Chapter Three: The Admission Order from the Stars

When Leon woke, the first thing he saw was a white ceiling. It was not the leaking sheet-metal roof of the slums or the broken canopy of an abandoned excavator. It was the clean alloy ceiling of a medical pod, bright enough to hurt. The air held no mining dust, only disinfectant mist and the faint sweetness of neural repair agents. He tried to lift a hand and found his wrist locked under a restraint strap. "Do not move," a woman's voice said. "You were unconscious for thirty-six hours. Your neural load exceeded a normal pilot's limit by a factor of six. Move around again and I will have the medical AI sedate you." Leon turned his head.