Humanity Lives in Bubbles7Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡGuEgkQulLD
Chapter One: Storm
Humanity had spread across the galaxy long ago, and one of the places it took root was a gas giant called Platum, a world so large its curve barely registered from the surface of any single colony. Platum was carved into hundreds of administrative sectors, each one home to dozens of floating colonies, all of it governed from somewhere far above by the Central Authority Council. Deep in Sector 224 sat one such outpost, and tonight it was caught in the middle of a storm. Clouds of green and violet churned against each other overhead, lightning forking through the gaps, thunder rolling in long after the flash had already faded. The floating city stretched nearly four square miles, a cluster of habitable pods dominating the skyline, most of them circular, a few rectangular, all built to withstand exactly this kind of weather.7Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡJEdog9v7bx
Something was watching the colony. It rode on the back of a massive winged creature, whale-like in shape, drifting through the storm as though the wind meant nothing to it at all.
Two figures stepped out of one of the pods, and the wind hit them the instant the door opened, hard enough that both had to raise a hand against it and fight just to stay upright. Their helmets sealed shut over their faces. The atmosphere outside was breathable under normal conditions, but a storm like this one turned it lethal fast. Their exoskeletons, pale gray, gave them extra bulk without stealing much of their mobility.
"Control, do you copy!" Daniel said, pressing two fingers against the side of his neck where the comm pickup sat.
"Copy. Signal's weak out here," a voice answered through his exoskeleton.
"We're heading for the breach!" Daniel said.
"Copy that."
"This rifle is too heavy," Johnny said, from a few steps behind, the thing braced across one shoulder. It was too big to be called a rifle. Too big, too thick, too heavy, and too rough, it was more like a hunk of iron someone had bolted a scope onto.
"Can you keep up?" Daniel called back, worry creeping into his voice.
"Doesn't matter. I've got your back," Johnny said. "Me and this bad boy will keep you covered." He nodded down at the shape trotting ahead of them, low and mechanical, boxy in the body with four thin legs and a single antenna curling off the back like a tail. It was slightly bigger than a golden retriever and built for exactly one job: scouting ahead through conditions no human wanted to walk into first. The robotic dog surged forward through the rain, and the two men fell in behind it, boots sinking into mud that the storm kept churning into something closer to soup.7Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡNAb2cQBche
Control Room7Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡx0VabfdUkb
Inside the control room, two people sat in front of a wall of monitors, more than fifteen screens flickering with data feeds, one enormous display in the center pulling everything together. A man in glasses, wearing a jacket stitched with the colonial outpost's insignia, leaned forward with his hands on the console. Beside him sat Alyssa, long hair pulled back, dressed in the kind of practical field coat most of the science staff wore over their instruments.
"Almost everything's offline. This storm's too strong," the man said, frustration cutting through every word. "I can't get the cameras back, and comms to Pod Five are down completely."
"Dr. Loda runs Pod Five, doesn't he? That's the fertilizer pod," Alyssa said.
"Yeah. And I can't reach him," the man said.
"It's a storm," Alyssa said, a note of worry creeping in. "This is exactly the kind of cover they like to attack under."
"Storm's too strong even for them," the man said, waving it off. "Too dangerous, even for the raiders."
Outside7Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡIWNCjnrFNy
Daniel, Johnny, and the robotic dog pushed forward together, though Johnny was falling behind, the weight of the rifle and a sudden gust of wind nearly taking his legs out from under him.7Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ9zIDepqtd1
"Daniel! Keep going, I'll catch up!" Johnny shouted, down on one knee, struggling to find his footing again.
"I'm heading in! Stay close!" Daniel called back, already pressing forward into the mist.
The rain thickened until Johnny disappeared from sight completely, but Daniel kept moving, until finally Pod Five's outline resolved out of the haze ahead of him.
A ping sounded in his ear, then a voice. "Hey, you need to hurry and use the seal patch to stop the leak."
"How much time do we have?" he said.
"Less than ten minutes," the voice answered.
He broke into a run toward the pod, pushing as fast as his legs would go, but the wind was too strong. He couldn't get up any real speed.
He reached the entrance and hauled the door open, a slab of metal thick as a bank vault door, and stepped inside.
The pod was dark.
"Dog, activate flashlight," he said.
