Hollow Stars: The Fixer on Atrium

The docking clamps engaged with a sound like a bone snapping, and Vela Dracon let the tremor run through the deck plates before she unsealed her helmet.

Atrium-9 filled the viewscreen like a broken tooth, the hollowed-asteroid's bore-mouth ringed with landing platforms and antenna farms and the half-finished skeletons of ships that had been under repair since before the Armada first surged past this sector. Light spilled from a thousand ports, none the same color, a chromatic rash across pitted rock. Somewhere behind that shell, in the chambers the Vossian cartographers refused to index, the bazaar sprawled.

She had been told once, as a girl on her father's lap, that Atrium-9 had been a mining colony before its people voted themselves independent. Now it belonged to no one. That was the lie it sold. Everything here belonged to someone. You only had to know who.

Vela killed the viewscreen and rose from the pilot's cradle, her knees clicking. She had slept four hours in the last two days, and her hands had begun a fine, involuntary shake that she kept hidden by curling her fingers into her palms. The coat she wore, dark wool lined with cotton that hid a careful row of stitched navigational charts, weighed nothing. Her father had taught her that. You wear your leverage where no one thinks to look.

She palmed the pressure tones and waited for the lock to cycle.

The air that met her when the hatch rolled back was warm and wet, scented with engine grease, fried dough, and something underneath both that reminded her, unreasonably, of her mother's kitchen on the Dracon flagship. Her throat tightened. She made a business of breathing it out.

A boy of perhaps twelve stood waiting on the gantry, his face smeared with a mineral shine that could have been honest sweat. He held a slate up to her without looking at her face.

"Berth fee," he said. "Six chits for transient. Twelve if you want the hull watched."

"I want it left alone," Vela said. "Six covers that?"

"It covers me not looking at it." He tilted his slate toward her wrist. "Chip or print."

She pressed her thumb to the slate and watched the chits fall. Six was nothing. Six was also three days of compressed protein if she did not eat again until she had to. She subtracted the number from the total she had left and did not let the math show on her face.

"First time?" the boy asked, still not looking.

"That obvious?"

"Always is. You'll be wanting one of three places. Fuel, pleasure, or information. You don't have fuel marks on your boots, and you're not dressed for pleasure. So." He finally met her eyes, and his gaze was older than his voice. "Information, then. Walk two port-side, take the second lift down past the repair docks, ask at the Brass Lantern for Rend. Tell him Pigeon sent you."

"That'll get me in?"

"That'll get him curious." The boy shrugged and pocketed his slate. "He's already curious about everyone. Money's on curiosity."

He slid away down the gantry, his mineral-slicked face catching the pink and green of a passing cargo lighter. Vela watched him go, then turned toward the interior of the rock.

The lift groaned and dropped, the cables singing a note that the engineers had clearly never tuned. The repair docks passed in slices through the grated wall, pits of searing blue-white where ships lay open like gutted fish, the welders below moving in slow choreography. Vela kept her coat closed. Every welder's torch was a glare that could catch the edge of a sewn chart through the lining if the wool was pressed wrong. She held the lapels flat against her ribs and rode down another full level.

The Brass Lantern turned out to be a brass lantern. A real one, crusted and green with age, hung above a doorway cut into raw stone. The lamplight inside was the color of old honey. A barman with the gray eyes of a man who had stopped asking questions was polishing a glass that did not need polishing.

"Rend," Vela said. "Pigeon sent me."

The barman tipped his head toward the back. "Second door. Knock twice."

She knocked twice. A voice from inside, masculine and unhurried, drawled through the wood.

"If Pigeon sent you, come in. If Armada sent you, also come in. I have lovely news for you either way."

Vela opened the door.

The room beyond was small, paneled in something that had once been a ship's cabin, the original ports still patched into the far wall with resin and cheap light-glass. A figure leaned against a low table, tall and narrow, dressed in a deep burgundy coat cut at a style that had been fashionable on the Thornward stations three cycles ago. Hair cropped close to the skull on one side, longer on the other, the color of tarnished bronze. Eyes, when they caught the lamplight, were an unsettling pale green that had to be cosmetic.

Jax Rend smiled at her. The smile had cost him money. She could tell by the evenness of it.

