Oxygen Due

The Anchor came up out of the dark the way it always did, slow and crooked, a wheel that had forgotten how to be round. Its rotating ring caught the light of the nearest star at an angle that made the welded seams look like old scar tissue, and somewhere along its patchwork skin a dish antenna had come loose from its mount and hung swinging on a single cable, a lazy pendulum nobody had ever bothered to fix.

Jax brought the Overdraft in low and slow, one hand on the yoke and the other working a cigarette he had no intention of lighting until they were docked, because Mara had made her feelings about smoking during approach known several times over the years, most memorably with a wrench.

"Clamp three's still out," she said, watching the docking display from the copilot seat. "And four's reading intermittent. You want intermittent or you want to circle for twenty minutes waiting on one."

"I want to not pay the docking fee twice because your intermittent clamp let go halfway through."

"It's not my clamp. I didn't build the clamp. The clamp came with the station, which came with the war, which came with — you know what, just favor three and stop asking me to defend infrastructure I don't own."

Jax favored three. The Overdraft shuddered into its berth with the particular graceless clang that passed for a good docking around the Rust-Ring, magnetic clamps engaging one at a time in a stuttering sequence that always sounded, to Jax's ear, like the station clearing its throat before it spoke. Somewhere behind him he heard Rin unbuckle before the ship had even fully stopped moving, cyberdeck already swinging up off the floor and onto her hip.

"Home sweet homeless," she said, and headed for the cargo bay without waiting to be told the ship was secure.

Jax let her go. There wasn't much point stopping Rin from doing anything once she'd decided to do it, a lesson the whole crew had learned early and repeatedly, and besides — he had his own list, and top of it was finding out exactly how bad the damage from the graveyard buoys really was before Mara found out first and decided for him.

He didn't get the chance. Mara was already three steps ahead of him down the exit ramp, flashlight in hand, running the beam along the Overdraft's flank with the grim, assessing patience of a surgeon reading an X-ray she already suspected was bad news.

"Port thruster housing's cracked," she said, before he'd even asked. "Not through, but it's stress-cracked along the seam, and that seam was already held together with more prayer than metal. We fly on that much longer without a proper patch, it's not going to fail gracefully. It's going to fail while we're doing something stupid, which, given our track record, is going to be soon."

"How much?"

"How much money or how much time?"

"Yes."

Mara clicked off the flashlight and looked at him, and in the dim orange wash of the Anchor's docking bay lights she looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with the flight and everything to do with arithmetic she'd already done in her head a dozen times before they'd even landed.

"Vex can fix it. Vex can fix anything if you give him enough time and enough beer. But we're already into Kessler for the coolant refill from last month, we owe the Anchor's dockmaster for the last two berthing fees, and I don't even want to say the number on Jax's tab at Mae's out loud because I think saying it gives it power."

"It's not that bad."

"It's exactly that bad and you know it."

"The disk," Jax said. "That's the play. We get eyes on what's actually on it, figure out who wants it and how bad, and if it's worth what I think it might be worth, all of this—" he gestured at the ship, the dock, the whole sad accumulation of debt hanging over their heads like weather "—stops mattering."

Mara didn't answer right away. She looked past him, out toward the ring's inner corridor where a thin trickle of station traffic moved under flickering strip lights, dockworkers and traders and the occasional Kessler-branded maintenance drone gliding along on its silent repulsors, sterile white against all that rust.

"Yeah," she said finally. "That's the play. Let's just try not to bet the whole ship on a fairy tale before we know what we're holding."

Henry emerged from the ship last, as he always did, having spent the intervening minutes doing a final walkthrough of the cabin — checking that nothing had shaken loose during the escape, that the galley's precarious gravity relay hadn't tripped, that the cassette deck had rewound itself properly rather than left chewing tape somewhere in its housing. He carried a small case in one hand, the kind used for delicate instruments, and fell into step beside Rin as she led the way up the ramp into the station proper.

"You are limping, Miss Aoki."

"I am not limping."

"Your left ankle is bearing weight asymmetrically and has been since we departed the courier vessel."

"I bruised it. It's fine. I don't need a diagnostic, Henry, I need a disk reader that isn't held together with hope and expired warranty stickers."

"I have a small medical kit in this case, should you reconsider."

"I will not reconsider."

"Noted, and logged as your decision rather than my negligence, should the ankle require amputation later."

Rin snorted despite herself, the sound echoing off the corridor's ribbed metal walls, and didn't argue further, which from her was practically a concession of the point. The Anchor's main corridor unspooled ahead of them in its familiar chaos — vendor stalls bolted directly into the old warship's bones, strings of patched lighting running along overhead cable trays, the smell of frying oil and hot metal and the particular ozone tang that came from a station running its air scrubbers past their rated lifespan. A pair of station security in mismatched armor leaned against a support strut near the junction, not looking for anything in particular, which on the Rust-Ring counted as diligent policing.

