The proximity alert chimed twice before Vex Tarrow silenced it with a flat palm against the console. Through the Anvil's forward viewport, Kestrel Station hung against a field of dead stars like a broken tooth left too long in the jaw of space.
"Seventeen thousand kilometers," Ensign Petra Mol announced from the co-pilot's cradle. Her fingers worked the sensor array with the nervous efficiency of someone who had learned touchscreens in flight school and never quite trusted them. "Decel burn in four minutes, Commander. Station's not responding to standard hails."
"Try the secondary band."
"Tried it. Static."
Vex studied the silhouette growing in the viewport. Kestrel had been a frontier watchpost in the war's first decade, a waystation for patrol corvettes running the rim sectors. The official record claimed it still served that purpose. The official record, Vex had learned long ago, claimed a great many things.
The hull plating told a different story. Half the dorsal array had gone dark. One of the station's three communication spires leaned at an angle that suggested either impact damage or years of neglected maintenance. Solar collection panels hung crooked, their surfaces clouded with the residue of long exposure.
"Rotation records from Bureau central show a crew complement of forty-two," Vex said.
"Showed," Petra corrected quietly.
The Anvil shuddered as the decel burn engaged, a low vibration that traveled through the deckplates and settled into Vex's molars. He gripped the armrest and waited for the burn to complete. In the monitors, Kestrel's running lights flickered in no pattern he recognized.
"Commander." Petra leaned forward. "I'm getting a return on the tertiary band. Voice only. Distressed carrier signal."
"Put it through."
The audio crackled to life. A voice came through, thin and reedy, swallowed by static every third syllable. "...unidentified vessel... this is Kestrel Station... requesting... identify..."
"Kestrel Station, this is Commander Vex Tarrow of the Anvil, Bureau registry nine-seven-alpha. We are here to conduct a routine personnel audit. Please acknowledge."
Static. Then: "...audit... understood... dock at bay... two... docking clamps may require manual... bay two... repeat, bay two..."
The channel cut to dead air.
Petra looked over. "That's not standard greeting protocol."
"No," Vex agreed. "It isn't."
Docking took eleven minutes longer than it should have. The bay clamps seized twice. Vex stood at the aft airlock in his field jacket, one hand resting on the grip of the sidearm holstered beneath the fabric. Beside him, Maren Holt waited with the patient stillness of a man accustomed to long silences. The retired marshal wore civilian clothes, a heavy coat over a wool sweater, his badge tucked away in an inner pocket, but he carried himself like someone who had never quite put the weight down.
"Smells wrong," Maren said.
Vex inhaled through his nose. Recirculated air, yes, with that faint metallic tang of long-used filtration cartridges. Beneath it, something stale. The smell of rooms that had not been cleaned in too long, of bodies living in too close a quarter for too long.
"Recirc system's overdue for service," Vex said.
"Recirc systems don't smell like that." Maren's voice was low and unhurried, a soft drawl that never quite rose above conversational. "Recirc systems smell like rust. That smells like neglect. Like people giving up."
The inner airlock cycled open.
The corridor beyond stretched away in both directions, lit by emergency strips that cast everything in a sickly amber wash. Half the ceiling panels had been removed, exposing bundles of cabling and conduit that pulsed with faint indicator lights. The deckplates were scuffed and grimed, marked with boot prints that went in too many directions to be a disciplined watch rotation.
Vex stepped through. His boot heel rang against the metal, and the sound carried farther than it should have.
"Petra, stay with the Anvil. Keep the engines warm."
"Acknowledged, Commander. Be careful."
He keyed the internal channel closed and started down the corridor, Maren a half-step behind. They passed three closed hatches before they encountered anyone.
A woman in a faded maintenance coverall emerged from a side passage, a tool case in one hand. She was perhaps thirty, her hair pulled back in a hasty knot, dark circles beneath her eyes. She stopped when she saw them. Her gaze went to Vex's jacket, to the subtle bulge beneath it, and her posture changed.
"Commander Tarrow." Not a question. "I'm Lieutenant Aves. Engineering. I'll take you to the duty officer."
"Lead the way."
She turned without another word and walked. Vex noted how she avoided eye contact. How her shoulders were set too high, the way someone holds themselves when they are tired past the point of rest.