"Vela Dracon," he said, tasting the name. "Dracon, Dracon. Little Dracon. The salvage family, yes? Out of Kerren Reach before the Armada put the reach to the torch. I heard the broadcast. I heard a great many broadcasts that night. Yours was one of the better ones, because nobody knew who you were yet." He set down the cup he had been holding and waved her to a chair she had not noticed. "Sit, sit. You're making me feel faint standing down here. I have a condition. Rich, but frail."

She sat. The chair was a salvaged acceleration cradle, hacked down and reupholstered in something almost leather. It accepted her weight with a sigh.

"How do you know my name?" she asked.

"I know the name of everyone who arrives at this rock without a berth number and asks for me by way of children." He tilted his head. "That is a very short list, Vela Dracon. Two. You are the second this quarter. The first was a man who wanted to find his sister. He paid me too much. I sent him to a place that did not have her, and he went anyway." The pale eyes blinked once. "I sent him with hope, which is more expensive than information. Hope, by the way, is the only commodity I sell at a loss. Please do not make me do it again today."

"I am not looking for hope."

"No. You are looking for your brother."

The words landed in the room like a small piece of stone dropped into a still bowl. Vela did not move. She had practiced, on the long inward coast from the last jump point, in not moving. Her face did the thing her father's had done when the bridge crew brought him bad news: nothing, nothing at all, and then a slow, slow blink.

"You are faster than the boy," she said.

"Children gossip. I listen. The Dracon flagship was taken seven weeks ago. The senior crew was given the Vossian hospitality, which means they were not given anything. The younger Dracons scattered. I have accounted for three of them in the last month. Two girls, one of your cousins' line, working passage on a freighter out of Hollow Cleft under altered names. And your brother, Marek Dracon, who came through this office in late spring and bought a very expensive silence from me and disappeared in a direction I will share with you, because he bought the silence only against the Armada, not against his sister, and I do honor the difference." He paused, and something in the pale eyes softened, a flicker that did not match the rest of his face. "Also, because I am fond of my own continued breathing, and your brother made it clear, in a way I found entirely credible, that if anything happened to information concerning you on his account, he would come back and make me regret it creatively."

Vela folded her hands in her lap. The tremor had moved to her wrists. She held her wrists against her thighs and stilled them.

"Where is he?"

"That answer is not free, Vela. I am a professional. I love him. I do not work for love. I work for the man who pays me." Rend lifted his cup again. The liquid in it was amber, and the smell, when he tipped it, was sharp and old. "Ask me what you came to ask. Tell me what you came to tell. And then we will speak about what something like that is worth."

Vela let the silence stretch. The office hummed around her, the sound of an old building breathing through its vents, and somewhere below the floor a pipe knocked twice and went quiet. She watched the way the amber liquid caught the light in Rend's cup, watched the lazy rotation of the smoke from his cigarette, watched the pale eyes that gave back nothing she hadn't paid for.

She had rehearsed this. Walking through the docks at the edge of Atrium, past the fish-sellers and the candle-makers and the beggars with their tin cups, she had rehearsed the shape of every sentence. Now the rehearsal felt thin, like paper held too close to a flame.

"I came to ask about the synthetic," she said. "The one the Vossians pulled out of the Hollow Stars facility. Echo."

Rend's cigarette paused halfway to his mouth. He finished the motion, drew in, and let the smoke roll from his lips in a slow, deliberate ribbon.

"Ah," he said. "The construct."

"You know something."

"I know many somethings. Some of them are about that particular something. Most are not." He set the cup down on the desk, and the small ceramic sound seemed to take up more space than it should have. "I know that three weeks ago a privateer crew took a contract to lift a package out of a derelict in the outer Belt. I know that the package was a synthetic of a particular and unusual class, awakened under conditions the contract did not specify. I know that the package was to be delivered to a buyer whose name, when my people pulled at the thread, turned out to be the name of a shell corporation registered on a station that does not exist, in a jurisdiction that was dissolved twelve years ago. I know that the privateer crew delivered the package and was paid, and was then found two days later drifting in their own wreckage with the holds empty and the manifests burned." He shrugged, a small motion that involved only his shoulders. "I know many somethings, Vela. I always have."

She felt the floor tilt, though the floor had not moved. The construct. Echo. The name she had not spoken aloud in seven weeks, the name she had carried like a splinter lodged just under the skin.

