Geid was a smaller planet than Argus had expected—a fact he discovered the hard way when his inner ear rebelled against the lighter gravity during their descent.
The Hummingbird touched down with barely a shudder, Jack Lane's expert piloting compensating for the atmospheric differences that would have sent a lesser pilot bouncing across the landing zone. They were setting down in the parking lot of an abandoned robotics factory, a vast concrete expanse cracked and overgrown with weeds, surrounded by the skeletal remains of industrial equipment. Rusted cranes loomed overhead like the bones of dead giants. Through the factory's shattered windows, Argus could see the assembly arms still frozen mid-reach—hydraulic models, the kind the Republic had phased out two decades ago in favor of magnetic actuators. He'd seen identical units displayed in the technology museum on Axis, mounted behind glass with placards explaining how primitive civilizations had once built things. Here, they'd been cutting-edge when the factory closed.
It would be a significant walk to meet their clients in the city. Averton lay beyond a ridge of low hills, its spires just visible through the haze of agricultural dust that hung perpetually over this region. Population: just under five hundred thousand. Median age: forty-two. Like most Geid settlements, the town centered around its harvest grounds—agriculture was not merely economy here but religion. The red wheat that gave Geid its fame grew nowhere else in the sector, and the Crimson Harvest—the annual festival marking the season's first cutting—was the closest thing the planet had to a holy day. The farming clans who traced their lineages back through generations of harvest cycles held more social power than any Republic official or Ministry representative.
"We are cleared to land, right?" Argus asked, peering through the viewport at the empty factory grounds. No welcoming committee. No security. No indication that anyone knew—or cared—that they were here.
"Yes," Jack said patiently. It wasn't the first time Argus had asked the question. "We are cleared. I filed the flight plan with the Sector Authority myself. All proper and legal."
"And yet no one is here to greet us."
"This is Geid," Vivian said from behind him, her voice dry as the desert wind. "They don't greet people here. They tolerate them."
Argus shot her a look, but she was already moving toward the exit ramp, her movements economical and precise. Even after months of traveling together, he still found her unreadable. The woman was a weapon wrapped in human skin, and she rarely let him forget it.
They disembarked from the ship and headed out to meet the rest of their party, stepping from the climate-controlled interior into the full assault of Geid's atmosphere.
The smell hit Argus like a physical blow.
He gagged, stumbling backward, one hand flying to cover his nose and mouth. The air reeked of manure and rotting vegetation and something else—something sweet and cloying that he couldn't identify. It coated the inside of his throat, thick and wet, making each breath feel like he was swallowing something alive.
Agricultural planets often smelled terrible, but Geid was in a class by itself. The entire ecosystem seemed designed to produce maximum olfactory offense. Somewhere in the distance, a massive herd of something—cattle? swine? he couldn't tell and didn't want to know—was contributing its daily output to the fragrant atmosphere.
Argus pulled the back of his shirt up over his nose and mouth, trying to filter out the worst of it. The fabric helped, but only barely.
A soft chuckle reached his ears from nearby. He shot a glare at Vivian, who had emerged from her own vessel—the Cudgel, a battered merchant ship that looked like it had been through several wars—and was watching his distress with something that might have been amusement.
"This is not bad," she said. Her expression remained neutral, but her eyes glittered with barely contained mirth.
"It smells like manure," Argus replied, his voice muffled by the fabric. "Like someone filled a swimming pool with manure and then set it on fire."
She shrugged. "There are worse things. Lower your shirt before you offend someone. The locals are proud of their agricultural heritage. And the smell will pass."
"You mean I'll get used to it." Argus forced himself to drop the edge of his shirt. The smell made him gag again, but he breathed through his mouth and tried to convince his brain that this was normal. "I'll get used to having little flakes of fecal material permanently lodged in my nasal cavities. That is so reassuring."
"Better than flakes of dead people," Vivian said softly.
Argus stared at her. "Is that supposed to make me feel better?"
"Just perspective." Her dark eyes met his, and for a moment he saw something ancient and tired behind them. "No matter how bad things are, they can always be worse. I've been in places where the air tasted of cremated bodies for weeks. Where you couldn't wash the death out of your hair no matter how hard you scrubbed. Compared to that, cow dung is almost pleasant."
Argus didn't have a response to that. He'd heard rumors about Vivian's past—her training at the Ministry, the missions she'd undertaken before going rogue—but she rarely spoke of it directly. When she did, the glimpses were always like this: small windows into horrors he couldn't imagine.
"You are quite the ray of sunshine, aren't you?" he said finally.
