learned to fix things under fire, in sandstorms, with useless tools and no sleep. Compared to that, a station with unreliable electricity was easy living.
A soft buzz from the door interrupted him. Damian sighed, set down the soldering iron, and opened the door panel.
Kella Wint grinned at him like she was carrying bad news and expected him to thank her for it. She was short for a Belter, messy hair tied in a loop, jumpsuit covered in grease. Her eyes were sharp, too sharp sometimes. Like she always saw more than she let on.
"Dami," she greeted, leaning her shoulder against the doorframe. "Got somethin' ya might like."
"I told you I'm not buying more scrap till I finish this," he said, gesturing at the half-dead tablet.
"Yeah, ya say a lotta things," she said. "But this one special."
He raised a brow. "Special how?"
"Special as in 'if ya don't grab it someone else will,'" she replied, pushing past him into the apartment without asking. Belters didn't really understand personal space. "And I like ya more than most, so I thought I'd give ya first dibs."
Damian crossed his arms. "This better not be another broken drone limb."
"It ain't." She reached into her bag and pulled out a sleek metal cylinder, dented but intact. She dropped it on his table with a metallic clunk. "Look."
Damian picked it up. It had weight. Real weight. Martian make. The lines were too clean, the edges too sharp for Ceres junk.
"A portable structural scanner," he murmured. "Military-grade."
Kella's grin widened. "Knew ya'd like it."
"Where the hell did you find this?"
She shrugged with an innocent expression so fake it was almost impressive. "Warehouse mix-up."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning don't ask unless ya want to be responsible for knowin'," she said. "Better ya stay stupid. Easier to deny later."
He snorted. "You're going to get spaced someday."
"And ya gonna fix my comms when I'm floatin' in vacuum, yah?"
He shook his head. "This is good. Really good. Even damaged, the processor alone is worth—"
"Worth more than ya got," she finished for him. "So stop bein' polite and buy it off me. Cheap."
He tested the cylinder's joints, checking the microfractures. "It's not completely dead. I can fix this."
"Ya gonna fix everything eventually. Like some kinda station ghost."
Damian rolled his eyes. "I don't even know what that means."
"Means ya quiet, ya everywhere, and ya touch systems ya shouldn't," she teased. "People notice."
That made him pause.
She looked at him again, a little more serious now. "Not in a bad way. But ya should be careful, Dami. This station hungry. It chew people up."
"I'll manage," he said.
"You always say that."
"And I'm always right."
She smirked. "Till the day ya ain't."
He didn't argue. Because she was right—and because he'd been wrong once already. That's how he ended up in this body in the first place.
Kella pushed off the table. "I got work. Ya need me, ya know where my warehouse at."
"Yeah," he said. "I'll stop by later."
"Good." She pointed at the scanner. "And bring credits. None of ya ghost tricks."
Damian sighed. "I don't steal from my friends."
She winked. "I know. That's why I trust ya."
After she left, he sat back down and turned the scanner over in his hands. It was heavier than it looked. Strong. Durable. Real tech, not the usual crap that circulated down here.
Perfect for what he was planning.
The apartment lights flickered again, longer this time. Damian frowned and glanced at the ceiling. The hum of the recyclers dipped, recovered, dipped again.
Something was wrong with the grid. Not uncommon on Ceres. But it felt different today—like a warning shot.
He didn't know it yet, but far out past Saturn, a ship called the Canterbury was already drifting toward its final hours.
And Ceres was about to change forever.