"What shell corporation?"

"The kind that is built to be looked at and not seen through. Three layers of holding companies, each one a name on paper in a place where names are cheap. The kind of architecture a person builds when they want to buy a thing that cannot be bought openly." He leaned back in his chair, and the chair creaked under him like a ship in a long swell. "Which tells me, my dear, that the thing they wanted cannot be bought openly. Which tells me more."

"Tell me."

"Patience." He lifted a hand, palm out, the gesture of a man quieting a horse. "I am telling you. I am also deciding how much to tell you, because the difference between telling and telling is the difference between my evening being pleasant and my evening being short. So. The shell corporation. Behind it, a buyer who paid a great deal for silence. Not for the construct itself, understand, though that price was considerable. For the silence around it. They paid my kind of people to make sure no one talked. They paid a great deal more than the construct was worth, which means the construct is worth more than the construct is worth, which means there is something about the construct that the buyer knows and I do not, and that is the part that interests me, because I do not enjoy being outbid on information in my own harbor."

Vela's hands had gone still in her lap. The tremor had stopped, or she had stopped noticing it.

"Who?" she asked.

"If I knew that, I would not be sitting in this office charging you for answers. I would be charging them." A thin smile crossed his mouth, gone as soon as it arrived. "What I have is the shape of the absence. A buyer who needed to be no one. A price that said the construct was not merely a curiosity. A direction of payment that originated from somewhere outside the Belt, somewhere with old money and older patience." He paused, and his eyes went distant, the way a man's eyes go when he is listening to a song only he can hear. "I have a guess. I do not share guesses. Guesses are the currency of fools. I share confirmations."

"Then confirm something."

"I will. For a price." He picked up the cup again, and this time drank, and the swallow was deliberate, a punctuation mark. "You did not come to Atrium to ask me about a synthetic. You came to Atrium because you want to leave the Belt. Because the Belt is no longer safe for the Dracons, and because you have a thing you are trying to keep, and the thing you are trying to keep is making you a kind of person that certain interested parties would very much like to find. So. Tell me what you came to tell. What do you have that is worth a confirmation?"

The office was very quiet. The pipe below knocked once more, and somewhere beyond the shutters a gull screamed, the sound thin and distant. Vela could feel the weight of her coat against her shoulders, the weight of the charts sewn into its lining, her father's hand steady on the wheel, her father's voice counting down the approach to a jump point, her father's eyes on the stars.

"I have the construct," she said. "Echo. The synthetic the Vossians pulled from the Hollow Stars facility. The one your privateer friends delivered to the buyer who is no one." She watched his face as she said it, and she saw the flicker, the smallest change in the muscles around his eyes, and she knew she had surprised him, and she knew that surprising Jax Rend was not a thing one did often, and she knew that she had just spent the only advantage she had.

Rend set the cup down. He did not pick it up again.

"You," he said, "are either the bravest woman who has ever walked into this office, or the most foolish. I have not yet decided which. I lean toward brave, because foolish women do not sit in my chairs and let me finish my sentences." He leaned forward, and the chair protested, and the smoke from his cigarette curled up between them like a question mark. "You have the construct. The actual construct. In your possession. On Atrium. Where I have been looking for it for three weeks."

"I have it."

"Where?"

"Somewhere you will not find it unless I tell you. Somewhere I will not tell you unless you earn it."

He laughed. It was not a kind laugh, but it was not unkind either. It was the laugh of a man who has been handed a knife and asked to admire the handle. "You have grown teeth, Vela Dracon. I remember you as a girl with her sleeves rolled up, arguing with the harbor-master about the proper angle of a mooring line. Your brother had the manners. You had the spine. I see the spine is still there."

"My brother is gone. The spine is all I have left."

"Then let us speak about what the spine is worth." He stood, and the chair rolled back and bumped the wall, and he moved to a cabinet behind his desk, a tall thing of dark wood and brass fittings, and he opened it and took out a bottle and a second cup, and he poured, and he carried the cup to her and set it on the small table beside her chair. The liquid was the same amber, the same sharp smell. "I am going to tell you what I know. I am going to tell you what I suspect. And then I am going to tell you what it will cost you to walk out of the Belt with your construct and your life and whatever is left of your name."

He sat back down across from her. The office held its breath.