The duty officer was waiting in the station's central operations room, a circular chamber ringed with consoles that should have been manned by at least six technicians. Two stations showed active. One of them was occupied by a young man who did not look up. The other was dark, its screens displaying scrolling error codes.
Behind the central command console stood a man in a captain's uniform. The rank insignia on his collar was correct. The fit of the jacket was not. It hung on him loose, as though it had been tailored for a larger frame, or he had recently lost weight he could not afford to lose.
"Commander Tarrow." His voice was flat, measured. "I am Bureau Officer Drel Koss, acting commander of Kestrel Station. I apologize for the irregularities of your arrival. We have been... experiencing some difficulties."
Vex studied the man's face. Hollow eyes, yes, the prompt had been right. But beneath the exhaustion there was something else, something harder to name. A stillness that suggested more than fatigue. The kind of stillness that came from holding something very tightly for a very long time.
"Officer Koss." Vex produced his credentials. "I'm here on Bureau orders to conduct a personnel audit. Your station is overdue for rotation review by eleven months. Central has been unable to reach your command staff."
Koss looked at the credentials. Did not take them.
"Communications have been... intermittent."
"Eleven months is a long time for intermittent."
"It has been a difficult year."
Vex pocketed the credentials. He took a slow turn of the room, studying the consoles, the dead stations, the single working technician who had not once raised his eyes from his screen.
"Officer, I need to see your crew rotation records. Service logs. The full complement manifest."
"Those records are... in process."
"Process."
"Being updated. We have had personnel changes. Transfers. The standard friction of frontier assignment." Koss's voice remained level, but Vex caught the faintest tightening at the corners of his mouth. "I can have them prepared within the day."
"Within the hour."
The technician at the console looked up then, just for a moment. His eyes met Vex's, and something passed across his face. Fear, perhaps. Or warning. Then he looked away again, and the moment was gone.
Vex turned back to Koss. The acting commander stood behind his console like a man bracing against a wind that only he could feel.
"Officer Koss," Vex said quietly. "Where is the rest of your command staff?"
"The commander is on extended leave. Medical. The executive officer... is no longer with the station."
"No longer."
"Transferred." A pause. "Three months ago."
Vex let the silence stretch. In the corner of his vision, Maren Holt shifted his weight almost imperceptibly, the way a man does when he has begun to notice something he does not like.
"I would like to see the officer's quarters," Vex said. "And the mess. And the medical bay. In that order."
Koss inclined his head. "Lieutenant Aves will escort you."
"I would prefer you do it yourself, Officer."
Another silence. The emergency lighting hummed in the overhead strips, a thin high note that set Vex's teeth on edge.
"Of course," Koss said. "This way."
They walked the corridors of Kestrel Station for the next forty minutes, and Vex counted every wrong thing he saw. The mess hall seated forty. Eleven places had been set for what appeared to be a meal that had been interrupted and never resumed. Trays sat congealed beneath overhead lights that buzzed with the wrong frequency. The chairs were arranged in clusters, as though people had been eating in small groups for reasons that had nothing to do with preference.
The medical bay was empty of patients and of staff. Three of the four examination beds had been stripped of their linens. Cabinets stood open, their contents jumbled. A diagnostic unit sat dark in the corner, its maintenance tag dated fourteen months prior.
"Medical officer?" Vex asked.
"On rotation at the central hub," Koss replied. "Scheduled to return next month."
Vex noted the answer. Filed it.
The officer's quarters told their own story. Doors that should have been locked were propped open. Bunks that should have been made were stripped bare. Personal effects, where they existed at all, had the temporary look of things not yet unpacked, or things already half packed.
"Officer Koss," Maren spoke for the first time since entering the station, his voice low and unhurried. "How many souls aboard Kestrel right now?"
Koss did not turn. He stood facing the window of the empty quarters, his reflection a ghost in the dark glass.
"Twelve," he said.
Vex stopped walking.
"Twelve," he repeated.
"Twelve."
The number hung in the stale air between them. Forty-two on the manifest. Twelve present. Thirty missing, or unaccounted for, or transferred, or any of the other words that station commanders used when they did not wish to say what they meant.
"Officer Koss," Vex said, keeping his voice level. "I need the manifest of every soul who has departed this station in the last twelve months. Names, destinations, vessels of transport. And I need the duty logs of every watch section for the same period."
