Chapter 4: Synaxis Burning Through the Veins of Callister

# Chapter 4: Synaxis Burning Through the Veins of Callister

The first thing Hadran noticed when the shuttle bay doors opened onto Callister Station was the silence.

Not true silence—there was the ever-present hum of atmospheric processors, the distant thrum of the station's fusion core vibrating through the deck plates, the chime of a cargo tracking system cycling somewhere in the logistics corridors below. But human silence. A shuttle bay on a hub station of this size should have been a chaos of shouted coordinates, of dockhands cursing in three languages, of loadmasters arguing with pilots about mass allowances while the forklifts whined between stacked crates. Callister was the Voss Consortium's primary distribution nexus for the entire Callister Nebula, a station that moved seventeen thousand metric tons of refined materials per cycle through its bays. It should have sounded like a market. Instead it sounded like a library.