The Nature of Expansion on Bional Segundis
By Davin Glynn
Second Place Winner, Bow & Chariot 2026 Science Fiction Story Challenge
Roots
The ore hauler rumbled across the cracked basalt plains of Bional Segundis, belching black smoke from groaning exhaust pipes. It was approaching the mouth of a gaping chasm, rent in the landscape by tectonic forces millions of years ago. Past the ravine the twin suns of the Bional system shimmered lazily. Their pale light played across the rusted off-white hull, causing the gold emblazoned logo of the winged sandal to glimmer dimly.
Inside the hulking machine miners were arrayed along two benches running the length of both walls. They seemed hardly aware of being jostled against each other by the motion of the hauler. Their soot-stained faces were set, as if in stone, with grim determination. Being situated directly over the roaring engine, the sweltering cabin smelled of sweat and petroleum.
Beyond the cabin was the cockpit, where a short driver bent over a command console and a one-eyed mine boss brooded.
“Lucky finding this deposit ey, boss?” said the pilot, not taking his eyes off the thick windshield before him.
“It ain’t lucky yet, not till that ore’s dug up and packed away.” the boss grunted in reply.
“Well, lucky so far. The men needed this. Been a while since we found anything. Food prices are going up.”
“I needed it too. A mine boss that don’t find no ore isn’t much use to Hermes Corp. They made that pretty clear in my last review.”
“Although I'm sure they didn’t say exactly that.” replied the pilot with a grin. A smirk slowly spread across the boss’s lips.
“Of course not, they said it more like this,” He cleared his throat before adopting his most high-pitched and nasally voice “We are concerned with the quality and consistency with which you are finding and extracting mineral resources and would like to have a caring conversation to determine if you might have better aptitude elsewhere.”
The pilot burst into laughter, a loud, gasping affair which left him clutching his side. By now the hauler was inching its way down the soft slopes which, for all their gentleness, would be no less deadly if the humongous vehicle were to topple forward. The miners in the cabin clutched fabric handbraces dangling from the ceiling and braced themselves. Before long the tracked machine was perched on a ledge overlooking the dig site, but the site was far from untouched. The pilot and boss both gave a start when they peered over the lip.
Below them another extraction team had already set up operations. Their dark green hauler with its black scorpion logo was parked at the bottom of the slope. Men with drills and sensors were already prodding the ground, marking rich veins and preparing to mine.
“What…” the boss murmured, his eyes smouldering with rage.
“I thought our scouts put a claim beacon do-”
“They did put a beacon down…” he hissed through gritted teeth, already standing up and making for the cabin. “...And this isn’t the first beacon which has gone missing right before a Pincer Group team happened upon it. Drop the command rover, I’m going down.”
Fifteen minutes later the one-eyed boss and the five heftiest miners in the outfit were dismounting the rover and approaching the rival hauler. The Pincer Group boss was standing ready to meet them. He was a tall, lanky man sporting a crooked smile filled out with prosthetic teeth.
“Stanchion! Funny seeing you here! It looks like you Hermes boys were too slow again! Well, what can you do? Better luck next time right?”
“We weren’t too slow, Reggie, and you know it. We had a claim beacon right there.” said Stanchion, jutting a thick finger toward the site. “My scouts placed it a few nights ago.”
“Claim beacon? We didn’t see no beacon! Are you sure you have the right place?” he replied, his left lip already curling into a smirk.
“Cut the shit Reggie. We were here first.”
“I’m not so sure my friend, but maybe so! I guess you will just have to take it up with the claims council at the capital. I'm sure they will set things straight.”
“Reggie, I am gonna ask you one last time. Take your boys and leave now. This is your warning.”
“Wow! Are you threatening me? I’ll have you know that Pincer Group doesn’t take kindly to intimidation and neither do the Planetary Authorities! If you have a problem with us you know who to take it up with, otherwise get lost!”
Stanchion was silent for a few moments, clenching his fists at his side. The men behind him scowled at their rivals, who had begun to gather behind their boss.
“Fine. You made your choice.” Stanchion turned and mounted the rover, beckoning his miners to follow.
