Rust flaked from the docking collar as the freighter's spine latched into Vesper-9's umbilical. Sera Vance watched the seal pressurize through the viewport, her reflection ghosting over the corroded hull of an ore hauler berthed three slips down. The station's interior lights were a sickly amber, the sort of glow that made everything look like it had been left to rot in brine.
"Rax." She keyed the internal channel, kept her voice flat. "Port lock is holding. Air mix reads thin, but breathable. Particulates off the chart."
No response from the cargo deck. She cycled through the feed again, adjusted the gain, and caught the hiss of coolant venting somewhere aft. Then his voice, rough with the permanent rasp of a man who had breathed too much propellant smoke: "Copy. I'll be up in a tick. Doris is wedged against the manifold again."
"Doris" was what Rax Calder called the ancient inertial damper he had cannibalized from three dead ships. Sera did not correct him. A man was entitled to name the thing keeping him alive.
She stood, legs stiff from twelve hours in the co-pilot cradle, and shrugged her jacket straight. The freighter's cabin smelled of solder, old coffee, and the faint ozone tang of a drive that had been running too hot for too long. Through the hull plating she could hear the docking cradle groan as it accepted their mass, iron against iron.
Vesper-9 announced itself on the public band as a free port. The automated greeting claimed commerce, repair, and rest were available to all honest travelers. The audio crackled. Somewhere in the transmission a woman laughed, and the laugh cut off mid-note, swallowed by static.
Sera palmed the hatch release and stepped onto the gangway.
The air hit her first. Recycled, stale, tinged with the sweet chemical tang of cheap reclamation filters. Beneath that, something older: the iron-and-salt smell of a port that handled more ore than people. Her boots rang on the metal flooring, each step a small percussion against the hollow drum of the station's superstructure.
Vesper-9's concourse stretched ahead, a long throat of mismatched bulkheads and jury-rigged lighting. Cargo haulers squatted along the far bays, their holds gaping, attended by droids with flickering sensor stalks. Closer in, a scatter of stalls hawked ration packs, coolant, and the sort of software that could only be obtained in places honest freighters did not advertise. Two figures in heavy coats argued over the price of a nav-chart near a defunct vending unit. One of them glanced at Sera, then away, uninterested.
She counted the cameras as she walked. Three along the main artery, two more tucked into alcoves where the ceiling dipped low. All of them pointed at the docking slips. All of them appeared to be active. The eye painted onto the nearest housing was a faded stencil, half-scraped away, the kind of crude insignia that said somebody had claimed this place and wanted everyone to know.
A wolf's head, jaws parted in a silent howl.
Sera adjusted her collar, kept walking.
Rax caught up to her at the junction where the concourse widened into a market square. He moved with the careful economy of a man who had learned to ration his body along with everything else, his coat patched at the elbows, his jaw shadowed with a day's growth. He had a spanner tucked into his belt and a smear of grease across one knuckle.
"Cheery hole," he said, glancing at the stalls.
"Cheery enough to fix the manifold."
"Cheery enough to rob us blind, more like." He fell into step beside her, his gaze sweeping the crowd with the idle alertness of someone who had spent too many years watching for shapes in the dark. "You see the cameras?"
"All of them."
"And the welcome committee?"
She had. Three figures leaning against the far wall, dressed in matching dark coats with reinforced shoulders. They were not watching the market. They were watching the docking slips.
Iron Wolves. Sera recognized the insignia before she recognized the posture: the stillness, the way their hands rested near their hips, the way their eyes tracked without seeming to move. Frontier scouts learned to hold themselves like that. Most of them died young.
"Could be standard security," Rax said.
"Standard security doesn't stencil itself onto every camera housing."
He grunted. "Could be the station manager's lot."
"Could be." She did not believe it. Neither did he. They walked on.
A stall keeper called out prices for fresh bread. The bread was not fresh. The stall keeper knew it. The customers knew it. The transaction proceeded anyway, because hunger did not care about honesty.
