Page 1 of Cloverleaf Station

Chapter one

On the outskirts of the Fringe, parsecs away from the central planets of the Alliance and all the modern amenities the people who lived there enjoyed, floated a round, pockmarked ball the size of a generation ship. To a casual passerby—not that there were any casual passersby out so far, only miners on the hunt for the rare-mineral-rich asteroids that this corner of the galaxy was home to—it almost might have been mistaken for a moon.

If moons came in the most lurid, neon shades of green imaginable, that was.

The ball was called Cloverleaf Station, and for eight months at a stretch, it was home to anywhere from fifty to two hundred souls: a mixture of miners, scientists, and a few seasonal workers. For the next five months, it would be home to exactly one man—Kieron Carr, the station master and the only person who was permitted to live there while the station’s stellar shields went out of synchronous orbit, leaving Cloverleaf exposed to direct radiation from the quasar that it, and everything else out there, revolved around.

Due to that intense radiation, Cloverleaf Station stretched nearly half a mile in diameter, but less than half of that was livable space. Its external walls were constructed from a blend of concrete and metal alloys that were thirty feet thick. Beneath the concrete was ten-foot-deep layer of water, followed by yet more radiation-resistant plating.

By the time all that layering was penetrated, the residual radiation was akin to spending an Earth day out in the sun—nothing that regular Regen treatments couldn’t easily take care of.

Of course, it got worse when the docking bay doors had to be opened and closed all the time to let ships in and out. When the radiation from the quasar was at its peak—when the valuable debris field that had convinced the Alliance to put Cloverleaf Station out there in the first place couldn’t be worked—it was simply too dangerous for anyone to work outside the safety of the station. Sitting still meant losing money, so most of the regulars took those months to go sell what they’d mined while scientists returned home to crunch data and write papers.

This time on Cloverleaf Station would be lonely, but Kieron found that these days, he liked lonely. If he couldn’t have the company of the one person he craved, the next best thing was no company at all. Heading into his second year on his own, he was more than ready for everyone else to get the hell out.

He really would have liked for them to do it without making a fucking mess of things before they left, though.

“Mason’s Bay, Mason’s Bay, check in. Over.”

“They’re probably busy screwing each other’s brains out,” Kieron’s assistant, Dave, said with a snort. “The Masons are the horniest pair on this station, and that’s saying a lot.”

“Horny or not, they never miss a check in,” Kieron replied as flatly as he could. He wasn’t a fan of Dave, who sucked at everything that Kieron had wanted him to be good at. Seriously, how could the man burn food so badly that even the kitchen’s regenerator wouldn’t take it back to reuse it? That left Dave looking after the controls and minding the comms while Kieron had to manage hosting services, exactly the opposite of the way he’d wanted it to work out.

Kieron would not be renewing Dave’s contract to work at Cloverleaf if he applied again, that much was damn sure.

“Well, I guess we just keep trying. I’m gonna go get a burger first, though; you want one?”

“No.” After a second, Kieron remembered to add, “Thanks.”

“Sure, man. Sure.” Dave left, and Kieron settled in to figure out who else was out there right now.

By this time tomorrow, Cloverleaf Station would be out of the shadow of Big Momma, the enormous asteroid they usually huddled behind. Its bulk did a pretty good job of deflecting the worst of the radiation, not only from the station but also from a lot of the smaller asteroids that made this a worthwhile destination for miners. Once you went beyond the big shadow, if you didn’t have the latest version of Cloverleaf’s adaptive AI to help guide your ship from safe zone to safe zone, your engines would burn out real fast. If you were still in the hot zone at that point, the amount of time you could expect to survive dropped precipitously.

It meant that Kieron, and Dave, had to keep meticulous notes on who was out, where they were in the moment, and what their charted course was if they wanted to have any chance of helping them when something went wrong. There were only three ships left on Cloverleaf that didn’t belong to employees, and two of them were currently docked, so at least Kieron didn’t have to worry about going after anybody else.

Where had the Masons been headed?

He pulled up their flight path, then groaned. “Dave, you fucking dumbass.” This plan was from two days ago, completely useless to him now. Sure, it was the responsibility of the ship’s crew to log a new plan before each flight, but it was the responsibility of the station masters to nag them until they did.

He tried the comm again. “Mason’s Bay, Mason’s Bay, this is Cloverleaf calling. Over.”

Nothing. Kieron broadened his bandwidth, extending his frequency detector farther into space. This close to a quasar, space was anything but quiet. The sound of the radiation came through across the radio, a constant emission of white noise, getting louder and louder as—

“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!”

“Shit!” Kieron almost jumped out of his chair as the strangest signal he’d ever heard out there poured in over the radio. Good grief, it was almost like a scream. What the hell was—

The strange sound cut off as quickly as it had come in, and at the same time, a new signal was suddenly audible.

“—leaf, come in Cloverleaf, this is Mason’s Bay, and we—crackle—elp, over! Repeat, we crackle immediate cracklecracklecrackle.”

Oh fuck, there they were. Their signal was being reflected off something else that might move at any time—he needed new angles fast. Kieron set the program to work, triangulating the signal’s path while he still had the mystery object to bounce it off. A moment later, their location came in.

They seemed to be drifting about fifty thousand kilometers away, a short hop in his ship, the Daring Do. Unfortunately, they were on path to drift straight out of the shadow of Big Momma and into the direct radiation of the quasar. Kieron estimated they had less than fifteen minutes of shade left before they started to bake.

Literally.

“Dave!” he shouted, sending the route directly to his implant before he jumped out of the chair. “Get in here!”