Koss turned. In the dim light his face was a mask, all angles and hollows, and behind the mask Vex glimpsed something he had seen before, in the eyes of men who had watched things they could not stop.
"You will have them," Koss said.
"Now," Vex replied.
Koss held his gaze for a long moment. Then he nodded once, a small stiff motion, and walked back toward the operations room without another word.
Vex watched him go. The corridor stretched before them in either direction, lit by that same sickly amber, and somewhere in the walls the station's ventilation system groaned through another cycle of long-neglected service.
Maren moved to stand beside him. The older man did not speak immediately. He stood with his hands in his coat pockets, his breath slow, his eyes on the empty corridor ahead.
"Something happened here," Maren said at last, low enough that the words barely carried.
"Yes."
"Something they're not telling us."
Vex did not answer. He was watching the place where Koss had disappeared around the corner, and he was thinking about crew rotation records, and about the technician who had looked at him with eyes that held a warning he had not yet learned how to read.
The corridor stretched ahead, amber light pooling on deck plates worn smooth by decades of boots. Vex walked without hurrying. Maren fell into step beside him, and for a few seconds neither man spoke. The station's ventilation system wheezed through another cycle, and somewhere distant a coupling popped with the sound of a joint giving way.
Maren broke the silence first.
"You thinking what I'm thinking?"
"Probably."
"Rotation lists. Duty logs. Twelve months of records, and a man who looked like he'd seen a ghost when he heard the request."
Vex did not answer immediately. He was watching the way the deck vibrated beneath his boots, the faint arrhythmic shudder of a power plant working past its tolerance. He thought of the names he had begun to compile in his head, the ones he had pulled from station notice boards on the walk from the docking bay. Three technicians transferred out in the last quarter. Two cargo handlers. One medic, reassigned to a deep-belt survey vessel. Every name had a destination attached. Every destination had a vessel. And yet when he had asked Koss to confirm the arrivals, the man had not been able to meet his eyes.
"Koss is afraid," Vex said.
"Of us?"
"Of what we might find."
They turned a corner and found themselves in a wider passage, an operations annex with viewports along one wall. The glass was filmed with condensation and something darker, a residue that caught the amber light and turned it the color of old blood. Through it, Vex could see the spine of the station's habitation ring, and beyond that, the slow tumble of asteroids in their eternal, indifferent drift.
A figure stood at the far viewport, half-turned away.
Vex slowed. Maren noticed, and slowed with him.
The figure was slight, and stood with one hand pressed flat against the glass as if steadying herself. The station-issue jacket she wore hung loose on her frame, the shoulders too broad, the sleeves pushed up to reveal wrists that looked too thin. Her hair was pulled back from her face in a severe knot, and in the dim light the lines of her cheekbones stood out like the edges of a blade.
Vex recognized her before she turned. Captain Dreya Solis. He had seen her name on the crew roster and on a half-dozen commendations on the station's public boards, back when this place had still cared about such things. She had been operations chief, once. She had been something more, before the commendations stopped coming.
"Captain Solis," he said.
She turned. Her face was drawn, the skin beneath her eyes bruised with sleeplessness, and there was a tremor in her shoulders that she did not seem able to control. She looked at him, and then at Maren, and then back at him again, and in her gaze Vex saw the same thing he had seen in Koss's, the warning and the fear braided together into something he could not yet name.
"Vex Tarrow," she said. Her voice was low, controlled, but it wavered at the edges. "I wondered when you would come."
"You know me."
"By reputation." A pause. "By the shape of your questions."
Maren had moved to one side, positioning himself so that the corridor behind them remained in view. The older man did it without thinking, the way a man who had spent too many years on the wrong side of a badge learned to watch a room.
"We need to talk," Vex said.
"Yes." Solis's hand dropped from the glass. She did not step closer. She stood where she was, in the failing light, and her eyes moved past Vex to the viewports, and through them to the asteroid belt beyond. "You came here asking about ships. About crews. About where the people of this station have gone."
"I did."
"Then I will tell you what I know." Her voice dropped, and though no one else was in the corridor, she leaned closer, the way a woman leans when she has learned that the walls themselves cannot be trusted. "And then I will ask you to leave this place, and never come back."