Rax stopped at a repair kiosk and leaned across the counter. The attendant was a thin man with close-set eyes and the permanent squint of someone who spent his days staring at diagnostics screens. Rax laid out the problem in the shorthand of his trade: manifold three, heat bleed, fitting shorn. The attendant nodded, asked a question about model numbers, and disappeared into a back room that rattled with the sound of falling parts.
"I'll be here a while," Rax said. "Go stretch your legs. Get the lie of the place."
Sera did not need to be told twice.
She drifted along the edge of the market, close enough to the stalls to look like a buyer, far enough to keep her hands free. The Iron Wolves at the far wall had not moved. A fourth had joined them, taller than the others, with the broad shoulders of someone who ate well and worked hard. His coat was finer than the rest, the insignia on his collar picked out in actual thread rather than paint.
He watched her.
She let her gaze pass over him without lingering, moved to a stall selling pre-owned datapads, and picked one up as if to inspect the screen. In its reflective surface she could see the Wolves conferring. One of them pointed toward the docking slips. Another shook his head. The tall one lifted a hand, and they fell silent.
Sera set the datapad down, declined the seller's offer with a shake of her head, and walked on.
Vesper-9's market was a gallery of small compromises. A clinic advertised neural calibrations in letters that had been re-glued twice. A chapel of some indeterminate faith offered blessings for a credit and salvation for ten. Two children chased a drone rat between the stalls, their laughter thin and reedy in the stale air. A woman with a scarred face sat on a crate and cleaned a rifle, her movements precise, her eyes on nothing and everything.
Sera circled back toward the repair kiosk, taking a different route. A side passage led her past a row of crew quarters converted into temporary lodging, their doors scarred with the marks of hasty repairs and hasty exits. A notice board listed berth fees, repair rates, and, in small letters at the bottom, a tariff for "security assurance." The tariff was not small.
She emerged into a smaller chamber off the main concourse, a place where freighters paused to negotiate before committing to a slip. A viewscreen dominated one wall, cycling through a list of berths and prices. Beneath it, a counter. Behind the counter, a man with a shaved head and the expression of someone who had stopped being surprised by anything the year before last.
"Berth nine," Sera said. "Freighter out of Thessa. Repair work in progress."
"Got your manifest?"
"Sent it on approach."
He consulted a terminal. His fingers moved with the bored efficiency of a man who had processed ten thousand of these transactions. "Berth nine. Repair authorization logged. Hull deposit paid through next cycle. Anything else?"
"Station command. Who runs the show?"
He looked up. His eyes were flat, professional, the kind of eyes that had learned to forget things on purpose. "Station management handles docking, repairs, utilities. Anything else, you ask the Wolves."
"And if we don't like their answers?"
"Then you don't ask." He returned to his terminal. "Next."
Sera stepped aside as a hauler captain pushed forward with a manifest chit. She waited until the clerk was busy, then drifted toward the viewscreen. Beneath the list of berths, in smaller text, a schedule. Three cargo shuttles due in over the next eighteen hours. Two outbound. One private yacht, no registry listed.
She filed the schedule away and turned to leave.
The tall Wolf was standing in the passage.
Up close he was younger than she had first guessed, his face angular, his hair cropped close to the skull. His coat bore the insignia of the Iron Wolves on the collar, and on his chest a single pip that marked him as something more than a scout. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, a posture of studied ease that did not quite conceal the bulk of the sidearm at his hip.
"You docked this morning," he said. His voice was North Welsh, the vowels rounded, the consonants given their full weight. "Berth nine."
"Observant."
"It's my job." He did not smile. "Station's busy. Lots of traffic. We like to keep track."
"Of the traffic."
"Of anything that might cause trouble."
Sera held his gaze. "We're here for repairs. Manifold fitting. We'll be gone inside thirty-six hours."