The robotic dog's chassis lit up, throwing a cold white beam across the interior. Rows of hydroponic vats stretched in either direction, most of them dark and still, thick pipework running overhead between processing tanks that should have been humming with activity and instead sat silent. The whole pod smelled faintly of ammonia and wet metal.
Bzzz. A noise from his transponder.
"Did you get in?" the voice said.
"Yeah. It's dark. I don't see anyone. No sign of the fertilizer team," Daniel said.
"Looks like the damage is worse than we thought. The leak should be on the west side, next to the air conditioners," the voice said.
"Roger. Roger," Daniel said.
He started west, guard up, shotgun mounted along his shoulder rig, the kind of weapon that could take a man's entire upper body off in one shot. Something shifted in the dark ahead of him and he swung the barrel toward it on instinct.
It was a cow.
The animal blinked at him in the flashlight beam, chewing something slowly, entirely unbothered by the fact that it had just had a cannon pointed at its skull. Daniel let out a breath and lowered the weapon.
"Oh. It's just you. You scared me, you know that?" He reached out and scratched it behind the ears, and the cow leaned into his hand, oblivious to the storm outside or the danger already inside the walls with it.
Then something hit him.
His ribs caved in on the first impact, a wet, hollow crack that arrived before the pain even registered. He was airborne for fifteen feet before he slammed into the far wall and dropped.
Control Room7Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡWyJifjWuQr
Panic broke across both faces in the control room at once.
"His vitals just dropped," Alyssa said.
"What was that? Could it be a raider?" the man said, already pulling up every feed he could reach.
Pod Five7Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡLxktLeNjd5
Daniel was still on the ground, barely able to move.
"Daniel, report! Are you hit?" the voice said through the transponder, sharp with urgency.
Daniel was dazed, his vision swimming, but the exoskeleton was already responding, injecting a stimulant straight into his bloodstream. His head cleared fast, sharp and alert in a way that felt almost too sudden, chemical rather than earned. The suit kept working, pumping compounds to blunt the inflammation swelling around his ribs while a swarm of nanobots threaded into the fractures themselves, knitting bone fragment by fragment. It wasn't a fix, not really, just enough to buy him the next sixty seconds.
The robotic dog was already moving, slamming into the raider that had hit him, buying Daniel the half-second he needed. The raider towered at nearly seven feet, built like nothing native to Earth: no legs at all, its lower body a thick coiling mass like a snake's, two powerful arms mounted high on its torso, a heavy metal mask fixed over where a face should have been. In its hands it carried a weapon shaped like an oversized leaf blower, a sonic cannon built to punch straight through exoskeleton plating and rupture whatever was underneath.
A second raider slithered into view and drove an electrified spear into the dog's flank before it could disengage, and the little machine went still, sparks jumping across its chassis.
Daniel's shotgun was gone, knocked loose somewhere in the fall. He triggered the suit's spider mode instead, six mechanical legs unfolding from a housing wired directly into his spine, letting him drive them the same way he'd drive his own limbs. He hauled himself up the wall, fast now, moving with none of the clumsiness from earlier drills. One raider closed on him with the spear while the second kept firing the sonic cannon, trying to pin him against the wall long enough for the spear to finish the job.
The spear-wielder caught up to him first. Daniel sacrificed two of the spider legs to block the strike, letting them absorb the impact, and drew a short blade from his hip in the same motion, a collapsible monoblade that telescoped out to nearly three feet the instant it cleared the sheath. He drove it through the raider's chest. The creature let out a grunt and went down.
The second raider was still reloading. Daniel used the gap and closed the distance at a dead sprint. The sonic cannon fired and missed. The raider ran the calculation fast: another reload cycle would take too long, and the human would close the distance before it finished. It abandoned the cannon and switched to melee instead, drawing a short sword in one hand and, in the other, a compact emitter no bigger than a fist. A press of the thumb and the device unfolded into a shimmering energy shield, a projected barrier held up by a capacitor charge that would only last a few seconds before it needed to recharge. The raider let out a scream, low and guttural, a sound that belonged to nothing born on Earth.
Daniel triggered the mist canisters built into his suit's shoulder plating, and the raider froze for half a second, blinded, before sensing him from behind and striking on instinct. The blade caught Daniel across the side. He grunted through it and drove his own blade into the raider's chest, the monoblade extending further as it went, unfolding through the wound.
"Still got you," Daniel said, forcing a smile through the pain.
Then he collapsed.
