Chapter 1: Owned in Zero-G
The shuttle bay air was a physical blow after the sterile silence of deep space. It smelled of ozone, scorched metal, and the faint, sweet tang of hydraulic fluid. Eva’s boots clanged on the grated decking, each step a jarring reminder of gravity’s insistent pull. Her body ached in a thousand different ways, a familiar catalog of strains and bruises earned from six months crammed inside a reconnaissance scout, muscles atrophied and then screaming back to life during re-entry. She just wanted a shower, a real meal, and twelve hours of black, dreamless sleep.
A young ensign, his face pale and his uniform crisply new, practically vibrated with anxiety as he scurried to intercept her before she even cleared the docking umbilical. “Sergeant Major Rostova? Ma’am? Councillor Volkov’s compliments. You’re to report to her immediately. Debris Reclamation Hub, Sector Gamma.”
Eva didn’t break stride. “My debrief is with Colonel Hess, Ensign. It’s scheduled.” Her voice was rough, unused to conversation.
The ensign kept pace, a nervous sparrow next to a bird of prey. “The Councillor has superseded that order, ma’am. It’s… urgent. She said to tell you it concerns your status.”
Status. The word had a cold, bureaucratic finality to it. Eva stopped, turning her full height to loom over the young man. He flinched. “Fine. Lead the way.”
The walk was a silent, winding journey through the station’s sterile arteries, away from the bustling heart of the military wing and into the colder, quieter sectors reserved for administration and storage. The ensign palmed a secure access panel, and the door hissed open onto a vast, echoing darkness.
The Orbital Debris Reclamation Hub wasn’t a room; it was a cavern. A zero-gravity cathedral dedicated to the ghosts of service. The air was frigid, smelling of vacuum and aged polymers. All around them, suspended in the still, cold air, drifted the flotsam of a thousand military lives. A dented helmet spun lazily, its visor reflecting the dim safety lights. A data-slate, its screen dark, bumped gently against a bundle of letters tied with a faded ribbon. Photographs of smiling families, of lovers, of pets, all floated in a silent, weightless ballet. It was a graveyard for things, and the ghosts clung to every object.
In the center of it all, suspended in the microgravity as if it were her personal throne room, was Councillor Aerona Volkov. Her elegant white hair was a shock of light in the gloom, perfectly coiffed despite the environment. She wore a severe, dark suit of civilian cut, its quality obvious even from a distance. In her gloved hands, she held a small, stack of sealed envelopes.
“Sergeant Major.” Aerona’s voice was calm, mellifluous, cutting through the profound silence without effort. She didn’t look up from the letters. “Welcome back from the dead.”
Eva’s blood went cold. “Ma’am?”
Aerona finally glanced at her, a faint, shrewd smile playing on her lips. She gestured with one hand, encompassing the floating detritus around them. “This is what’s left of you, Eva. May I call you Eva? Your personal effects. All cataloged, all processed. Quite the prolific writer, weren’t you?” She flicked her wrist, and one of the envelopes—Eva recognized her own slanted script on it—drifted toward a dark, yawning chute in the far wall. There was a brief, silent flash of orange light from within the chute, and the letter was gone. Incinerated.
“Those are mine,” Eva said, her voice low, a threat simmering under the surface.
“Were,” Aerona corrected gently. “They were yours. Your long-range scout suffered a catastrophic comms failure, followed by an energy signature collapse consistent with a core breach. Standard protocol after ninety days of silence: declaration of Presumed Killed in Action. Your file was closed.” She tossed another letter into the chute. Flash. Gone. “It’s remarkably efficient, the machine of war. It grinds on, with or without its individual cogs.”
Eva’s hands clenched into fists at her sides. This was a violation on a level she hadn’t even conceived. They’d erased her. Boxed her up and tossed her aside while she was still breathing. The fury was a hot, sharp spike in her gut. “I’m standing right here.”
“And that presents a fascinating bureaucratic problem,” Aerona mused, drifting closer. Her eyes, a piercing, cool gray, scanned Eva from head to toe, assessing, calculating. “You see, the moment you were declared KIA, every asset, every credit, every thing that was tied to your identity was liquidated or reabsorbed. But it goes deeper than that. The enlistment contract you signed at sixteen, on that lovely, desolate rock you called home… it has clauses. In the event of death, the state assumes full ownership of the biological and intellectual property of the deceased. Your body, Sergeant Major. Your training. Your very soul, if such a thing exists. It all belongs to the Galactic Military Corps.”