"Thirty-six hours is a long time on Vesper-9." He tilted his head, a small motion, almost courteous. "Things happen. Pipes burst. Cargo goes missing. People misunderstand the customs of a place. It's best if newcomers understand how things work here. Saves a lot of grief."
"Customs."
"Call it what you like." He unfolded his hands, let them hang loose at his sides. "We keep the peace. We keep the lights on. We keep the air moving. For that, the station takes a contribution. Voluntary, of course. But stations that forget to contribute tend to have unfortunate accidents."
"Unfortunate."
"Very." He glanced toward the market, where the other three Wolves had resumed their positions along the wall. "Your captain. The older one. He has the look of someone who's seen trouble. We like to know what kind."
"He's a freighter captain."
"Freighter captains don't usually carry the kind of scars he carries. Not from freighters."
Sera said nothing. The tall Wolf studied her for a moment longer, then inclined his head, a gesture that was not quite a bow.
"Welcome to Vesper-9," he said. "Enjoy your stay."
He turned and walked back toward the market, his steps unhurried, his posture easy. Sera watched him go. The camera above the passage tracked his movement with the small, precise motion of a servo that had been recently serviced.
She returned to the repair kiosk. Rax was still at the counter, leaning on his elbows, listening to the attendant explain the difference between two grades of manifold fitting. His expression suggested he had heard the explanation before, from someone who knew what they were talking about.
She waited until the attendant disappeared again, then said, quietly, "We have a problem."
Rax did not look up. "The manifold?"
"The Wolves."
Now he looked up. His eyes were the color of old iron, and just as unreadable. "How bad?"
"Tariff. Voluntary. Thirty-six hours to find out how voluntary."
He considered that for a moment. "Could be worse. Could be they're just shaking us down."
"Could be."
"You don't think they are."
"I think they recognized your scars before I did." She kept her voice low. "I think they're watching the docking slips because that's where we came in. And I think the tall one with the pip was sent to introduce himself because they wanted us to know we were being watched."
Rax rubbed the back of his neck, a slow motion, his gaze drifting toward the market. "Doris isn't going to be ready in thirty-six hours if the fittings don't match. I need the parts. I need the time."
"Then we pay."
"We pay, and they know we're soft. We don't pay, and we find out how voluntary their customs are."
Sera did not answer. The attendant returned with a tray of components, and Rax turned his attention to them, lifting each fitting, checking the threads, holding them up to the light. Sera stood beside him and watched the market, and the Wolves, and the camera that tracked them both with the patience of something that did not need to blink.
"You think they recognized me."
It was not a question. Rax kept his eyes on the fittings, but his voice had shifted, the working-class vowels of Old Sheffield flattening into something harder.
"They recognized the scars. Yes." Sera did not soften it. "Old blast pattern. Lateral. The kind that leaves a lattice across the jaw when the charge goes off at the wrong distance." She paused. "The kind Iron Wolf medics know how to dress. The kind their recruiting officers screen for."
"And my age."
"And your age. And the fact that you stopped drinking for two years after Vesta, and you started again last winter, and you don't think I've noticed." She said it without accusation. Just inventory.
Rax set the fitting down. His hand lingered on the metal a moment too long.
"Vesta was twelve years ago."
"I know."
"I wasn't the one who fired."
"I know that too."
He looked at her then. Not the market. Not the camera. Her. "Then you know I'd rather hand them my teeth than give them a reason to dig into my crew."
"Then give them the tariff. Let them shake us down. And we leave before Doris gets curious." Sera lifted a fitting of her own and examined the threading, as if the conversation were simply about plumbing. "I can have the route remapped by dawn. The southern corridor is uglier, but it stays clear of the checkpoint they care about."
Rax was quiet for a long time. The market noise filled the gap, the vendors, the distant clatter of a grav-sled, the low hum of the station's atmosphere processors working their tired lungs. He picked up the fitting again. Turned it in his fingers.
