Blood for a Stranger
Novelette 9,434 words Recommended by 2 award/anthology sources
"Crunches and shrieks buffeted the Magellan LLC smartship as it plunged into Enceladus’s kilometers-thick ice crust, making their way to the subsurface ocean and the rival LuxeSpace corporation’s station situated there. Warning signals flashed through Jarrell and his fellow shipminds’ readouts, but they followed their orders and continued inward."
Content warnings 1
war
Quasar links out; the story lives on Lightspeed, where the author gets the click.