She didn't smile, but something in her posture softened slightly. "Someone has to be."
Jeremiah cleared his throat, drawing their attention. The old Minister stood near the edge of the landing pad, looking profoundly uncomfortable in the loose-fitting brown garb that Jack had provided. The clothing was appropriate for the region—practical, understated, designed to help them blend in with the local population—but Jeremiah had spent fifty years in Ministerial robes. Wearing anything else clearly felt like a betrayal of everything he believed.
He'd shaved his head that morning, a process that had taken nearly an hour of careful preparation and involved the application of a glossy substance that gave his scalp an extra sheen. The effect was supposed to make him look like a merchant from the outer settlements. Instead, he looked like a bald man who had put too much effort into looking like a merchant.
Vivian had done up her raven hair in a tight bun, pinned with simple wooden sticks that concealed the thin blades she always carried. That had taken nearly as long as Jeremiah's transformation.
Argus's own hair was as ruffled as ever—he'd made no effort to change his appearance beyond the clothing—though he noticed with some dismay that his hairline was receding more than he remembered. When had that started? Was it stress? The rigors of travel? Or just the inevitable march of time catching up to him?
He was thirty-four years old. Too young to be going bald. Too old to pretend it wasn't happening.
"We need to get moving," Jeremiah reminded them, his voice taking on the authoritative tone that came naturally to a man who had spent decades commanding religious congregations. "We have many people to speak to and not a lot of time. The Ministry expects a full report within the week."
Then the short, bald man turned and strode toward Averton, his steps quick and purposeful despite his age. Vivian and Argus exchanged a glance—the kind of look that only develops between people who have spent too much time together in enclosed spaces—and followed.
They'd decided to leave the soldiers aboard the Hummingbird, at least for now. A group of three could blend into the local population with some effort; a group of twenty-three, half of them carrying military-grade weapons, would stand out like a bonfire at midnight. If things went wrong, they could call for backup. Until then, stealth was the priority.
Plus, Argus reminded himself, if things really went wrong, he had Vivian. One woman worth twenty soldiers, if the stories were true.
He hoped he'd never have to find out.
"Here," he said, pulling a stack of pamphlets from his satchel and handing them to Vivian. The papers were cheaply printed, the text almost illegible, but they served their purpose—they identified their little group as representatives of a farming supply company based on Terminus. A cover story thin enough to collapse under scrutiny, but most people didn't scrutinize. Most people took things at face value.
Vivian tucked the pamphlets into her own bag without comment. She knew what they were for.
The walk to Averton took nearly an hour, following a dirt road that wound through fields of red wheat—Geid's famous export, the stalks heavy with crimson-tinged kernels that caught the late afternoon light and turned the landscape the color of old rust. Workers toiled in the distance, bent over their crops, their movements slow and rhythmic, hands moving in patterns passed down from parent to child like prayers.
No machines here—Geid's agricultural traditions were ancient and jealously guarded, passed down through generations of farming families who viewed automation as a kind of heresy.
Halfway to the city, they passed a cluster of field workers gathered around a battered holoterminal mounted on a fence post. The unit was a relic—a boxy thing with visible wiring and a cracked projection lens that scattered the image into ghostly fragments. On Axis, these had been replaced by seamless neural-linked displays years ago. Argus's own datapad, tucked in his satchel, could have projected a signal a hundred times cleaner from any relay in the sector. But the signal was poor—Sector Six's relay stations were decades behind the Core's—and he caught only a fragment of audio before the feed dissolved into static: "...representatives from four planetary systems have signed the new charter. The self-declared Union has issued formal demands to the Republic for recognition and territorial sovereignty..."
One of the workers glanced up as they passed, her gaze drifting past them to the Hummingbird's silhouette still visible on the horizon. The ship's sleek composite hull and angular stabilizer fins must have looked alien against Geid's skyline of timber frames and corrugated metal. She stared for a long moment, then turned back to the holoterminal with the careful disinterest of someone who had learned not to ask questions about things above her station.
The workers muttered among themselves, their weathered faces tight with something Argus recognized. He'd seen that same expression in the crowd at the stadium on Tellus—in the eyes of people who'd lived with a boot on their necks so long they'd forgotten what standing straight felt like. Hope, dangerous and newborn, mixed with the older, safer instinct to keep your head down.
Vivian caught his eye but said nothing. She didn't need to. Darius Gray's declaration—born in a soccer stadium only weeks ago—was already rippling outward, five sectors from where it started, reaching a farming world that had never heard of the Ministry. Even here, where people measured wealth in harvest yields and traced their lineages through crops instead of capital, the question was arriving: whose side are you on?
