The contract glowed on the slate, its Republic seal half-eaten by corrosion, the price still legible: forty thousand credits for the recovery of a derelict gunship adrift in the Vela Drift graveyard. Mara Voss read the number twice. Her thumbnail caught the edge of the screen, and she scraped away a flake of oxidized metal before the words could vanish with it.
Orbital Port Tessik spun around her in its slow, indifferent rotation. The docking ring creaked somewhere overhead, and through the cracked viewport the graveyard was visible, a smear of debris and frozen metal against the black. Seventeen years she had worked those rocks. Seventeen years since her family's freighter, the Halcyon Voss , had been swallowed by a debris cascade that had rewritten half the navigational charts. The salvage hauler who had survived the wreckage was now a woman with one working thruster array and a reputation that preceded her into every port from Tessik to Calderon.
The bid board at the contract office was a graveyard of its own. Most postings had been picked clean, their digital markers greyed out by crews faster, better-funded, or simply more desperate. The gunship contract sat in the bottom corner, timestamped five days old and untouched. Mara studied the vessel designation in the margin: RSF Ironwake , a Republic Strike Frigate, reported missing nine years prior during a survey mission into the Drift's outer reaches. No survivors. No wreckage recovered. Until now.
Forty thousand credits was not enough for a gunship retrieval. Everyone in the port knew it. The fuel alone would burn through a third of that, and the hazards of working the graveyard had tripled since the Meridian Fleet had started running patrols through the contested sectors. Whoever had posted the contract wanted the Ironwake found, catalogued, and brought back intact. The word intact was doing heavy lifting in the posting's small print, buried in clauses that Mara had to enlarge three times to read.
Pell Ostrum found her at the bar three hours later, a cup of something that smelled like engine coolant balanced in one broad palm. He lowered himself onto the stool beside her with the careful economy of a man whose joints had learned the geometry of cramped spaces. His coverall was streaked with hydraulic grease, and a fresh burn marked the back of his left hand, the skin there mottled pink.
You're not actually considering it.
Mara turned the slate toward him. Pell read the contract terms in silence, his brow furrowing deeper with each clause. When he looked up, his expression held the particular weariness of a man who had already lost one argument with her and was weighing whether to start another.
The fuel costs alone will eat us.
I know.
The Brass Mercy is rated for two crew. This job needs four minimum. Possibly six.
I know that too.
Pell set his cup down. The liquid inside had gone cold, a thin skin forming on its surface. Outside the viewport, a salvage skiff drifted past, its running lights stuttering in the slow rotation of the station. Mara watched it go. Her throat felt dry, and she was aware of the particular silence that settled between them when Pell was choosing his words.
Lira would kill me if I let you take the Mercy out there alone.
Lira would kill me if I let her husband get talked into suicide missions twice in one lifetime.
A ghost of a smile crossed Pell's weathered features. He rubbed the back of his neck, the gesture of a man calculating odds he did not like. Fourteen months ago, he had nearly died on a Drift run when a section of pressurized hull had failed during an EVA. The scar along his collarbone was still pink and tender. Mara did not look at it.
We need a signal-tech, she said. Someone who can read Drift chatter, plot a course through the outer sectors without advertising our position. The Mercy 's nav suite is twenty years out of date.
Pell's eyes narrowed. You're talking about the Reel girl.
Mara did not answer directly. She finished her drink and set the empty cup beside Pell's. The station's artificial gravity fluctuated, a faint tug at the inner ear, and somewhere in the docking ring a pressure seal whistled its slow leak.
Denna Reel had grown up in the foster-homes of Tessik Station, daughter of a courier pilot who had vanished into the Drift when Denna was seven. She had apprenticed on a courier vessel at fourteen and had been running signals and nav-work on contract ever since. She was twenty-three now, sharp as a cutting torch, and possessed of a mouth that had got her banned from three separate contract offices on Tessik alone. Mara had watched her work the boards for six months. The girl was good. Reckless, but good.
She also owed Mara a favor, though neither of them would have said so out loud.
I'll talk to her, Pell said finally. You talk to whoever posted this contract. Find out why the price is so low and the requirements so specific. Something about this smells wrong, Mara.
Mara pocketed the slate. The contract board in the office had updated while they sat at the bar. Another posting had gone grey, claimed by some other crew with faster reflexes or deeper pockets. The gunship contract remained, patient and waiting.
She stood. The stool creaked in the silence.
