Chapter 3: Danilov's Pistol

# Chapter 3: Danilov's Pistol

The pistol sat on the table like an argument no one had won.

It was a Colt 1911, manufactured on Earth sometime before the first colony ship left its atmosphere—steel and walnut grip, the bluing worn to silver along the barrel from years of handling, the kind of weapon that had no practical application in an era of directed-energy sidearms and molecular disruptors but carried a weight that had nothing to do with ballistics. Danilov Voss had placed it there himself, laid it with deliberate care on the stained mahogany of the long table in the officers' mess of Meridian-7's command tier, where the overhead lights caught its angles and made it gleam. He had positioned it the way their father positioned a dish at the center of a table—not as a weapon but as a statement, a text written in steel that said: *I am the man in this room who carries the past.*