The suit kept trying, chemicals and nanobots flooding through a body that had taken more than it was built to absorb in one night. It wasn't enough. Down the corridor, three more raiders came into view, and Daniel lay there watching them approach, too far gone to move, bitter at himself for letting it come to this, and strangely at peace with the fact that he'd at least gone down fighting.
BOOM.
A round tore through the lead raider's chest before it took another step. The rest scattered, screaming, confused, hunting for the source.
Daniel let out a weak laugh. Should have trusted him.
At the far end of the pod, Johnny had set up the rifle, braced and calm, sighting down the length of it like the last ten minutes hadn't happened at all.
"One down. Two to go," he said out loud, to no one.
The raiders threw up a smoke screen and raised shields that did almost nothing against what was coming.
BOOM. The second one lost its upper half entirely.
BOOM. The third shot missed.
The last raider clenched a fist, and a cluster of small missiles launched from a housing built into its wrist, screaming straight for Johnny's position. He triggered the spider legs on his suit and launched himself clear of the blast.
A scream tore through the pod, raw and feral, closer to something a raider would make than a human. It was Daniel, back on his feet somehow, blade in hand, cutting the last raider down in one motion. Then he dropped again, out cold before he even hit the floor.
Daniel woke to Johnny leaning over him with a medical scanner pressed to his ribs.
"You've been out about three minutes," Johnny said. "I already sealed the breach. Nobody's here. Looks like the raiders dragged whoever they took somewhere else. There's blood, but no bodies. Pod Five's clear."
"You saved my ass one too many times today," Daniel said, managing a smile.
Debriefing7Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡiKyJYiNWDK
Thirty people packed the debriefing room, arranged around a long steel table scarred from decades of use. At the head of it stood the Captain, an old man by appearance, silver haired, deep lines carved into a face that had clearly spent years outdoors. He looked to be in his sixties. He was, in fact, well past a hundred and twenty. The colony's life-extension treatments bought decades most people never used to get, and the Captain wore his like a man who'd earned every one of them.7Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ2fJi2pEVAx
"As you know, we had a raider incident this morning," the Captain said. "They're becoming more frequent. This time, they took Dr. Loda. We don't yet know why. We found signs of a struggle and traces of blood belonging to the rest of the fertilizer team, but no bodies. We believe they were taken alive."
The room broke into a wave of gasps and low, urgent muttering.
"I know how this sounds," the Captain went on. "This is the first time the Plutamians have resorted to kidnapping. Every scrap of evidence points to it. We don't know their intent yet, but this has already been reported to the Central Authority. As most of you know, Dr. Loda is, without question, the leading expert on fertilizer synthesis in this colony, possibly on the planet. Losing him sets us back. The rest of the team, may their families find some peace, is a loss we can recover from in time. We have other fertilizer crews across the colony, and new hands can be trained. Losing Dr. Loda is different. His work accounts for a significant share of what makes our exports competitive at all. Fertilizer makes up roughly eighty percent of what we trade to other outposts, the remaining twenty coming from natural fruit and plant stock. I expect our output to fall somewhere between thirty and forty percent in the months ahead, until we can rebuild that expertise."
The room erupted again, worried faces turning to each other all across the table. Johnny and Daniel, both still healing, barely reacted, simply absorbing the news.
"Alyssa, if you'd continue," the Captain said.
Alyssa rose, tablet in hand. "As you know, the rich hydrocarbon gas we draw from the upper atmosphere gets run through the refinement stacks, cracked down through a catalytic process, and converted into a stable nutrient base for the livestock and crop beds. We also process mineral-rich fragments left over from the moons this planet once had, before they broke apart into the floating debris fields we mine today, and use them as a soil additive for our surface crops. Both processes depend on the incoming gas mixture staying inside a narrow tolerance. That tolerance is drifting. If the trend holds, everything we're pulling turns toxic before it ever reaches the refinement stage. We may need to relocate. I've already reached out to the Central Authority Council about a better sector, but I doubt it goes anywhere. Every open sector is either already booked for future colonies or set aside as a natural preserve."
Korg, a big man with a wild red beard, slammed a fist on the table hard enough to rattle every cup on it. "Those goddamn bureaucrats. They don't have the first idea what it's like out here on the frontier. We've got twelve hundred people in this colony. We barely have the resources we need as it is, and they can't even give us a decent sector?"
