The holo-map flickered blue and amber over the briefing table, the Tessera Belt stretching out in a scattered constellation of asteroid claims and patrol routes. Captain Reina Solenne stood at the head of the table, her hands clasped behind her back, the insignia on her collar catching the projection's glow.
Three officers sat before her. Darius Vex occupied the chair nearest the door, his shoulders squared but his eyes fixed on the map with the weariness of a man who had seen too many briefing rooms. Chief Engineer Voss slouched at the opposite end, a coffee bulb warming his thick, scarred fingers. Between them, Pilot Rook Melas leaned back with one boot hooked over his knee, a grin already tugging at the corner of his mouth.
Solenne waited until the hum of the recyclers cycled down to silence.
"The Convoy Authority has cleared us for a shakedown run," she began. Her voice carried the measured cadence of someone accustomed to being heard over engine noise and shouting crews, the lilting softness of her southern hemisphere accent sharpened by command. "We enter the Tessera Belt at oh-six-hundred tomorrow. We engage whatever the Vethari have left in our path. We come back with proof that ICS-Tributary can fight."
Rook whistled low, a bright, reckless sound. "Picket drones. The Sovereignty still runs picket drones out there?"
"The Sovereignty runs whatever it pleases," Solenne replied. "We have been given authorization to return fire. That is all."
Voss grunted into his coffee. "Authorization. There's a word."
Darius said nothing. His gaze had drifted to a cluster of amber markers on the holo-map, six of them spaced along a fractured asteroid chain. The Vethari pattern. He had studied such patterns on a weapons console years before his discharge, back when discharge still meant retirement and not the quiet, hunted thing it had become.
Solenne turned her attention to him. "Mr. Vex. You have not flown since your certification. You will operate the defensive suite on the Banshee while Pilot Melas handles flight. You will speak to each other, you will trust each other, and you will not improvise beyond what we have drilled."
"Aye, Captain," Darius said. The two words came out rough, scraping against his throat the way Adriatic salt scraped against old stone.
Rook tilted his head, studying the weapons officer with open curiosity. "You ever punch something in anger, Vex? Or is this your first time off the leash?"
Darius met the pilot's gaze. There was no sharpness in Rook's face, only the bright, searching attention of a young man who treated danger as a puzzle to be solved. Darius found the expression difficult to trust.
"There is a first time for everything," he said.
"Cheerful," Rook replied. "I like a man with range."
Voss set his coffee bulb down with a hollow clatter. "If you two are finished flirting, the Banshee's forward shield emitter is still reading seventeen percent below spec. I'll have it patched by oh-five-hundred, but the port dorsal coupling is going to throw a fault code every time you cycle it. Do not let it rattle you."
"Noted," Darius said.
"Noted," Rook echoed, already standing, already stretching. "I'll pre-flight in twenty. Vex, meet me in Bay Three. Bring your stomach. The loops in the Tessera turn pilots into vomit."
He sauntered out, boots clicking against the deck plating in an unhurried rhythm. Solenne watched him go, then turned back to Darius and Voss.
"He is reckless," she said quietly.
"He is the best pilot we have," Voss answered.
"He is also the only pilot we have," Solenne added. She looked at Darius. "Keep him alive, Mr. Vex."
The briefing room door hissed shut behind her. Voss drained his coffee and rose, joints popping.
"She's worried," the chief engineer observed. "I can hear it in her voice. Worry does that to a captain. It makes them start issuing orders they cannot enforce." He paused at the door. "You sleep last night?"
"Some," Darius said.
Voss made a sound somewhere between a cough and a laugh. "Some. Right." He left without another word, the door sealing behind him with a soft pneumatic sigh.
Darius sat alone with the holo-map for a long moment. The Tessera Belt rotated slowly under the projection, amber and blue markers drifting in their slow, orbital dance. Six drones. Possibly more, lurking behind the larger asteroids. Possibly none. The Sovereignty's picket doctrine had never been predictable, only thorough.
He stood, rolled his shoulders until something in his neck cracked, and walked to the Banshee.
The fighter squatted in Bay Three on its landing struts, a sleek, scarred thing with mismatched hull plating and a cockpit canopy still fogged from the last diagnostic. Rook was already inside, hands dancing across the flight controls with the careless grace of a man playing an instrument he had long since mastered.
