` The airlock hisses open. There is a smell of recycled oxygen and stale coffee. A low, omnipresent hum that you have long since learned to filter out, a constant mechanical breathing of a station built for eight thousand souls.

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` You are standing in the observation deck of Sector Seven-G. The viewport shows a starfield, cold and eternal. A single cargo freighter, its running lights blinking, is drifting into dock, a few kilometres away.

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` The deck is empty, except for one man.

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` He is sitting on a bench bolted to the floor, back to you, hands clasped in his lap, staring out at the void. His suit is expensive but rumpled, the kind of dark charcoal that used to be pressed. Silver hair, trimmed neat. A thin, stooped posture that suggests a man who has not slept well in weeks.

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