The room murmured its agreement, most of them clearly feeling the same anger Korg wasn't bothering to hide.
"Yeah. Resources have been tightening up across the board," Johnny said, and the room's energy dipped a little, a few confused looks passing between people wondering why he'd bothered speaking at all.
A man near the back stood, dark skinned, dressed in a sharp yellow shirt, speaking with the kind of polish that made people lean in without meaning to. His name was Gust Frink.
"What Johnny means," Gust said, "is that the colonies the council favors, mining posts, manufacturing hubs, tech outposts, run populations upward of twenty thousand. We're a fraction of that. Farming colonies like ours get treated as expendable, not because we matter less, but because there are more of us and we're easier to replace."
The room nodded along, several people repeating pieces of it back to each other, and Gust sat back down looking entirely unbothered by having just done Johnny's explaining for him.
Daniel wasn't paying much attention to any of it. His eyes kept drifting to a young woman a few seats down, the daughter of the colony's Chief Mechanic. Beside him, Johnny had an arm around his wife's shoulders. He was twenty-two and already married, which wasn't unusual in colonial culture at all.7Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡC87nNO7Nlx
The Captain's voice cut through the room again, calm but firm. "These are difficult times, and I intend to secure the best deal I can before we're forced to leave. Before we close this session, I want the room to recognize Daniel and Johnny, who took down five raiders single-handed today."
The room broke into genuine applause. It usually took three armed colonists to bring down a single raider. Two men taking out five was the kind of thing that got repeated for months.
Johnny grinned, soaking in every second of it, and pulled his wife into a dramatic kiss, one arm around her waist, the whole gesture lifted straight out of an old newsreel of soldiers coming home from some war two centuries gone.
Main Pod7Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡBXrajEEFmk
Johnny and Daniel walked the corridor together afterward.
"Did you hear about the Mimics?" Johnny said.
"What are you talking about?" Daniel said.
"Word going around, things pretending to be other species. Acting almost exactly like the real thing, except for how they behave. Some say they can even pass as human. Probably nothing, no real proof, but I swear I—"
He cut himself off. Something up ahead had caught his attention, and Daniel had noticed it too.
The colony's Chief Mechanic, a stocky man named Otto Voss, was crouched beneath the belly of a massive spider-legged combat mech, cables running from a diagnostic rig into an access panel on its underside. The machine stood the size of a light tank, its hull a dense matte gray bristling with sensor housings, eight thin articulated legs folded beneath it like a resting insect, a narrow cockpit set low between the shoulder mounts.
Beside Otto sat his daughter, short hair falling just past her ears, eyes fixed on her phone the way they usually were.
"Whoa. Is that what I think it is?" Johnny said, already crossing the room toward it.
Otto rolled out from underneath the machine, goggles pushed up, dust caked across his face. He grinned the second he recognized the voice.
"It is. The X-11. Upgrade from the X-8 we've been running. Council finally sent us something worth having, or at least one of them."
Johnny and Otto fell into an easy back-and-forth about the machine's specs, both of them clearly happier talking tanks than anything from the debriefing room. Daniel used the moment to drift closer to the Chief's daughter.
"You guys have some serious hardware," Daniel said.
"Yeah, we do," she said, only half paying attention.
"Are those the specs you're pulling up?" Daniel asked, doing his best impression of someone who actually cared about servo tolerances.
It worked well enough. She turned the tablet toward him and started walking him through the X-11's readouts, and Daniel nodded along, understanding none of it and not minding at all.
"How does the Captain keep pulling machines like this out of the council?" Otto said. "I can barely stomach five minutes of listening to those people talk, let alone negotiate with them."
Johnny laughed. "Same. No idea how he does it."
"You two want to take it out for a run?" Otto said.7Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡL0PRhMEWXr
The Edge of the Island7Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡzCSYk7ISZR
The storm had broken by the time they got there, the sky clearing into pale gold streaks where the gas giant's upper atmosphere caught the light. Around fifteen people had gathered at the edge of the island, drawn by word moving fast through the colony. Overhead, a pod of enormous jellyfish-like creatures drifted through the clouds, each one the size of three school buses, trailing long ribbons of tentacle beneath them. Further out, something that looked like a manta ray the size of an aircraft carrier glided low across the horizon, and closer to the island a flock of smaller creatures, each no bigger than a dog, wheeled and scattered against the wind.7Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡaoLvUkztm2
Otto stood on top of the X-11, shouting instructions down to Daniel and Johnny as they climbed into the cockpit hatch. His daughter stood off to the side, watching the machine with the focused attention of someone hunting for the one flaw nobody else had caught yet.