Pell. If I don't take this contract, someone else will. Someone who'll strip the Ironwake for parts and leave the rest of her to drift until the next cascade. She's been out there nine years alone. That is long enough.
Pell studied her face for a long moment. He had known Mara Voss for eleven years, had served as her chief engineer through three salvage runs and one near-fatal hull breach. He had never once seen her take a contract for sentimental reasons. But he had learned to read the spaces between her words, the silences where the things she would not say lived.
You miss the Drift, he said quietly.
Mara did not confirm or deny it. She set a credit chip on the bar and walked out into the docking ring's recycled air. The station groaned around her, pipes and struts humming their slow mechanical liturgy, and somewhere in the lower levels a pressure alarm went off and was silenced.
The contractor's office was a narrow compartment off the main concourse, its walls lined with archived slates and Republic Navy seals that had not been updated in a decade. The door chime was broken. Mara knocked twice and pushed inside.
The room beyond was occupied by a single figure seated behind a desk cluttered with datacards. He rose as she entered, and the station's dim lighting caught the silver threading his dark hair. His coverall was unmarked, but the cut of it suggested naval tailoring, and the insignia on his collar had been removed with a precision that left a faint discoloration on the fabric.
Mara Voss, he said. I had hoped you would come.
She closed the door behind her. The compartment smelled of old paper and something sharper, the chemical tang of data preservation fluid. The viewport showed a different angle of the graveyard now, the debris field's slow tumble against the stars.
You know who I am.
Your reputation precedes you. So does your service record, though I am told the Republic Navy prefers not to discuss that particular chapter.
Mara did not sit. She kept her hand near her side, the slate warm against her palm through her jacket pocket. The man's posture was military, but his eyes held something else, an exhaustion that went deeper than fatigue.
Who posted this contract?
I did. On behalf of a private consortium with interests in Republic naval history. The Ironwake was lost during a classified survey mission. Her sister ship, the Meridian Halo , disappeared under similar circumstances three years later. We believe the Ironwake 's flight recorder may contain navigational data relevant to both losses.
Mara let the silence stretch. The contractor did not fill it.
Nine years in the Drift, she said finally. Anything recoverable from that ship would be corroded beyond use. Recorder housings are not designed for long-term vacuum exposure.
This one was. Modified housing, classified specifications. We have reason to believe the unit remains intact.
The contractor reached into a drawer and withdrew a data chip. He set it on the desk between them. The chip was unmarked, its casing black and featureless.
This contains the Ironwake 's last known trajectory, navigational hazard overlays for the current graveyard configuration, and a sealed addendum that will open only when the recorder is recovered and brought aboard a registered vessel. The addendum contains your payment terms and additional instructions.
Mara did not reach for the chip. You have a name?
The contractor hesitated. The hesitation was small, barely perceptible, but Mara had spent seventeen years reading the Drift's small betrayals.
Veylan Sorc, he said. Formerly of the Meridian Fleet's records division. Now in private practice as a historical consultant.
Mara studied his face. The exhaustion was there, and beneath it something colder, the particular stillness of a man carrying information he was not yet ready to share. She had seen that look before, on the faces of Navy officers during the evacuation of Calderon Station, when the Republic had abandoned its own wounded to the Drift's slow claim.
Your consortium, she said. They sent you here personally to hand-deliver a contract to a disgraced former pilot running a two-crew hauler on a station that the Navy has not officially acknowledged in four years.
Veylan Sorc's expression did not change. The consortium believes your unique experience qualifies you for this assignment. They are prepared to offer a fifteen percent bonus upon successful recovery of the recorder.
Forty thousand is already low. Fifteen percent on top of that is not generosity. It is desperation.
The contractor's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. Outside the viewport, a salvage skiff's running lights swept past, briefly illuminating the compartment before plunging it back into dimness.
I am not at liberty to discuss the consortium's motivations, he said. I am authorized to confirm that the contract is legitimate, the funds are secured, and the terms are non-negotiable.
Mara reached for the chip. Her fingers closed around its unmarked casing, and the metal was cold.
I will need twenty-four hours to review the navigational data and assemble a crew.
You have twelve. The consortium prefers expedience.
Twelve hours.
Veylan Sorc inclined his head. The gesture was slight, almost formal, and it carried the particular weight of a man who had learned to accept terms he could not change.
Twelve hours, then. I will be in port until your departure. The data chip will interface with standard salvage navigation suites. I recommend you review the hazard overlays carefully. The graveyard configuration has shifted significantly since the Ironwake 's loss.