"The tall one. The one with the pip."
"Pryce."
"Pryce." He tested the name. "He didn't ask about cargo. Didn't ask about manifest. Didn't ask for the registry fictions. He asked for names."
Sera did not answer. She had been hoping he had not noticed.
"Who did he ask about?"
"You." She set the fitting down. "And me. Specifically."
Rax exhaled through his teeth. A small sound, half whistle, half curse. "Then they already know."
"They already know."
"Then the tariff is a leash. They're not shaking us down. They're tagging us."
"Probably."
"Which means," he said slowly, "we have two choices. We run. Tonight. Before the fitting, before the route change, before they can lock the slip." He picked up another fitting, a different one, and held it beside the first. The threads did not match. He set it down with a careful, controlled motion that told Sera he was choosing not to throw it. "Or we figure out what they actually want, and we give it to them, and we walk away breathing."
Sera watched him. The lines around his eyes were deeper than they had been a year ago. The scar tissue along his jaw caught the market light and held it.
"There's a third option," she said.
He looked up. "Always is with you."
"I disable the checkpoint. Tonight. While they're still counting on us to behave." She kept her voice flat. "Bury their sensors in a six-hour loop. Their comms too. They won't know it's happened until we've already cleared the corridor."
"And how do you plan to do that from the docking slip?"
Sera allowed herself a small smile. The first one in a week. "That's the third option's third option."
Rax studied her. The old iron eyes did not blink.
"You smuggled yourself aboard the Lark."
It was not a question. Sera did not confirm it either. She simply stood there, in the middle of a market three sectors from where she was supposed to be, holding a manifold fitting that did not belong to her, and waited.
"You've been in the cargo hold this whole time." His voice had gone very quiet. "Since the last station. Since we took on the fuel. Since Doris started complaining about the weight distribution."
"The weight distribution," Sera said, "is because I've been moving around the secondary hold to keep the signal dampened. You're welcome."
He laughed, once, short and sharp. Not a happy sound. "Doris is going to kill me."
"Doris doesn't know."
"Doris always knows. Doris is a ship. Ships have opinions." He rubbed the back of his neck again, slower this time. "Why."
It was the question Sera had been waiting for. She set the fitting down with care and turned to face him fully.
"Because I owed you a debt from the Vesta extraction. Because your crew is the only one on this side of the sector who still takes jobs that don't involve a corporate logo. And because," she added, her voice dropping half a register, "I have spent the last three weeks being hunted by people who used to pay me, and I am very tired of running alone."
Rax did not answer immediately. He looked at the market. He looked at the camera that was still watching them. He looked at the manifold fittings scattered across the tray.
"You said you'd crack the checkpoint. Bury their sensors. Loop their comms." He picked up one of the good fittings and slipped it into his pocket. "You can do that from a slip?"
"I can do that from a hammock if the network's lazy enough. Frontier stations always are." She hesitated. "But I need to be on the Lark. Properly. Not in the cargo hold. I need a console and a hardline and about forty minutes where nobody opens the wrong door."
"Doris will ask questions."
"Doris," Sera said, "is a ship. Ships get answers when they're told."
Rax almost smiled. Almost. "Come on. Let's go introduce you to the crew."
They left the market with the fittings and the bad news and the sense that the station's gravity had shifted half a point to the left. Sera walked beside Rax through the corridors, matching his pace, not speaking, reading the seams of the bulkheads for the patterns of cameras and access panels. She catalogued four blind junctions and a maintenance hatch that had not been secured properly.
The Lark sat in a mid-tier slip, ugly and functional, her paint a faded rust that had given up pretending to be anything else. Sera had seen her schematics before. She had walked her corridors in her mind a dozen times during the long, damp hours in the cargo hold. Now she saw her for real, and the ship was both larger and smaller than she had imagined, the way all ships were.
