The rigs sang to him.
It was a song of fans and coolant pumps, a layered white noise threaded with the faintest electrical whine. In the silence of L1, it was as close to birdsong as Elias Mara ever got.
He floated in the mining bay of Rook-7, boots hooked under a handhold, torso half inside an open ASIC unit. The rig’s panel drifted beside him, tethered by a worn red cord. Tiny flecks of carbon dust hung in the air, sparkling in the light from the station’s central strip.
“Come on,” he muttered, nudging a board back into alignment. “You’ve had worse than this.”
The board clicked into place; diagnostic LEDs rolled from red to amber to a steady green.
“Atta girl.” He gave the casing a fond tap. “You’re back on the clock.”
He sealed the unit and pushed off gently, drifting backward as the rig slid into its slot in the dense honeycomb wall. Around him, hundreds of identical machines hummed in sync, chewing on hashes, each one a lottery ticket against the universe.
On his HUD, the hash rate climbed. Rook-7 was no mega-farm, but it was respectable for a one-man station: a few exahash of stubborn independence held together with duct tape and principled anger.
He straightened, caught another rail, and checked the monitoring console floating beside him. Network difficulty, latest blocks, mempool activity. His rigs were in sync with the latest height, pointing to the same unblinking reality as everyone else, from basement miners in Ohio to underwater data bunkers off Lagos.
One global view. One ledger. One protocol.
For now.
The station pinged.
A notification window expanded in the corner of his vision, overlaying the block data with a crisp, blue-white logo he instantly disliked: IRD – Interplanetary Revenue Directorate.
“Here we go,” he sighed.
He tapped to accept.
The message unfurled, formal and cold:
NOTICE OF HASH DUTY TAX IMPLEMENTATION
Effective immediately, all extraterrestrial Bitcoin block producers operating under the jurisdiction of the United Earth Charter are subject to a 12% Hash Duty Tax, payable in BTC to the Treasury-IRD multisig address embedded in the IRD validation header.
Blocks without validated IRD stamp will be subject to propagation deprioritization through sanctioned relay infrastructure in order to protect network stability and regulatory compliance.
Noncompliance may result in fines, sanctions, interrupted relay service, and seizure of orbital infrastructure.
Thank you for contributing to a fair and sustainable interplanetary future.
For a moment, the only sound was the rigs.
Elias snorted.
“You can’t stamp Bitcoin,” he said aloud, mostly to himself, partly to the idiots three hundred thousand kilometers away.
He scrolled down, half-expecting a joke. Instead, he found legal code, signature hashes from the Treasury, and a list of “approved relays” for “compliant propagation.”
They weren’t trying to change the protocol. They were trying to choke the pipes.
He closed the message with a flick, pulling up his node stats again. Peers, propagation times, orphan rates. So far, the numbers looked normal.
“Bluff,” he decided. “Empty suit posturing.”
Still, he set the console to log latencies more granularly, then pushed off into the station proper.
Rook-7 wasn’t much. A pressurized central hub the size of a small apartment, two spinning habitat rings grafted on later when he’d decided getting osteoporosis in his forties wasn’t badass, just stupid, and the mining bay—a skeletal exoskeleton of panels and heat radiators hanging out into the black like a mechanical coral reef.
He cycled through the main hatch into the passage that led to the habitat ring, letting the gentle spin pull him “down.” By the time he reached the galley, his feet had weight again, maybe a third of Earth gravity, just enough to keep a coffee mug somewhere near the table.
He loaded grounds into the recycler and queued up his block alerts on the wall display.
“Let’s see your ‘deprioritization’,” he muttered.
Twenty-eight minutes later, one of his rigs hit pay dirt.
The station’s notification tone chimed, clear and satisfying. The wall display flashed:
New block found: Height 851,992 – Rook-7 mining pool
He watched the propagation graph with a familiar tight-chested excitement—the same feeling he’d had since the first time his GPU in a cramped apartment scraped together enough luck to matter.
Nodes lit up on the map, each representing a peer he was connected to directly or indirectly. The relay pathway out from L1 arced down to geosynchronous satellites, then to ground stations on every continent. The block’s hash rippled across the network.
For three seconds.
Then the line flickered, slowed, and crawled.
“What the—”
Another block appeared on the feed. Different coinbase. Low latency from Earth-based relays. His block vanished from the chain view—relegated to orphaned status.
Rook-7’s reward: zero.
Elias stared at the display. Then he pulled up the logs.
Outbound connection from his node: clean. Broadcast from his antenna: confirmed. Roundtrip time to his first relay: normal.
Somewhere after that, the path had congealed into molasses.
He replayed the graph. His block went out, hit the IRD-approved relays, then… waited. Meanwhile, another miner’s block from central Earth came in hot, slipped into the mempools of the majority, and locked his out by sheer speed.
