When spaceship fuel is loaded or unloaded, the port central to the transaction is evacuated very sneakily. The substance volatile enough to aggressively propel spaceships through interstellar distances and so potent that it requires freezing for transport and so valuable that its presence is a secret is generally not considered safe for civilian interaction. The exception tends to be the most important loading crews, (for reasons which may or may not become apparent as we discuss insurance premiums) and a crew from the receiving planet or vessel, who can then collectively have responsibility thrust upon them posthumously for any problems which arise should the proper handling instructions not be followed, or should physics reassert itself without more warning than six billion years of consistency can provide. In cases of planetary export, a team from the mining company with top-secret clearance and human collateral on file prepares the blocks of frozen fuel for loading onto the ship. Malyria is a waystation- specifically a storage point for the Gasocorp Conglomerate’s third district fuel division- and as such a team of six Gasocorp employees were in charge of loading the fuel and transporting the blocks on this particular day. They were all carefully selected to ensure they had very little in the way of ancillary costs after death. It was a risky job.

Gasocorp Employee Gareth Will had been stationed on Malyria for six days, hidden in a bunker and encouraged to reveal secrets about his childhood. He was from Star System 47, a group of planets that were becoming less defined by the star they orbited than by the remarkable fact that humans had spread there and settled on them, as the planets themselves were not particularly fit for habitation. They were part of what some in the Galactic Empire called The Civilization Zone, an area which had been written off as dead space by all except the most far reaching services- one of which was not the mail, incidentally, which was amusing given their propensity to tout their infinite value- and the most dogged, margin-seeking companies. Their proximity to the Capitol System was the impetus behind their initial settlement, but after centuries of failure and billions of lives lost they were more or less abandoned by their support systems and the population now sinks every year. Spinster daughters and eldest sons became the only demographics likely to stay behind, because there was nothing for any of the rest of the population to do.

Gareth Will was an only child, and so theoretically could have had a bright future on the dying world from which he came, except for two unfortunate facts: his had been one of the only two families left; and it had not been the more powerful one. So instead of a glorious life of subsistence farming tethered to the land and debased in a thousand ways in constant sub-zero temperatures he had chosen to escape by smuggling himself out in the hold of a ship carrying the hothouse tomatoes which were the primary export of the other family on the planet, known as the Canderians. He had no doubt his father had died when the news had broken, given that Gareth was in line to become the final DNA slave for the Canderian Family (a necessary precaution to prevent mandibular prognathism and the inability to understand basic multiplication). By leaving he knew he had accelerated their timeline, deprived them of their last generation of truly free labor, and triggered the kind of malice that, galactically speaking, only exists in the most inbred places. Undeterred by this knowledge, as his father had lived a long, robust, regularly-milked life, Gareth joined Gasocorp for a minimum-wage job and the remote prospect of making it to middle-age. He was happy with the decision in general, and was thinking as he often did about how bright his future looked when, instead of fuel blocks tumbling irresponsibly out of the conveyor port and onto his cart, a frozen body thundered out onto the offload ramp, rotated, and stuck. He slammed the Halt button with his gloved hand and waited in the frozen bay for someone to come find out why. Citing cost of replacement in case of explosion, they hadn’t given him a radio.