Under a Hostile Sky : Part One

Posted on Wed Dec 10th, 2025 @ 10:18pm by Commodore Stephen MacCaffery

2,829 words; about a 14 minute read

Mission: The Tavrik Accord: Orchestrated Chaos
Location: Meridian Station, Tavrik III

Stephen felt the world grab the shuttle and refuse to let go.

The Susquehanna hit Tavrik III’s atmosphere with a shudder that vibrated through the deck into his teeth. The thin air pulsed unevenly against the hull. The inertial dampeners tried to mask the turbulence, but the shuttle’s frame disagreed. A low, bone-like vibration persisted, a steady reminder that this planet did not welcome visitors.

Across the aisle, Lieutenant Khorev’s hand rested loosely on the strap overhead. He rode the turbulence with blank focus, eyes on the bulkhead, calm, noting every jolt as data, not threat. Behind him, the twelve were belted in, in plainclothes and neutral gear, pretending nothing was wrong. The illusion shattered when the shuttle dropped half a meter, and three of them tightened their grips.

Stephen’s fingers curled around the seat edge—not from fear, but because the air outside pressed in with intent. The briefing’s talk of 'variable winds' and 'shear potential' had sounded clinical; here, gusts struck so hard that even the smallest trim corrections sent motion rippling through the hull, beyond what the dampeners could smooth away.

Through the forward viewport, clouds tore past in uneven bands—gray and rust, stretched thin by a starved atmosphere. The ocean below was no invitation: a hammered metal expanse, dark and restless, streaked with white where the wind scoured the surface. Here, water did not meet land in gentle curves. This was a collision of elements, a boundary shaped by force, not comfort.

“Approach vector adjusted two degrees starboard,” the pilot called back. “Compensating for shear.”

“Copy,” came the calm affirmation from the co-pilot.

The shuttle rolled left, then right, small shifts that felt larger because of the vibration. Khorev’s gaze flicked to Stephen, just for a heartbeat. A professional check: Are you fine? Do you need me worrying about the VIP instead of the horizon?

Stephen met his eyes and allowed the corner of his mouth to move. “I’ve had rougher landings,” he said.

It wasn’t bravado. It was an old reflex, easing tension with understatement. It earned him a quiet, huffed sound from the ensign in the port-row seat, the kind of almost-laugh people let out when they were grateful for any excuse.

The shuttle trembled beneath the hiss of recycled air, the muted chime of cockpit alerts, and the clatter of gear overhead. Not disaster, just truth. Tavrik III, making its introduction.

The coastline came into view: a strip of gray sand the color of poured concrete, stretched between the black water and the rose-brown land. Surf pounded in slow, heavy impacts, throwing up spray that the wind flattened and dragged inland in dirty veils. Beyond the sand, on a low rise, geometric shapes rose out of the haze. Prefabs. Antennae. A tower like a spike driven into the world.

Meridian Station.

From this height, it looked like someone had drawn a colony cross-section on a planetary survey map and then forced reality to match the diagram. A cleared rectangle of terrain, roughly three hundred by two hundred meters, marked the footprint, with landing pad chevrons bright against the scoured ground. Federation-standard navigational beacons flashed a steady amber around the pad, their lights cutting through the murk like metronomes.

To the north, white and blue structures sat in arranged rows—housing, labs, admin—each in its place, streets laid out with precision. The sixty-meter Spike rose at the center, with white panels and dark portals, stark and assertive. Solar array wings angled westward toward a pale sun, seemingly indifferent. Sensor towers ringed the outskirts, thin as spears.

The shuttle banked, nose dropping, and ramp lifting. The landing pad appeared in the viewport: gray composite with white lines and a faded Delta at the center. Figures waited at the near edge; some wore duty uniforms, others layered field jackets over civilian clothes, looking like "colonists told to stand here and look official.” One woman stood slightly ahead of the others, feet planted, hands behind her back.