He scrolled through packet timestamps. There it was.
Twelve seconds of unexplained delay applied to his block propagation through the “sanctioned relay infrastructure.”
“Oh, you bastards.”
They weren’t lying. They’d built a soft fork of physics.
He sank into the bolted-down bench as the coffee recycler chimed, perfectly oblivious. On the display, his orphaned block’s transactions trickled into the next valid block, their fees claimed by someone else.
On principle, that was what pissed him off most.
Not the money—though sats were sats—but the fact that his work, his energy, was being harvested by a system that had decided his jurisdiction made him second-class.
He took the coffee, drank half in one swallow, and signed into the Frontier Miners channel.
The chat feed was chaos.
Gany-03: anyone else losing blocks?
Krieger-Belt: IRD just orphaned two of mine
LunaHive: the tax is real. Earth blocks getting priority
Orbital_Jack: if we don’t pay, we’re wasting energy
Raa-Min: I didn’t fight through the 2020s for permissioned mining in 2043
Samara-Mars: they can’t do this. can they actually do this??
Elias typed with sharp, precise strokes.
Rook-7: They can’t touch Bitcoin, but they own most of the big relays. They’re adding latency to non-compliant traffic. That’s enough to orphan us.
Orbital_Jack: so we pay the damn tax
Rook-7: Then they own us forever. It won’t stop at 12%.
Three dots pulsed. New messages rolled in: fear, resignation, bluster.
Then a username he didn’t recognize popped up.
Nova_Mira: There are other relays.
He frowned.
Rook-7: Identify.
Nova_Mira: Later. Docking with you in two hours. Warm up the guest hatch, Elias.
He stiffened.
Rook-7: I didn’t invite—
Nova_Mira: You were never very good at staying off registries. See you soon.
The connection terminated.
He stared at the handle: Nova_Mira.
Mira Arren.
It had been nine years since he’d last seen that name. Nine years since she’d walked out of a failed research grant, a smashed satellite dish, and a scandal over “unlicensed transmissions” with a backpack and a smirk.
Nine years since she’d told him, “Some day, I’m going to build a network no one can shut off.”
He hadn’t believed her.
Apparently she remembered him anyway.
He finished his coffee, checked the station logs for incoming craft, and swore when he saw the faint blip of a small vessel aligning on Rook-7’s trajectory.
“Of course,” he said to the empty room. “Of course today.”
⸻
Mira’s ship was uglier than he expected.
The docking cam showed a battered cylinder with mismatched panels, patched heat shielding, and what looked suspiciously like a telescope strapped to its side with cargo straps and stubbornness.
Her transponder identified the vessel as Scattershot.
“Scattershot, this is Rook-7,” Elias said, toggling the comm. “Your hull looks like it lost an argument with a micrometeorite swarm.”
“Rook-7, your station looks like it was assembled out of yard-sale parts and paranoid manifestos,” Mira’s voice replied, bright and amused. “Permission to dock?”
“Granted,” he said reluctantly. “Try not to break anything vital.”
“Can’t make promises.”
The docking clamps engaged with a thunk he felt through the floor. He cycled the inner hatch and waited.
Mira floated through the airlock like she owned the place, boots catching the rail in one smooth motion. Zero-G suited her; she’d always been more comfortable in motion than at rest.
Her hair was shorter now, shaved on one side, the rest pulled into a short knot. A thin scar ran from her left cheekbone to her ear, pale against her brown skin. Her eyes were the same: sharp, restless, slightly amused by everything.
She carried a battered backpack and a tablet covered in stickers: old mission patches, defunct companies, a faded orange “₿”.
“Elias,” she said, as if they’d had coffee only yesterday. “You look exactly like someone who reads IRD notices for fun.”
He crossed his arms. “And you look like someone who fakes their transponder ID.”
“Oh, absolutely.” She dropped the backpack, boots mag-locking to the floor as the station’s gentle spin asserted itself. “Nice to see you too.”
He didn’t hug her. He also didn’t throw her back out the airlock. That felt like progress.
“What do you want?” he said instead.
She tilted her head toward the wall display in the galley, where the latest IRD notice was still minimized in the corner.
“What you want,” she said. “Untaxed blocks.”
He gestured her toward the galley reluctantly. She helped herself to recycled coffee like she lived there and leaned against the table, glancing up at his node stats.
“You’ve already lost a block?”
“One,” he said. “Right after their announcement.”
“They’ll make an example out of the first wave,” she said. “Scare everyone else into compliance. Old playbook.” She sipped the coffee, grimaced. “You still drink this sludge?”
“It keeps me alive. Allegedly.”
