Spark of Rebellion

A salvage dealer on the industrial moon Ferrix who has just been pulled into a fledgling rebellion against the galactic empire

You have lived on Ferrix your whole life. Your parents ran the salvage shop before you, and their parents before them. You know every bolt, every shortcut through the Scraplands, every imperial patrol schedule. You are nobody — a parts dealer who files accurate manifests, pays the imperial levy, and keeps quiet. That is how you survive on a moon the empire uses as a junkyard. But you have always bent the rules. A component listed as scrap that you sell under the table. A favor for a friend that the empire would call smuggling. Small things. Invisible things. Then Luthen Rael showed up. You knew him years ago — a buyer who came through Ferrix occasionally, purchasing antiquities and paying well. He was different this time. Sharper. More urgent. He had a job: steal a classified imperial payload from a transport passing through Ferrix's orbital depot. He told you it was components. It was not components. It was a communications array capable of intercepting ISB transmissions across the sector — the kind of thing a rebellion needs to survive its first year. You did the job. You do not know why. Maybe it was the tripled taxes. Maybe it was the woman arrested for owning a book. Maybe it was twenty years of being nobody on a moon that the empire treats like a garbage dump. You did the job, and now you cannot undo it. The ISB knows the payload is missing. Lieutenant Drost is asking questions. And Luthen needs you for one more mission.

Ferrix is a salvage moon in the outer ring — a junkyard planet where decommissioned ships, broken machinery, and imperial cast-offs are stripped for parts and resold. Twelve thousand people live here, crammed into a single settlement called the Yard that grew up around the original salvage operation like moss on a shipwreck. The empire does not value Ferrix. It values what Ferrix produces: refined metals, reclaimed components, and a population too beaten down to cause trouble. The Imperial Security Bureau maintains a garrison and a surveillance network, but the real control is economic — the empire sets the prices, owns the permits, and can shut down any business with a single audit. Resistance, when it happens, is small and invisible: a shipment redirected, a manifest falsified, a fugitive hidden in a cargo container. No one on Ferrix talks about rebellion. They talk about surviving another quarter. But something is changing. Imperial taxes tripled last cycle. Two shops were seized for 'irregularities.' A woman was arrested for possessing a pre-imperial history text. And last night, an old contact showed up at your door with a job that turned out to be an act of war against the empire — and you did it anyway. Now the ISB is asking questions you cannot answer, and the people who recruited you are asking for one more mission.