When they were out of earshot the most hot-headed of the vanguard spoke up: “How could you let them walk all over us boss? If we don’t do something now, it's just gonna keep happening!”
“Oh we are gonna do something alright, and it's never gonna happen again…” Soon enough he was back in the cockpit. The pilot stood up and opened his mouth to speak, but the boss beat him to it.
“Can you get us up there?” he pointed at a higher shelf situated just above the Pincer Group hauler. “I think so. I just have to wrap back the way we came and turn left up the opposing slope.”
“Good. Take us there, and tell the men to ready the charges.”
Trunk
George arrived late, again. He left his personal rover parked sloppily between two spots in front of a Hermes branch office. The building was a stolid block of concrete, scored with long and thin window slits. On the horizon a cloud of dust rolled slowly across the basalt plains.
George hurried under strip after strip of fluorescent lights, past doors stamped with numbered nameplates down a hallway with generic corporate-pattern carpet. He even almost skipped his morning heated caffeine. His boss had already warned him about tardiness.
Finally he reached the office, E172: the Risk Management department. He opened the door slowly, hoping to slip in unobserved, but his caution was unnecessary. No one was in their work pods, instead they were huddled on the far side of the room, eyes transfixed on a newscast screen. George looked up and the color drained from his face.
The screen showed an outright massacre. Images flashed of smouldering corpses, partially liquefied, strewn across a mining site. Men missing limbs, men impaled with jagged chunks of metal, men with faces frozen in an eternal scream of mortal terror. Behind them was a flaming mining hauler, spewing a pillar of black smoke into the heavens. A face whose jaw hung slack on its remaining connected mandible was the last thing George saw before voiding his morning caffeine into a small mesh paperbin. The tinny voice of the newscaster echoed throughout the office.
“It appears that the attack occurred around 10:00 standard time yesterday morning. Authorities acted quickly, managing to apprehend all suspects involved. Official sources indicate that thirty of the fifty two victims have been identified. Forensic analysis has determined that the survivors of the initial explosion were later executed with piercing weapons…”
The faces of the perpetrators flashed on the screen, grizzled, soot-stained, many scarred or singed. They were especially struck by the image of the captain. His sole eye blazed with defiant intensity.
The crowd’s awed silence was broken at last by a short analyst with a well-oiled hairdo. “Animals…” he hissed with seething contempt. “They’re animals.”
“H-how could they have done this?” stammered a pudgy auditor, whose round back was darkened by a quickly growing sweat stain. “I mean, why? Why d-did they think they had to do it?” As he spoke he tugged at his collar, pulling his already taut shirt to its limits of its elasticity.
“Are we sure those are our boys?” asked a tall, bony office coordinator who gnawed at her cracked knuckles furiously.
“Of course it was our boys!” the analyst snapped, “Unless some Pincer Group extraction team attacked one of their own, or unless a new competitor moved in overnight!”
“Gerard.” said a stern voice belonging to the department HR representative, emerging suddenly from her office. She was a woman whose face seemed as if frozen in a polite corporate smile, the kind of smile a mother might give a child who asks for too many sweets. Despite the wildly inappropriate circumstances this smile showed no signs of wavering. “I know this is a stressful time for all of us, but you know that is no way to treat a fellow employee or even a fellow person! We will be discussing this later, but for now I think you should apologize.” All hints of Gerard’s former rage vanished in an instant, replaced with red-faced shame. After mumbling an apology to the indignant office coordinator he attempted to subtly efface himself from the crowd.
“W-what are we supposed to do?” said the auditor, whose heaving breaths had begun to quicken. “I mean, should we alert the planetary authorities?”
“No one is doing anything until we get word back from corporate. Davis is speaking with them right now” said the HR representative. All the eyes drifted toward Davis’ corner office. The door was shut and the blinds had been closed since they came in in the morning. “Until then why don’t we all take our seats and try to get some work done? If anyone feels upset by the recent developments my doors are always open for counseling.” Suddenly all eyes were pulled back towards the entrance by the sound of groaning. George was recovering from his bout of nausea.
“Hey, I think we are gonna need to call sanitation” he murmured sheepishly.