Rax stopped at the airlock and pressed his palm to the pad. The system took his print, his pulse, his heat signature, and after a long moment the inner door sighed open.
"Welcome aboard," he said. "Try not to break anything."
"Define anything."
He stepped through. She followed. The air inside was cooler than the station, carrying the particular tang of recycled atmosphere and machine oil, and underneath that, the ghost of the coffee Rax brewed too strong every morning.
The Lark's cockpit was two decks up, accessed by a ladder that Sera climbed with the practiced ease of someone who had spent time on ships far worse than this one. The ladder rungs were worn smooth in the places where boots had found them most often. She noted that. Filed it.
Rax dropped into the pilot's chair and pulled up the internal manifest. Names. Roles. The face of a woman with cropped dark hair and a scowl that suggested she had been arguing with the universe for longer than the universe had been paying attention.
"Mira," Rax said. "Our engineer. She'll want to know who you are before she decides whether to like you."
"Mira Donnelly," Sera said.
"You've done your homework."
"I do my homework." She settled into the co-pilot's seat, the one with the cracked leather and the springs that dug into the small of the back. "I also know that Mira's sister still lives in the Caldera settlement, and that her nephew is five, and that Mira sends money home every cycle through a routing that even the Wolves haven't bothered to flag yet."
Rax turned in his chair. The old iron eyes. The scar tissue. The particular stillness of a man who had learned, a long time ago, not to react to things that surprised him.
"You've been in my crew's personal files."
"I've been in your crew's shipping logs. The personal files are a side effect." She met his gaze. "I needed to know who I was trusting."
"And what did you learn?"
"That your engineer is loyal. That your pilot, Chen, lost a brother at Vesta and never talks about it. That your medic, Halberd, has a gambling problem he thinks nobody's noticed. That your cargo handler, Tovera, sleeps with a knife under her pillow, and that your comms operator, Drew, has been sending encrypted signals to someone outside the system for the last nine days." She let the last one hang.
Rax's expression did not change. But his hand, the one resting on the arm of the chair, tightened a fraction.
"Drew."
"I haven't read the contents. I wanted to give you that courtesy."
"How very generous." His voice had gone dry. The working-class vowels of Old Sheffield sharpening again. "Anything else?"
"Yes. Your ship is named after a song your mother used to sing, and the call sign you broadcast in an emergency is a phrase in a dialect nobody speaks anymore, and I think that's the most sentimental thing about you." She paused. "Except the coffee."
Rax looked at her for a long moment. Then he laughed, low and rough, the sound of something that had been held tight for a long time finally being let go.
"Right. Sera Vance. Former corporate netrunner. Current stowaway. Future headache." He turned back to the console. "You said you could crack the checkpoint. You said you needed forty minutes. You said you needed a hardline and a console." He began keying in commands. "Doris. You listening?"
The ship's voice, when it came, was female, warm, slightly weary, the vocal equivalent of a grandmother who had seen too much.
"I am always listening, Rax. It is one of the privileges of being a ship."
"Then you know what's happening."
"I know there's a stowaway in my secondary hold. I know she's been there since the last station. I know the weight distribution has been off by a margin I chose not to report." A pause. Theatrical. "I also know she just climbed up my ladder without asking, and I have opinions about that."
"Doris," Rax said, "this is Sera. Sera, Doris. She's the real authority on this ship. I just do what she tells me."
"A sensible arrangement." Doris's voice carried the ghost of a smile. "Sera. I have read your file. The corporate one, which is mostly lies, and the freelance one, which is mostly accurate. You are very good at what you do."
"Thank you."
"You are also very expensive."
"I waived my fee."
A longer pause. The kind that meant Doris was running calculations.
"Why?"
"Because," Sera said, "the people hunting me are the same people who would very much like to know what Rax is carrying through this corridor. And I would rather be on the side of the ship they can't sink."
"Hm." Doris considered this. "That is a more honest answer than I expected."
"I try."