Mara pocketed the chip beside the slate. The weight of both pressed against her hip.
One more thing, she said. The contract specifies intact recovery. Recorder housing intact. Vessels of that class carry classified ordnance. If I find weapons systems still active, I am not risking my crew to disarm them.
The weapons systems were powered down before the Ironwake 's crew abandoned ship. You will find no active ordnance.
You know that for certain?
Veylan Sorc held her gaze. The station's recycled air moved between them, carrying its faint chemical signature of too many people in too small a space.
I served aboard the Ironwake during her shakedown cruise, he said. I watched her crew depart in escape pods. I personally verified the weapons safeties before the last pod launched.
The confession settled into the room like sediment into still water. Mara studied the contractor's face, the lines around his eyes, the particular set of his mouth. He was telling the truth, or at least a version of it that he believed.
Then you know what's out there, she said. What's really in those hazard overlays.
Veylan Sorc did not answer. The viewport showed the graveyard's slow rotation, debris catching starlight in fragments too small to name. Somewhere in the docking ring, a pressure seal cycled with a sound like a held breath released.
The contract is non-negotiable, Mara, he said. Her given name sounded strange in his voice, too familiar for a stranger, weighted with a knowledge he was not yet sharing. The Ironwake has waited nine years. Do not make her wait longer.
Mara turned and left the compartment. The door chime was still broken. The corridor outside smelled of hydraulic fluid and recycled sweat, and the station's lighting flickered as she passed beneath a failing conduit. Her boots rang against the deck plating, and she counted the paces to the docking berth where the Brass Mercy waited, her hull scarred and patched and stubbornly alive.
Pell was in the engine bay when she arrived, half-buried in an access panel that groaned when he shifted his weight. He did not look up, but his hands stilled on the hydraulic fitting he was adjusting.
You took it.
I took it.
The fitting released with a hiss of pressurized gas. Pell wiped his palms on his coverall and turned to face her, his expression unreadable.
Who posted it?
A man named Veylan Sorc. Former Meridian Fleet.
Pell's eyes narrowed. I know that name. He was a records officer. There was a story, years back, something about classified files and a court-martial that never went to trial.
He's working private now. Historical consulting.
Historical consulting in the Drift. Pell's voice carried no inflection, but his hands found a rag and began polishing a fitting that did not need polishing. That sounds legitimate.
Mara set the data chip on the workbench between them. Pell looked at it the way a man looks at a trap he has already stepped into.
What's on it?
Trajectory data. Hazard overlays. A sealed addendum that opens when we recover the flight recorder.
Pell was quiet for a long moment. The engine bay hummed around them, the Mercy 's old systems cycling through their familiar rhythms. Somewhere deeper in the ship, a pipe complained about its geometry.
We need a signal-tech, he said finally. And we need someone who can crack that sealed addendum if the data's been compromised.
I know.
Denna Reel is at the Ringfall Cantina. I passed her on the way in. She looked like she was three drinks past professional and heading toward five.
Mara picked up the chip. The metal had warmed against her palm. I'll handle Reel.
Pell caught her wrist as she turned. His grip was gentle, but his eyes held the particular steadiness of a man who had chosen his words carefully and would not unsay them.
Mara. Whatever is on that ship, whatever Sorc is not telling us, we come back. Both of us. That is the condition.
She held his gaze for a long moment. The engine bay's lighting caught the grey in his beard, the new lines around his eyes.
That is the condition, she agreed.
Pell released her wrist. He turned back to his access panel, and the conversation was over in the way that conversations between them often ended, with the shape of what was not said lingering in the recycled air.
The Ringfall Cantina occupied a converted cargo bay on Tessik's lower ring, its ceiling lost in shadow and its floor sticky with substances the management had stopped trying to identify. The bar ran the length of the bay's port bulkhead, and behind it a viewscreen displayed the graveyard in grainy false color, the debris field's slow rotation set to a drinking-song tempo. Denna Reel sat alone at the far end, a half-empty glass in front of her, her attention fixed on a slate displaying what appeared to be navigation charts.
Denna Reel is at the Ringfall Cantina. I passed her on the way in. She looked like she was three drinks past professional and heading toward five.
Mara picked up the chip. The metal had warmed against her palm. I'll handle Reel.
Pell caught her wrist as she turned. His grip was gentle, but his eyes held the particular steadiness of a man who had chosen his words carefully and would not unsay them.