“Hash rate?”
He shot her a look but answered. “A little over three exahash at last check.”
“Not bad for one man’s stubbornness,” she said. “We could use that.”
“We?”
Instead of answering, she swung her tablet around. The station’s network pinged as she connected. A map appeared, not unlike his block propagation visualization—except this one focused on the outer system.
Dots shimmered across the asteroid belt, Ceres, Mars orbit, a few off-grid clusters in lunar shadow. Between them, thin lines traced arcs of radio paths.
“What am I looking at?” he asked.
“Illegal infrastructure,” she said cheerfully. “The kind that gets you labeled ‘unauthorized transmitter’ and kicked out of academia.”
She tapped a node deep in the Belt.
“Unlicensed dishes, narrow-beam antennae, piggyback transmitters on survey drones. A ghost relay network. No IRD approvals, no Treasury taps.”
He frowned. “I thought you were smuggling data for black markets.”
“I am,” she said. “But I built this for something better than selling contraband entertainment channels to bored asteroid miners.”
She zoomed the map, highlighting the path from Rook-7’s position at L1 to a relay perched on the shadowed side of a tumbling rock.
“This is your path out,” she said. “We bounce your block data along the ghosts. Earth nodes see it before the IRD can smear it in latency.”
“You think you can beat their throttling?”
“I know I can beat their scheduler,” she said. “They’re optimizing for compliant relays. They didn’t budget much compute to track freeloaders who don’t show up in their registry. At least not yet.”
He studied the map. The path was long, bending out and back like a sling. Each hop introduced its own delay, but the total still looked competitive.
He felt the first spark of something he hadn’t felt since the IRD notice hit his screen: hope, dressed in defiance.
“What’s the catch?” he asked.
Mira smiled slowly. “Work with us. We need big miners like you to put weight behind the ghost net. If we trickle a few small blocks through, they’ll write it off as noise. If we push enough hash, they have to notice.”
“And when they notice,” he said, “they send drones.”
Her smile didn’t falter, but she straightened.
“They’ll send drones regardless,” she said. “They can’t let off-world miners make them look weak. But if we move fast, they won’t have a neat legal case or an obvious technical target.”
“We?” he pressed.
She sighed, then flicked a window open on her tablet: a chat feed, separate from his Frontier Miners channel. Names he recognized—Samara-Mars, Gany-03—were there, alongside handles he didn’t.
Nova_Net-Sys: ghosts online at 74%
Belt-Node-9: confirm last ping
Luna-Dark-Stack: IRD scanner sweep detected, minimal interference
Samara-Mars: still losing blocks. need solution asap
“We’ve been prepping for something like this since the Outer Relay Crackdown,” she said. “IRD just jumped the timeline.”
He leaned back, feeling the hum of the station through his boots.
“What exactly are you asking me to do?” he said.
“Point a portion of your hash through my relay,” she said. “Test it. Let one block ride the ghosts. If you see it land on Earth nodes faster than their sanctioned path, we scale up.”
“And if we fail?”
“Then you’re exactly where you are now,” she said. “Orphaned. Taxed if you comply. Broke if you don’t.”
She let that sit between them, heavy as hard vacuum.
“That’s the thing about coercive systems,” she said softly. “They don’t leave you a no-risk option.”
He looked past her at the rigs visible through the hatchway, racks upon racks of silent workhorses trusting him to feed them power and coolant and purpose.
“You built all this,” she said, following his gaze. “To be free of people like them. How much of that are you willing to rent back for twelve percent and a pat on the head?”
He hated that she was right.
He also hated that she knew it.
“Fine,” he said. “One block. We test.”
Her smile lit up the room. “Knew you weren’t completely domesticated.”
⸻
They spent the next six hours in the mining bay, surrounded by the hum.
Elias rerouted a portion of his rigs to a secondary node he spun up on the fly, isolated from his primary relays. Mira fed in coordinates for the first ghost hop: a repurposed survey dish hanging fifty kilometers off a small, nameless rock between Mars and the Belt.
“Call sign is Hollow-3,” she said. “Old MarsCorp asset. They wrote it off as debris ten years ago.”
He adjusted the antenna array on Rook-7, narrowing the transmit profile. The station’s main dish rotated with a slow, deliberate grind.
“You sure IRD won’t see this?” he asked.
“Oh, they’ll see something,” she said. “But not enough to classify. We’ll look like background noise unless we get greedy.”
He finished the config and sat back.
“Okay,” he said. “Test packet.”
Mira typed a short message, hash-signed it with a throwaway key, and hit send.
On his console, a tiny blip left Rook-7, arcing into the Belt. It hit Hollow-3, bounced to another ghost relay on Ceres’ dark side, then zigzagged back toward Earth’s night hemisphere, where a handful of friendly nodes listened with ancient, refurbished radio receivers.