Vex did not move.
"Tell me."
Solis closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, there was something in them that had not been there before, a kind of broken clarity, the look of a woman who had decided to step off a ledge.
"The Verax belt," she said. "You will have heard of it. Mining consortium, three thousand souls at the last official census. We supplied them. We ferried their ore. We kept the comm relays alive between their outposts and the rest of the sector."
She paused. Her hand, hanging at her side, trembled visibly now.
"Six months ago the relays went quiet. Not all at once. One by one. Outpost by outpost. We sent inquiry pings. We got nothing back. The consortium filed no distress. Their corporate office on the inner worlds sent auditors. The auditors came, and the auditors left, and the auditors filed reports that said everything was in order."
"What was not in order?" Vex asked.
Solis looked at him. Her jaw worked.
"The crews," she said. "The crews that flew the supply runs. They came back lighter each time. One less tech. One less pilot. One less cargo specialist. The manifests said nothing. The logs said nothing. The berthing assignments were updated, but the names of those who had left were not."
Vex felt something settle in his chest, cold and heavy.
"How many?"
"Seventeen." Her voice was barely a whisper now. "Seventeen souls, over six months. And no record of any of them ever having been aboard."
Maren spoke for the first time, and his drawl had flattened into something harder than Vex had heard from him in years.
"Where did they go?"
"We do not know." Solis's gaze dropped to the deck. "We do not know because we were never meant to ask. The orders came from above. They came with a cipher that only the stationmaster and the bureau officer were cleared to read. Koss saw them. I saw their effects."
"What effects?"
"Transfers," she said. "Transfers to deep-belt survey vessels, to ore carriers, to stations beyond the cordon. Each one signed by a captain who had no authority to sign them. Each one countersigned by a name that does not exist in any personnel database we can reach."
Vex thought of Koss, of the technician's eyes, of the man who had looked at him with a warning he had not yet learned how to read.
"And the miners?" he asked. "The ones at the outposts?"
"Silent." Solis's voice cracked. "Silent, and dark, and cold. Three thousand souls, Tarrow. Three thousand souls, and nothing. Nothing at all."
The ventilation system groaned again. Somewhere deeper in the station a pressure seal cycled, and the deckplates shuddered beneath their feet.
Vex looked at Maren. The older man's face was unreadable, his eyes on Solis, his hands still in his coat pockets. Whatever Maren was thinking, he kept it there.
Solis turned back to the viewport. Through the filmed glass, the asteroid belt wheeled on, slow and indifferent, and somewhere out there, in the dark between the rocks, three thousand people had vanished without a name to mark their going.
"You should leave," she said, to the glass, to the dark, to no one. "You should take your questions and your quiet man with the kind eyes, and you should walk back down that corridor and through that airlock and out of this place. And you should never come back."
Vex did not move.
"Captain," he said. "Who gave the orders?"
Solis did not turn.
"I do not know," she said. "I have spent six months trying to learn, and I have learned nothing, except that the people who gave them do not want to be known."
She raised her hand and pressed it flat against the glass again, and the tremor in her shoulders was visible even from where Vex stood.
"But I will tell you one more thing," she said. "Because you came here, and because you asked, and because I am tired of being afraid in this place."
Vex waited.
"Petra Mol," she said. "Ensign Petra Mol. The youngest of us, and the brightest. She was the one who first noticed that the berthing manifests did not match the crew rotations. She brought it to me, and I brought it to Koss, and Koss brought it to the stationmaster. Three days later she was reassigned to a deep-belt courier run that does not appear on any flight plan we can access."
She turned then, and looked at him, and her eyes were very bright and very steady.
"She has not come back," Solis said. "And we have not heard from her in six weeks."
The silence stretched between them, and Vex Tarrow thought of all the things he had been told in his life about the silence of certain women, and how he had never believed any of it until this moment.
He waited.
Captain Dreya Solis stayed where she was, palm pressed flat to the glass, and the stars beyond her hand did not pause for her grief. They kept their ancient, indifferent drift. Somewhere out there, in the dark between the rocks, three thousand people had vanished without a name to mark their going.
"You should leave," she said, to the glass, to the dark, to no one. "You should take your questions and your quiet man with the kind eyes, and you should walk back down that corridor and through that airlock and out of this place. And you should never come back."