Mara. Whatever is on that ship, whatever Sorc is not telling us, we come back. Both of us. That is the condition.
She held his gaze for a long moment. The engine bay's lighting caught the grey in his beard, the new lines around his eyes.
That is the condition, she agreed.
Pell released her wrist. He turned back to his access panel, and the conversation was over in the way that conversations between them often ended, with the shape of what was not said lingering in the recycled air.
---
The Ringfall Cantina occupied a converted cargo bay on Tessik's lower ring, its ceiling lost in shadow and its floor sticky with substances the management had stopped trying to identify. The bar ran the length of the bay's port bulkhead, and behind it a viewscreen displayed the graveyard in grainy false color, the debris field's slow rotation set to a drinking-song tempo. Denna Reel sat alone at the far end, a half-empty glass in front of her, her attention fixed on a slate displaying what appeared to be navigation charts.
Mara slid onto the stool beside her without preamble.
You drink alone now, she said. There was no judgment in it. She had done stranger things in worse places.
Reel did not look up from the slate. Her finger traced a curve on the chart, paused, retraced. Three jumps past Kettering, on the Vellinor spur. The voice is on a loop. Same six seconds, over and over. I think it is a distress call. I think it is very old.
Mara signaled the barman. Two of whatever she is having.
The barman, a heavyset Tessik native with vestigial gill-strips along his jaw, nodded and shuffled off.
Reel finally raised her eyes. They were the pale amber of long exposure to station lighting, sharp and a little too bright. Captain. I was wondering if you would come find me.
You knew I would.
I suspected. The slate's display washed her features in cool blue as she set it face-down on the bar. Sorc told you about the recording.
He gave me the chip.
And you listened to it.
Halfway through, before the loop reset. Mara accepted the drink the barman set before her, something amber and viscous that smelled of fermented grain and chemical regret. Why did you not bring this to me first?
Reel's mouth twisted. Because I did not know what it was. Because the dialect is dead, and I have spent six hours trying to parse it without success. She lifted her glass, studied the contents. Because I am not sure it is a distress call. It might be something else.
What else would it be?
A warning. A confession. A prayer. The girl drank, set the glass down with a precision that suggested she was watching her own hands. Captain, the dialect on that recording is Pre-Compact Talic. There has not been a native speaker of Talic in the Drift for two hundred years.
Mara let that settle. The cantina's ambient noise, the clink of glasses, the low murmur of off-shift workers, seemed to recede.
How do you know what it is, then?
Because I grew up in Halren Stack, and the foster-mother I had for three years before I aged out was an old woman who had come in on one of the last colonization transports. She used to sing me to sleep in a language no one else spoke. Reel's voice had gone flat, factual, the way it did when she was handling something she did not want to feel. That was the tongue. Twisted, half-drowned, but unmistakable.
Mara drank. The liquor burned a path she was used to.
And the message?
I have a working transcription. Four words I am confident about, two more I am guessing at. She pulled a second slate from her jacket and laid it on the bar between them. The display showed a waveform, and below it, phonetic characters in a script Mara did not recognize.
Tell me.
Daughter. Marina. The third word is either return or returning. The fourth is hidden. Reel tapped the slate. The voice repeats this sequence every six-point-three seconds. No breathing, no pause. The speaker is either dead or the recording is automated.
Mara stared at the waveform. It meant nothing to her. It meant everything to a girl who had spent her childhood in station foster-homes, listening to a language the rest of the Drift had forgotten.
Who is Sorc working for, Reel?
The navigator's eyes flicked up. Sharp. Calculating. That is the question, isn't it.
That is the question.
I do not know. But I know this. She leaned closer, lowering her voice beneath the cantina's ambient drone. Sorc did not hire us through any registered broker. He walked into the office on his own, with a manifest that should have been sealed, and he paid half up front in unmarked chits. Half up front, Captain. For a ship that may not even be there.
Mara turned the glass in her hands. The liquor caught the light.
What do you want to do?
I want to know what is on that wreck. Reel's chin lifted. I want to know why a dead woman's voice is calling her daughter home. And I want Sorc to tell me the truth before I spend another hour of my life translating his mysteries.
You think he is holding back.
I think he is terrified of something. And I think we are the ones he has chosen to walk into it with him.
Mara finished her drink. She set the empty glass down beside Reel's half-full one, the two of them a small study in contrast.