"Co-pilot seat," the pilot called out as Darius climbed the access ladder. "Strap in. Touch nothing until I say."
Darius settled into the right-hand seat, the harness biting into his shoulders. The cockpit was smaller than he remembered, the instrument panel a tight constellation of switches and glowing readouts. The smell of ozone and recycled air filled his lungs. Beneath him, through the deck plating, he could feel the faint vibration of the hangar's tractor field.
"Comms check," Rook said. "Banshee Actual, channel seven."
"Reading you," Darius replied. His voice sounded strange inside the helmet, flattened and intimate.
"Good. Shield panel's to your left. Weapons panel's to your right. Forward shields on my mark, aft shields on yours. If something hits us from behind, that is your fault, and I will judge you."
"Noted."
"Splendid." Rook ran a gloved finger down the startup checklist. "ICS-Tributary, Banshee Actual requesting launch clearance."
Solenne's voice crackled back through the channel, warm and steady. "Banshee Actual, you are cleared for launch. Bay Three doors opening. Watch your port quarter on egress, the tractor emitters are misaligned again."
"Copy. Port quarter. Tractor emitters. Anything else?"
"Stay alive, Pilot Melas."
"Always do, Captain."
The bay doors parted, and the black of space opened beyond them. Darius had not been off a deck in three years. The stars hit him first, a hard, bright wall of cold light that made his chest tighten. Then the curvature of the planet below, blue and white and impossibly distant.
"Easy," Rook murmured, though whether to Darius or to himself was unclear. "Easy now."
The Banshee slid out of the hangar on a whisper of thrust, and the Tessera Belt opened ahead of them, a field of tumbling rock and silent, glittering dust.
Rook killed the running lights.
"What are you doing," Darius said, not a question.
"Going dark. The drones hunt on thermal. Running lights make us a target. You will get used to it."
The cockpit dimmed. The instruments glowed amber and pale blue, painting Rook's face in soft, shifting color. His grin had faded. In its place sat a concentration Darius had not seen on the briefing room floor, a quiet, focused stillness that made the pilot look suddenly older.
"Contact," Darius said. "Bearing zero-seven-three. Twelve thousand kilometers. Single thermal signature."
"I see her," Rook replied. "She's ours, drifting. Far mark."
He fed power to the engines, and the Banshee surged forward, the asteroid field rising around them like the walls of a cathedral made of stone and ice.
Darius watched the Vethari signature drift across his scope. Twelve thousand kilometers. Eleven. Closing slow.
"Shield forward on your mark," he said.
"Mark." Rook's voice was clipped now, fast and bright and utterly steady. "Forward shields up. Aft to you."
Darius cycled the aft shields. The panel lit green.
"Green," he said.
"Beautiful. First drone is at nine thousand and closing. Weapons free on my call. Do not fire until I say."
"I understand."
"No, you do not. But you will."
The drone grew in the scope, a small, angular shape resolving out of the dark, its running lights pulsing in the Sovereignty's cold crimson. Darius felt the Banshee bank hard left, the harness biting into his chest as Rook threaded them between two tumbling rocks the size of city blocks.
"There," Rook said, calm as a man ordering a drink. "Now."
Darius' hand found the weapons panel. His thumb settled on the firing stud. The shape on his scope held steady for a single breath. He pressed.
The pulse cannon roared, a single sharp bark that lit the cockpit in white. The drone came apart in a bloom of debris and dying light.
"One," Darius said.
"One," Rook echoed, grinning again now, the brightness back in his eyes. "Two more on approach. Bearing zero-four-one and zero-nine-five. High and low. The Sovereignty sent a flight, not a sentry."
Darius felt something shift in his chest, a cold and familiar thing that he had believed dead.
"How long," he asked.
"Until they are on us? Thirty seconds. Until you have to shoot? Twenty."
"Then move."
Rook laughed, a sharp, startled sound, and threw the fighter into a climb that pinned Darius against the seat. The asteroids blurred. The stars wheeled. The second drone filled the scope, and Darius fired, and the scope went bright with debris, and the third was already sliding in from below, and Rook was shouting, "Shield aft, shield aft," and Darius cycled the panels, and the drone's pulse round scraped past the Banshee's belly close enough to rattle the teeth in his skull.
"Got him," Darius said, his voice a scraped-out rasp. "Aft shields holding."
"Of course they are. You built them."
The third drone wheeled away into the rocks, trailing a ribbon of fire from its port engine.