Ping.
“Roundtrip latency?” she asked.
He checked. “Eight hundred thirty-four milliseconds.”
She grinned. “IRD? Average from you to their blessed relays is currently…”—she tapped her tablet—“two point two seconds. Plus whatever policy-based hold they’re stacking on top lately.”
He felt the familiar itch in his fingers as he pulled up his mining configs.
“Let’s see if we can make some Treasury lawyers cry,” he said.
They switched the test node to actual work, pulling templates from the mempool and grinding nonces. It made up only ten percent of his total hash, but it was enough to matter if luck struck.
For three hours, nothing happened. They monitored, tweaked, drank bad coffee. Mira dozed in the chair, head tipped back, the faint blue light from the consoles painting her face in exhausted angles.
Then a chime cut through the hum.
His secondary node flashed:
New block found: Height 851,998 – GhostNet Pool (Rook-7)
Mira sat up so fast she nearly threw herself out of the chair.
“Propagation,” she snapped.
Elias brought up the node map. The block shot out through the ghost path, pinging from Hollow-3 to Ceres to a clandestine receiver in the Atacama desert.
From there, fiber.
Earth node confirmations stacked up like falling dominos.
“IRD relays?” she asked.
He overlaid their stats.
For three glorious seconds, his ghost-borne block led the race.
Then the sanctioned relays noticed. Their traffic surged as they tried to push a competing block from a compliant farm in New York.
Too late.
By the time the IRD-backed block reached the majority, the network had already committed. Propagation graphs converged on the ghost block. Transaction explorers tagged it as canonical.
Mira whooped, a sound so bright it startled him.
“You did it,” she said, thumping his shoulder. “Unstamped, untaxed, unstoppable.”
“They’ll trace the path,” he said, even as a smile tugged at his mouth. “They’ll see traffic coming from the Belt.”
“They’ll see a lot of traffic coming from the Belt,” she corrected. “GhostNet isn’t just your relay. We’re running noise constantly. This was a whisper in a hurricane.”
He watched the block settle, the mempool adjust, new transactions stacking on top of his work. Somewhere, someone buying coffee or paying an invoice would be resting on the security his rigs had provided.
“That’s one,” he said. “We need more.”
She nodded. “We need many. And not just yours.”
Her tablet pinged as word spread. In the Frontier Miners channel, messages popped up:
Samara-Mars: we saw your block
Gany-03: IRD’s scanners just spiked. they know something slipped through
Orbital_Jack: how?
Rook-7: Off-grid relays. Ghost paths. It works.
For a handful of minutes, hope washed through the channel like a wave.
Then the IRD responded.
⸻
The first hunter-killer drone appeared on long-range scopes twelve hours later.
Elias saw it in the station’s external sensor logs: a small, cold object on a high-efficiency course, dark against the stars, no active transponder.
“Unmarked?” he asked.
“Of course,” Mira said, scrolling. “They’ll claim it was a lost research probe if anyone catches them.”
He magnified the image. The drone looked like a flattened arrowhead, its outer hull designed to scatter lidar, its propulsion almost entirely nuke-electric. It was big enough to carry lightweight weapons and a respectable sensor suite.
“Range?” she asked.
“If it keeps that vector,” he said, “it hits the Belt in eighteen hours. First ghost relay in its path is Hollow-3.”
She went still.
“They’re not going after you yet,” she said, thinking aloud. “They’re going after the infrastructure. Cut the ghosts, then offer amnesty to miners who comply.”
“We knew this was coming,” he said.
“Not this fast,” she replied. “They moved quicker than expected. Someone in IRD is competent and scared.”
The Frontier Miners channel was already buzzing.
Belt-Node-9: we see it too. drone inbound
Samara-Mars: can we move the relay?
Nova_Net-Sys (Mira): not in 18 hours. best we can do is shut it down and hope they miss it
Luna-Dark-Stack: and if they don’t?
Nova_Net-Sys: then we lose one. we keep the rest quiet. don’t use hollow-3 until further notice.
For a day, Elias watched the dot move, a shark cruising a coral reef made of stolen dishes and repurposed antennas.
Then Hollow-3 went dark.
No explosion on the feed. No fancy visuals. Just a steady signal, sixty hertz heartbeat, then… nothing.
The Belt chat went silent for a few seconds. Then messages burst through, raw and fast.
Belt-Node-9: it’s gone.
Samara-Mars: any backup?
Nova_Net-Sys: we have others. but they’re triangulating. every time one of you broadcasts, they adjust.
Luna-Dark-Stack: this is war.
Orbital_Jack: we’re not fighters. we’re miners.