"Rax." Doris's voice sharpened. "We have a problem."
Rax's hand went still on the console. "What kind?"
"The kind with teeth. Three Iron Wolf scouts just docked at slip forty-two. They are not customs. They are not tariff collectors. They are boarding parties, and they are requesting permission to come aboard."
"How long do we have?"
"Four minutes. Maybe less, if they decide the request is optional."
Sera was already moving. She dropped out of the co-pilot's chair, dropped down the ladder two rungs at a time, and dropped into the cargo deck with the controlled grace of someone who had done this a thousand times before.
"Where are you going?" Rax called after her.
"To greet our guests." She did not slow down. "Get Mira to the engine room. Get Tovera to the cargo bay. And Rax?"
"Yes?"
"Let them in."
"You're joking."
"I'm not. Let them in. Three of them, you said?"
"Three."
"Then three is a number I can work with."
She vanished down the corridor before he could answer. Rax stared at the empty ladder for a moment, then keyed the comms.
"All hands. Boarding party. Standard protocol. And someone tell Drew to delete whatever he hasn't deleted already."
He paused. Then, quieter, to himself: "And someone tell me what the hell I've gotten us into."
Doris, of course, did not answer. Ships kept their own counsel. But somewhere in the bowels of the Lark, the lights in the secondary hold flickered once, twice, and then steadied, as if the ship itself had decided to hold its breath.
Three Iron Wolf scouts came through the Lark's airlock with the unhurried precision of men and women who had walked onto stranger ships than this one and expected to walk off again. Their armor was matte grey, patched with the kind of field repairs that spoke of long campaigns and shorter supply lines. Each carried a rifle slung low across the chest, and each wore the sigil of a wolf's head split by a vertical line, etched into the pauldron in faded enamel. They did not speak as they filed into the cargo deck. They simply stood, shoulder to shoulder, and waited.
Sera was waiting too.
She stood at the base of the ladder with her arms folded and her weight settled low, the picture of a woman who had nothing to hide and less to fear. The data-core was no longer in her hand. It was somewhere else now, tucked into the architecture of the ship in a place no patrol had ever thought to look, and her face gave nothing away. The airlock cycled shut behind the third scout with a sound like a tomb sealing.
The lead scout was a woman with close-cropped silver hair and a jaw that could have been hewn from the same alloy as her rifle. She studied Sera for a long moment, then let her gaze travel across the cargo deck: the stacked crates, the sealed lockers, the faint scorch marks along the far bulkhead where a plasma torch had bitten too deep during last month's repairs. Her eyes returned to Sera's.
"You're the runner."
It was not a question. Sera inclined her head a fraction of an inch. "I'm the engineer. Sera. And you are?"
"Lieutenant Gwen Rhis. Iron Wolf Forty-Third Recon. We're here on behalf of the Sector Authority to conduct a routine cargo inspection."
"Under whose authority, Lieutenant? Citation number, if you don't mind."
Rhis's mouth twitched at one corner. "You do mind, don't you."
"I mind a great many things. Citation. Number."
"Fourteen dash Tarragon. Issued out of Moriarty Station, signed by Prefect Corlan. You can verify it on the relay if you'd like."
"I would like." Sera's voice remained perfectly even. "I'll have our pilot pull it up. In the meantime, Lieutenant, I'm sure your people are tired. Can I offer you tea?"
Rhis did not blink. "What I would like is for you to open that locker." She pointed, without looking, at the long storage unit bolted to the bulkhead behind Sera's left shoulder. The one that held nothing more interesting than emergency atmosphere seals and three cases of ration bars. "And that one." A second locker, aft, full of magnetic boots. "And any container on this vessel not sealed against atmosphere with a manufacturer's tamper seal."
"You'll find we're a little lax on the manufacturer's tamper seals," Sera said. "Independent contractors tend to be."
"Then I'd like to see what's underneath the lax."
