Conflict Space

Prologue — Chapter 1, Scene 1

The Hollows — Perimeter Sector 7 · Eight Months Before the Fall of Terra Nova

The sky over the Hollows had no stars. Whatever hung above this part of the planet was choked behind a permanent haze of mineral dust — fine, ferrous, blown up out of the basin every evening by the cooling winds and never fully allowed to settle — and the haze turned the night into a bruised, copper-dark ceiling that pressed down on the world like the inside lid of a kiln. Somewhere far above, two suns had already finished setting. None of it reached the floor of Sector 7. The light that did reach down here came from the rock itself.

The ravines cut through the landscape like old wounds — not gentle valleys carved by patient rivers but raw splits, the sort of geology made fast and angry by something the planet would no longer admit to. Through that pale stone ran veins. Black, glassy, thinner than a finger at one end and thick as a forearm at the other, branching in fractal patterns up the cliff faces like a circulatory system that had long since stopped pumping. The veins were faintly luminescent — not bright enough to read by, but enough that on a moonless night a man could stand at the bottom of the ravine and see the outline of the canyon walls drawn against the dark in slow, breathing pulses, as if the rock itself had a heartbeat that had only just remembered how to beat.

Captain Daniel Miller hated this place. He had said as much three hours ago, standing at the mouth of the ravine while his scouting team ran their final pre-deployment checks. Said it the way he said most things — flat, dry, with the particular weariness of a man who had been a scout long enough to know that hating a place was a luxury you allowed yourself before the work started, because you would not have time during, and you might not have breath after.

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