Mira paced the cramped galley, muttering equations under her breath. Elias knew that look: her brain grinding through signal patterns, propagation windows, detection thresholds.
“This doesn’t scale,” she said. “If we keep playing hide-and-seek with one block at a time, they’ll just keep killing relays until the ghosts are too sparse to matter. We need to flip the game.”
“How?” he asked.
She stopped and looked at him.
“By making them fight more targets than they can track,” she said. “We need a synchronized surge. Every frontier miner, every ghost relay, broadcasting at once. A storm.”
He imagined the map: dozens of miners across L1, L2, Luna, the Belt, Mars. All of them, in tight coordination, pushing blocks out along illicit paths.
“They can’t throttle all of us at once,” he said slowly.
“They can try,” she said. “But their detection algorithms and response drones have budgets. Humans wrote them. Humans constrained them. We exploit that.”
He looked at his rigs. They hummed back, indifferent but ready.
“What’s the risk?” he asked, already knowing.
She didn’t sugarcoat it.
“They’ll triangulate some of us,” she said. “Maybe send drones your way eventually. Some stations may go offline. Temporary or… less temporary.”
“And if we don’t?”
“Then we bleed out slowly,” she said. “One orphaned block at a time, one capitulation at a time. GhostNet withers. Tax becomes normal. In five years, some intern at the Treasury will write a paper about how they tamed the ‘wildcat miners of space’ and everyone will clap.”
He hated how vividly he could imagine that.
Mira opened the Frontier Miners channel, switching to a shared call. Faces popped up—some actual, some avatars, some just icons.
Samara-Mars, her dark hair floating around her in low gravity. Gany-03’s logo, a stylized ice chunk. LunaHive’s grainy camera from the lunar farside.
“Everyone sees the problem,” Mira said, not bothering with preamble. “IRD has drones. They’re killing relays. We can’t trickle blocks through quietly forever.”
Samara grimaced. “What are you proposing?”
“A coordinated hash surge through GhostNet,” Mira said. “We call it what it is: an uprising. We set a time, we set a block height, and we all push. Every relay we’ve got. Every miner who refuses to be stamped.”
LunaHive frowned. “If we get tagged, we’re done. They’ll seize our equipment. Some of us have families on Earth, Mira.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m not pretending there’s no cost. But there’s cost either way. The question is: do we pay it now, on our terms, or later, on theirs?”
Silence stretched.
Elias leaned into frame.
“They’re already taxing us,” he said. “Not just the 12%. They’re taxing our risk. Our future. Every block we mine under their thumb teaches them they can get away with it.”
He met their gazes, pixelated or ghosted though they were.
“When we started mining,” he said, “the whole point was that there was no permission button. No one you had to ask. We’ve watched that get chipped away at on Earth—regulation, compliance, KYC. We left. We built all this”—he gestured at his station—“to get away.”
Samara’s expression softened.
“And now they reached out here,” he said. “What was the point of leaving if we kneel anyway?”
Gany-03’s icon pulsed. “My crew is with you,” a voice said. “We can’t match your hash, but we’ll point what we have.”
“LunaHive online,” another said. “We’re tired of pretending the Charter is voluntary.”
One by one, more miners chimed in. Not all. Some stayed quiet, faces drawn, eyes elsewhere.
That was fine. No protocol had ever needed unanimity.
Mira pulled up a shared document: a countdown clock, a target block height, a list of connected ghost relays and their capacity.
“We synchronize here,” she said. “In about thirty hours, based on current block times, we aim to shove as much of the next difficulty period through ghost paths as we can. IRD will scramble. They’ll throw drones and throttles at us. We don’t stop. If even one of our blocks lands as canonical in the middle of the storm, we break their narrative of control.”
“And if we land more than one?” Samara asked.
“Then history books get a more interesting chapter,” Mira said.
They spent the next two hours assigning time slots, contingency paths, backup channels. Someone turned the countdown clock into a joke meme. Someone else posted an ancient protest song with new lyrics about hash rates and latency.
Elias watched, feeling something he hadn’t allowed himself in a long time: camaraderie.
They weren’t just scattered specks in the dark. They were a network.
And now, they were about to prove it.
⸻
Time in space could stretch or snap, depending on what you were waiting for.
In the thirty hours that followed, it did both.
Elias tuned his rigs, checked coolant lines, recalibrated antennae. He rerouted more and more of his hash to GhostNet until finally, with a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding, he flipped the last config.
All of Rook-7 was pointed through Mira’s illegal, fragile, beautiful pipeline.
His primary node still listened to IRD relays, watching their traffic like an eavesdropper at a hostile party, but he no longer sent anything that way.
Mira sat at the main console, eyes flicking between ghost relays, IRD scanners, and the ticking countdown.
