Northstar Industrial Co. / NSIC

For about a month in 2921, anyone could go to Kallis.

The jump point had been found by a soldier on a scan station in Oso who wasn’t supposed to be looking for one. The system on the other side was new, unworked, and legal to enter, and it would stay that way until the Senate voted.

Nora Klein owned a Freelancer MAX and hauled contract freight out of the Covalex hub in the outer reaches. She had no particular claim on Kallis. What she had was a hull that could carry three and a fair idea of which two. Going meant dropping her standing contracts and fuelling out of pocket, with no guarantee the vote wouldn’t come early and leave her with nothing.

Sam Ostrowski read sites. Owen Tate worked them. Klein had crossed paths with both for years without ever calling either a friend. The corporations were still filing route applications when the three of them left.

The jump was the easy part. The point had been mapped a week earlier and the line through it was published, and Klein flew it the way she flew everything, without commentary. What came out the other side was a system in the middle of being built. Nine bodies at nine different stages, some of them still shedding material, none of them finished. The Imperial Cartography Center had scanned all of it from a distance and moved on. Nobody had looked closely.

Ostrowski spent four days looking closely.

Kallis is a system that never settled. In an older one, material sorts itself over billions of years. The heavy things sink, the surface cools, and what you want ends up under a thousand kilometers of rock that costs more to move than the material is worth. In Kallis none of that had happened yet. It was all still where it fell.

He ran the scanners until he found a body worth the trip, and then ran them again to be sure, because there was no second trip and no chart to check himself against. He was working off returns nobody had ever seen before, from a kind of body nobody had ever worked. When he finally called it, he called it flat. Klein took them in.

The material was where Ostrowski said it would be. What it did once Tate started cutting was not in anybody’s handbook, because there was no handbook. The rock came apart in a way nothing predicted and it put Tate down hard.

There was no medical bay on that ship. Three bunks, a galley and a head. Getting Tate somewhere he could be stabilized meant a route they hadn’t planned, and the fuel had been budgeted for a straight run in and out. Every hour spent on him was an hour closer to the vote.

They went anyway. Nobody wrote it down as a decision, because none of them treated it as one.

They came out inside the window with all three aboard and the hold full. The Senate closed Kallis four days later. It has been closed ever since.

Klein sold enough to register a company and kept the ship. The other two came to work for it, which is to say they kept doing what they had been doing, with the paperwork caught up to it. Tate worked another thirty years with a hand that never fully closed again. The rest of the haul went to the Imperial Cartography Center, which had scanned Kallis from orbit and never held a piece of it. It is still the only material anyone has taken out of that system.

They named the company for the one thing in Kallis that was finished. Nine half-made worlds around a star that had already become what it was going to be.

Tate is supposed to have said, while they were still arguing about the fuel, that they weren’t leaving anything out there. He meant the cargo. Ostrowski took it the other way. That is the way it stuck.

We don’t leave anything out there.

All three are gone now. Northstar Industrial still runs the way they ran it: small crews and work that one person cannot do alone. Somebody reads the site, somebody works it, somebody brings it home, and it matters less who than that everyone does. Larger hulls are on order. The work has not changed.