"Mae's first," Jax said, falling into step at the front of the group, "then Vex, then Wire Alley. In that order, because I would like to eat something that wasn't reconstituted before we deal with anyone who's going to lie to us about prices."

"Everyone lies to us about prices," Mara said.

"Yeah, but Mae only does it a little."

Auntie Mae's smelled the way it always smelled — burnt starch, synthetic broth, the ghost of a thousand cigarettes smoked inside a building that technically prohibited smoking, all of it wrapped in the low crackle of a jazz record playing from a speaker older than most of the customers. The neon noodle sign in the window buzzed and flickered its perpetual half-dead rhythm, and Mae herself stood behind the counter exactly where she always stood, sleeves rolled, one eyebrow already raised before they'd cleared the door.

"You look like hell," she said, by way of greeting, already reaching for the coffee pot.

"Good to see you too, Mae."

"I mean it. You look like you got dragged behind something." She poured Jax a cup without being asked, set it down hard enough to slosh coffee over the rim, and turned her attention to the rest of them with the same appraising eye she gave a delivery of questionable produce. "Sit. All of you. You look like you haven't eaten since I last saw you, which, knowing you, is probably true."

They took the corner booth, the one with the good sightline to the door that Mara always insisted on and Jax always pretended not to notice her insisting on. Henry remained standing a moment longer than the others, surveying the diner with the polite, faintly formal attention he brought to every room, before folding himself into the booth beside Rin with the careful precision of someone who had once, in some other life, been trained to sit properly at a great many tables.

"The usual," Jax said. "Times four. And don't skimp on the noodles this time, Mae, I know you've been cutting portions since the last supply run."

"I have been cutting portions," Mae said, "since Kessler jacked up the price on synthetic protein for the third time this quarter, which you'd know if you read a bulletin board instead of flying off into restricted space chasing whatever it is you're chasing this week." She said it lightly, but her eyes lingered a beat too long on the four of them, on the state of their jackets and the exhaustion under their eyes, before she turned back toward the kitchen window and called the order through.

Rin had her deck out before the food arrived, disk connected via a battered adapter cable to her forearm CRT, running the same diagnostic loop she'd started on the ship. The little green screen scrolled slow, patient, mostly errors.

"Anything?" Mara asked.

"Same as before. Fragments. There's a route buried in there, but it's not just corrupted from age — somebody encrypted this thing properly, decades ago, with something that doesn't match any civilian encryption schema I've ever seen. It's not corporate-standard. It's not military-standard, not current military anyway. It's old. Like, old-old. Whoever built this wanted it to survive and wanted it to be unreadable to basically everyone, which are two goals that don't usually travel together." She frowned at the screen. "I need real hardware. Something with an actual isolated processor, not this—" she rapped a knuckle against her forearm rig "—which is great for most jobs but wasn't built to crack forty-year-old military crypto."

"Wire Alley," Jax said.

"Wire Alley," Rin agreed. "There's a guy — Oskar, goes by Ozzie, sells salvaged mainframe components, he's got an old isolated reader rig I've used before. Not cheap. But not Vex-repair-bill expensive either."

"Everything's Vex-repair-bill expensive to you," Mara said. "You've never paid a repair bill in your life."

"I contribute in other ways."

"Name one."

"Morale."

Mae arrived with four bowls balanced along one arm in the manner of someone who had spent thirty years perfecting exactly that maneuver, setting them down with a clatter, and lingered a moment longer than strictly necessary.

"You didn't hear this from me," she said, low, glancing once toward the door, "but there's been a couple of Kessler compliance types through here this week. Not the usual maintenance crews. Suits. Asking questions at the dockmaster's office, asking about ship registries, that sort of thing." She straightened, wiped her hands on her apron, expression carefully neutral. "Didn't think much of it till just now, looking at your faces."

Jax kept his own face perfectly still, which took more effort than it should have. "What kind of questions?"

"Didn't say. Dockmaster's not much for gossip when there's a Kessler badge in the room, you understand. But it wasn't routine. Routine doesn't usually come with two men in white suits standing very quietly by the door not eating anything."

"Thanks, Mae."

"Eat your noodles," she said, already moving off toward another table. "Whatever trouble you're in, you're no good to anyone starved."

The trouble, as it turned out, had already found its way into the Overdraft's accounts by the time Mara checked in with the dockmaster's office to settle the berthing fee.

She stood at the counter — a battered terminal booth wedged between two support struts, manned by a clerk who looked like he'd rather be anywhere else — and watched the man run her account chip through the reader a second time, then a third, his frown deepening with each failed attempt.

"It's saying declined," he said. "Insufficient — no, wait, it's not insufficient, it's saying frozen. Account frozen, pending compliance review."

"Compliance review of what?"

"Doesn't say. Just says frozen." He tapped the screen, squinted, tapped it again like that might change the outcome. "This is a Kessler-administrated account, right? Life-support subscription bundled with your fuel credit?"

