Night fell over the city.

There were still lights on at the saloon owned by Mr Shanah down the street. That crafty bugger still had fuel for his generators obviously. It made the place look almost inviting. Still, any port in a storm, and besides, I might find what I’m looking for in a dive like that.

That and some watered down liquor. I shouldered into the door.

“Eorthe! How are you on this eshanao day my friend?” Shanah cheered. Clearly he was buttering me up for something, the bar-keep’s jolly greeting was out of character with his usual foul-mouthed utterances.

“What’s so eshanao about it?” I shot back, parroting the Norahl patois back at him. I had no idea what it meant, but I could read the context, “Save the friendly barkeep routine for the tourists Shanah, I’m just here for a drink.”

“Well fuck me for trying add a bit o’ cheer to yer day!” he harrumphed and poured me a drink, “What’s got you in such a foul mood? Apart from being stuck on this rock.”

“Message from headquarters. Came in over the low-power receiver coded ‘No Response Necessary’. I’m pretty sure they don’t even care that we can’t respond. They just automatically re-broadcast on the long-wave backup when they don’t get a ping back.”

“Barstids…” said Shanah, “What was the message?”

I shrugged and took a gulp of the thick, sweet liquor. What the hell, it wasn’t like they encoded it, and people were bound to work it out soon enough. I only got routed the message so I could account for the fuel surplus on the books. Or at least I would have if I hadn’t already flogged the surplus off…

“The resupply boat got redirected. Apparently we’re not a priority. At least three months until the next resupply.”

“Three months?!” Shanah growled “Fucking b’yuracrats!”

“At least three months,” I corrected “which we know means more like six, and even then there’s no guarantees.”

“We’re screwed then! This place has got two months o’ supplies left, tops, and that’s assuming the bloody QM’s at the supply warehouses ain’t already flogged half o’ it on the black market. Hell, I’ve only got ’bout a month’s fucking grog left here as it is.”

I kept quiet on his point about the QM’s. I was no better. But no alcohol? A grim prospect! I beckoned Shanah closer.

“That’s why I’m looking to get off this rock. Listen, you know people. Any of the bums in this joint know how to pilot a ship?”

“Yeah, I know people… I know a lotta things but this ain’t a fucking information kiosk. What’s it worth to ya?”

“Forty kilos.” I replied quietly. That should be enough fuel for him to keep his little operation running for another six months, plus a little extra to trade for supplies.

“Sixty kilos. Prices are gunna be going up real fucking soon once word ’bout the resupply boat gets out.”

“Sixty then. Send one of your guys around to collect it tomorrow.” Hell, it was all going to get looted anyway if I managed to take off. Won’t be long now before someone gets desperate enough to try and siphon the fuel off manually.

“Tonight. Since yer so keen to take off. Like y’said I know people, and I don’t trust any of them, not you, not even me own fucking mother.”

“Fine, fine, tonight.” I conceded and downed the last of my drink. “I’ll head back to the fuel depot now, so send your guy around and I’ll buzz him in the gate. Make sure he’s got the name of that pilot.”

I should probably give you some background on why we’re on this hunk of rock.

The locals call it Hiethnatio. It’s actual designation is RJS 985 (Rhaeso)-6 S/2276 H 15, but no one wants to deal with that mouthful, so we just refer to the city, the moon and the planet all by the same name. We’re the only colony out this way so it doesn’t make much of a difference. The moon is the largest of the fifty or so satellites orbiting around a super-massive gas giant in the Rhaeso system. The whole system is a few jumps wide, with a naturally habitable planet named Oleth and a couple of geo-engineered planets (Hileth and Ysene) further in towards the star, supporting several billion inhabitants, but out here in the boondocks there’s only a couple of hundred thousand colonists.

The moon is abnormally large for a satellite, around 50,000 kilometres in diameter. Scientists think it could be a captured planet which wandered into the orbital path of Hiethnatio. It would be home to a larger population if it wasn’t for the lack of sunlight out here. No one lives here that doesn’t need to be here, or at least no one would live here by choice.