He thought of the broadcast footage from Tellus—hundreds of thousands packed into that stadium, and among them must have been children. Children hoisted onto their parents' shoulders, too young to understand what was being promised, old enough to feel it in the roar. He wondered how many of those parents were lying awake right now, the way Samantha must be, asking themselves whether the world they were building would be worth what it cost the ones too small to choose.
The thought triggered something colder—a memory of Grove's message sitting in his terminal, and the deployment grid he'd transmitted three weeks ago. Grove hadn't accepted his offer blindly. Her first response to his anonymous contact had been a single demand: patrol schedules for the Kael Nebula corridor, data she could cross-reference against publicly available shipping disruption reports. A test—if his coordinates matched the pattern of disruptions that merchant captains had been complaining about for months, then he had genuine military access. If they didn't, he was a fabricator or a trap. Only when his data aligned exactly with the disruption pattern had her second message arrived, terse and professional, with terms. Not trust. Verification. The kind of cold arithmetic that kept intelligence officers alive long enough to be useful. Three weeks since the deployment grid. Long enough for the information to be decoded, analyzed, shared. Long enough for someone to plan an ambush on a patrol corridor he'd handed over. He thought of Captain Reyes aboard the Halcyon's Mark—the quiet man with the glass jar of hard candies on his desk, the two daughters he mentioned in every conversation—and his stomach turned over. Had anything happened? Was anyone already dead because of what he'd done? He had no way of knowing. The outer sectors ran on delayed transmissions, garbled relay stations, and news that arrived weeks after the fact. If the Halcyon's Mark had been attacked, he might not hear about it for months. The uncertainty was almost worse than knowing. It lived in the hollow space behind his ribs, a dull ache that flared whenever he let his guard down—during the quiet watches on the ship, in the moments before sleep, and now, watching these field workers listen to news of a rebellion that someone else had started.
He'd told himself what he did wasn't rebellion. Just a father protecting his daughter. But the deployment grid didn't care about his reasons. Eleven Capital Ships. Tens of thousands of crew members. If even one of his sabotaged coordinates had failed to mislead, if Grove had corrected his alterations and sold the real data—the blood would be on his hands regardless of why he'd spilled it.
It was the same question Argus had been carrying since he'd learned about his daughter—whose side are you on?—and the same one he suspected everyone in the galaxy would have to answer before long.
He pushed the thought aside and kept walking. One problem at a time.
The smell gradually became bearable, or perhaps Argus's nose simply gave up trying to process it. By the time they reached the outskirts of Averton, he could almost breathe normally.
An old man sitting outside the first building they passed raised a gnarled hand in greeting. "*Tahl gerd*," he called out—good earth, the traditional Geid welcome that wished fortune on the hearer's harvest. Jeremiah returned the gesture with a practiced nod and a passable reply, though his Core-world accent made the old man's eyebrows climb toward his weathered hairline.
The city spread before them in a jumble of narrow streets and low buildings, nothing like the towering spires of Axis. This was old architecture, built from local stone and timber, designed to last centuries rather than impress visitors. Power cables hung between the buildings in sagging loops—external wiring that Core worlds had buried underground generations ago. A generator coughed somewhere nearby, its combustion engine spitting exhaust that smelled of refined vegetable oil. The Republic ran on fusion cores small enough to fit in a satchel. Geid ran on whatever burned. Merchants called their wares from open stalls—sacks of red wheat flour, clay jugs of *karha*, the thick fermented grain beer that fueled the farming clans through their long harvest days, and stone-griddled flatbreads whose warm, yeasty smell almost cut through the ever-present reek of manure. Children ran through the streets, kicking balls made of wrapped cloth. The sound of a dozen different languages mixed in the air, creating a constant background hum that reminded Argus of the markets back home.
Back home. As if Axis had ever truly been home. As if anywhere had.
"We're looking for a man named Rica Lane," Jeremiah said, consulting a small notebook he'd pulled from his robes. "He runs a repair shop near the eastern market. According to our intelligence, he's been making contact with anti-Republic elements."
"You mean he's a rebel sympathizer," Vivian said flatly.
"I mean he's a person of interest. We're here to talk, not to judge."
Argus noticed Vivian's hand drift toward her hip, where a concealed blade waited. He hoped it wouldn't come to that. Hoped that this would be a simple reconnaissance mission, gathering information for the Ministry's endless files.
But somewhere deep in his gut, he knew better.
Things on Geid were never simple.
And before this day was over, Argus Wade would discover just how complicated they could become.
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