Chapter 6: Arak of the Borderlands

The wind off the Drift came in horizontal and smelled of iron filings and something organic underneath, something the settlement's air processors had never quite managed to scrub from the local atmosphere in thirty years of trying. It arrived every morning at the same angle, from the same quarter, with the same indifference to whatever it encountered. Arak had been here long enough to stop registering it as weather and start registering it as time.

He was three kilometers out from Harrow's Drift's perimeter wall when the ping hit his wrist unit — a standard Confederation ranger priority channel, which he answered because he answered everything on that channel with the same unhurried professionalism he brought to all of the work here. The brief was flagged for frontier command distribution. It would reach forty-seven rangers across six sectors within the same ten-minute window. The Confederation had gotten better about dissemination in recent years, which was, he had learned, not always an advantage.

He read it once, standing in the iron-smelling wind with his thermal coat open at the collar because he had been moving fast enough to generate his own warmth and had not yet cooled down. A contract security detail had reported an anomalous contact signature near the Kett Station outer ring four days ago. The brief contained a classification code he had not seen in fourteen years — not because the code had been retired but because the specific combination of threat tier and artifact designation only appeared in documents that referenced the old pre-Confederation scholarship, the historical material that had been formally archived in the wake of the Mordaxian collapse and informally buried in the years since.