“Drones?” he asked.
“Three confirmed,” she said. “One sweeping the Belt, one in high lunar orbit, one on a trajectory that’s uncomfortably close to us but not locked yet.”
He checked the vector. The third drone’s path put it in their vicinity in maybe twelve hours, assuming no course change.
“They’re moving their pieces,” she said. “We move ours faster.”
The countdown hit its final hour. Messages flooded the Frontier Miners channel.
Samara-Mars: heat levels stable. mars rigs ready
Gany-03: ghost relays beta and delta online
Luna-Dark-Stack: farside nodes synced. let’s do this.
Orbital_Jack: may your nonces be low and your enemies rate-limited
Mira glanced at him.
“Still time to chicken out,” she said lightly.
He shook his head. “I didn’t wire half this station myself and live on algae coffee for eight years to pay a hash tithe.”
“That’s the spirit.”
The clock rolled down: 00:05:00… 00:04:59…
Elias found himself unconsciously holding a handrail tighter than necessary.
When the first synced block window hit, it felt like a wave.
Miners across the off-world network, all pointed at a similar template, poured hash into the same moment. Ghost relays lit up, traffic spikes bursting from the Belt, from shadowed craters, from orbiting tin cans barely held together.
On Earth, IRD’s scanners went into overdrive.
“They see us,” Mira said, voice tight. “Their bandwidth just spiked. They’re trying to classify the sources.”
Numbers scrolled across her screen: signal strengths, angles, estimated positions. She tweaked transmission patterns on the fly, nudging Elias’s emissions half a degree off predicted sweeps.
Elias watched his rigs’ status: no errors, temperature rise within acceptable margin, power draw spiking. This was what they were built for.
Minutes ticked.
No blocks. Not yet.
“This feels like that time you took the analog electronics exam without studying,” Mira said.
“I passed that exam.”
“You cheated off my work.”
Before he could answer, one of the Frontier Miners pinged.
Gany-03: BLOCK
Elias yanked open the explorer window. Block height 852,014: GhostNet—Gany cluster. Propagation graph: ghost path first, tangling with IRD relays, then surging ahead as Earth nodes saw it via multiple off-grid routes at once.
IRD responded with a brutal traffic spike. Mira grimaced.
“They’re dumping everything they’ve got into their relays,” she said. “We just blew their ‘nothing to see here’ policy.”
The next block went to a compliant Earth farm—no surprise, given their massive hash. But the one after that? LunaHive.
Another ghost block wedged into the sacred chain.
“Two,” Elias breathed.
Sensors chimed.
The drone vector targeting Rook-7 changed.
“It’s locking on,” Mira said. “They must have triangulated our signal pattern, or at least narrowed it down to this corridor.”
“How soon?” he asked.
“Nine hours if they floor it,” she said. “Sixteen if they play cautious. We’ll know in an hour which it is.”
The countdown for the next block window rolled down. His rigs kept grinding. His stomach clenched.
“If they hit us,” he said quietly, “that’s game over.”
“For you,” she corrected. “Not for the network. Not if this works.”
He thought of Hollow-3, its quiet death. Of nameless techs at IRD terminals, justifying drones as “neutralization of illegal transmitters.” Of politicians on Earth talking about “harmonizing interplanetary finance” from comfortable chairs under blue skies.
“I don’t want to be a martyr,” he said.
“Good,” she said. “Martyrs are inefficient. Stay alive. That’s the more annoying outcome for them.”
The next block approached. His local node calculated current height, estimated time.
Then one of his rigs hit a solution.
The notification chimed, brighter, sharper, as if it knew.
New block found: Height 852,019 – Rook-7 (GhostNet)
Mira’s fingers flew.
“Broadcast,” she said. “Path alpha-gamma. No, alpha-epsilon, IRD’s got a sweep on gamma.”
The block header launched from Rook-7, wrapped in narrow-beam pulses, angled just off the drone’s line of sight. It streaked toward a relay hidden behind a dark rock, then bounced, bounced again, each hop shaving microseconds where the IRD added whole seconds.
On Mira’s screen, IRD relay traffic surged, trying to shove a competing Earth block into the network.
For a heart-stopping moment, both propagation graphs overlapped.
“Come on,” Elias whispered. “Come on you beautiful permissionless bastard.”
He watched the node map as if his stare could bend space-time. A cluster of Earth nodes, not under IRD influence but watching multiple peers, saw his ghost block first.
They relayed it, independent of any sanction.
The consensus line tipped.
On the block explorer, height 852,019 solidified with Rook-7’s coinbase.
Mira whooped again, louder this time. “We’re in! We’re the tip of the spear, Eli. They can’t censor us all.”
