The tension never ended.

Spending time on a ship, at no expense no less, was supposed to be… calming. Like a vacation, or a get away or whatever.

Maybe it was that I had never gotten one of those, or the suspicious guy, or the looming threat of dying on a ghost planet where you could hear the screams of those caught on it via radio, crying out for the sweet release of death across the whole system.

It was a real toss-up that. I couldn’t quite put my finger on the cause of my unease. A mystery for the ages.

Each day I would wake up and check and double-check my ammunition, train with my new long-ish coil gun and do some exercise, smoke, drink, check if I was needed on board and go through it all again.

I was doodling in my ship, going over the specialty designs for ammunition to see if I could make any of the listed specialty ammunition, and I was fairly sure I could make some explosive rounds, but unfortunately, I was still planning it out on paper when my radio pinged.

I jerked in shock at the sudden noise while sitting down in the cramped kitchenette. My brain took a few seconds to remind me what that meant.

Once I did remember, I scrambled from my chair, dropping the design and pencil and made my way to the cockpit, backtracked to the cabin for my headset, and then made my way back up the stairs to the cockpit where I could hear the ping come through again.

I practically slapped my headset in, double-checked my radio, and then opened the channel.

“This is Bandit, who do I have the pleasure of speaking to?” I asked.

I didn’t know precisely who I was expecting to pick up the line. It could have been the captain, a member of the crew, or even the Collector themself, but I was not expecting the man who had given the briefing after I had gotten aboard.

“Hello, Bandit, My name is Manfred, and I work directly on behalf of the Collector. I am currently contacting you to inform you that we are in the process of docking in one of the satellite stations around Luna. We will soon send you a docking number for you to make your approach to the Lighthouse. Can I assume you remember the public plan?” He asked somewhat huffily like he was out of breath.

Poor guy, he probably didn’t respond well to low gravity, he had the planet dweller look, probably one of the moons, though, considering his height. Like most people, the low gravity made him slightly stretched out and taller than me but must have left him with trouble in the extremes of gravity. Spacers had problems on planets, and those who lived on planets often got motion-sick in the void.

He got the worst of both worlds, I supposed.

“I do remember the public plan, we all go over under the pretense of a delivery, then I go down to the surface, retrieve the artifact while others stay there for a few days, and return to the ship in time to return to Gabriel so I can link back up with my company. There are a few questions I had, if that’s ok.” I confirmed, giving him the general shape of the plan.

My part was all free hand; I didn’t have a list of things I needed to do, and I was going to go probably die on a dead world that haunted my nightmares instead.

Fun.

“That is more than fine, thank you for confirming you remember the public plan. Feel free to ask me your questions, I can speak on behalf of the Collector.” He told me, he told me, still short on breath and with a slight mumble.

“Ok, first off, I don’t know the procedure for landing on the Thone, assuming there is one. Second, I don’t have the gear to scan a whole planet, but I assume you have something for that, I’m here to secure and return the artifact, not scurry around for years to find it. Third, after secured, do I to keep the package secured until we return to Gabriel’s space, or do I hand it off once I return?” I asked Manfred as politely as a mercenary could.

The poor guy sounded just shy of being in pain, I wasn’t going to be rude; I was a firm believer in everyone deserving dignity and freedom, and there was very little in the way of preserving his dignity by being anything but courteous.

“Ah yes, the first two are thankfully covered by the same source. You will be landing on the Lighthouse, you need to seek out the keeper; he tells people all they need to know, and you just have to show him the chit you previously retrieved. You are to hold onto the package once you return if you don’t have significant enough shielding to hide the package, a case has been prepared, although it is rather large. Do you have any more questions?”

“Not particularly. Although I hope you're being paid handsomely, you sound rather uncomfortable.”

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“My pay is quite generous. Don’t worry about me, miss, especially when you’re the one performing the most dangerous part of the contract. If you have no more questions, then all you have to do is wait for your information and ask to depart to the Lighthouse.” He told me, a bit of mischief in his voice.

Good on him, with an employer like the Collector shilling out millions, I bet this guy had a good salary.

“Just one, although it's not mission-critical. I’ve never actually been this way, why is it called the Lighthouse?”

He snorted, following it with a wheezy chuckle.

“Miss Bandit, may I call you Miss Bandit?”

“Sure, it’s no skin off my back.”

“You haven’t looked out a window, have you.”

“I haven’t, no. I don’t have access to a window, and no offence, I don’t trust the crew, there are some suspicious people on board.”

“No offence taken, Miss Bandit. You will understand when you see it, I can’t do it justice with my words. It’s one of the wonders of the old world you know, one of the wonders of the system. I can agree with that, it is quite the sight.”

