They sent us to the ascent of the Kazakhstan step, a bleak, unforgiving stretch of wind-scout land where rusted fences led nowhere and the horizon buzzed like a tuning fork.

The wind still bit through two layers of thermals. The roads were barely roads at all, just tire-gouge scars in frozen soil.

No birds, no herders, no villages, just empty land and silence for miles.

When satellites fall, they're supposed to burn up in the atmosphere or land in the ocean, far away from anything

that matters.

That's how they're designed.

But sometimes things go wrong.

A miscalculation, a failed thruster, or a misfire in orbit.

When they come down on land, it's our job to make it go away.

We're contractors, a clean-up crew that logged the telemetry, recover anything that didn't vaporize, and flag what might belong in a black box.

Most of it's worth for slag by the time it hits Earth.

Once or twice, we've pulled out something interesting, sensitive, usually gets taken off

our hands before we can even ask what it was.

This mission? Standard.

Eight of us were assigned with two trucks, fold-out tents, portable uplinks, satellite relays,

a drone, and a ground-penetrating radar unit.

The site was flagged by orbital trackers.

Something had come down hard and fast.

We expected scorched wreckage and a couple long days shoveling sand and mud. Maybe a bonus

if anything survived intact. But something was off from the start. The telemetry was

jittery. GPS would lock, then drift. The terrain didn't quite match the coordinates. It was

like the maps themselves didn't want us here.

...