Vex did not move.
"Captain," he said. "Who gave the orders?"
Solis did not turn.
"I do not know," she said. "I have spent six months trying to learn, and I have learned nothing, except that the people who gave them do not want to be known."
She raised her hand and pressed it flat against the glass again, and the tremor in her shoulders was visible even from where Vex stood.
"But I will tell you one more thing," she said. "Because you came here, and because you asked, and because I am tired of being afraid in this place."
Vex waited.
"Petra Mol," she said. "Ensign Petra Mol. The youngest of us, and the brightest. She was the one who first noticed that the berthing manifests did not match the crew rotations. She brought it to me, and I brought it to Koss, and Koss brought it to the stationmaster. Three days later she was reassigned to a deep-belt courier run that does not appear on any flight plan we can access."
She turned then, and looked at him, and her eyes were very bright and very steady.
"She has not come back," Solis said. "And we have not heard from her in six weeks."
The deck shifted under Vex's boots.
He had thought, coming down that corridor, that he was hunting for ghosts. He had thought the worst he would find was the dull, bureaucratic truth: a misfile, an unfortunate coincidence someone had dressed up as conspiracy because conspiracy was easier to swallow than incompetence. He had been wrong about all of it.
"Where," he said. "What courier service. What ship."
"I cannot tell you," she said. "It would be a death sentence for both of us. For Petra, if she is still alive. For me, certainly. For you, before the week was out."
"Then tell me something you can."
She looked at him for a long moment. The viewport behind her held the whole turning sky in its glass, and her face was lit from behind, all edges and shadow, the planes of her cheekbones carved by starlight.
"I can tell you this," she said. "I have held a thing in my possession for six months, and it has been the heaviest thing I have ever carried. Heavier than my commission. Heavier than my oath. Heavier than the years I have left."
Her hand moved to the inner breast pocket of her uniform jacket, and Vex saw the shape of her fingers curl around something small and rectangular.
"I have been waiting," she said, "for someone I could give it to."
She took a step toward him, and her knee buckled, and the chip fell from her pocket as she went down.
Vex was moving before he knew he meant to. He caught her under the arms, took her weight, eased her down against the base of the console where the deck plating was cold and clean. Her head lolled. Her breath came shallow and quick, and on her temple a vein pulsed blue under the skin.
"Captain," he said. "Captain. Stay with me."
"I am here," she whispered. "I am still here."
Her fingers scrabbled at the deck. The chip lay between them, no bigger than a thumbnail, matte black, unmarked.
"Take it," she said. "Take it and go. Do not let Koss find you here."
Vex palmed the chip. It was warm from her body, and heavier than he had expected, as though it had drunk six months of her fear and kept every drop.
"What is on it," he said.
"Protocol," she breathed. "The new protocol. The one they have been rehearsing at the relay stations. The one they have not yet run, because they have not yet gathered enough of us into one place to justify it. It tells you what they will do to us. It tells you how. It tells you the names of every station that has signed on. It tells you the names of every official who has looked the other way. And it tells you," she said, and her voice cracked, "it tells you that the protocol burns them all. All of them. Every station. Every colony on the list. Every soul that has seen too much and cannot be allowed to see it again."
Her eyes rolled, and she slumped.
The chip pressed into the meat of Vex's palm like a coal.
He held it for a breath, two. Then he rose, sliding it into the inner pocket of his own jacket, where it lay against his chest with the weight of every star he could see through the viewport behind Solis's fallen form.
He keyed his wrist comm twice. Static. Once more. Static. The relay in this section was being held open, and held open meant someone was listening, and someone meant Koss.
He did not have time to wait it out.
He knelt beside her. Her pulse was thready but present, her skin the colour of old wax. Whatever had taken her, it had been quick, and it had been chemical. The tremor in her hands, the faint blue at the edges of her lips. He had seen this once before, in a customs hall in the outer belt, a courier who had opened the wrong envelope at the wrong desk.
"I will come back for you," he said, low enough that no microphone could have caught it. "I will come back, and I will bring someone who knows what to do."
He did not know if he was lying.
He stood, and the door to the control room sighed open as he approached it, and he stepped through it into the dim service corridor beyond, and the door sighed shut behind him.
Halfway back to the airlock, a hand caught his elbow.