The Susquehanna came down hard enough that the deck bounced twice before settling. The vibration shifted, dropping from atmospheric protest to the lower, steadier hum of idling engines. A beat later, that hum wound down.

“Touchdown,” the pilot said. “Welcome to Tavrik III.”

The hatch indicator flicked from red to amber to green. Tavrik’s air knifed in as the ramp dropped, cold and thin and edged with something chemical. Stephen’s lungs expanded out of habit, meeting resistance halfway. He had to make himself finish the breath. The briefings had been honest, habitable, yes. Friendly, no.

Wind pressed into the cabin, steady and insistent, tugging at jackets, slipping cold fingers through seams and collars. Not a gale—Meridian’s structures broke the worst of it—but relentless. The sort of wind that would grind a person down, given time.

Stephen rose, straightened his jacket, and walked down the ramp onto gritty composite. Tavrik’s gravity was slightly less than Earth’s, making his step feel light and off. Wind pressed against his chest and shoulders from a consistent direction, as the atmosphere had committed. The security detail followed in a loose formation, with Khorev slightly behind and others radiating outward, resembling a small group of colleagues or a shell.

The woman at the pad’s edge waited until he was within conversation range before moving. She stepped forward, hand out.

“Director Sabine Eriksson,” Stephen said, taking it.

“Commodore MacCaffery,” she replied. Her grip was steady, callused. The wind feathered the graying hair at her temples, pulled at the zipper of the field jacket she wore over a standard-issue tunic. Her eyes, gray and sharp, did a quick inventory of him, then of the people behind him. “Welcome to Meridian Station. I assume Captain McKinney told you we have problems.”

“That word came up,” Stephen said. “Along with ‘riot’ and ‘fourteen dead.’”

She nodded once, confirmation, not apology. “That’s part of it. You’ll want the whole picture.”

Her gaze slid over to Khorev. “Lieutenant.”

“Director.” Khorev inclined his head. They measured each other in a beat of silence, two professionals calibrating.

“Let’s get you under a roof,” Eriksson said. “The wind’s polite today, but that doesn’t mean it likes you.”

They crossed the pad toward the Spike under the eyes of mounted cameras and one uniformed ensign with a phaser at her hip and a data-slate in her hand. She snapped to a crisper posture as they passed, eyes front, but her attention flicked to Stephen’s rank pips, then to the plainclothes behind him. People learned to count threat vectors early out here.

The airlock door opened as Eriksson approached, seals hissing. Inside, a neutral-gray cylinder housed emergency lockers, suit hooks, and status displays. The outer door sealed behind them, pressure equalizing with a soft, mechanical sigh. The inner hatch slid open onto a corridor of climate-controlled air and Federation lighting.

Relief hit with almost indecent force. The air settled at a precise, engineered comfort—twenty-two degrees, humidity balanced on the knife-edge between parched and clammy. The floor flexed just enough to spare knees and backs from long hours. The hum of environmental systems faded into the background, a promise of order against the world outside.
This was the Federation’s true strength: the refusal to yield, making inhospitable worlds livable by force of engineering and will.

“Operations first,” Eriksson said, moving down the curving corridor. “So you can see who’s paying attention to us.”

They passed wall panels cycling through data: atmospheric composition, power grid loads, and local comm traffic. People moved with purpose—no loitering, no hurry. On a small status board, a column marked “Shore Parties” listed “SUSQUEHANNA: DOCKED – 13 PERSONNEL.”

The operations center sat behind a wide doorway marked by a blue stripe. Inside, it featured a horseshoe of consoles around a holo-table, with screens displaying atmospheric modeling, orbital traffic, and perimeter sensors. A stack of monitors showed exterior feeds: the pad, perimeter, and coastline. The air had a faint tang of ozone and heated circuitry.
Eriksson stepped to a sensor console and tapped commands with the ease of someone who’d done this a thousand times.
Stephen's stomach tightened; numbers meant lives.

