The Seriema arrives at Sigma's Reach carrying too little fuel, too much damage and one contract large enough to repair both. Tezzeret wants an artifact recovered from a mining colony that does not answer. Sami accepts because the fee may keep the ship flying and because every route through Sothera remains another chance that Mirri might somehow return. The captain once worked as a scrapper and mechanic near Kavaron's debris fields. Only first mate Tannuk remains from Sami's earlier crew.
The station behaves as if its people have only stepped away. Lights work, machinery waits and a meal is laid out, but no voices answer the hatches. Evidence contradicts itself: the colony appears organised for long occupation while its records insist almost nobody was ever present. The emptiness is therefore not abandonment. It is a history with people cut out of it.
Inside a quality-control chamber, Sami finds a black stone. Contact brings an alien sense of selection, as though possibility has narrowed around the hand holding it. Memories arrive of colonists attacked by the Sunstar Free Company, then recede behind another version of events. Sami brings the object aboard without knowing that the recovery was already part of the thing's route. The incomplete staffing records at Sigma's Reach are themselves evidence of interference, not a reliable count of how many workers Tezzeret's contract originally involved. The Endstone's first apparent memories of the Sunstar Free Company must be read alongside later revisions; the story never supplies one clean, independently preserved historical version that Sami can simply recover.