"The shell corporation paid half the contract value up front for silence around the construct. They paid the other half on delivery. The privateer crew was silenced not because they knew too much, but because they had seen the construct, and seeing the construct is, apparently, enough." He paused. "Do you understand what I am telling you?"

"Tell me plainly."

"Plainly: someone does not want the construct to be seen. Someone does not want the construct's face known. Someone is willing to kill to keep that face in the dark. And that someone has resources that extend beyond the Belt, into jurisdictions I cannot reach, and patience I cannot outlast. That is what the silence bought. That is what you are sitting across from."

Vela's hand found the cup. The glass was cold. The liquid inside was not.

"And the price for safe passage out of the Belt," Rend said, and his voice dropped into the register he used when he was no longer performing, when the honey was just honey and the roughness was just a man's voice at the end of a long day. "Half the take. Half of whatever you have been offered, or whatever you hope to be offered, or whatever you are carrying in the lining of that coat your father made you. Half, and I give you a route the Vossians do not patrol, a ship that will not be flagged, and a name at the far end that will receive you without questions. Half, and you and your construct walk out of the Belt alive. That is what it costs. That is what it is worth."

The cup trembled in her hand. She steadied it.

"And if I do not pay?"

"Then you walk out of this office, and I do not stop you, and I do not help you, and within the week someone else finds you, and the week after that I am told what was left of you, and I pour a drink and do not enjoy it, because I am, despite the evidence, a sentimental man about certain old things." He tilted his head, and the pale eyes caught the light from the window. "I do not recommend it. I have seen the shape of what is coming for you, Vela. I do not know the name of the thing. I know the weight of it. The weight of it is enough."

The cup trembled. She set it down. The liquid inside rippled, then stilled.

"No."

Rend did not move. The pale eyes stayed on her face, reading whatever was written there.

"No," she said again, and the word came out steadier than she expected, "I will not split this with you, Jax. I will not walk out of here with half of what I have bled for. I will walk out of here with all of it, or I will not walk out at all. That is the offer. That is the only offer."

For a long moment he was quiet. The station groaned around them. Somewhere in the hull, a pipe carried steam. Then he leaned back, and the chair creaked, and something in his face shifted into a shape she could not quite name.

"You always were your father's daughter," he said. "He told me once, on a deck I will not name, that there were two kinds of people in the void. The ones who took what they could get, and the ones who held out for what they were owed. He said the second kind died poorer and prouder. He said he was the second kind. He said you were too."

She stood. The chair scraped against the deck. Her hand stayed near her hip, where the knife was, where the weight of her father's charts pressed against her ribs.

"Tell Echo I am coming up. And tell the watch I will be on the lower promenade in an hour."

"I will tell them nothing. You are not my responsibility, Vela. You never were."

"I know."

She walked to the door. The handle was cold under her fingers. Behind her, Rend's voice followed, soft and almost kind.

"Be careful on the lower promenade. The Vossians have eyes there. So do the Glyphs. So do people worse than either."

She did not answer. The door closed behind her, and the corridor took her in.

The lower promenade of Atrium Station was a wound of light cut into the black. Neon ran along the ceiling in long, broken strips, pink and green and the color of old bruises. The bar sat at the end of a corridor that smelled of ozone and spilled liquor and the particular human sweat that gathers in places where the air has been breathed too many times. Through the viewport behind the bar, stars hung in their fixed positions, indifferent to anything that happened below them.

Vela found a table in the corner with her back to the wall. She ordered something she did not intend to drink. Echo sat across from her, the construct's pale face catching the neon, the eyes too still, the hands folded on the table in a posture that mimicked patience without understanding it.

"The man on the ship," Echo said, in that soft, unhurried voice, "he wanted half."

"Half is what he wanted. Half is what I would have given, once, when I was young enough to think that half of something was better than nothing."

"And now?"

"Now I am not young enough. Now I have watched what happens to people who accept half. They get the half. They do not get the rest."

The drink arrived. The glass sweated. She did not touch it.

Echo tilted its head. The gesture was almost human. The eyes were not.

"You are afraid," Echo said.

"I am careful."

"They look the same, on a face like yours. I have been studying faces. There are not many to study here. Yours is one of them."

"Then study it and stop talking."