“George?” said the HR representative. “What time did you make it in today? Can I pull you for a quick chat?”
While George was subjected to a caring conversation on the subject of punctuality, the rest of the office shuffled back to their work pods. They stared at their displays, scrolled up and down documents, or opened and closed day old transmissions while sneaking glances at the newscast. Time passed sluggishly.
Finally Davis emerged from his office, a typically animated man who seemed completely worn and ragged. “I see you have all seen the news. I just got off call with corporate. They have requested all data we have on the Stanchion extraction team.”
Branches
The data audit revealed the path taken that day by the Stanchion team. Their hauler traveled to the scene of the attack, before looping around to a higher elevation then descending into the pit. It also showed that their scouts had placed a claim beacon at the site of the incident, which went offline in the late hours of the night prior. The pudgy auditor wondered aloud why the extraction team hadn’t simply forwarded this data to the authorities, before he submitted his findings to corporate.
The corporate headquarters at the capital had been abuzz with activity since the early hours of the morning when the full host of staff had been mustered for mandatory emergency overtime. The situation was monitored, reports were written and rewritten and business insights were analyzed. So many meetings were scheduled that the system administrators had to impose a fifteen invite minimum. The PR department's inbox was scrolling faster than the whole team of twelve could churn out boilerplate responses. The legal department was involved in tense negotiations nearly continuously. By sunrise the building's caffeine stockpiles had run dangerously low, and an additional emergency shipment was hastily scheduled.
By noon a crowd had begun to form outside the sleek glass tower, necessitating the deployment of additional perimeter guards. They chanted, picketed, and waved signs with the mangled faces of the victims. Workers shunned the windows, those who were compelled to walk past them pointed their faces inward. On the lower floors the din of the mob was loud enough to seriously disrupt productivity.
Soon enough all the data was aggregated, examined, verified and compiled into a series of high-level business insights. Now the corporate leadership was ready to meet and make a decision.
The executive war room was located on the top floor of the skyscraper, inside of the glass dome which crested the monument. Directors and officers were seated around a slab of polished obsidian which ran the length of the room. The air had the crisp, climate-controlled coolness which workers loathed for its starkness but appreciated for its invigorating quality.
The Planetary Director sat at the head of the table, a tall man with a mane of jet black hair that had only just begun to retreat up his forehead. He stopped to survey his subordinates before starting. Their faces mixed the dark circles of sleep deprivation with the wired wide-eyed stare of excess caffeine consumption.
“So…” he said, pausing to build gravitas. His voice was thick and rich. “...To begin, what do we know for sure? I believe Richards has something prepared?”
“Yes I do.” Richards broke in with his nasally voice. He was a young, skinny and acne ridden analyst who had quickly risen through the ranks of Hermes Corp by his ability to scour massive amounts of data and quickly discern noise from signal. “According to our internal records the Stanchion team placed a claim beacon at the site of the incident at 3:43 pm three days prior. The beacon remained active until 1:37 am the night before, when it stopped transmitting.”
“Okay, so the beacon was removed. Why did they not simply alert the authorities?”
“That’s where things get interesting. On the planetary public ledger there is no record of the beacon ever having been placed. It’s as if it was never there.”
“How is that possible?”
“Well, that’s what we aren’t sure about. Maybe it was simply some kind of glitch?”
“No, couldn’t be. If it was a random glitch how could the Pincer extraction team have known to take advantage of it?”
“You know, we’ve dealt with something like this before.” came a gravely voice from the far side of the table. It belonged to Rex, a security consultant brought in by corporate to handle delicate situations. He was a bald, heavyset man whose weight gave the impression of bulk rather than corpulence. There was fierce debate over whether bringing him in was consistent with Hermes' corporate values, but it was eventually determined that the risks of his inclusion were lower than the risks of needing his particular expertise and not having it. “You said that it was a Pincer Group extraction team?”
“That is correct.” added the analyst
“Well, what industries is Pincer Group involved in?”
“Let’s see, mining of course, materials manufacturing, energy, construction…software?”