“I’ll have to take your word on it for now, then, I have to admit, if it's just a lighthouse, I’ll be rather let down. That’s all, Have a good day Manfred, Bandit out.” I told him, quickly cutting the channel.

I took the headset off and left to get some food ready in the kitchenette, I grabbed my radio and tried to calm my nerves. But no matter what I did, it persisted, the feeling of queasiness in my gut not abating in the slightest. It sat there like a cancer, eating away at my state of mind, and I hated it. It made me want to get this over with, it made me want to rush, which was something I knew would bite me in the ass.

Patience saved you, patience lets you see the bigger picture and not get stuck in a poor decision. The cloistered scholars that ran the closest thing to a church where I grew up called patience a virtue and a weapon.

But then again, they also warned us of how greed could corrupt us, and make us do unreasonable things, things we would otherwise never do. And I had ignored that, hadn’t I? Maybe if I was more superstitious, I would have never gotten myself into this mess.

It was an unending eternity of a wait that dragged on and on, I ate and smoked and had some coffee to keep me sharp with its terrible bitter taste that was only worsened by being made in a percolator. Normally, I could enjoy the bitterness, but the worry in my gut only made it feel like drinking poison.

But the call got to me soon enough, with a second ping and quick conversation where I got the go-ahead to leave the ship and a landing spot.

Every moment of lifting off from the hold I had called home for the last week, the tension got worse, but there was also, in a way, a release.

Like a bowstring the moment before release. The tension wanted to be relieved, and the fingers that guided me were almost loose, slipping but not off.

I disengaged my docking gear and lifted them, engaging my vertical thrusters a little to give me some room before slowly accelerating out and away from the giant ship.

I didn’t quite know where I was, so I pulled away and made a loop to get my bearings.

The grey, rocky surface of Luna came into view, its pockmarked surface was not what I was looking for. It looked like almost every other moon I had seen.

But as I came around, I saw the domes.

Giant transparent domes, not reflective like that of glass, shot up and out of the bare cratered surface, and it took me a moment to recognize what I was looking at.

A city, held within an artifact.

It took my breath from me.

It was just too big.

The domes on other moons were generally big windows, transparent glass-like metals to give a view, often built into a crater with some anti-impact related protections. Not literal egg-shaped domes that protruded into the void.

It was one hell of a sight. A sign of what Luna was in comparison to every other inhabited moon. The original, the like of which could only be emulated, never re-created.

Whatever was responsible for it had to be an artifact. It was the kind of tech we could no longer reproduce.

I could see a city through it, tall structures reaching up past the crater it was set within, reaching out to the transparent dome.

I had to wonder just how high it was. My view from my boat was good, but the distance made guessing impossible.

I recognized that I had stopped my turn and snapped back to myself, pulling up to get the Junker not to fly off into the dome’s airspace. The last thing I wanted to do was crash into it if it was closer than I believed it was.

The landscape shot past, and I was looking back out into the void. Then, the space station the ship was docked to. I kept turning, looking for what should have been an obvious sight when I passed over the side of the ship and saw it.

Lights amid dark shapes encircling a planet in a latticework.

An orbital ring with struts to either pole of the planet, encircling a ball of swirling white so big in my vision that I had to wonder just how close we were.

A marvel of construction that made the dome look like nothing more than a prop.

A giant, truly monolithic, if distant, iron tomb to contain a dead planet that still haunted the solar system hundreds of years after the fall.

A graveyard's protective walls that stood to keep those contained on the planet, the one full of the dead that refused to remain dead, as opposed to keeping others out.

A coffin for a race of demi-gods.

I could feel the hair on my body stand up, what little I had, and dread joined in with the feeling of tension. A terrible, bone-deep dread that sunk down into my bones and made my mind remember that despite all the tampering the Terrans had done to make us, they had based us off of them, that somewhere deep inside, there was something animalistic deep down, a thing that operated on instinct, instead of rationale.

It railed against the sight, it screamed into the back of my head, ‘Danger, this creature will kill us.’

I rallied myself.

It was just a planet, just a job. I just had to go pick up a thing, then I could leave.

Through a mixture of breathing and what remained of my will, I was able to aim the Junker towards the Lighthouse, throttled up a bit, and sped through the dark, the reassuring void that felt more at home within than the place that had birthed my creators.

I locked my angle in and let go of the wheel.

I went to pass the time, but there wasn’t much I could do. I almost plugged in my headset but stopped myself when I remembered what had led me to buy my guns.

It was almost funny, in a terrible way.

That transmission had made me who I was, and who I was had drawn me back to it like a moth to a flame.