Eriksson cleared her throat and continued. "Kaldari aerial traffic," she said. Flight paths painted themselves over a representation of Tavrik's western hemisphere in green arcs. "Recon flights over our sector up thirty-four percent in the last six weeks."

Lines overlapped in a tangle near Meridian’s coordinates. She layered another dataset. Threads of amber light sparked and flickered in orbit and beyond.

“Vethari signal traffic has tripled in the same timeframe,” she added. “Long-range comms, tight-beam transmissions, bursts we can’t decode, and a few we can. Both sides are paying a lot more attention to this coast.”

Stephen studied the patterns. The Kaldari arcs were nearer, lower, like a hand hovering close to a face without touching. The Vethari signals were more distant, flared high and sharp, as if someone were etching lines in invisible ink over the planet.

“Commercial interest?” he asked. “Or should I be hearing drums?”

“Depends which office you sit in,” Eriksson said. “Command calls it ‘mutual intensification of monitoring.’ My security chief says it’s everybody counting how fast they could get here if they decided they needed to.”

“And you?”

“I think we’ve gone from ‘curiosity’ to ‘asset under consideration.’” She looked at him. “We’re visible, Commodore. Once you’re visible, you’re in someone’s plans, whether they tell you or not.”

He took that in. Isolation was one kind of vulnerability. Being under a microscope was another.

Eriksson stepped back from the console. “Come on. If I leave Kettle alone too long, he’ll either blow something up or write another forty-page memo about his timeline.”

The science corridor smelled faintly of disinfectant and ozone. Lab doors lined the walls, some closed, some open to reveal flashes of work in progress: sediment cores on stands, atmospheric samples in sealed containers, holographs of molecular structures.

In one lab, a man in a stained coat stood over a sample tray, lips moving as he worked through numbers only he could see.

“Dr. Kettle,” Eriksson said.

He jumped, then blinked a few times as if dragging his vision back from a different layer of reality. “Director,” he said. “You brought the dignitary.”

“Marcus Kettle,” Eriksson said. “Chief science officer. This is Commodore MacCaffery.”

Kettle wiped his hands on the sides of his coat, leaving new smears. He extended one. His grip was firm, but there was a tremor in it that he probably thought he was hiding.

“Commodore,” he said. “Welcome to the grand experiment. Try not to breathe too deeply when you’re outside.”

“I’ll take that under advisement,” Stephen said.

Kettle jerked a thumb at a live display on the far wall. Colored contour lines marched across a stylized representation of Tavrik’s western coast. Numeric values ticked upward and down along one side.

“Ten-year feasibility studies,” Kettle said. “That’s what we promised Command. Ten years to give them an honest answer about whether this rock can be something other than a mining pit with aspirations. They came back last month and asked for ‘significant positive indicators’ for their eighteen-month review.”

He leaned forward slightly, eyes wide with incredulity. "It's like asking a chef to deliver a five-course meal atop a shifting sand dune,' he added, voice tinged with frustration. 'We’re scrambling to find anything meaningful while the dust keeps moving the finish line, half-joking that by the time we find what they're after, we'll need a miracle, not metrics."

He snorted. “We don’t even have eighteen months of decent baseline data yet. Last dust storm took half my sensors offline and changed the surface albedo over two hundred klicks of shoreline, and they want me to tell them when families can picnic on the beach without environmental suits.”

“Command likes metrics,” Stephen said. “Numbers they can put in boxes.”

“Physics doesn’t care about their boxes,” Kettle said. “Or their press releases.”

Eriksson’s mouth quirked. “Marcus is a little stressed,” she said.

“Marcus is being asked to either lie or to redefine ‘positive indicator’ until it’s meaningless,” Kettle shot back, but there was more weariness than heat in it. “I’ll tell you what I tell them, Commodore: if nobody starts any wars, nobody gets too clever with orbital mirrors, and they give me thirty years, I can probably give them breathable air and soil you can grow something in that isn’t a fungus that eats metal. Anything less, they get a very expensive cautionary tale.”