Alyssa pushed through the edge of the crowd, frowning at the commotion. "What's going on?" she asked a man standing nearby.
"They're gonna jump it off the island," he said, grinning.
"What? Why?" Alyssa said.
"Wanna test the thing out," the man said, like that explained everything.
"That's against protocol. Those idiots are going to get themselves killed." She was already moving, cutting straight through the crowd. "Hey! Get off that thing! You can't just use it as a test dummy for your own amusement!"
"Shit. It's Alyssa," Johnny said, going pale in the cockpit.
"We already filed the paperwork, it's an official field test," Otto said, scrambling down off the hull, sounding a lot less confident than he had a minute ago.
Daniel sealed the hatch and had the ignition sequence running before Alyssa made it within ten feet of the machine. She broke into a run to stop them, but the X-11 was already moving, launching off the edge of the island in a single powerful leap before dropping straight down into the vast churning gas below.
"I'LL HAVE YOU BOTH DISCIPLINED!" Alyssa shouted after them, her voice already swallowed by the wind.
The crowd's reaction split three ways at once, shock, excitement, and grudging disbelief that they'd actually gone through with it. Otto and his daughter were both grinning, watching the machine hold together as it fell.
Inside the cockpit, Daniel and Johnny were riding the same current of fear and adrenaline.
"We're going down fast!" Daniel said, grinning even as the color drained from his face.
Johnny forced a smile of his own, eyes locked on the readouts, saying nothing.
Daniel's hands moved fast over the controls, scanning the terrain rushing up to meet them. A floating rock formation drifted into their path and the X-11 banked hard around it. A second rock appeared, closer, and Daniel used it as a launch point instead, planting two legs against the surface and vaulting them off at an angle.
"Watch out!" Johnny shouted, spotting a third formation looming ahead.
Daniel didn't answer, too locked in to spare the breath.
"Firing the short-burn thrusters!" Johnny called out, hands moving fast over his side of the console.
Twin thrusters flared along the machine's flanks, kicking the fall into a controlled glide. For a moment they leveled out and both of them broke into relieved grins.
Then the console lit up with a new alert. A distress signal was bleeding in from a ship somewhere below, and underneath it, the altimeter kept climbing down faster than either of them liked.7Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡQZdHClwcFd
The Council7Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡoPa4gLBVd4
In the Captain's private quarters, three holographic figures flickered into existence at once, wrapped in the white robes of the Central Authority Council. They were three of the council's twelve members.
"Thank you for accepting my call," the Captain said.
"No trouble at all," said the man standing at the center of the three.
"We understand you wish to discuss your relocation to another sector on the planet," said the woman on his left.
"Yes, ma'am," the Captain said.
"That won't be possible," she said. "Every sector you requested is either already reserved or designated for research use."
The Captain's jaw tightened, just barely.
"What we can offer instead," the man in the center said, "is relocation to Sector Nine. It has several thriving colonies you'd be well positioned to trade with, as well as nearby sectors."
"Sector Nine is a red sector," the Captain said, his voice rising a fraction. "That means frequent raiding parties. It would put my colonists in serious danger. We're a farming colony, nothing more. We're already struggling in a yellow sector. If we're moved into red, I don't believe we survive it."
"Quiet," the man on the right said, his voice cutting sharp through the transmission. "The council has already extended you the courtesy of an explanation for why relocation elsewhere is unavailable, and still you push for more. Such insolence will not go unanswered. I could have you demoted for that tone alone."
The Captain didn't flinch.
The woman on the left wore a thin, satisfied smile. The man in the center shifted, a flicker of discomfort crossing his face before he smoothed it away.
"The man does raise a fair point," the center councilman said finally. "Dangerous or not, small colony or not, we cannot afford to lose more outposts to raider activity, not with morale and supply lines already strained as they are. We will authorize additional military hardware for your defense. You are to relocate to Sector Nine within the week. Transmission ending."
The three figures dissolved into static and vanished.
The Captain stood alone in the quiet room for a long moment.
"Those corrupt fools," he muttered, and turned back toward the window overlooking the storm-scarred island below.
END OF CHAPTER ONE7Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡv9NOadNHXA
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