Rook pursued.
Rook pursued.
The Banshee dove after the crippled drone with the eagerness of a hound on a scent. The asteroid field swallowed them both, a maze of tumbling stone and drifting dust that filled the windscreen with shifting shadows. Darius braced against the g-forces and felt the familiar weight settle across his shoulders, the old harness of duty and reflex snapping tight.
"Easy," he said. "It is wounded. It will try to draw you into the densest rock."
"I know." Rook's voice was bright, too bright, the kind of brightness that hid something darker. "That is why I am going fast."
The drone corkscrewed through a gap between two boulders the size of hab blocks, trailing that thin ribbon of fire. Rook threaded the Banshee through the same gap with a clearance that made Darius' stomach drop. Pebbles rattled off the hull like rain on a tin roof.
"Range," Darius said.
"Four hundred. Closing. I want this kill, Darius. Give me this one."
Darius adjusted the targeting reticle. The drone was weaving, using the asteroids as cover, and every time he found a clean lock the rock slid back into the way. His finger hovered over the firing stud. The shape on his scope flickered, steadied, flickered again.
The port shield array pinged a warning. A glancing hit from debris, nothing serious. Darius watched the readouts as if they were scripture. Power levels. Distribution. The familiar numbers that once meant the difference between life and the long quiet after.
He nudged more juice to the port side. Old habit. Old ship. The Banshee had always taken her hits forward and to port, and his hands remembered before his mind could countermand them. The starboard shields thinned. He did not notice. He was watching the drone.
"Two hundred," Rook said. "I have eyes on the cockpit section. One shot, one kill. Make it clean."
"I am trying."
The drone broke left. Rook rolled after it, and the asteroid field spun, and for a moment the Banshee was flying upside down through a canyon of stone with stars below and shadow above. Darius' targeting computer lost the lock. He re-acquired by eye, the old way, the way they taught at the academy before the academy taught cruelty.
"One fifty," Rook murmured. "Steady."
A new shape slid onto the scope. Not the wounded drone. A second one, fresh, unmarked, dropping out of the shadow of a tumbling boulder the size of a city block. It had been lying in wait, and it had chosen its moment with the patience of a thing bred for ambush.
"Break right," Darius said. "Break right now."
Rook did not break right. Rook saw the wounded drone still pulling away, still trailing fire, still a clean kill if he could just hold the line for another two seconds. His hand stayed on the stick. His eyes stayed forward.
"Break right," Darius said again, louder. "Drone new, bearing zero-eight-seven, range one-twenty, hot."
The new drone fired.
The plasma dart came in low and fast, a streak of blue-white fire that crossed the gap between the rocks like a thrown spear. It should have hit the Banshee amidships. It should have punched through the unshielded starboard flank and turned the cockpit into a brief and terrible sun.
Darius did not think. His hands moved on the shield panel the way a man's hands move when his wife is falling, when his child is reaching for a knife, when there is no time for thought and only the body knows. He dumped power. Not to port this time. Not to the side the ship liked to take her hits. He dumped everything he had, every spare joule, every reserve, straight into the starboard array.
The shields flared so bright the cockpit washed white. The plasma dart hit the wall of force and came apart in a spray of molten particles that skittered across the canopy like thrown sand. The impact threw Rook sideways against his harness. The Banshee yawed, lost her elegant line, and for a moment they were sliding sideways through the asteroid field with no control and no composure.
The console screamed. Every warning light on the panel came on at once. Port shields in the red. Forward shields in the amber. The starboard array was holding, barely, a guttering candle in a storm. The ship's heart was exposed on the side Darius had always favored, and the new drone was already cycling its weapon for a second shot.
Darius saw it on the scope. He saw the wounded drone too, still pulling away, still trailing its ribbon of fire, still a clean kill if he could just turn the ship and fire. The shot was there. He could feel it in his hands the way a bowman feels the arrow in the bow. One second of work. One clean squeeze of the stud. The drone would die, and they would have swept the field, and the Banshee would limp home with her pilot grinning and her guns still smoking.
Rook groaned beside him. A small sound, bitten off. Darius looked sideways and saw blood on the canopy frame where Rook's head had struck it. Saw the way Rook's hand had gone white on the stick. Saw the pilot's eyes trying to focus, trying to find the horizon, trying to remember which way was up.
"Rook."