The second scout, a tall man with a burn scar that ran the length of his neck and disappeared beneath his collar, shifted his weight. He said nothing, but his hand drifted toward his rifle. Sera tracked the movement without appearing to. She had probably tracked it before he had made it.
"You have a problem with my people, Lieutenant?" Sera asked.
"I have a problem with an unregistered vessel carrying undocumented cargo through a contested corridor on the same day the Authority flags a possible data breach at Velsharn. But I'm sure those are unrelated."
"Quite unrelated. I'm sure the Authority will find that out as soon as they finish looking."
"How long will that take, do you think?"
"Longer than you have jurisdiction to detain me without charge. Section twelve, paragraph four. I'd be happy to cite it, if your citation doesn't already."
Rhis stared at her. Sera stared back. Somewhere in the guts of the ship, Rax's boots rang on metal as he crossed the upper deck, and the sound was the only thing that moved for a long three seconds.
Then Rhis exhaled through her nose, the ghost of a laugh. "You're good."
"I've had practice."
"I'll bet you have." Rhis unslung her rifle and set it against the nearest crate with the deliberate care of a woman making a concession. "Three crates. That's all I'm asking for. Three of your choosing, opened in front of me, sealed again after. If there's nothing in them, we're gone in ten minutes and you get a clean transit stamp."
"And if there's something in them?"
"Then we have a conversation that takes a lot longer than ten minutes, and you lose the stamp."
Sera considered. She let the silence stretch, the way she had learned to do, so that the people on the other side of the negotiation filled it with their own doubts. Rhis did not fill it. She simply waited, hands clasped behind her back, and the patience of a woman who had been on a hundred of these boards was almost a physical weight in the hold.
"Three crates," Sera said at last. "Of my choosing."
"Of my choosing."
"Lieutenant."
"Engineer."
They held each other's gaze. Then Sera tilted her head, a small concession that cost her nothing, and walked to a stack of sealed crates near the aft bulkhead. She rapped her knuckles on the first one. "Atmosphere spares. Boring. Boring. Boring." She moved to the next. "Medical supplies. Boring. Boring."
"You can skip the commentary."
"I could, but I find it helps me think."
She stopped at the third crate, a heavy black unit with the faded stencil of a shipping consortium from Tau Ceti. She rested her palm on it for a moment, and something in her expression shifted, a flicker of memory that she smoothed away before it could be named.
"This one," she said. "Open it."
Rhis stepped forward. The scarred scout produced a cutting torch from his pack, and within two minutes the seal was broken and the lid lifted. Inside, nested in shock foam, lay a disassembled Mark IV atmospheric processor, its components laid out in precise order, the kind of part that fetched a small fortune on the frontier and was worth exactly nothing to anyone chasing a data-core.
Rhis looked at it for a long time. Then she looked at Sera.
"Happy?"
"Thrilled. You?"
The lieutenant's mouth tightened. She gestured, and the scarred scout resealed the crate with practiced efficiency. When the lid clicked shut, Rhis gave Sera a small nod that was almost, against her will, a nod of respect.
"We're done here. For now."
"For now."
"I'm going to remember your face, Sera Vance."
"I've been told it's memorable."
Rhis turned on her heel. Her scouts fell in behind her, two grey ghosts trailing a grey captain, and the airlock hissed open to the dock's stale recycled air. Sera stood very still until the outer seal engaged and the pressure equalized and the Lark was, once again, a closed system with only its own people inside.
She let out a breath she had not entirely been holding.
"Clear," she said, to no one in particular, and then, louder, to the ship: "Clear, Rax. They bought it. For now."
Rax's voice came down the ladder well, rough with relief. "For now isn't very long."
"No. It isn't." She did not move from where she stood. Her hand had come to rest, almost without her permission, on the side of the sealed crate that had never contained anything but air processors. The crate she had chosen because opening it cost her nothing and showing it to a stranger cost her less. "They'll file a report. The report will flag us at the next checkpoint, and the next, and the next. We've got maybe twelve hours before the relay catches up with us, and by then we need to be somewhere the Iron Wolf doesn't care about."