“That’s it! Software!” came a voice from a VP in corporate strategy. “Just a few months ago Pincer Group got this big contract with the planetary authorities to provide servers and software for their law enforcement databases!”
“So Pincer Group can remotely delete all evidence of the claim beacon, then send in their teams to steal the site?” asked the Planetary Director.
“Not just that,” picked up the analyst, “That software also supports the request queue. They can delete the claim, steal it, then summon the authorities and move their request to the top of the queue.” The Director sat back, ruffled his brow, and wove his fingers together. A wave of anxiety suddenly seized him, clutching at his throat.
“So they can keep doing it, claiming all the best sites right out from under us? ” The room was silent, the consultant looked expectant. The Director sighed then asked. “So, what can we do about it?”
“The way I see it, as long as Pincer owns the contract, you guys are shut out. They can steal your claims and the authorities can’t or won’t intervene. If you want to maintain your presence on the planet you will need to do something about that.”
“Go on.”
“My company can provide a service here, nothing we haven’t done before. Our cyber operations team can remotely infiltrate the law enforcement servers and cause what we call a ‘maintenance cascade’. Usually our clients take advantage of this downtime by securing their assets with additional private security. I have a few firms I can recommend to you from off-planet who are used to this kind of work.”
“We are already in deep shit with the press. We can’t escalate now.”
“Our operatives can guarantee Hermes Corp will remain unimplicated. The failure will appear to be the result of a faulty software update pushed by Pincer Group.”
The Director pressed his fingers into his temples and thought. He was haunted by visions of the destruction his action would cause, burning storefronts, police barricades, overcrowded hospitals. He was weary of being burdened with such a task. At the same time, he thought about the shrinking output during the last few months, about the consequences to his career which the Hermes Corp governance back on Earth spelled out in no uncertain terms: “Failure means replacement”, and about his rivals in Pincer Group celebrating with a generous employee bonus.
There was no room for deliberation. As the Planetary Director his power was vast and sophisticated, but completely conditional on his success.
He looked down the room and saw his anxieties were mirrored. He stood up to speak. “The way I see it, we only have one choice. Failure isn’t an option for us.”
The chief human resources officer spoke up. “One more thing, what about the extraction team?”
The CEO pictured the face of the captain, the unyielding willpower reflected in his hardened features. He felt a pang of sympathy, almost kinship, bubble up inadvertently. “The miners were hardworking men with a long and dutiful record of service to Hermes Corp. They acted as they did due to situational factors outside of their control, but we cannot be seen to defend them publicly. Unfortunately they are on their own.”
With that the meeting was concluded.
Tree
The bug was first noticed in the morning by a developer with the planetary authorities, who saw his app was no longer receiving data from its API calls. Upon investigation it was discovered that no data was being transferred between any servers at all. It appeared that an update pushed overnight from Pincer Group had resulted in a catastrophic error. Each server had reset all of its network configurations and each database had dumped all of its records. Pincer Group later denied pushing this update, but audit logging (which was mysteriously immune to this error) confirmed their culpability.
By the afternoon it had been leaked to the public that law enforcement’s surveillance and record-keeping capabilities were totally offline. What followed was a wave of crime and vigilantism which swept across the planet. In the cities roving gangs clashed with property owners while civilians cowered in barricaded apartments. The chaos continued until authorities were able to enforce martial law. A curfew was imposed, non-essential work was cancelled, and checkpoints were established at intersections.
In the provinces violence was more pervasive. Cycles of crime, retaliation, and counter-retaliation escalated faster than the authorities had the power to contain them. Fighting was especially brutal between rival extraction teams, who were already galvanized by the recent incident. It was rumored that a private security company from off-planet was involved, but nothing was ever confirmed.
After three days the servers were back online and order had been restored. With the mass of conflicting reports it was impossible to determine guilt and innocence, so authorities opted to issue mass amnesty for the extent of the outage. Pincer Group was determined to be responsible, and ordered to pay hefty fines in addition to losing their software contract. They also lost possession of many of their most valuable mining sites, which had been seized by rival extraction teams during the struggle. The news cycle for the next few weeks was completely devoted to discussion of the lawlessness and the story of the Stanchion extraction team was lost to time.