"Yeah." The voice was thick. "Yeah. I am here. I am here, I am just. Give me a second."
The drone fired again.
The second dart came in from above this time, a hammer blow from a different angle, and Darius could not cover both. He could turn the ship and present the port flank, the side he had thinned with his own foolish hands, and pray the shields held. He could keep the starboard array up and let the port take the hit, and watch the numbers on his console slide toward zero. Or he could do what the new drone wanted him to do, what every ambush was designed to make its prey do, and freeze.
He looked at the scope. The wounded drone was small now, a smudge of fire sliding into the deep shadow between two boulders. One more second of pursuit and it would be gone. One more second of shields and Rook would be dead.
"Darius." Rook's voice was a thread. "The drone. It is getting away."
"I know."
"If you have the shot, take it. I can hold her."
Darius looked at his pilot. He looked at the scope. He looked at his hands on the shield panel, the hands that had once obeyed orders he could not stomach, the hands that had learned in a single burning moment what it meant to choose one life over a mission.
He chose Rook.
The shield panel went flat. Every joule he had left went into the starboard array, the side facing the new drone, the side that had already taken the first hit and was begging for relief. The port side went dark. The forward array thinned to nothing. The Banshee became a ship with one good shield and a heart of glass.
The second dart hit the starboard wall and the wall held. Barely. The cockpit shook so hard Darius' teeth clicked together. A shower of sparks rained from the overhead panel. Something in the back of the ship made a sound like a man clearing his throat, and then went quiet.
The new drone held position for a long moment, as if surprised. Then it rolled and slid away into the rocks, vanishing into the maze with the unhurried grace of a thing that knew it would be back.
Rook's head lolled against the headrest. His hand had gone slack on the stick. The Banshee drifted, her nose pointed at nothing, her engines throttled back to a whisper.
"Rook." Darius reached across and gripped the pilot's shoulder. The flight suit was warm under his fingers. He could feel the muscle, the bone, the stubborn animal fact of a living man. "Rook, talk to me."
A breath. Two. The canopy was still spotted with the spray of the first dart, little scorched stars on the glass.
"I am going to have a headache," Rook murmured. "I am going to have a very large headache, and you are going to buy me a drink, and we are never going to speak of this."
"You are bleeding."
"It is a scratch. It is a scratch and a bruise and my pride, in that order." Rook's hand found the stick again. His knuckles were scraped raw but his grip was steady. "Get us out of the field, Darius. Before the other one finds its friends."
Darius did not argue. He ran his hands over the panel, cycling what he could, coaxing what would not cycle, and nursed the Banshee around in a slow, limping turn toward open space. The asteroids fell away behind them like a closing door. The wounded drone was gone. The new drone was gone. The field was quiet again, the particular quiet of a place that has just tried to kill you and is waiting to try again.
Rook flew with one hand. The other kept drifting to the side of his head, touching the wound, pulling away to look at the blood on his glove.
"It was a clean shot," Rook said. "You had him. I saw the pipper settle."
"Yes."
"Why did you not fire?"
Darius watched the readouts. Port shields recharging. Forward shields recharging. The numbers climbing in their slow, patient way. He thought of a man in a cockpit that was burning, a man who had chosen a stranger's life over the mission, a man who had died for it, and who had left behind a debt that could never be paid in any currency the living understood.
"Because the shot was not as clean as you thought," Darius said. "And because I have made that choice once already, and I will not make it again."
Rook was quiet for a long moment. The Banshee cleared the last of the rocks and the stars opened up ahead of them, vast and indifferent and very, very bright.
"That sounded like a story," Rook said softly.
"It was not a story."
"No. I do not suppose it was."
The comm unit crackled. A voice, clipped and familiar, sliced through the cockpit like a blade through silk.
"Banshee, Tributary. Confirm status. Solenne out."
Rook glanced at Darius. Darius glanced at Rook. The moment stretched, thin as wire.
"Banshee," Rook said, and his voice was bright again, perfectly bright, the brightness of a man who had decided to put the blood on the inside of his smile. "Two drones destroyed, one escaped. Minor damage. Pilot intact. Requesting permission to dock and buy my gunner the drink he just earned."
A pause. The kind of pause that meant someone on the other end was choosing between two languages, the one she had to speak and the one she wanted to.
"Permission granted," Captain Reina Solenne said. "Dock bay three. And Melas."
