In dark corners of the frigid void between pinpricks of nuclear fire, the currents of ions and eddies of solar winds flow through the lightless void, an unimaginably vast sea of stellar particles and pitiless vacuum. Hanging where the unseen pulls of gravity clash and the Aether scrape close, floats Sacarium Stellarium, the Sanctum of Stars. A name that evokes images far more grandiose than what had been a six-dock stellar repair port. Now, two decaying cruiser hulks sit at two of them, slowly being absorbed into the mass of decks that made the lower two hundred decks lying under the spires of the lords of trade.
For over three thousand Terran years, the Fortunato trade clan has expanded a network between solar systems on the edges of four major systems. Family lines have lived and died, never setting a foot off a world of steel ground and air shipped in from living worlds. The Fortunatos have expanded their vast wealth and influence on the blood and broken lives of generations in the Stellarium’s body. Now, the lines of power and greed spread beyond the sacred space of the Imperium of Man and into the domain of the Tau Xenos and their poisonous lies.
Among other, far darker, influences festering in the shadows of the Lower Decks.
****
His breath was already fogging in front of him this close to the outer hull, and Saturio pulled his patchwork synth leather coat tighter as he jogged along the rattling walkway. He kept his face covered with a scarf over the rebreather he’d plucked from a scrap vendor’s cart while he sold the ancient woman power cells for her welding kit. If there were an actual hull breach out here, not even the upper spire tech would keep him alive. It might give him time to get away from a micro meteorite hole, or a rogue cloud of carbon monoxide and argon up from the industrial decks. The runner he’d inherited this route from hadn’t worn one, went hypoxic, and gone over the ledge. ‘Least that’s what it looked like had happened to Saturio when he’d found the body.
Either way, he hadn’t looked back; the other deck runner had routes, credits, and a stash of genuine Necromunda-grade Obscura that had Saturio traded for freedom from Tycho’s 86th Deck gang. You either bought your way out of a gang or killed your way out, and Saturio wasn’t quite the killer for that. Not yet anyway.
He sprinted, then hopped over a gap in the walkway where a maintenance servitor moved on rails along the outer hull. Saturio didn’t look down at the vast gulf of emptiness that vanished below him. Rumour said that all artificial gravity had a point where it would swap, and if you fell into that spot, you’d slow and float, suspended in the thin, false atmosphere of the station. Others said deck runners past had fallen into the gravity well and been stuck, unable to move, that their skeletons could be found floating in the void outside water reclamation.
Writing in the Gray Area 