Chapter 1
Morning aboard Nova Elysium did not begin with sunrise.
The small crimson disk of LP 791-18 appeared on the observation screens every ninety minutes. Slowly, almost lazily, it drifted across them before vanishing behind the planet below — a world eternally boiling with rivers of lava, around which the station moved in low orbit.
People here lived by internal time. In the residential sectors, soft lighting gradually shifted from dawn-pink to midday white, imitating a terrestrial morning. The ventilation carried the scent of coffee and freshly baked rolls.
Lev Orlov sat in the kitchen of his residential module in Delta Sector. A steaming mug stood on the table beside an untouched piece of toast. On the warm gray wall hung a holographic landscape of Earth: forest, lake, morning mist. Irina had chosen the image before his departure.
“So you won’t forget what green looks like,” she had said.
Lev glanced at the empty chair across from him.
During communication sessions, the holo-projector would cast Irina’s image there, creating the illusion of quiet evenings together. The calls came once every two or three days, whenever Nova Elysium’s position relative to distant Earth allowed a stable connection through the Concordat relay quantum network. He could see her face, hear her voice, but he could never touch her.
Irina laughed, talked about her experiments with extremophiles, complained about temperamental laboratory equipment that constantly needed recalibration. And Lev listened, always catching himself missing the warmth of her hands, the scent of her hair, the way she wrinkled her nose when drinking tea that was too hot.
There would be no call today.
Lev remained alone with the silence of the artificial morning.
He activated the living room wall display, switching it to the station’s external cameras. The planet appeared beneath him.
LP 791-18 d.
Orange-red. Scarred with glowing lava fissures and flickering volcanic eruptions. It breathed. Pulsed. Every second, somewhere on its surface, another volcano exploded, hurling tons of ash and gas into the thin atmosphere. Ionized particles became trapped inside the planet’s magnetic field, and once the buildup reached critical density, plasma jets tore across the sky.
The collectors of Nova Elysium harvested the induced energy of those magnetospheric eruptions, turning the fury of the planet into power for the Concordat.
Lev stared at that hell and felt a strange calm.
He had grown used to it.
Four years were enough to stop noticing the abyss of fire beneath your feet.
He finished his coffee, placed the mug into the sink, and changed into his work coveralls bearing the insignia of the Stellar Expeditions Directorate engineering service. Lev was responsible for the plasma collectors — the heart of the station’s energy system.
They did not gather lava or capture gas directly.
They worked with what was born afterward: when volcanoes hurled millions of tons of superheated gases and metallic vapors into the exosphere, the star’s harsh ultraviolet radiation ionized them into dense plasma. The planet’s magnetosphere trapped and accelerated that plasma stream.
The collectors of Nova Elysium simply stood in its path.
As the plasma crossed the station’s artificial magnetic fields, it induced colossal electric currents.
That was how the planet’s rage became energy for the entire Concordat.
The service corridor greeted him with muted emergency lighting. The soft flooring yielded pleasantly beneath his steps, absorbing sound. Standard information crawled along the walls: system status, remaining storage capacity, shift schedules, announcements.
Just before the elevator that would take Lev down to the technical level, a directional acoustic array silently activated in the ceiling panel — technology that created a narrow ultrasonic beam modulated with speech. The beam brushed against his ear, and the calm, bodiless voice of the Curator — the station’s artificial intelligence — spoke:
“Engineer Orlov, your scheduled inspection of the Seventh Circuit begins in twenty minutes. All collector systems are functioning within normal parameters.”
“Thank you, Curator,” Lev replied automatically.
The technical level was his kingdom — corridors of unpainted metal, the smell of ozone, the steady hum of converters. This place smelled of work, of routine, of something deeply familiar and loved.
Here, he forgot how much he missed her.
He walked past rows of distribution cabinets, fingertips brushing cold metal panels as he read diagnostics and listened to the voice of the machine decks.
Everything was normal.
As always.
And far below, deep within LP 791-18 d, magma churned.
There, beneath the crust, inside a rising mantle plume, a bubble was growing — one whose parameters had already begun to exceed the limits of stability.