"Captain."
"The next time you fly a wounded drone into a nest, I will have your wings, and I will have them framed. Solenne out."
The channel went dead. Rook grinned. The grin sat oddly on his face, bright as a lit match in a dark room.
"See?" he said. "She likes me."
"She tolerates you. There is a difference."
"You say tolerance, I say love."
Darius turned back to his panel and began the long, patient work of counting what they had left. Shields at half. Ammunition low. One engine running hotter than it should. One pilot bleeding quietly into a gauze pad he had produced from somewhere in his boot.
It was enough. It was more than enough. It was everything he had ever wanted, and it tasted, as it always did, like ash and cold coffee and the faint salt of another man's blood on the glass.
The dock clamps took the Banshee like teeth taking bone. Three hard jolts, then the shudder of metal mating with metal, then the pressurized groan of the bay door cycling shut. Through the canopy, Darius watched the yellow caution stripes on Halcyon's interior hull slide past, the same stripes he had watched a hundred times before, and felt nothing move in him at all. He had expected relief. He had expected, perhaps, the small warm weight of having brought another crew home alive. Instead there was only the long quiet after the storm, and the strange awareness that the storm was not over but had merely changed shape.
Rook killed the systems one by one. The way he did it was telling: he did not power down the weapons first, like the checklist wanted. He killed the engines last, as if he were not quite ready to admit he had stopped flying. Then he sat back, and the brightness that had carried him through the wreckage of the drone strike drained out of him all at once, the way color drains from a bruise. He looked at his own hands on the throttle as if he did not recognize them.
"I lied to her," Rook said, very quietly.
"About what."
"About being intact." He lifted the gauze pad from his boot. The blood on it was black in the bay's amber light. "Minor damage."
Darius reached across and took the pad from him, set it aside in the disposal bin, and pressed his thumb to the small comm stud on the yoke. "Banshee, dock bay three, medical priority, one minor laceration, passenger pilot."
"Copy, Vex. Sending medics."
He popped the canopy. The bay air hit him, recycled and warm and tasting of coolant and human sweat and the particular metallic sweetness of a ship that had been running too hot for too long. The smells of home, if home were a place that did not want him. He climbed down first, ignoring the ache in his shoulder where the recoil of the rear-mount had wrenched something he would pretend about for as long as he could pretend, and turned to watch Rook swing down after him, moving slower than a man his age had any right to.
They stood on the deck for a moment, eye to eye across the Banshee's scarred hull, and Darius thought how strange it was that the universe kept handing him children to carry. He had been the youngest weapons officer in the Adriatic theater. He remembered, sometimes, being the one carried.
"Rook."
"Hm."
"Don't lie to her again."
Something moved across Rook's face, too quick to name, gone before it could be catalogued. "She worries," Rook said. "Let her."
He limped toward the medics already crossing the bay, and Darius let him go, because some kindnesses required the receiver not to see them.
The private console was waiting for him in the small maintenance alcove behind the bay's rear bulkhead, a recessed screen tucked between two conduit panels, blinking the steady amber that meant a captain's summons queued behind a closed channel. Darius had asked for it to be installed there, years ago, when he had still believed the worst thing a man could do was be found out. Now he keyed it open with the practiced motion of a man who had opened many such doors.
The screen filled with Solenne's face. She was not smiling. She had the particular stillness she wore when she had already decided what she thought of him and was now in the process of delivering it. The light in her quarters was the warm yellow of late watch, and the silver in her hair caught it like a blade laid sideways.
"Close the door," she said.
"The door is closed, Captain."
"Then close it twice."
He reached out and slid the secondary shutter home. The alcove went dim. The amber of the screen became the only color in the room.
"You will tell me," she said, "why my weapons officer's station currently reports a half-power discharge and a rear-mount misfeed and an ammunition count that suggests he personally fed the magazine into a furnace."
"Sensor ghosts, Captain. The forward diagnostics need a recalibration. I filed the request with engineering."
"Voss told me what the diagnostics needed was a prayer and a fire blanket."
"Voss is a poet."
"Voss is a liar with a wrench, and so are you, and I am asking you, Vex, as your captain and not as the woman who signs your pay, to tell me what happened in that bay."
