Chapter One: Twenty-Three Percent

The sky of Helios-9 was always the color of rust. On the colonial maps of the Solar Federation, the planet was nothing more than a minor number in the frontier mining belt. It had no oceans, no forests, no blue horizon a travel company could put on a recruiting screen. It had mines, smelting towers, dust storms, slums, and extraction rails that drilled from the surface toward the molten dark below. At six in the morning, the sirens of Mining City District Seven tore through the haze. Leon Voss lifted his head and saw a white plume of waste flame burst from the top of a distant smelter. The light cut across his face. He was eighteen, still young in the line of the jaw, but the dust had already carved something hard into him.