El Mirador

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You wake to find yourself in a cramped, foul-smelling capsule spacious enough for one. After coughing up congealed phlegm and bronchial surfactant, you stretch your arms and legs, roll your neck, and glimpse the artificial world beyond the escape pod's porthole.

The Niven habitat El Mirador stretches out before you: a pearlescent band filled with verdant earth and vast oceans, its distant pinnacle arcing sunward to the point of near-invisibility.

A ping flashes in the corner of your eye; then highlights your destination, and marks it with real-time ETA and proximity data.
Two blinks, in rapid succession.

The pupil-centric indicator in your field of vision hovers to continue on present entry vector, and winks green.

You rub the coarse sleep from your eyes, and wonder just how long it's been since you were put into cryo. Has it really been twelve years? Thirteen? Does the mission still stand, after all this wakeless time?

Pulling up the contract shows it was last synced with Astralum Corporation's database just over a month ago.

Valid. Incomplete.

You're still their dog, still on the hunt.

Just a highly intelligent, highly dangerous animal, as far as the suits on Earth and the inner colonies are concerned. The Lagrange points, they probably snicker from a coward's safe distance, befit an engineered killing machine like you.

All that wild emptiness.