On Moons

When salvage pilot Wren Calloway cuts her way through a ninety-year-old wreck in the Flora debris stream, she expects titanium, lithium, and a fair price at the Vesta brokers. Instead, her thermal sweep finds a dark glassy nodule buried in the rubble, three degrees warmer than anything that cold has a right to be, and pulsing every forty-one minutes like something holding its breath.

Within hours an escrow of one hundred and forty thousand credits lands in her account, posted by Orison, an a...