Here in the Coalition, we have all grown used to our racial and cultural divisions. While commingling exists – as we see with the half-elves and half-orcs forming their own communities – for the most part the elves stay with the elves, and the humans with the humans, and the dwarves with the dwarves, and so on. Our strength comes from how we each work together and leverage our differences to help one another. Yet some worlds take this farther…

  – Gibral Manehaven, Speaker of Culture, Kingdom of Thane

  It was a tiny window, barely large enough for him to see anything even with his face pressed against it. Just over ten centimeters tall and thrice that wide, it was just a narrow slit that let in some natural light, illuminating the storage room of the dingy habitat.

  For Pan, it was a treasured secret.

  The dull amber light of the star shining down upon the planet made the narrow window look like a gentle reddish glowing light, giving the chilly storage room a dark and dreary appearance. This was suitable for the old habitat, which mostly kept functioning on sheer spite and grease. The insulation was terrible on this side of the hab, and that’s why it had been converted into cold storage, letting the natural freezing temperatures outside keep the food fresh.

  Staying in here for long was uncomfortable, but Pan did it anyway… frequently. Whenever he had the chance, he’d push one of the storage crates along the wall, climb up so he could reach the window, and spend a good ten to fifteen minutes each day – sometimes more, if business was slow – just staring out the window.

  He’d discovered it six months ago. Not the window, that was obvious. But looking out from the right angle gave a startlingly clear view of the spaceport docks. Usually it was a dull view of more so-called ‘merchant’ ships in one of the bays, but once in a while he’d spied a sleek Enforcer tucked into the docks. He’d daydreamed that he could sign up on one of those ships, even though he knew they were only here for show. Every Enforcer that came by Lariat IV was already bought and paid for… but that didn’t stop his fantasies.

  He could never stay long, of course. Pan had work to do, and none of his bosses were very forgiving of what they viewed as slacking off. Even without that threat, the room was freezing! This high on Mount Chipped Fang, the already thin atmosphere was almost nonexistent, and even if this window was a glimpse of freedom, it was also a statement to him that he couldn’t survive more than a few minutes, at best, outside the sprawling mess of interconnected habs and corridors.

  Sometimes he was lucky enough to catch a ship docking or leaving. Those were always a magnificent sight, seeing the pulsing thrusters ease the massive hunks of steel and alloy into position, fitting themselves into the aging docks. It was rare enough that he would often linger until his fingers and ears chilled, and his breath began to fog the glass. More than once in the last half a year he’d been chastised and cuffed for running late, scurrying back to work after staying too long watching the breathtaking sight.

  But today, he got a special treat.

  The ship that docked as he watched wasn’t normal at all. For one thing, it was nearly the size of a full cruiser, which made it barely able to fit into the largest bay. Ships that size normally didn’t get this low into the atmosphere without good reason, but some larger vessels would dock in the thin layer this high up the mountain. That by itself was exciting, but this ship had character.

  It lacked the sleek lines and polished hull of an Enforcer. In fact, the hull was a patchwork of old plating and an outdated, jagged design in places. The ship had clearly seen better days, but it looked functional and – more importantly – was shaped like the dragons of myth. Pan had never heard of a ship shaped like a dragon, but he knew what one was supposed to look like. The ‘wings’ of the ship were tucked flat against its sides, but even so he caught a glimpse of the clawed legs and feet as it came down on approach, and the bow of the ship was in the distinctive, almost beak-like shape of the dragons he’d heard about in stories.

  For a moment, he just admired the craft… but then he forced his hope down. It was an old, battered ship. Unique in shape, but like most of the ships that came by here, it was neither new nor showed any insignia of a stable Coalition representative. Unlikely to be a smuggler, with such a unique profile, but probably not much better.

  With a heavy sigh, the skinny gobling dropped back to the floor and grunted as he put his shoulder into moving the crate back.

  It was time to get back to work.

  Pan was careful to make himself ‘convenient’ to the locals. As a half-blooded orphan whose goblin mother had spent the last year of her life unresponsive, he’d had to fend for himself for far too long. His elf blood did him no favors, making his already diminutive body even more scrawny than most goblins. About the only good thing about his heritage was how little sleep he needed, and how his small size made him adept at using some of the crowded maintenance tunnels the labyrinth of interconnected habitats now boasted.

  Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.

  Fang City hadn’t even been a formal city at first, just a small collection of habitats with a research station attached. When Elarkis had withdrawn, the research station had been abandoned, but the docks expanded and more habs added. Layering over the years had made a bustling city of barely-functional habitats, each from a different technological era, making the nightmare of maintenance an ongoing thorn in the side of the administration.

  For Pan, it made it easy for him to slip in and out of places quietly. He was pretty sure he’d overhead things he shouldn’t have multiple times, but he was also smart enough not to repeat any of them. Most of the time, like this fateful day, he’d use them for shortcuts and odd jobs. Like delivering the satchel full of sandwiches to one of the chop shops on the way back to his house.