Even as the exhilaration hit, the drone pinged again.
Velocity increase.
“They chose fast,” Mira said quietly. “ETA six hours. They’re burning fuel to make a point.”
He felt the station around him in a new way: not just as home, but as a target. Thin metal between him and vacuum, heat signatures bright against cold background.
“We can shut down,” he said. “Cut emissions. Play dead.”
“And let them walk away with their narrative intact?” she said. “Let them say, ‘We pressured the rebels and they vanished. Order restored.’”
“You have a better idea?”
She stared at the drone vector, then at his antenna array, then at the ghost relay map.
“Maybe,” she said. “How attached are you to that forward array you hate?”
He followed her gaze. The forward antenna was older, less efficient than the main one. He’d kept meaning to replace it.
“Not very,” he said slowly.
“Good,” she said. “Because we’re about to make it the loudest, most obvious illegal transmitter IRD has ever seen.”
⸻
The plan was insane.
That didn’t make it bad.
“We feed a decoy signal through the forward array,” Mira explained, fingers tracing vectors in the air. “Big, noisy, obviously ghost-style. Enough to make their drone think it’s found the culprit.”
“And the real traffic?” Elias asked.
“Switch to the secondary array and low-power bursts,” she said. “Stay under their threshold. While they’re busy blowing up your sacrificial antenna, we route the last wave of blocks.”
“Last wave?”
She met his eyes.
“GhostNet can’t stay this exposed forever,” she said. “We’ve already taken losses. After this surge, we go quiet, regroup, reconfigure. But we leave them with a chain full of untaxed blocks and a story they can’t easily rewrite.”
He took a breath, let it out.
“Do it,” he said.
They worked in tandem, rerouting power, decoupling control systems. He felt a twinge of pain as he severed the forward array’s protective circuits; if anything hit it now, it would fry spectacularly.
“Remind me why we can’t do this with a remote dummy buoy?” he asked.
“Because you don’t have one, and building one would take more hours than we have,” she said. “Also, this way is more dramatic.”
“Of course it is.”
As the drone closed, the station played dead—on one side.
Forward array: hot, loud, illegal. Secondary array: whisper-quiet, sipping power, perfectly aligned with a ghost relay on the far side of a small Trojan asteroid.
Elias watched the external sensors, zooming in on the approaching IRD machine.
Up close, the drone was uglier. Functional. No markings. Weapon pods nestled under its belly like coiled fists.
“Range?” he asked.
“Fifty kilometers,” Mira said. “Well within ‘accident’ distance.”
The drone angled slightly, nose turning toward the brightest emitter in the area: Rook-7’s forward antenna.
“Lock,” Mira murmured. “Come on, you officious toaster… take the bait.”
A pixel-hot point flared on the sensor feed. A narrow beam of destructive energy lanced out—microwave, maybe, or something nastier.
It hit the forward array dead-on.
From inside the station, the impact sounded like a giant metal drum being hit with a sledgehammer. The lights flickered. A smell like burnt copper and ozone flooded the mining bay.
Elias swore. “That thing cost me three months of scrounging.”
“You hated that antenna,” Mira said. “Mourn later. Broadcast now.”
On cue, his rigs hit another block.
New block found: Height 852,023 – GhostNet Pool
“Of course,” he said, half laughing, half in disbelief. “You dramatic bastard.”
Mira slammed it onto the secondary array and fired. The signal shot out, low and thin, hugging a path that kept the station’s bulk between it and the drone’s primary sensors.
The drone, busy verifying its kill of the “illegal transmitter,” didn’t notice.
On Earth, the block propagated. A few IRD nodes hesitated, trying to push a rival block, but the wider network had already spoken.
Four ghost blocks in one difficulty window.
More than enough.
The drone swung past Rook-7, scanning briefly. The forward array glowed cherry-hot on thermal imaging, a ruined flower of twisted metal. The rest of the station looked quiet, its emissions within the range of normal background.
Apparently satisfied, the drone adjusted trajectory and burned toward its next target, deeper into the Belt.
Elias slumped into a chair, adrenaline fizzing out of him all at once.
“You realize,” he said, “we just convinced a military-grade enforcement drone that it solved its problem while we mined right under its nose.”
Mira grinned, eyes bright.
“Feels like the old days,” she said. “You, me, illegal transmissions, institutional overreach.”
“Last time we pulled that, we got your grant revoked,” he said.
“This time, we got a global, uncensorable ledger to include a line item that says, ‘You can’t tax what you can’t catch.’”
The Frontier Miners channel had exploded.