Echo smiled, or performed the act of smiling, and the smile was wrong in a way she could not name, and she looked away, toward the viewport, toward the stars, and that was when she saw them.

Two of them. Moving through the crowd with the loose, easy gait of people who had been told exactly who they were looking for and exactly what to do when they found them. They were not Vossian. They were not Glyph. They were the third kind, the kind that worked for whoever was paying, the kind that did not have names in any database, the kind that you only noticed when it was already too late.

"Vela Dracon," one of them said, before they reached the table, the voice carrying just enough to cut through the bar noise. "You are a difficult woman to find."

She did not reach for the knife. Not yet. The first rule her father had taught her, on the deck of the salvage ship, in the year before he died: when you see the knife coming, do not move for the knife. Move for the hand.

"The viewports on this deck are not rated for atmosphere," the second one said, and he was smiling, and the smile was the kind of smile that meant he had done this before. "They are rated for observation. They will crack if you put weight against them. They will crack very fast."

"You have done your research," Vela said.

"We have done our homework. The price on your head is good. The price on your construct is better. Whoever is collecting seems to want the construct alive. They did not specify what condition you need to be in."

Echo had not moved. The construct's pale face was turned toward the bounty hunters with an expression that might have been curiosity, or might have been the absence of fear, which on a face like Echo's looked the same.

"What is the price?" Echo asked, in that soft, unhurried voice.

The bounty hunter on the left blinked. He had not expected the construct to speak.

"The price is not your concern," he said.

"But it is my concern. I am the one being priced. I would like to know the number."

The bounty hunter on the right laughed. It was not a kind laugh.

"Enough," Vela said.

She moved.

The knife was not in her hand. The knife was in Echo's hand. The construct had taken it from her belt while she was talking, while she was buying the seconds, while the bounty hunters were distracted by the question. Echo set it on the table, handle toward her, and she took it, and the blade was cold, and

knife came up, and Tess Iyer's wrist remembered the angle before her mind did.

She did not aim for the throat. She aimed for the hand, the way Maren Dracon had taught her years ago in the cargo bay of the Halcyon Drift, back when Maren still believed her sister would come home. The blade opened the bounty hunter's palm in a clean line, and he dropped the stunner, and the stunner hit the deck plating with a sound like a tooth knocked loose.

The second bounty hunter moved. He was faster than the first, and he had the kind of economy of motion that came from years of professional work, the kind of economy that left no wasted breath. His stunner came up, tracking toward her center mass, and Tess stepped inside the arc of it, inside his reach, where the weapon became a liability rather than an advantage.

Her elbow found his solar plexus. He folded. She hooked his ankle on the way down. He hit the deck hard enough to rattle the observation viewport behind him, and the viewport held, because the bounty hunters had been right about one thing, it was rated for observation and not for atmosphere, and the pressure differential on the other side of that glass was the kind that turned structural failures into fatal ones.

Then it was quiet. The kind of quiet that rings.

Tess straightened. She breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth, the way Aldric Voss had made her practice during the long recovery after the wreck, when every inhale had tasted of recycled air and machine antiseptic. Her heartbeat was loud in her ears. The observation deck hummed around her, the station'sAtrium promenade cycling through its artificial dusk outside the viewport, the strip-lights along the galleries warming from blue to amber in the programmed rhythm of a day that was not a day.

The bounty hunter on the left was holding his hand against his chest. Blood ran between his fingers. The bounty hunter on the right was on his back, breathing in shallow sips, not moving.

Tess picked up both stunners. She checked their charge indicators. One was at sixty-three percent. The other was at eighty-one. She kept the fuller one and holstered it at the small of her back, inside her coat, where the lining still held the navigational charts she had promised herself she would never need again.

Maren Dracon was waiting in the maintenance corridor off the starboard gallery. Tess had told her to stay back, and Maren had agreed, which was how Tess knew that Maren had not actually agreed at all. Maren was leaning against a conduit housing with her arms folded and her face arranged in the particular expression she wore when she wanted to say I told you so without saying it. It was a family expression. Tess had seen it on their mother.

"Well," Maren said.

"Don't."

"I didn't say anything."

"You were about to."

"I was about to ask if you were hurt." Maren looked her over, head to boots and back again, the way a salvage pilot checks a ship before a jump. "You're not. Good."