The words should have felt like a cage slamming shut. They should have ignited a righteous fire in her chest. And part of her was furious, screaming at the injustice, the cold, impersonal theft of her life.
But another part, a part buried deep under years of academy discipline and battlefield obedience, stirred awake. It was a dark, unwelcome thrill. The systematic stripping away was… clean. Absolute. There was no more Eva Rostova, daughter of colonists, woman with a past. There was only this entity, this owned thing, standing before its master. The submission was enforced, total, and a shocking, electric current of arousal pulsed through her, so at odds with the fury that it left her dizzy. It was more intense than any firefight, more intimate than any lover. This was being unmade, and the sheer power of it was intoxicating.
Aerona saw the conflict in her eyes, the slight hitch in her breathing. The politician’s smile widened, just a fraction. She knew. “Your combat record is exceptional. A scandal like this—a soldier back from the grave, her life erased by her own government—would be very problematic for certain factions in the military. But for me… it’s an opportunity. You are now a blank slate, Eva. My blank slate. And we have so much work to do.”
She reached out and plucked a drifting photograph from the air. It was of a younger Eva, standing rigidly at attention in her academy graduation photo, her eyes already hard. Aerona studied it for a moment, then let it go, watching it drift toward the incinerator chute.
“The question is,” Aerona said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper, “what are we going to do with you?”
“The question is,” Aerona said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper, “what are we going to do with you?”
She let the silence hang, a tangible thing in the cold air, before drifting back to a console embedded in a floating pillar of data-screens. Her fingers danced across the interface, pulling up files that glowed with the stark, impersonal light of official documentation. Eva’s file.
“Let’s begin with the practicalities. The woman you were, Sergeant Major Evangeline Rostova, is legally deceased. Her service record is sealed, her benefits disbursed to her non-existent next of kin.” Aerona didn’t look up from the screen, her tone conversational, as if discussing inventory. “This means you no longer hold rank. You are not a soldier. You are, technically, property. Military assets, even those of a… biological nature, must be properly accounted for and reallocated.”
Eva stood rigid, the words ‘reallocated’ echoing in the hollow space where her identity used to be. The initial, shocking thrill was curdling, mixing with a fresh wave of humiliation that burned hotter than any anger.
Aerona finally glanced over, her gaze impersonal, administrative. “Your flight suit, your boots, your undergarments. All of it is standardized issue. It belongs to the Corps. You will remove everything. Now.”
The command, delivered so flatly, hit Eva with the force of a physical blow. This wasn't the battlefield, where stripping for a med-scan was a matter of survival. This was ceremony. A deliberate, systematic dismantling. The vast, dark chamber felt like an amphitheater, and Aerona was the presiding priestess.
For a long moment, Eva didn’t move. Every instinct, every ounce of hard-won pride, screamed at her to refuse, to spit in this elegant woman’s face. But deeper than that, woven into the very fabric of her psyche from a childhood of bells and drills and absolute obedience, was the compulsion to comply. The academy on that wind-scoured colony world hadn’t just taught her to fight; it had taught her to belong to something greater than herself. This was the ultimate, perverse expression of that belonging.
Her fingers felt thick and clumsy as she reached for the first seal at her collar. The hiss of the pressure release was obscenely loud. She shrugged her shoulders, and the heavy, carbon-weave suit slid down her arms, catching at her wrists before she could shake it free. The cold of the hub bit into her skin, raising goosebumps. She let the suit drop. It floated beside her, a ghostly, empty version of herself.
She bent, each movement stiff, to unseal her boots. Kicking them off, they tumbled away in a slow, weightless cartwheel. Finally, standing in the center of that cavernous space, surrounded by the ghosts of other soldiers, she removed the rest, the simple, practical cotton and synth-fabric that was the last barrier between her skin and the institution that now owned it. The clothing drifted from her fingertips, joining the other detritus in its slow, silent dance.
She stood completely bare, the chill air a constant, shocking presence on her skin. She refused to cover herself, forcing her hands to remain at her sides, her spine straight. She was a weapon, stripped for maintenance. A asset, being inventoried.
