Judas-12 wasn’t sure how he’d let this happen, but here he was: floating along the hull of Caliban Station, a four-limbed murder machine closing the gap between them. The NSS Buddy moved with unsettling efficiency, its polymer limbs extending and contracting with hydraulic precision. It was built for this—vacuum, zero-G, the cold nothing of space. Judas wasn’t.

  “Samson,” he muttered, his breath fogging the interior of his helmet. “Got any advice?”

  “Yes,” Samson replied crisply. “Stop taunting hyper-competent security robots.”

  “Not helpful,” Judas growled, gripping the tether line looped around his waist as he launched himself toward the nearest hull strut.

  The station loomed around him, massive and indifferent. Caliban Station wasn’t a marvel of human engineering so much as a compromise: a sprawling, segmented maze of modules and gantries built over decades of necessity and neglect. The mass driver stretched from its belly like a syringe, its hollow core aligned with Pluto’s surface far below. Its purpose was simple—hurl mined material back toward the inner solar system—but its sheer scale defied simplicity. The driver’s rails extended out into the void for kilometers, their lengths shimmering faintly in the distant light of the Sun.

  Judas couldn’t take in the view, though. Not entirely. He was busy not dying.

  The NSS Buddy was gaining. Its thrusters flared in short bursts, correcting its trajectory with mathematical precision. Judas kicked off the hull again, using his suit’s compressed air jets to propel himself along the station’s surface. Every motion was sluggish, deliberate—he couldn’t afford to overshoot, not with Pluto’s gravity well waiting to swallow him if he made a mistake.

  “Samson,” he said, gritting his teeth as he drifted toward the next strut. “How fast is this thing?”

  “Faster than you,” Samson replied. “Its thrusters are optimized for pursuit. Yours are not.”

  “Great,” Judas muttered. “Anything else I should know?”

  “Yes. It appears to be carrying a grappling mechanism. Likely designed to—”

  Before Samson could finish, the Buddy fired. A metallic claw shot past Judas, missing him by what felt like centimeters. It slammed into the hull ahead, magnetic clamps activating with a sharp, metallic snap.

  Judas cursed, yanking himself to the side with his tether. He drifted, his compressed air jets hissing as he adjusted his trajectory. The Buddy retracted its grappling claw with a smooth, mechanical motion, recalibrating for its next shot.

  “Samson,” Judas said, his voice tight. “I need options.”

  “I’m calculating,” Samson replied. “But if your goal is survival, I suggest avoiding capture.”

  “Solid advice,” Judas muttered.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  He glanced down, his visor’s augmented display overlaying the distant surface of Pluto with telemetry data. The planet wasn’t the icy wilderness he’d grown up reading about. Centuries of mining operations had left it scarred, its once-pristine plains now dotted with craters and jagged debris fields. Massive chunks of ice and rock drifted lazily away from the surface, forming a slow-motion exodus into the void.

  The sight was mesmerizing in a way that felt almost sacrilegious, as if humanity had taken something beautiful and made it... useful. Judas didn’t have time to dwell on it. The NSS Buddy fired again.

  This time, the grappling claw grazed his boot, throwing him into an uncontrolled spin. He flailed, struggling to reorient himself as his HUD screamed warnings about suit integrity and rotational velocity. The station blurred around him, its segmented modules and endless rails blending into a kaleidoscope of utilitarian geometry.

  “Samson!” Judas shouted, panic edging into his voice.

  “I’m here,” Samson replied, his tone maddeningly calm. “You need to stabilize.”

  “No kidding!” Judas snapped, fighting the urge to vomit as his spin slowed. He managed to grab the edge of a nearby strut, his gloves’ magnetic clamps activating with a satisfying click.

  The Buddy was closer now, its visor glowing faintly as it adjusted its approach. Judas could feel the cold precision of its focus, like being hunted by a predator that didn’t need to eat.

  “Plan,” Judas said, his breaths coming fast and shallow. “Tell me you’ve got one.”

  “I have several,” Samson said. “Most involve you not panicking.”

  “I’m not panicking,” Judas lied, his visor catching the faint glow of the NSS Buddy’s grappling claw retracting for another shot, watching its arm recoil back with the equal-and-opposite motion, compensated for by more jets of compressed air. He fired his own jets, using the station’s familiar geometry to slingshot himself into a narrow gap between two antenna arrays. The Buddy adjusted seamlessly, its thrusters spurting and spraying as it followed.

  There was no noise, but he imagined the hiss. The NSS Buddy wasn't part of his suit's sound duplication paradigm.

  “Correction,” Samson said, his voice infuriatingly steady. “You are panicking. And I must point out that your trajectory suggests you are heading nowhere.”

  “Everywhere’s nowhere,” Judas shot back, banking hard off a rail strut. His HUD painted a grim picture: oxygen reserves dipping, thruster pressure unsteady, and his heart rate tapping out the beat of a particularly bad day. “You sure surrender isn’t the right move?”

  Samson hesitated just long enough to make Judas sweat. “It is statistically favorable. However—”

  “Not happening,” Judas interrupted, kicking off a maintenance platform. He grabbed hold of a rail ahead, his gloves’ magnets activating with a sharp click. “Give me the downside.”

  “The downside?” Samson echoed. “The NSS Buddy will likely apprehend you with minimal harm, but there’s no guarantee its handlers will share that restraint. Court martial is probable. Conviction is likely.”

  “And you think they’ll buy ‘I was just curious’ as an excuse?” Judas asked, yanking himself around a corner and narrowly avoiding a grazing shot from the grappling claw. The Buddy’s claw hit the rail instead, the magnetic clamps locking it in place for a moment before it disengaged.

  “Unlikely,” Samson said. “Though it is better than your current course of action, which appears to be improvisation at lethal velocity.”

  Judas ignored him, focusing instead on the station’s vast, alien geometry. Caliban Station wasn’t a place designed for beauty—it was functional, sprawling, and unapologetically massive. Industrial railings extended in all directions, interspersed with support struts and sensor clusters. The centrifuge modules rotated lazily in the distance, their bulk casting long shadows over the surface.

  And then there was the mass driver, stretching out from the station like the arm of a god. Its rails shimmered faintly, the electromagnetic coils idle now but no less imposing. Beyond it, Pluto loomed in the void, an unfeeling specter that Judas tried very hard not to think about.

  Lethal velocity. Very encouraging, Samson, he thought to himself.