Wave Rise

Wave Rise

Three hops out from Khesret, beyond a transit through Zatheeri Reach, Wave Rise hangs over Vashren II: a Federation desert colony under dense, tainted air, rust flats, and a quarantine order old enough that half the warning buoys have forgotten which century they're enforcing. The world has tens of thousands in sealed towns. The A-class orbital berth has fuel, repair, medical isolation bays, and a lot of doors painted yellow.

The approach is the problem. Federal interdiction buoys drift off their published stations, broadcasting superseded Colonial Health codes and firing hard exclusion warnings at anything that enters on the old vector. Some are harmless. Some still have maneuvering fuel. One has begun tagging civilian hulls as biological contacts and forwarding their transponders to a dead office. Colonial Affairs wants the system chart corrected without announcing how badly the quarantine perimeter has decayed.

Wave Rise isn't alien custom wrapped around a beacon ring. It's familiar bureaucracy left outside too long: sun-bleached seals, contradictory orders, clerks working from three versions of the same statute, and colonists who need the berth open without having every cargo run treated like an outbreak. Scouts get paid to decide which warnings are real. Here, they may also decide which embarrassments become public.