Samara-Mars: we saw your block from rook-7 again
Luna-Dark-Stack: IRD is losing their minds. scanners are redlining
Gany-03: drone skipped us. moved further out. they’re hunting blind
Orbital_Jack: four ghost blocks confirmed this period. THEY CAN’T PRETEND THIS DIDN’T HAPPEN
Mira typed a short summary of the decoy maneuver, leaving out enough details to keep imitators from getting themselves killed without understanding.
“We’re not done,” she told them. “GhostNet is going dark for a bit. Cycle your emissions. Be boring. Let the IRD exhaust its political capital and logistical budget chasing shadows.”
Samara replied:
Samara-Mars: we’ll lay low. but thank you. all of you. for proving it can be done.
One by one, miners signed off, their icons dimming as they turned their attention to heat management, repair, exhaustion.
Outside, the drone vanished into the dark.
Inside, Rook-7’s rigs kept humming, a little slower now as Elias dialed them back to something sustainable.
The IRD couldn’t erase the blocks they’d already mined. Consensus didn’t work that way. Thousands of nodes on Earth, neutral and stubborn, had accepted the ghost blocks as valid. Any attempt to retroactively punish them by reorganizing the chain would cause more chaos than even the boldest bureaucrat would risk.
The Hash Duty Tax was not dead. Not yet. But it had been wounded in its debut.
In the days that followed, Treasury officials walked back statements. IRD spokespeople emphasized “voluntary compliance” and “ongoing consultation with stakeholders.” The more technically literate commentators pointed out, in dry tones, that throttling relay infrastructure was a fragile way to enforce fiscal policy on a protocol designed to route around damage.
Elias watched a clip of a televised hearing one day, IRD’s director sweating under gentle questioning.
“Is it true,” a representative asked, “that despite your new policies, several off-world mining entities successfully produced blocks without the so-called Hash Duty Tax stamp?”
The director opened his mouth, closed it, and settled on, “Anomalous events linked to unauthorized infrastructure, which we are addressing.”
Elias smirked and shut the feed.
History would remember it more succinctly:
They tried to stamp Bitcoin.
Bitcoin said no.
⸻
A week later, Mira packed her bag.
“You’re leaving,” he said, leaning against the galley doorway.
“GhostNet needs reconfiguring,” she said, slinging the worn backpack over one shoulder. “I can’t do that from here. Too conspicuous.”
“You could stay,” he said, surprising himself with the suggestion. “Rook-7 can always use a sysadmin who doesn’t sleep.”
“And you could come out to the Belt,” she countered. “Hollow-3 may be gone, but we’ve got other rocks.”
He shook his head.
“This station is mine,” he said simply. “I built it. I know every bolt. I’m not abandoning her because some accountant pointed a drone at my antenna.”
She smiled softly.
“Didn’t think you would,” she said. “Offer stands anyway.”
At the airlock, she paused.
“You did good, Elias,” she said. “You stepped up. You didn’t have to.”
He shrugged. “They picked a fight in my yard.”
She hesitated, then unclipped a small data crystal from her belt and pressed it into his hand.
“GhostNet access keys,” she said. “Rotating set. Changes weekly. If IRD swings back around, you’ll know where to aim your hash.”
He closed his fingers around the crystal.
“Try not to get yourself killed,” he said.
“Terrible business model,” she said. “Staying alive lets you annoy the enemy longer.”
The hatch cycled. She floated into Scattershot, gave him a brief two-finger salute through the small window, then was gone, her ship peeling away from Rook-7 like a stray thought.
Elias watched until she was a distant speck, then vanished entirely against the starfield.
He turned back toward the mining bay.
The rigs greeted him with their eternal, indifferent song.
He ran a hand along the nearest unit’s casing.
“Back to work,” he said. “Plenty of blocks to win.”
He climbed into the control chair and pulled up the node interface. Block height, difficulty, mempool, peer list. Among the endless columns of numbers, four entries glowed in his memory:
852,014 – Gany-03.
852,016 – LunaHive.
852,019 – Rook-7.
852,023 – GhostNet Pool.
Four blocks in a chain of hundreds of thousands. Tiny. Insignificant, some would say.
But history hinged on tiny, stubborn moments.
He zoomed in on 852,019, the one his rigs had carved out of raw math, smuggled past drones and throttles and fear.
Coinbase text: a short message he’d inserted at Mira’s suggestion, wedged into the data forever.
“You can’t stamp Bitcoin.”
He smiled.
Outside, the sun burned, the emptiness waited, and the laws of physics went on not caring about tax policy.
Inside, Rook-7’s hash pointed, not at permissioned relays, but at a path carved by disobedience and ingenuity.
Somewhere down there, in a courtroom or an office, someone would insist that control was inevitable, that the system would always find a way to tame the edges.
Up here, in the humming quiet above a small blue world, a man and his machines quietly disagreed.
And block by block, the ledger listened.