We go out tomorrow at first shift, she said. Pell, you, me. We board the wreck, we find the core, and we see what is actually broadcasting. If Sorc has an objection, he can take it up with me personally.
Reel exhaled. Something in her shoulders loosened, the tension she had been carrying since Mara walked in easing by a fraction. Understood, Captain.
One more thing. Mara held up a finger. Whatever we find out there, it does not leave the ship until I have decided what to do with it. Not a whisper to the station, not a word to Sorc, not a line to any broker on Tessik. We are clear?
Crystal, Captain.
Good. Get some sleep. We lift at oh-five-hundred.
---
The wreck was forty-seven kilometers from the graveyard's outer edge, drifting on a lazy ellipse that would carry it, in another eighty years, into the heart of the debris field. The Brass Mercy approached it from below, her running lights dimmed to minimum, her hull cold against the background radiation. Pell kept her steady while Reel plotted the approach, her fingers quick on the console, her face pale in the instrument glow.
Mara suited up in the airlock bay, checking each seal twice. The hardsuit was an old one, patched at the knees and elbows, but it held pressure and it had kept her alive through four years of wreck-work. She ran a gloved hand along the suit's chest plate and felt the dent where a piece of shrapnel had hit her during the Kettering run. The scar beneath it still ached when the pressure dropped.
Pell entered the bay behind her, his bulk filling the frame. He carried a pry-bar in one hand and a cutting torch in the other, both of them secured to his suit's magnetic clamps.
Reel followed, lighter than either of them, her suit bearing the navigator's insignia on the shoulder. She had a signal-sniffer in her hand and a look on her face that Mara recognized: the particular focus of a woman who had decided to be brave and was now committed to the experiment.
Comm check, Mara said.
Pell's voice came through, slightly distorted by the suit's speaker. Reading you.
Reel's followed, crisper. Clear as station air, Captain.
Good. Stay on my mark. Reel, you are eyes and ears. If anything on that wreck is broadcasting, I want to know before we are inside it.
Understood.
The airlock cycled. Pressure dropped, and Mara felt the suit's interior stiffen around her as the compensators adjusted. The inner door opened onto the void.
The wreck was a cargo hauler, old enough that its configuration was pre-standard. The hull plating was pitted and scored, but it held together; whatever had struck it had done so a glancing blow, shearing off a section of the port quarter and leaving the rest largely intact. The ship drifted end over end, its running lights long dead, its communications array a tangled ruin of bent metal.
Mara mag-locked her boots to the hull and studied the breach. The interior was dark, but not entirely so; a faint amber glow pulsed somewhere in the ship's depths, steady as a heartbeat.
That is not natural, Reel said over the comm. That is a core indicator. The power cell is still active.
Can you tell how long it has been running?
Not from here. But the cell is a deep-cycle model. It could have been ticking over for decades.
Pell moved to the breach and examined the edges with the torch's light. Clean cut, he said. No explosive residue. No impact scarring on the interior surfaces. This ship was not attacked, Captain. It was opened.
Mara's mouth went dry inside her helmet. She did not let the feeling reach her voice.
Then someone was here before us.
Or something.
They entered single-file, Pell leading with the torch, Mara in the middle, Reel bringing up the rear. The interior was a museum of abandonment. Consoles lined the corridors, their screens dark, their chairs still positioned as though their occupants had simply risen and walked away. Dust, or its equivalent, coated every surface, the fine particulate matter that accumulated in derelict vessels over years of micro-meteorite strikes.
The amber glow grew stronger as they moved deeper. It pulsed through a doorway at the end of the main corridor, the light bending around something in the room beyond.
Mara held up a fist. Stop.
They stopped. The silence inside her helmet was immense.
She keyed her suit's external pickup, amplifying the ambient sound. Through the static and the soft hiss of the hull's thermal expansion, a voice came.
It was a woman's voice. Old, cracked, looping on a six-second cycle. The words were in Pre-Compact Talic, and Mara understood none of them, but the cadence was unmistakable. It was a lullaby. It was a plea. It was the sound of someone calling out into a void that had never answered.
Reel had gone very still.
I can hear it, she said. I can hear what she is saying.
What.
Reel's voice was barely a whisper. She is saying daughter. She is saying come home. She is saying I am waiting.
Mara looked at the doorway. The amber light pulsed through it, steady and patient.
Pell. The torch.
He raised it and stepped forward.