"Anywhere in particular?"
"The coordinates I gave you. Punch them in, and get us moving. I want to be at the derelict before the second sunset."
"The derelict." Rax came down the ladder and stood beside her, close enough that she could smell the coffee on his breath and the faint ozone tang of the ship's wiring that clung to his shirt. "You still haven't told me what's on it."
"I told you what's in the data-core. Coordinates. Layout. Approximate hull integrity." She paused. "There's more."
"How much more?"
"Enough that whoever hired me would very much like to know I never reached you. And that I never told you what was actually at the end of those coordinates."
Rax was quiet for a moment. The cargo deck hummed around them, the Lark settling into the low vibration of pre-flight checks, her bones singing with the coming surge of engines.
"Tell me," he said.
"No."
He turned to look at her, and for the first time since she had come aboard, Sera saw something on his face that she had not expected to see. Not anger. Not suspicion. Something closer to patience. The patience of a man who had already made up his mind to trust her and was waiting for her to catch up.
"You're going to tell me eventually," he said. "Or you're going to die with it, and then I never find out at all. And I don't think you're the kind of person who dies with secrets, Sera Vance. I think you're the kind who trades them."
"Everyone trades them. For the right price."
"What's the right price?"
She looked at him then. Really looked. The lines around his eyes. The way his shoulders sat, low and squared, like a man who had been carrying weight for so long he had forgotten what it felt like to set it down. The faint tremor in his hands that he thought she had not noticed, the tremor of someone who had been too close to his own past to ever quite climb out of it.
"Survival," she said. "Mine, yours, the crew's. Get us to that derelict. Let me go aboard. Whatever's inside, I'll need ten minutes alone with it. After that, you get the truth. All of it. And the truth, Rax Calder, is worth considerably more than the coordinates you're carrying right now."
"And the name of the one who hired you?"
She shook her head once, slow, the motion almost gentle. "That one's not for sale. Not now. Not to you. Not yet."
"Because you don't trust me."
"Because I don't trust anyone who doesn't earn it. And you've earned, maybe, a third of what I need to give." She held up a hand before he could speak. "Don't be insulted. A third from a man like you is a high mark. Most people never get a first."
He studied her for a long moment. Then he nodded, once, and turned toward the ladder. As he climbed, he said over his shoulder: "Ten minutes. I'm timing you."
"I'll know if you're lying."
"You'll know if I'm lying."
He went up, and the hold was hers again. Sera stood alone in the cargo deck, the engines beginning their climb toward full power beneath her boots, the hull warming as the Lark turned her bow toward the coordinates that had been the death of more than one crew and the making of none.
She did not know what was at the end of those coordinates. Not entirely. The data-core carried fragments, the kind of fragments that got people killed for knowing, and she had been paid to deliver the whole picture to someone who would use it in ways she did not want to think about. She had been paid very well. She had taken the money, and then she had rerouted the core to a backwater port and a demolitions expert with a haunted face and a crew that asked too few questions.
She did not know why she had done it. She would think about that later, perhaps, when the engines were hot and the stars had rearranged themselves around her. For now, there was only the Lark, and the work of keeping her alive.
She touched the crate once more, a gesture that was almost a goodbye, and then she went up the ladder to the cockpit. Rax was already in the pilot's chair. The relay at Moriarty was already signing off on their transit. Somewhere behind them, Lieutenant Gwen Rhis was composing a report that would arrive at Velsharn in seven hours and change everything.
Somewhere ahead of them, a Precursor warship waited in the dark, and the dark waited for them all.
Sera buckled herself into the co-pilot's seat. The Lark shuddered, steadied, and jumped.
Behind them, the stars moved. Ahead of them, the dark opened like a door.