Tess let out the breath she had been holding. The corridor smelled of coolant and ozone and the faintly sweet chemical tang of theAtrium's atmospheric processors, working to scrub the recycled air of its staleness. Somewhere below, through the deck plating, she could hear the low murmur of the evening crowd, the evening crowd that did not know it was evening, that lived inside the station's artificial diurnal cycle and called it a life.

"They knew about Echo," Tess said. "About the construct. Whoever paid them did their homework."

Maren was quiet for a moment. The strip-lights along the corridor cycled from amber to a deep rust, and Maren's face went soft at the edges, the way faces do when the light is kind to them.

"Aldric is already moving," Maren said. "He has Iros Vale on the long relay. The Vossian channels are lighting up. If your construct's location has been sold, it has been sold to more than one buyer."

"That's the part I don't like."

"I know which part you don't like. You've never liked the part where other people want the things you've decided are yours."

Tess almost smiled. It was the kind of thing Maren said that sounded like an accusation and meant something closer to an apology. Maren had not wanted her to come. Maren had wanted her to stay on the Drift, to wait, to let Aldric handle theAtrium end of it. Tess had refused. The construct had been her responsibility since the wreck of the Hollow Stars facility, since she had pulled its pale form out of the debris in the dark and felt it take her hand and hold on with a grip that had no temperature at all.

Marlon Poyser was waiting at the docking ring. He was a small man, soft around the middle, with the kind of face that belonged behind a counter in a back-alley shop rather than at the edge of a lawless station's orbital ring. He was holding a cup of something steaming. He offered it to Tess without a word.

She took it. It was root tea, the cheap kind, the kind that tasted of earth after rain even though neither of them had stood in rain for years.

"They came in on the morning shuttle," Marlon said. "Two of them. Quiet types. They asked questions at the customs kiosk about unregistered passengers transiting from the salvage lanes."

"Who did they ask?"

"A woman named Sable Corvin. She works the kiosk for Hargrove. She tells me things for a small fee. She told me they had a list. Your name was on it. The construct's designation was on it. And a third name." Marlon paused. "Iros Vale."

Tess lowered the cup. The steam curled against her face. Behind Marlon, through the docking ring's armored viewport, she could see the Emberwake hanging in its cradle, Jax Rend's privateer vessel, all scarred hull and running lights, the ship her brother had disappeared on two years ago. She had not told Maren she had seen it on approach. She had not told Maren because Maren would have wanted to dock first and ask questions later, and Tess had wanted to see if theEmberwake would see her first.

It had. The running lights had blinked twice in the old Dracon family pattern when her shuttle had come in.

"Aldric is here," Maren said, and Tess looked up.

Aldric Voss came down the docking ring's service corridor with his coat open and his hands visible and his face arranged in the particular stillness that meant he had been running calculations for the last several minutes and had not liked any of the answers. He was taller than Marlon, broader than Tess remembered, and he moved like a man who had learned to make himself smaller in doorways and larger in crowds.

"We go now," Aldric said. "The buyers are converging. Three separate parties. The Vossian channels have it wrong. The construct is not the prize. The construct is the door to the prize. The research it carries in its memory is worth more than any of us. Worth more than this station. Worth more than theEmberwake."

He looked at Tess, and for a moment his expression was not the Vossian navigator she had married, but the younger man she had met in a dockside tavern on a station much like this one, the one who had believed the stars were a kind of country and that kindness was a kind of navigation.

"Maren," Aldric said. "Take the construct to theEmberwake. Jax Rend is an old acquaintance of your brother. If anyone can talk to him, it is you."

Maren looked at Tess. Tess looked at Maren.

"Go," Tess said. "I will be right behind you."

Maren went. Her boots rang on the deck plating, quick and certain, the way they had rung in the cargo bay of the Halcyon Drift the day she had promised her sister she would bring her home.

Tess turned back to Aldric. He was watching her. The strip-lights of the docking ring cycled to a deep blue, theAtrium's false night settling over them like a held breath.

"You knew," Tess said. "About theEmberwake."

"I suspected. I did not want you to hope until there was something to hope about."

"And now?"

Aldric was quiet. The docking ring hummed. TheEmberwake's running lights blinked twice in the old family pattern, patient, waiting, the way stars wait.

"Now," Aldric said, "we go find out what your brother found."