The only reason anyone bothered to geo-engineer this lonely rock can be summed up in one word; Hentriacontane. It’s a higher alkane which was thought to only naturally occur in plants, or produced by some extinct insects back on the Earth before the Exodus (the more recent one, not the Biblical one). The scientists analysing the data from the initial survey mission of this system got really excited, because they thought that the presence of long-chain carbohydrates was proof of life elsewhere in the universe. Turns out it was just some freak coincidence of astro-chemistry. I guess the universe is so big it was bound to happen somewhere!

In any case, this hentriacontane was here in abundance. In seams underground, coating patches of rock on the surface, you usually encounter it mixed in with the regolith, like a gritty, waxy mud. Since it was an alkane, it could be cracked to make basic organic fuels, and the hydrogen extracted for use in the cargo and transport ships to get us to the jump-gates, and the fleets of battleships of course.

Of course the Corporations immediately wanted to strip-mine the whole moon and use what was left as a un-manned strategic Liquid Hydrogen depot in the event of future (and some would say inevitable) disputes with the other human factions in neighbouring systems. But the powers-that-be on Oleth had decreed that any planets or satellites being harvested for resources must be colonised first, since habitable real-estate was hard to find in this corner of the galaxy it seemed. Not that this moon was remotely habitable before it got geo-engineered at huge expense, but I guess the government doesn’t want the Corporations getting too powerful, hence they create these artificial limits on how much of the moon can be mined. Extract too much and they’ll screw up the orbit, which wouldn’t matter too much except now there’s all these voting and tax-paying citizens living there to worry about. You see what they did there?

So basically Hiethnatio served as this system’s petrol station, which was fine so long as you had places to go and people to see, i.e. when there was a war on. But with the current lull in hostilities, there was no use for the volumes of fuel needed to jump fleets between systems. There was plenty of fuel reserves further in on Oleth and Hileth to cover hops between the planets, so for the last few years we’ve been left to our own devices out here. Location Classified, effectively forgotten, living alongside the largest repositories of Liquid Hydrogen and high octane fuel in the known galaxy.

My name is Martchael “Marty” Spencer, I was the city’s last remaining Refuelling Tech. I say “was” because there hadn’t been so much as a life-pod in to refuel here for five months. Practically an eternity for colony with a permanent human population. This was not an ideal situation for me, since I only earn credits based on how many kilos of fuel I transferred. Still, being the only person with the access codes to the fuel stores had its advantages. I made enough on the burgeoning black-market to keep myself flush with credit. At least that meant I could buy what passed for a drink around here.

The big problem was we weren’t getting any solar.  This hemisphere of the moon was almost perpetually in the shadow of the gas giant it orbited. Normally the giant solar reflectors in their complex orbit around the gas-giant would give us regular doses of what passed for sunlight this far out, but they had gone out of alignment due to the electro-magnetic tsunami generated by a massive planet-side storm last month, which had also knocked out our communications relay. With two-way Comms down, there was no way to get the reflectors realigned. They were unhelpfully directing our sunlight back out into space, where it was of no benefit to anyone.

It was surprising we were able to survive out here at all. The original geo-engineers had done an excellent job on the atmospheric conversion here, I’ll give them that. The upper atmosphere was so ionised that the radiation given off by the gas giant had no hope of getting down to ground level. I was thankful for that, things were bad enough here without getting cooked whenever you ventured outside.

Around me the spires of the city’s buildings loomed. On moons like this one the low gravity allowed you to build up. And I mean up! The heavily shielded “penthouses” on top of those buildings were over five kilometres above ground level, projecting through the dusty lower atmosphere for the best views of the starscapes above. Although almost everyone was living at ground level now that the power was off. Penthouses cease to be as attractive when you have to climb a couple of thousand flights of stairs to get to them. Besides, anyone with the kind of credit balance to afford those places had long since got themselves on the last ship to somewhere like Tiynatah Beach out on Nahakao, one of the naturally habitable planets a few jumps from here.

If they’d had any sense, they’d have gone further than that.

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I’m Grażyna Czyżewski. Ya, I know, it is not pronounced like it’s written. My family comes from Nowa Warszawa. Everyone around here calls me Zyna.