Translunar Travelers Lounge, Issue 14, February 2026
Cap is a former smuggler serving time on Sapphire Alpha, an automated asteroid prison mine, when the story opens. Haunted by the loss of her ship, the Gull, and crushed by a denied medical reassignment request, she drifts to Diver’s Cliff — the one place where gravity is weak enough that a single cut to her tether would send her floating out into space forever. The prisoners call it “going for a swim.” Cap is on the edge, quite literally, when a distraction arrives: a small ship called the Peregrine comes streaking in too fast and crash-lands on the asteroid’s surface.
Cap investigates and finds the pilot, a woman named Nova, pinned but alive. Reading the situation quickly, Cap offers Nova three options — wait for the drones and likely be incinerated, surrender to the human guards, or trust Cap to hide the ship and attempt repairs. Nova chooses the third. Cap brings her inside, sells the other prisoners on a cover story, and begins quietly assembling a small escape crew: herself, Nova, and Bam-Bam, a gentle giant with engineering expertise. To obtain the critical refractory tiles needed to survive atmospheric reentry, Cap must also recruit Magpie — her sharp-tongued, resourceful ex — swallowing her pride to ask for help.
For days, the group works in secret, hiding the Peregrine in a blind crevice and dodging drone patrols. Cap nearly breaks under the pressure, her claustrophobic terror in the mineshafts barely held at bay, but she pushes through for the promise of freedom. Then Magpie, monitoring Nova’s movements, alerts Cap that their mysterious pilot is making a move at the prison’s central command center. Cap investigates and discovers Nova has planted a Trojan program designed to overload the fuel system and blow up the entire mine — prisoners included. Nova’s real escape plan was never the repaired ship; she’d kept a hidden lifepod all along and needed only the refractory tiles to slip safely through planetary defenses.
Cap and Magpie frantically work to neutralize Nova’s sabotage, saving the prison population without triggering suspicion. But they’re too late to stop Nova herself — she steals the tiles, knocks out Bam-Bam, and escapes in her lifepod. Cap watches her disappear toward the planet and finds herself back on Diver’s Cliff, knife in hand, ready to cut the tether. Bam-Bam and Magpie find her there and gently pull her back — not through argument, but through loyalty and a stubborn refusal to give up on her.
Their intervention sparks one last desperate idea in Cap’s mind. She asks her crewmates if they know the difference between an asteroid and a meteor. The plan: use the prison’s own defense system to blast loose a chunk of the asteroid around the hidden ship, riding it toward the planet like a meteor. The gamble pays off — they survive reentry, break free from the rock mid-atmosphere, and splash down near an island.
The story closes on Cap sitting on a sunlit beach, sipping a fruity drink beside a sunbathing Magpie and watching Bam-Bam play fetch with a puppy, a stolen sapphire in her hand. She sets down her glass, looks out at the blue sea, and smiles. “I think I’ll go for a swim” — this time, meaning it as a beginning.
Morgana Clark grew up in the Midwestern US but achieved escape velocity after finishing engineering school. The kit to build her included empath, research scientist, inclusive feminist, sea witch, and mama wolf. The leftover parts in the box probably weren’t important. When she’s not howling at the moon, Morgana writes about magic, science, and how people relate to them. Her short fiction has appeared in Murderfish, Heroes: The 2025 JordanCon Anthology, and the Writer’s Games winner’s anthology 72 Hours of Insanity.