He turned, fast, already reaching for the blade he did not carry anymore.
It was the old man. Maren Holt. Standing in a doorway he had not seen, his face half in shadow, his pale eyes watchful and a little amused.
"You have it," Maren said.
It was not a question.
"Yes," Vex said.
"And Solis?"
"Down. I do not know how bad."
"Then we have minutes," Maren said. "Maybe less. Koss has a man at every junction on this level. I paid them off to let me walk, but the money runs thin in a hurry. Tell me what she said."
Vex told him. The protocol. The names. The relay stations. The line about burning them all.
Maren listened, and the lines around his mouth went deeper, and when Vex was done, the old marshal drew a long breath and let it out slow through his nose.
"Well," Mar
"Well," Maren said, and the word hung in the dim air like a held breath, "then we do what marshals used to do, before the Bureau told us how to breathe."
He stepped back into the doorway and gestured Vex through. Beyond it lay a narrow maintenance shaft, the kind of forgotten artery that only old-timers and rats remembered. The smell hit Vex first: stale coolant, machine oil, and something faintly sweet he did not want to identify.
"Your girl," Maren said, nodding back toward the corridor they had come from. "Petra. She's in cargo bay six, lower tier. Tied to a chair, but breathing. Koss wanted her as leverage. He hasn't had the stomach to hurt her yet. He thinks she's worth more whole."
"And Solis?"
Maren's mouth tightened. "Solis is Koss's problem. Whatever she swallowed, Koss put it in her tea. He's had her on a leash for two years. Tonight was the night she bit through it." A pause. "Tonight, or never."
Vex understood. Solis had chosen to pass the information along, knowing it would cost her. She had given Vex what she had, and then she had sat back down in her chair and waited for the consequences.
He also understood what Maren was not saying. They could not carry Solis out. She could not walk, and the service shafts were not wide enough for two men and a stretcher. If they tried the main corridors, Koss's men would cut them down before they reached the airlock.
"So we leave her," Vex said.
"We leave her," Maren confirmed. "For now. Koss won't kill her. She's the only card he has left that the Bureau still cares about."
Vex looked at the old man. Maren met his gaze without flinching.
"You don't have to like it," Maren said quietly. "I don't."
Vex nodded once, and they moved.
The shaft was cold and close. Vex kept his head down and his shoulders turned, scraping against conduit bundles and the ribs of forgotten piping. Maren moved ahead of him with the surety of a man who had walked this particular artery many times before. His boots found the rungs of ladders Vex could not see, and twice he caught Vex's collar and hauled him up onto ledges that gave way under hand or foot.
Down they went. Past the humming bulk of a reactor that Vex felt through his boots before he heard it. Past a junction where someone had scratched a crude star map into the wall with the point of a knife. Past a sealed hatch that Maren paused at, listening, before he eased it open and slipped through.
The cargo bay smelled of rust and old fish. Six rows of empty crates had been shoved against the far bulkhead to clear a space in the middle, and in that space a single chair stood under a single work lamp. Ensign Petra Mol sat in it, her wrists bound in front of her with flex-cuffs, her face bruised along one cheekbone. Her eyes, when they found Vex in the doorway, went wide and then narrow, and she did not make a sound.
"Easy," Vex said. He crossed the bay in three strides and crouched in front of her. "Easy, Petra. It's me."
"Vex." Her voice came out cracked at the edges. "You came back."
"I came back."
He drew the small knife from his boot, the one blade he had kept all these years, and sawed at the flex-cuffs. They parted with a plastic snap. Petra flexed her wrists, wincing, and then her hand came up and closed around his forearm with a grip that surprised him.
"The captain," she said. "Did you find her?"
"I found her."
"Is she all right?"
Vex did not lie to her. He had never lied to her, and he was not going to start now, not in a rust-stink cargo bay at the edge of nowhere with Koss's men somewhere above them. "She's alive," he said. "She's in trouble. We're going to get her help."
Petra searched his face, and whatever she found there seemed to satisfy her, because she nodded once and let go of his arm.
Maren had produced a cutter from somewhere inside his coat and was already working on the bolts of the bay's secondary airlock, a small personnel hatch meant for use in orbit only. The bolts resisted, then gave, one by one, with a sound like distant bones cracking.
