Sci-Fi

The engine of the SS Chronos did not hum; it screamed in a frequency beyond human hearing, a structural vibration that felt like needles against the marrow. Inside the cockpit, Elias Thorne sat enveloped in the soft, amber glow of the console. Outside the reinforced viewports, the universe was no longer a collection of stars but a smeared kaleidoscope of blues and violets—the visual distortion of traveling at $0.999c$.

Elias reached into the pocket of his flight suit and pulled out a silver pocket watch. It was a relic of the Old World, a brass-geared anachronism in a ship built of carbon nanotubes. He flipped the casing open.

The neon outside my office didn’t glow so much as struggle.

It flickered and buzzed like it had something left to say but no lungs to push it out. Sickly violet light bled through the slats of my blinds, striping the room in uneven bars that crawled across the chrome desk, the empty glass, the revolver I didn’t remember buying. Out here in the rings, even light had a habit of losing itself.

The smell hits me before the sirens do—engine grease and spent shells baked into the regolith, rising off the trench walls like incense at a funeral. Callisto’s sky is the color of a bruise, Jupiter hanging low and swollen on the horizon, its bands of rust and cream indifferent to the men dying beneath it. I press my back against the frozen mud and check my rifle for the fourth time in three minutes.