The Icarus Dawn’s wreckage hung in Mars orbit like a gutted beast, its hull scorched and twisted from the south pole blast. Elias Crowe stood in the shuttle bay—a salvaged tin can they’d dubbed Red Fang—his boots crunching on debris as he slung a crate of tantalum fragments aboard. The metal glinted, scraps of their hard-won prize, all that survived the terraformer’s overload. His suit was a mess—patched, scratched, still stinking of Martian dust—and his bad leg ached like a motherfucker, but he grinned anyway. They’d beaten the odds, and he’d be damned if Earth took that from them.