"There's a skiff docked on the ventral ring," Maren said, not looking up. "Pre-Bureau registry, no transponder, plenty of fuel. I have papers that say I'm a salvager, and she is my wife, and you are my nephew who doesn't speak because of a childhood accident. The papers will hold for about an hour once we hit atmo. After that, Koss will have every relay in the sector lighting up."
"How long to the skiff?"
"Four minutes if we run. Twelve if we're quiet."
Vex looked at Petra. Petra looked at the airlock. Maren wrenched the last bolt free and the hatch swung outward into the dark, revealing a short crawlway and, at its far end, the curved flank of a small craft against the stars.
"Quiet, then," Vex said.
They moved quiet.
The crawlway smelled of someone else's sweat and old rubber. Vex went first, then Petra, then Maren, who paused at the hatch to wedge a piece of scrap into the guide rails so the door could not be sealed behind them. The skiff's hatch was already unlatched. Maren had been here before. He had done this before. He had planned this exact exit on some night when he could not sleep, and the stars through his kitchen window had looked too much like the ones he used to chase.
Inside, the skiff was cramped and smelled of fish and fuel. Vex helped Petra into the rear cradle, and Maren dropped into the pilot's seat and began the wake-up sequence without ceremony. Lights blinked on across the console. The hull ticked once as it equalized. Somewhere in the dark ahead of them, the wreck of Kestrel groaned as it always did, the sound of a ship remembering how it had died.
Vex strapped himself into the co-pilot's seat and watched the readouts come up, one by one. Pressure good. Fuel good. Heat signature clean. He allowed himself, for one breath, to feel something that was almost like hope.
Then the comm chimed.
It was a single tone, low and deliberate, and Maren's hands stilled on the console. He did not answer it. The tone repeated, and on the third repetition, a voice came through the speaker, flat and unhurried, a voice Vex recognized.
"Tarrow." Bureau Officer Drel Koss. "I know you can hear me. I know where you are. I have been patient with you for longer than you deserve, and I am done being patient."
Vex did not answer. Maren did not answer. Petra, in the back, made no sound at all.
"You have something of mine," Koss continued. "The captain gave you a list. She did not give you the context. You don't know what you're carrying. You don't know what it will cost you, or the people you love, to deliver it. I am offering you, one time, the chance to bring it back."
A pause, perfectly timed, the silence of a man who had rehearsed this in a mirror.
"Refuse, and the next voice you hear will not be mine. It will be Solis's, and it will be the last thing she ever says. I have given the order. It cannot be taken back."
The line stayed open. The skiff's engines were idling. Maren's hands were on the throttle, but he had not moved.
Vex thought of Solis's face in the glow of the console light, the blue at her lips, the tremor in her hands. He thought of the relay stations, the names, the line about burning them all. He thought of Maren, who had given up a quiet life to help him. He thought of Petra, bruised and brave in the back of a smuggler's skiff.
He reached forward and keyed the comm.
"Koss."
"Vex."
"You made a mistake," Vex said. "You poisoned your own captain to keep a secret, and you thought that made you safe. It didn't. It made you loud. By morning, every relay on that list is going to know what you did, and what you did is going to cost you more than you can pay."
He keyed off the channel before Koss could answer.
"Go," he said to Maren. "Now."
Maren went. The skiff lurched forward, out of the wreck's shadow, into the black and star-scattered dark, and the wreck of Kestrel fell away behind them, groaning once as if in answer, and then was gone.
Maren flew them out of the debris field in silence, threading the skiff between frozen chunks of hull plating and the pale bones of old antennae. When they were clear, he set a course that would take them around three suns and through a lane no Bureau patrol had mapped in fifteen years. Then he leaned back in his seat and let out a long, slow breath through his nose.
"For what it's worth," the old marshal said, "that was the right call."
Vex did not answer. He was watching the viewport, where the stars had begun to slide sideways as Maren engaged the drive. Somewhere ahead of them lay a relay station, and after that another, and after that a long chain of names that Solis had trusted him to carry. Somewhere behind them, in a locked room aboard a dying wreck, a captain lay with poison working through her blood, and a man named Koss had just lost the only advantage he had.
Vex reached back into the dark and found Petra's hand. She squeezed once, hard, and did not let go.
The skiff flew on.