He told her. Not all of it. Enough of it. The wounded drone. The nest. Rook's decision, and his own, to keep the Banshee inside the kill box rather than break out clean. He told it in the flat, careful voice he used when truth was a thing he was laying out on a table like a disassembled rifle, piece by piece, so that she could see how each part fit and judge whether any of them were missing.
When he had finished, she was quiet for a long time. The channel breathed between them, a faint hiss of carrier static.
"You let him fly wounded into a hornet's nest," she said at last, "because he asked you to."
"I let him fly into a hornet's nest because he asked me to."
"And if he had died in there."
"Then I would be writing a different letter tonight, and you would be signing it, and we would both hate ourselves for the rest of this cruise, and the convoy would still be six hours short of the checkpoint."
"And you."
"I would still be here, Captain. I am difficult to kill. You have noticed."
"I have noticed," she said, and her voice changed, dropping half a register, losing its public edge. "Darius."
The use of his name stopped him the way a hand on a chest would have. He waited.
"You saved his life."
"I covered him. He saved his own."
"You will not let me give you this, will you."
"It is not mine to take."
She studied him through the screen, and he let her, and did not try to look like anything other than what he was: a tired man in a maintenance alcove with a shoulder that burned when he breathed too deep. Whatever she saw, she put it aside.
"Two things," she said. "First. You are confined to the ship until Voss signs off on the rear-mount. I will not have my weapons officer dragging a bad shoulder into the next engagement. Second. After Voss signs off, I am putting you on the primary defensive rotation for the transit through the Blackett Shoals. Not the Banshee. The Tributary herself."
He blinked. "Captain."
"You heard me."
"The Tributary is a freighter. She does not have a weapons officer's station. She does not have a station I have ever sat at. I have spent my career making holes appear in other people's ships. You are asking me to stop making holes and start preventing them."
"I am asking you to keep a hole from being made in us. The Shoals are narrow, and the corridor is a known ambush vector, and the convoy's escort complement is one pilot short of doctrine because of a transfer that is not your business. Rook flies top cover. You sit at the master damage console on the bridge, and when something comes through us, you tell me where it is and what to do about it."
"And if I tell you wrong."
"Then we die together, and cleanly, and you will not have to write any letter at all. Do you understand me, Vex."
"I understand you, Captain."
"Good." She hesitated. There was something else. He could see it sitting behind her teeth, the way he could see a round sitting in a chamber. "Darius. The reflexes you used in that bay. The half-second reads. The angles. That was not weapons officer work. That was pilot work. That was the work of a man who used to fly."
"I used to fly."
"You still do. You just do it from a chair now. And the chair is bigger than you remember, and it carries more people than you remember, and there are no longer any windows in it." She paused. "Find the windows, Vex. Find them or make them. Because if you cannot fly the ship from that chair, I cannot keep you in it."
The channel held for one more breath. Then she closed it from her end, and the screen went dark, and Darius Vex sat alone in the alcove with the smell of his own sweat and the soft tick of the conduit cooling behind him.
He thought about cockpits. He thought about the Banshee, and the way she had answered his hands when he was younger, the way she had been an extension of him, a second body with a throat that could scream. He thought about the cockpit he had flown in the Adriatic, the one he had not thought about in years, the one he had flown the day the order came through and he had refused it and the universe had taken everything from him in the time it took a man to say no. He thought about the cockpit he had flown that day, and whether the man who had sat in it was still the man who was sitting in this alcove now, and whether the answer mattered to anyone but him.
Then he thought about the Tributary. About her keel, and the strange thing Voss had muttered about in engineering, the thing that lived in the bones of the ship and hummed when no one was listening. About the IRONWAKE, and the weight of it, and the way it had settled into him like a second skeleton. About Solenne, and her quiet faith in him, and the terrifying size of the chair she was offering.
He closed the secondary shutter. He stood. He went to find Voss, because Voss would have to look at the shoulder eventually, and because Voss was the only man aboard who talked to him without flinching, and because the night was young and the convoy was six hours short of the Blackett Shoals and somewhere out there the universe was deciding what kind of pilot it intended to make of him next.
At the door of the alcove he stopped, and put his hand flat against the bulkhead, and felt, for just a moment, the faintest tremor run through the metal, low and patient, like a heartbeat laid down in iron. The Tributary, breathing under his palm.
He opened the door and walked out into the ship, and did not look back, and did not let himself wonder whether the windows would come. He would make them. That was the job now. That had always, he suspected, been the job, and he had only just now been shown the chair.