Aerona’s eyes performed the inventory. They were not the eyes of someone looking at a person, but of an appraiser assessing a piece of equipment. They noted the network of fine scars across her ribs, the powerful definition of her thighs and shoulders, the long, dark hair that floated like a nebula around her head. There was no lust in that gaze, only cold calculation.
“Good,” Aerona said, the word a bland approval. She gestured to the incinerator chute with a faint tilt of her head. “Dispose of it.”
Eva’s breath caught. The finality of it. She reached out, her movement slow, and gathered the floating bundle of her life. The fabric was still warm from her body. She pushed it, a gentle, decisive shove, toward the dark opening. There was the same silent, orange flash. A brief, heatless glow that illuminated the sharp planes of her face for an instant before vanishing, taking the last physical proof of Eva Rostova with it.
Aerona gave a slow, satisfied nod. “Now we can begin. You understand your position?”
Eva looked at the politician, floating serene and fully clothed in the darkness. The humiliation was still there, a sharp stone in her gut. But beneath it, something else was coiling, warm and dark and terrifyingly alive. A terrifying sense of focus. Of purpose. She was nothing. Therefore, she could be anything.
Her voice, when it came, was low and steady, stripped of all rank, all pretense.
“Yes.”
“Good,” Aerona said, her satisfaction a tangible thing in the cold air. “That will make what comes next easier to process.” She gestured with a data-slate, its screen glowing. “Your file, even in death, is remarkably thorough. You checked all the boxes upon enlistment. Organ donor, tissue donor, full biological resource allocation.”
Eva said nothing. The chill was seeping into her bones, a deep, cellular cold.
The chill was seeping into her bones, a deep, cellular cold. Aerona watched her, a curator observing a particularly interesting specimen. The data-slate in her hand wasn’t just a screen; it was a manifest.
“Biological resource allocation,” Aerona repeated, as if clarifying a minor point. “It’s standard, really. In your case, it presents two distinct paths. The first is quite straightforward. Your body, as a deceased asset, is scheduled for reclamation. Your corneas would go to a Vice-Admiral whose vision is failing. A kidney and a section of your liver are a match for a senior legislator’s daughter. Your bone marrow, your cardiac tissue… it’s all quite useful. The process is clinical, efficient. You would, in a very literal sense, continue to serve.”
Eva’s stomach tightened. She saw it not as dismemberment, but as a diagram. A schematic of her own body being broken down into components, shipped out to prolong the lives of important strangers. The utter anonymity of it was its own kind of void. A final, total erasure.
“And the other path?” Eva’s voice was flat, the words forming in the frigid air.
Aerona’s smile was a thin, sharp line. “The other path acknowledges a certain… wastefulness in the first option. Your combat ratings, your neural adaptability, your physical conditioning—it’s a unique and expensive portfolio. Dismantling it would be like scrapping a perfectly functional warship for scrap metal.” She drifted closer, until Eva could see the fine, almost invisible lines around her eyes. “The Marine Corps has a special designation. It’s for assets that are too valuable to demobilize and too legally complicated to exist as citizens. You would become a wholly-owned asset of the Corps. No rank. No pay. No identity. Your body, your mind, your entire existence would be property. You would go where you are sent, do what you are told, for as long as you are deemed operable.”
The choice hung in the air between them, more real than the floating debris.
It wasn't a choice at all. It was a diagnosis.
One option was a final, physical unmaking. The other was a perpetual, living dissolution. The first was an end. The second was a transformation into a tool, a thing, a weapon with no will of its own.
The dark, unwelcome thrill she’d felt earlier surged, hot and undeniable this time. It fought with the primal terror of annihilation. To be taken apart on a table was a horror. But to be remade into this… this owned instrument? The sheer, absolute surrender of it called to the deepest, most disciplined part of her, the part forged in the academy’s crucible. It promised a purpose so pure it bordered on oblivion. No more choices. No more past. Just function.
She looked at the incinerator chute, its dark mouth still holding the ghost of the orange flash that had consumed her clothes. She looked at Aerona, who held her future in a data-slate and a raised eyebrow.
Eva took a breath, the cold air sharp in her lungs. Her nakedness was no longer about humiliation; it was a statement of fact. She was a blank slate.
“The Corps,” she said, the words final.