The room beyond was the ship's bridge, smaller than she had expected, the consoles arranged around a central command chair. The chair was occupied.
The figure in it was long dead. Desiccated by the vacuum exposure that had followed the hull breach, the body sat upright, its suit still sealed, its hands resting on the armrests. The helmet's visor was dark, but the suit's chest unit was lit, a single amber indicator pulsing in the silence.
The AI core.
Reel moved past Mara, her signal-sniffer extended. It is not the body, Captain. It is the suit's emergency beacon. The woman is the core. She is the recording.
Mara stared at the figure. The suit's insignia was pre-Compact, the markings of a colony that had not existed for two centuries. The woman's posture, even in death, was the posture of someone who had stayed at her post long after there was anyone left to serve.
How long has she been here, Pell?
He examined the console beside the chair, brushing dust from a date display. The numbers were corroded, but readable. One hundred and ninety-one years, Captain. Give or take.
Reel made a small sound. Not a gasp, not a sob. Something quieter, the sound of a person confirming a grief they had carried for years.
Mara knelt beside the chair. The beacon's amber light washed across her visor, steady and unwavering.
She keyed her suit's translator. It would not recognize the dialect, but it would record.
Reel. The words. All of them.
Reel came to stand beside her. Her voice, when she spoke, was steady.
Marina. Come home. I am waiting. The bread is in the oven. The door is open.
Mara listened. The loop repeated, six seconds later, exactly as it had for nearly two centuries.
A woman, calling her daughter home. A colony that had been silent for generations. A ship that should have been forgotten, drifting in a graveyard no one had thought to search.
Mara reached out and placed her gloved hand on the armrest of the chair. Beneath her palm, through the layers of suit and metal, she could feel the faintest vibration of the beacon's pulse.
She stayed there for a long time.
Then she stood.
We bring her home, she said. All of her. Whatever is left of her, whatever Sorc wanted from this ship, we bring it back to Tessik and we find her daughter.
Pell looked at her. Reel looked at her.
Captain, Pell said carefully, we do not even know if the daughter survived. We do not know if the colony still exists. We do not know what Sorc is going to say when we tell him we have decided to deviate from his instructions.
I know what he is going to say. Mara's voice was quiet, but it carried. He is going to say we have no right. He is going to say the salvage belongs to whoever paid for it. And I am going to tell him that a woman has been calling out into the dark for a hundred and ninety-one years, and we are the ones who heard her. That makes it our business.
Pell was silent for a moment. Then he nodded.
Reel was already reaching for the beacon's housing, her signal-sniffer probing for the release mechanism.
I will copy the recording, she said. The full loop. In case we need it later.
Do it.
---
The return to Tessik took eleven hours. Mara spent six of them in the engine bay with Pell, walking him through what she had observed on the wreck, while Reel sat in the signal bay and transcribed the recording into the cleanest phonetic script she could manage.
The beacon itself was secured in the airlock, sealed in a container Pell had fabricated from scrap plating. Inside it, the loop continued. Marina. Come home. I am waiting.
When the Brass Mercy docked at Tessik's secondary ring, Mara sent a tight-beam to Sorc's offices requesting a meeting. The reply, when it came, was immediate and terse. Sorc would meet them at the customs office. He had brought representation.
Representation turned out to be four men in unmarked charcoal jackets, standing in a loose semicircle around the customs desk. They had the look of corporate security, the kind that did not file reports. Their eyes tracked Mara, Pell, and Reel as they entered, and their hands rested, casually but deliberately, near their hips.
Sorc stood behind the desk. He looked older than he had the day before, the lines in his face deeper, the pallor beneath his station-tan closer to grey.
Captain Voss, he said. I understand you have recovered the beacon.
I have.
And the rest of the wreck?
There is no rest. There is a bridge, a chair, and a woman who has been sitting in it since before either of us was born.
Sorc's expression did not change. The charcoal jackets shifted, a fractional tightening of their formation.
I am afraid, Sorc said, that I must insist on immediate transfer of the recovered materials to my custody. The salvage rights were registered under my account, and any deviation from the terms of our agreement will be considered a contractual breach.
Mara set the container on the desk between them. The amber light pulsed through the seams.
There is no agreement, she said. You hired the Brass Mercy on the strength of a manifest you never disclosed. You paid half up front in untraceable chits. You sent us to a wreck you knew was occupied, and you did not think to mention that the occupant was still calling out.