“Understood,” Stephen said. “If I have to put this in a sentence later, I’ll aim for the honest version, not the optimistic one.”

Kettle gave him a long look, as if weighing the odds of that actually happening.

“Appreciated,” he said, finally. “Try to keep my atmosphere intact. I’ve invested a lot of insomnia into it.”

They left him to his numbers and ghosts.

The residential zone announced itself with sounds: children’s voices, casual conversation, and utensil clatter. The corridor led to a broader spine with doors and alcoves. A mural of blue and green arcs hinted at waves and hills. A scraggly plant in a pot under a grow-light sat in a corner, contrasting the station’s utilitarian lines.

People moved at different tempos. A woman in a sweater guided a boy with a datapad into a classroom, holding his hand. Two teens in jumpsuits leaned against a wall, joking over a device. A man in engineering gold, boots scuffed, unzipped jacket, talked with someone over his shoulder, sounding like a friendly argument.

Stephen’s attention caught on a trio near a doorway: a girl, maybe fifteen, with a braid down her back; a lanky boy, elbows sharp in an oversized sweatshirt; a smaller, curly-haired kid, perhaps eleven, balancing a tray with three bowls. They laughed at something the youngest said, radiating the kind of easy certainty that the ground would hold beneath their feet.

Will’s age, he thought, before he could stop it.

The youngest caught him looking. His smile faltered, replaced by wary curiosity. The older boy’s eyes tracked the security detail behind Stephen, taking in plainclothes jackets and the way they didn’t quite move like civilians.

Stephen gave the youngest a slight nod and a half smile, the sort you offered someone else’s kid in a court waiting room, nothing threatening, nothing that would invite a conversation they weren’t ready to have.

“New visitor,” the girl said to the younger two, voice pitched low but not quite low enough.

“Looks important,” the middle one replied. “Or in trouble.”

“Those usually look the same,” the youngest said.

That earned a snort from Eriksson. “They’re not wrong,” she murmured.

Stephen met the kids’ eyes a moment longer than courtesy allowed, then looked away. The moment lingered, heavy in his chest, an unexpected ache settling beneath the routine professionalism. Meridian wasn’t just numbers or policy; it was the immediacy of teenagers grabbing meals, leaning against bulkheads, grumbling about school, children whose entire lives had unfolded under this lesser gravity and alien sky. He recognized, with a sharp awareness, how fragile their sense of safety was, how a single wrong knock could redefine the boundaries of home. The realization pressed at him: these were not merely statistics on a briefing sheet, but young people whose daily certainties, already precarious, could be lost in an instant.

“Personnel with families are less likely to leave or cause trouble,” Eriksson said, watching him watch them. “It anchors them. Gives them something to lose. That’s a strength.” She paused. “It’s also a vulnerability.”

She nodded toward a ceiling-mounted node. A surveillance lens tracked slowly along the corridor, adjusting focus.

“We’re a secured perimeter wrapped around a community,” she went on. “Every spouse and kid on this station makes us more stable and more fragile at the same time. If someone wants leverage, they don’t have to hit a shield generator. They have to make the families feel unsafe.”

“People volunteered for this,” Stephen said. It came out less like a defense and more like a reminder to himself.

“Some did,” Eriksson said. “Some got told this was the posting that would keep their family together. I don’t judge the choices. I make sure the records show who’s out here when somebody in the core starts playing chess.”

They passed a small common area where a pickup game of something like handball was underway against a cargo-netted wall, with kids and adults mixed. A scoreboard glowed in one corner, numbers tight. Somebody had scrawled “NO BROKEN NOSES THIS WEEK” on a physical board taped beside it, the handwriting messy and hopeful.

End Log

Commodore Stephen MacCaffery
Special Envoy
Tavrik III

 

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