The gate opened and Marcus Webb stepped onto ground that was almost Earth.

Almost was the word that would haunt him for the rest of his career. The soil was almost red (more ochre, less iron). The sky was almost blue (more amber, less oxygen). The gravity was almost 1G (0.97, which meant things fell slightly slower, which meant nothing until it meant everything). And the people who lived here— the Tarr—who were almost human in the way that every intelligent species must be: bipedal, facial features arranged in the familiar pattern, capable of something that looked like language and probably was.

"Assessment complete," Marcus said into his recorder, standing on a ridge that overlooked a Tarr settlement that consisted of approximately forty structures built from woven plant fibers and packed earth. "Population estimate: 800-1000 individuals. Technology level: agricultural, pre-metal. Resource density: exceptional. The rare earth deposits beneath this valley are the richest single concentration Gateway has encountered in seven world evaluations."

He paused the recorder. Looked at the Tarr going about their day—carrying water, tending crops, children playing a game that involved hopping between stones in a pattern that might have been a language Marcus would never learn.

"Recommendation," he continued, "is initial contact followed by resource survey and extraction planning. Timeline: 6-12 months for full assessment. Estimated resource value: approximately 4.7 billion credits, possibly more depending on purity of neodymium deposits."

He was an engineer, not an economist. But even an engineer could recognize 4.7 billion credits when he heard it. That was enough money to make anyone in the solar system pay attention.

The first contact was smooth. Too smooth, in retrospect. The Tarr brought their elders forward—three elderly individuals, two female and one male, all with skin the color of polished copper and eyes that held something Marcus couldn't identify. Respect? Curiosity? Fear?

"We come in peace," Marcus said through the company translator, a device that converted verbal language into text on a wrist display. "We are explorers."

The eldest Tarr—a woman whose face was mapped with lines that spoke of exceptional longevity—replied through the translator: "You are the ones who fall from the sky in your metal bird."

"Yes. We mean no harm."

The woman studied him for a long moment. "Harm is a word with many meanings," she said through the translator, and Marcus felt, for the first time in his career, the uncomfortable sensation of being *understood* by someone who had no reason to understand him.

Her name was Nara, and she became his primary contact over the following weeks. She was intelligent in a way that went beyond language—she understood the concept of resource extraction immediately, and she understood the implications.

"You want to take what is underground," she said, not as accusation but as observation.

"We want to study it. Understand it. Use it responsibly."

"The ground is our body," Nara said. "What is underground is our blood. You want us to let you draw our blood."

Marcus didn't have an answer for that. The company playbook had protocols for first contact, for resource assessment, for environmental impact evaluation. It did not have a protocol for "your scientist tells you that extracting minerals is equivalent to drawing blood, and you are not sure if she is being metaphorical."

He reported the complexity to Commander Ada Ng through a encrypted channel. Ada was a tall, severe woman whose career in the corporate security apparatus had been built on efficiency and a complete absence of sentimentality.

"Schedule the migration," she said when Marcus outlined the situation. "Move them to the northern territory. It's uninhabitable—perfect for resettlement."

"But the northern territory has no water source—"

"Then give them one. Drilling is straightforward."

"They've been on this land for ten thousand years, Ada. Ten thousand."

"And we've been building colonies for sixty. Sixty years of expansion, Marcus. The Board doesn't care about ten thousand years. They care about the next quarter's projections. Schedule the migration."

He did. He told himself it wasn't his decision. He was an engineer, not a policymaker. His job was to assess, not to execute. But the assessment had led to the recommendation, and the recommendation had led to the order, and the order was his to carry out—or to refuse.

He carried it out.

The Tarr migration was, by Gateway standards, model. Marcus's team provided transport, temporary shelter, and basic supplies. The Tarr volunteers—only two hundred of the eight hundred agreed to move—boarded the company shuttles with Nara at their center, her copper skin glowing in the shuttle's artificial light, her eyes fixed on something that might have been the floor or might have been the sky through the viewports.

Marcus watched from the ridge as the shuttles departed. The remaining six hundred Tarr stood in their village and watched the shuttles go. Nobody cheered. Nobody cried. They just stood there, small figures against large landscapes, and waited for the next thing.

The next thing was mining.

It began slowly—small operations, surface sampling, core drilling that went two kilometers down and brought up rock that shimmered with rare earth elements. The company built access roads that cut through Tarr farmland. The Tarr did not protest; the two hundred who had migrated to the north were living in a place with no water, and the six hundred who had stayed understood, however implicitly, that protest was not an option.