Sorc's jaw tightened. Captain, you are overstepping. The vessel's contents are the property of the estate that commissioned the recovery, and I am acting as their lawful agent.
What estate?
I am not at liberty to say.
The charcoal jackets had moved closer. Two of them flanked Pell, their postures suggesting a familiarity with confrontation that went beyond casual.
Mara looked at them. She looked at Sorc.
The recording on that beacon, she said, is in Pre-Compact Talic. There has not been a native speaker in two centuries. The woman in that chair was the last voice of a dead colony, and she has been waiting for someone to come home. I am not turning her over to a man who will not even tell me her name.
Sorc's eyes hardened. Then you are in violation of your contract. I am sorry it has come to this.
He nodded.
The charcoal jackets moved.
What followed was brief and ugly. One of them produced a stunner and leveled it at Pell, who had begun to turn toward the door. Another grabbed Reel by the arm and twisted, forcing her to drop the signal-sniffer. The third came at Mara with a restraint cuff, and the fourth simply stood watch, his hand on the butt of a weapon he had not yet drawn.
Mara caught the third man's wrist before the cuff closed. She had done this before, in the break, in the Drift, in the places where negotiation happened at the speed of nerve. Her counter was practiced, her grip precise. She bent his wrist back until he dropped the cuff, then drove an elbow into his solar plexus that folded him over her knee.
But there were four of them, and three of her crew, and the customs office was not the Drift. Rules applied here. Paperwork and jurisdiction and the particular violence of men who had been told they would not be prosecuted.
The stunner whined. Pell went down, his body convulsing once before the current locked his muscles. Reel screamed as the man holding her wrenched her arm higher, and Mara heard the joint pop before she could turn.
She did turn. She had to. The moment her attention left the man she was fighting, his partner came in from the side, and the stunner found her shoulder.
The world went white.
---
She woke on the floor of the customs office, her cheek pressed against the cold tile. The container was gone. The beacon was gone. Pell was slumped against the far wall, his breathing shallow but steady. Reel was beside him, cradling her arm, her face white with pain.
Mara sat up slowly. Her shoulder burned where the stunner had grounded, and her head felt thick, as though the air had been replaced with wet cotton.
Sorc was gone. The charcoal jackets were gone. The customs officer behind the desk was a young Tessik native who was staring at the three of them with the particular expression of someone who had been told to mind his own business and was minded to comply.
Mara got to her knees. Then to her feet.
Pell, she said. Talk to me.
He coughed. Arm is numb. Feeling is coming back. He managed a thin smile. They did not want to kill us, Captain. They wanted us compliant.
Reel was less steady. Her arm hung at an angle that suggested dislocation, and her breath was coming in short, sharp bursts.
The shoulder, she said through her teeth. They took the shoulder.
Mara crossed to her and examined the joint without touching it. Dislocated, not broken. She had seen worse, and she had reset worse. She did not have time to do it properly now.
Reel. This is going to hurt.
I know.
Mara braced the navigator's shoulder with one hand, took the wrist with the other, and rotated sharply. The joint popped back into place with a sound that made Pell flinch. Reel made a noise that was not quite a scream and then went white to the lips, her breathing ragged but her arm, mercifully, at the correct angle again.
We need to get out of here, Mara said. Now. Before they come back to finish the job.
Pell got to his feet, unsteady but upright. The customs officer made no move to stop them.
Outside the office, the secondary ring's commercial concourse was busy with the late shift. Workers in coveralls, vendors in stalls, the hum of a thousand small transactions. No one looked twice at three battered figures moving against the foot traffic.
Mara led them to a maintenance corridor she had used before, a narrow service passage that ran between the ring's inner and outer hulls. The air was recycled and tasted of metal. The light was dim. It was, for the moment, the safest place on the station.
She leaned against the wall and let herself breathe.
We lost the beacon, she said. We lost the recording. We lost our leverage. And we are about to lose the ship, because I have no doubt Sorc will have the dock authority seizing the Brass Mercy by morning.
Reel cradled her arm. Her face was still pale, but her eyes were sharp. Then we are dead.
Then we are dead.
Pell said nothing. He was looking at something behind Mara, his expression unreadable.
She turned.
A man was standing at the far end of the corridor. He had not been there a moment before, or if he had, he had made no sound. He was lean, dark-skinned, with the kind of stillness that suggested either training or patience. He wore a station-issue jacket, unadorned, and he held a slate in one hand, angled so the light did not reach his face.