The corridor lights in Berdiansk Station's Sector 5-C flickered just once, which meant the station’s power routing was finally stabilizing, or just getting worse in a quieter, more consistent way. Marie stepped over a mess of loose cabling, ducked beneath a sagging air duct that no one had ever bothered to refit, and walked down the gantry toward the repurposed cargo pod that she had paid around 120 grivnas to rent for a month.
She keyed in her code. The metal door gave a little mechanical cough before hissing open, always about half a second late.
Inside was everything she owned that mattered: a bedframe scavenged from Taiidan military surplus, a dented water dispenser running from a cracked polymer line, a hanging blanket to separate the sleeping area from the gear locker, and a flickering display screen that picked up whatever the Primosk Zone’s mad, tangled relay network happened to cough up. Sometimes movies from the Taiidan Republic. Sometimes distorted pirate news. Sometimes Hiigaran educational material from storage modules no one remembered uploading.
She slumped onto the bed without undressing, massaged her temple with the knuckle of her gloved hand, then fished out a pack of the cheap cigarettes from the Taiidan interior markets, the ones that came in soft plastic, barely sealed, the kind where every third cigarette tasted like lubrication grease. She lit it with a spark-lighter and let the smoke drift.
Today had been another day of nothing, which was sometimes better than something in the Zone. She’d made a few inquiries. Asked about a job guarding a scryer salvage op. Heard some yelling from two self-important fools at the place she currently frequented for food debating what it was like for a Beast-preserved human mind to exist inside the structure of a “mansasanganakam.” No conclusions reached. Just voices echoing in a corridor that never got warm.
Marie turned on the screen with a wave. It fuzzed, cleared, and locked onto a playback feed: an old Kiith Manaan epic being reenacted by volunteers from a civilian culture program on Hiigara. She didn’t remember the name. Something about lovers separated by the war of sand against sea. The acting was good in a raw, awful sort of way, like everyone remembered they used to believe in these stories but didn’t anymore, and still wanted them to matter.
She didn’t watch it. Not really. She listened.
She unstrapped her boots, leaned back, exhaled. Let the epic dissolve into some soft-voiced nature documentary. Something about the underwater breeding rituals of native Hiigaran reef crabs, creatures that had never known exile, genocide, or orbital bombardment.
Marie drifted off like that.
She awoke several hours later, not from sound but from the absence of it. The episode had ended. The screen, still faintly glowing, now displayed something else. A flat and simple documentary - low funding, neutral voiceover. The kind they used for children or people recovering from surgeries.
“...the K’tiilan burrow mammal, once native to the Great Banded Desert of Kharak...”
Marie sat up halfway. Blinked.
The image showed a sleek-bodied creature crawling through a simulated desert dome, the artificial dunes in warm, false lighting. “Survival strategy includes suspended metabolic stasis, the creature voluntarily shuts down cellular function, chemically self-desiccates, and endures surface temperatures exceeding 200 degrees..”
It burrowed. Paused. Froze mid-motion. The simulation showed time-lapse imagery of decades passing. The creature didn’t move.
Marie blinked again. A line from a book about the wide spectrum of technologies developed for the trip from Kharak to Hiigara surfaced in her brain, unbidden:
“Biotechs studied numerous desert-dwelling animals that go into a form of suspended animation during the hottest times of high summer..”
The narrator continued:
“After the fall of Kharak, preserved specimens were reintroduced to artificial habitats on Hiigara. The K’tiilan adapts well to containment. It does not require social interaction. It recognizes its boundaries. It does not panic. It simply waits.”
Marie stared. Her mouth was dry. Not from the Zone’s air filters, not from the cigarette. Just dry.
She reached forward, not even aware she was moving, and turned off the screen. For a moment, the pod was dark.
Then:
“We’re the same,” she whispered, her voice raspy. “A sample from a dead world.”
She sat still for a long time after that. When she finally laid back down, she didn’t dream.