Marcus monitored it all with the detached professionalism of a man who had signed up to be an engineer and nothing more. The neodymium deposits were extracting cleanly. The yield projections were exceeding Board expectations. Commander Ada was pleased. The Board would be pleased. Marcus's account would be pleased.

Dr. Samuel Okafor was not pleased.

"Marcus," the anthropologist said during one of their weekly encrypted calls, "I've been reading your assessment reports. You're describing the Tarr displacement as 'voluntary relocation with compensation.' That is not what happened. They were displaced at gunpoint, and the compensation was a plot of barren land and a promise of water that hasn't arrived."

"It was handled according to protocol—"

"Protocol is written by people who have never watched a civilization disappear. Marcus, do you remember why we're here? We're explorers. Pioneers. The noble tradition of human expansion into the cosmos."

"We're a corporation. We have fiduciary duties."

"Fiduciary duties to whom? The Board? The shareholders? Marcus, look at what you're doing. You're not exploring. You're repeating. Every colony, every extraction, every 'voluntary relocation'—it's the same pattern, Marcus, just with different faces and different planets. You are not the first person to stand on a ridge and watch a people lose their home. You won't be the last. But you could be the one who decides to come down from that ridge and refuse to look away."

Marcus ended the call.

The accident happened three weeks later.

A group of Tarr—perhaps forty individuals, mostly young men who had been farmers before the migration—began disrupting mining operations. They didn't have weapons, not in any conventional sense. They carried sticks and stones and the fierce determination of people who were defending what was left of their world.

Marcus ordered non-lethal dispersal. Company security deployed sonic emitters—devices designed to cause discomfort without permanent harm. The Tarr groups dispersed. Standard procedure.

Except one group didn't disperse. They stood their ground, hands raised, sticks planted in the earth like flags. The security team escalated the sonic output. And then, impossibly, the ground gave way.

Not dramatically—a small section of the excavation site collapsed, and twelve Tarr went down into the darkness below, along with enough equipment to bring the operation to an immediate halt.

When the dust settled, twelve Tarr were dead. Not injured. Not displaced. Dead.

Marcus stood at the edge of the collapse and looked down into the dark and saw, among the rocks and broken equipment, the copper-skinned body of a young Tarr man whose hand was still extended toward the surface, as if reaching for something he would never reach.

The company report described it as a "tragic structural accident during routine dispersal operations." The local Tarr described it as "the ground taking back its children." Marcus described it to himself in the gas station notebook he'd started carrying, in entries that grew shorter and more fragmented as the weeks passed:

"12 dead. Structural failure. Or was it? The ground was already weakened by core drilling. We weakened it. We weakened them."

"Board is calling it an 'isolated incident.' Ada says we increase security presence and resume operations. Okafr hasn't called. I don't blame him."

"Sometimes I think about the woman on the shuttle. Nara. She looked at me the way you look at something that has already decided what it's going to be, and you understand that your opinion doesn't matter."

Six months after the accident, Marcus stood in the new colonial headquarters—a prefab structure that sat on the ridge where he had first watched the Tarr village, now replaced by a mining operation that was generating approximately 400 million credits per quarter.

His desk was larger now. The view was better. And in the top drawer, beneath a stack of resource reports and quarterly projections, was a promotion notification: Marcus Webb, reassigned to World 13 as Senior Administrator, effective immediately.

World 13. A larger world. More population. Richer resources. More complex political structure, according to the preliminary report.

He signed the notification. His signature looked the same as it always had—loopy, slightly hurried, the sort of signature that belonged to someone who wrote it a thousand times without thinking about it.

Outside the window, the mining operation continued. The Tarr settlement—what was left of it—was visible in the distance, a small cluster of fiber structures against a vast landscape that was being stripped of everything beneath its surface.

Marcus sat in his chair, in his new office, with his new title and his new assignment and his new understanding of what he was: not an engineer, not an explorer, not a pioneer.

A manager. A colonial administrator. A man who stood on ridges and watched peoples lose their homes and signed papers that made it happen.

He opened the desk drawer and looked at the promotion notification one more time. Then he closed the drawer.

World 13 was waiting. And Marcus Webb, senior administrator, ready manager of other people's losses, began the process of preparing for his next assignment.

The elevator, or whatever it was that carried Gateway's agents between worlds, would be ready when he was. It always was.