  He’d carefully listened for anyone nearby, popped the vent cover, and then slid into the small room without notice, as usual. He didn’t really like Talc, the owner of this place, but a couple of the employees thought it was pretty hilarious how Pan would just pop up out of nowhere, drop off lunch, and then scamper away into the city on his way home. He couldn’t call them friends, but it was a welcome relief from the screaming he usually heard from his drug-addled boss.

  “Marigold ain’t in charge here. Not anymore.”

  Pan froze as he eased the door open. Marigold had been the previous owner. Kind of pleasant in her own way, but ruthless in business. Supposedly, someone had leaned on her too much, and her constant refusal to cross whatever line they were demanding had led to a brief, bloody change of ownership. Pan missed her, since Talc was all around an unpleasant guy. He recognized Talc’s manner of speech there. The broad-shouldered elf was smarter than he looked, but often played a bit brutish so people would underestimate him.

  “Your terms are unacceptable. Either make another offer, or I’ll just go elsewhere. I don’t need these parts that badly.”

  The more measured female voice made Pan’s ears twitch. He decided not to reveal himself quite yet, slinking up behind a stack of boxes to keep himself unseen. He peeked between two of them that had a crack wide enough to look through, to see if he could get a view of the commotion.

  What he saw was… part of the back of Talc. The elf was heavyset, but more in a bodybuilder way than obesity. He also had a short, crooked nose that looked like it had been punched a few too many times for the healers to fix, but Pan couldn’t see that at the moment. The elf was nearly two meters tall, and built so thick that some people joked he must have orc blood somewhere in his lineage.

  Just, they never said it to his face.

  Pan squinted at the other person, who was just out of view thanks to the box edge. She stepped forward once, putting herself in sight just as Pan was considering a different vantage point. This elf was slender, pretty, and wearing rugged street clothes under a weathered leather jacket. Her blonde hair was bound in a ponytail, and her eyes were a vivid green.

  She also didn’t look worried at all.

  Talc was still talking. “I figured you might say that. See… Marigold wouldn’t play nice with the runners, either. Here, you gotta run some stims or something, sometime. Marigold was just a little too tight about that. Turns out, she was one of those cultist crazies you hear about sometimes.”

  The sound of weapons powering up made Pan tense, and he felt a queasy chill run through him. He’d been careful not to hear that noise as much as possible, but he could still tell. The faint hum and the whisper of quintessence flowing into chambers was quite distinctive. He glanced around for a good place to hide, eying the door he’d come in through. It was much harder to get that opened quietly from this side, but maybe during the argument…

  “Now you show up,” Talc continued. “Asking about Marigold. Coming out of a big ship shaped like a dragon. Refusing to run some simple stims. This ain’t even the nasty stuff, you know? It’s just a little wake up.”

  Pan heard the woman answer mildly, “We don’t want any trouble. If you can’t help us, and we can’t help you, we just walk away. No problems, everything back to normal.”

  “Except we kinda want the bounty on cultists they just posted,” Talc chuckled. “So boys, go ahead and–”

  The beefy elf never finished his command. Pan had just stepped past the boxes he was hiding behind when the bright flash of light seared into his eyes, and he felt his entire body convulse in pain. He collapsed to the ground, writhing about in agony with a hand flailing about for support of any kind.

  He heard shots fired, screams.

  Shouts as if from a distant, echoing tunnel.

  Loud crashing.

  His fumbling hand landed on something soft, half-warm. It squished beneath his fingers, but a waxy coating kept it from getting on his hand. He yanked it back in disgust before his nose registered the scent of meat and bread.

  He’d grabbed one of the sandwiches he’d brought with him.

  His vision started to clear, bright spots floating amidst the fuzzy, indistinct shapes of the room. Orienting himself toward the door, he stumbled toward it, hands and knees on the floor. His ears were ringing, a steady loud tone muffling almost all the noise that reached them.

  When his hand landed in a puddle of something warm and liquid, he didn’t try to inhale to confirm what it was. He just kept going.

  A louder noise sounded like a dull whump to his half-deafened ears, but it came with a blow like a hammer to the side. Pan felt himself lifted off the floor, his ribs flaring with pain, before his back felt a sharp digging impact against it when he crashed into some of the empty boxes resting against the wall. The small frame slumped down, breath knocked out of him.

  As Pan wheezed for air, his lungs and ribs burning, he blinked tears from his eyes. Slowly, the spots were drifting away from the large blob before him. Vision was shaky for several breaths as the gobling’s mind compensated for the head-rattling injuries, and his eyes fought off the initial flare of light.

  In agonizing increments, his sight returned. Still fuzzy around the edges and struggling to focus, but he could see what was before him.

  A glowering, ratty-haired dwarf woman, belts and pouches attached at seemingly random places on her squat, powerful body. She had a large mana pistol that looked like a toy in her meaty hand.

  Except this toy was quite deadly. And pointed right at Pan’s forehead.