"It's bundled because that's how Kessler bundles everything, so that you can't pay for one thing without touching all the others."

"Well, whatever it's bundled with, it's frozen. You'll need to take it up with a Kessler compliance office. There's not one on the Anchor — nearest one's three jumps out, unless you want to wait for the traveling adjudicator, and last I heard he's not due through here for another six weeks."

Mara stood very still for a moment, doing the math she always did in situations like this, the math of exactly how bad things were about to get versus how bad she could pretend they weren't.

"What happens to our docking berth if the fee doesn't clear?"

"Forty-eight hours grace period, station policy. After that, impound and auction, same as anybody."

"Forty-eight hours."

"That's station policy, ma'am. Nothing personal."

She thanked him with considerably less warmth than the sentiment deserved and walked back out into the corridor already composing, in her head, the very short and very unpleasant conversation she was about to have with Jax.

She found him outside Solder & Spit, leaning against the doorframe while Vex crouched beneath the Overdraft's exposed thruster housing, one rotating inspection lens whirring softly over his natural eye as he studied the crack Mara had already diagnosed an hour earlier.

"Bad," Vex said, without preamble, before Mara had even finished crossing the docking bay. "Worse than you probably think, and you probably think it's pretty bad already, so — worse than that."

"How much worse."

"Structural. Not cosmetic. This crack's been growing a while, probably since before that graveyard nonsense you two won't tell me about, and the buoy hit just finished the job the last hundred bad landings started." Vex straightened, wiping grease off the lens with a rag that made it marginally dirtier, and fixed Jax with the particular flat, unimpressed stare of a man who had fixed this exact ship more times than either of them cared to count. "I can patch it. Won't be pretty, won't be permanent, but it'll hold through a jump or two if you don't do anything stupid with the throttle."

"Define stupid."

"Define your entire flying style, Mercer, and you'll have your answer."

"How much and how long."

Vex named a number that made Jax's jaw tighten and Mara's stomach drop, not because it was unreasonable — for the work involved, it was almost generous — but because they both knew, without needing to say it out loud, that between the frozen account and the dockmaster's forty-eight-hour clock, they did not currently have access to money that existed.

"We're a little cash-poor at the moment," Jax said, in the careful, measured tone he used right before asking someone for something he knew they'd say no to. "Any chance of running a tab?"

"Your tab is already longer than the ship, Mercer."

"A short extension, then."

Vex looked at him for a long moment, then at Mara, whose expression had settled into the particular grim calculation she wore when she was trying to figure out which of several bad options was least likely to get someone killed.

"Cash or scrap," Vex said finally. "You know the rule. I don't run charity, and I sure as hell don't take Kessler credit — not that you've got any of that either, from what I hear."

"You hear things fast."

"I hear things fast because I fix ships for a living and ships have owners and owners talk, especially when they're standing in my bay looking like somebody just froze their accounts three hours after docking." Vex's rotating lens clicked and refocused, studying Jax's face with an expression that was less accusatory than simply tired. "Kessler compliance office was through here yesterday, asking the dockmaster about unregistered salvage activity in restricted zones. Didn't say a name. Didn't have to. There's not exactly a long list of idiots flying rust-buckets into military graveyards this month."

Mara felt something cold settle in her chest, separate from and worse than the ordinary anxiety of unpaid bills. "They know it's us."

"They suspect it's you. There's a difference, for now." Vex crouched back down beside the thruster housing, resuming his inspection with the brisk, businesslike air of a man who had decided the conversation was over whether or not the participants agreed. "I'll patch what I can on good faith, because I like you both more than I like most people who owe me money, which is a low bar, but it's a bar. You get me something — scrap, salvage, actual currency, I don't care — inside a week, or I start selling parts off this thing to cover the difference."

"A week."

"A week. And Mercer — for what it's worth, whatever you dragged out of that graveyard, I'd get it somewhere safer than a docking bay with Kessler suits asking questions three doors down. Just a professional observation."

Wire Alley, by contrast, didn't care who was asking questions about anybody, which was more or less the entire business model.

The corridor ran deep into one of the Anchor's oldest sections, a former cargo spine converted decades ago into a warren of stacked stalls and jury-rigged shopfronts, strung with lights that ran on power nobody had bothered to ask permission to draw. The air smelled like solder and ozone and the particular sweet rot of old plastic housings that had been baking under work-lamps for longer than they were rated for. Vendors called out from behind counters heaped with cracked navigation chips, gutted terminal shells, coils of salvaged cable thick as a man's wrist, and the occasional genuinely dangerous piece of unlicensed hardware displayed with the casual confidence of people who had already bribed whoever needed bribing.

Rin moved through it like she owned the place, which, in the specific currency Wire Alley respected — reputation, competence, the willingness to haggle without flinching — she more or less did.

"Ozzie!" She rapped her knuckles on a stall counter stacked three deep with server components, behind which a heavyset man with a magnifying loupe permanently strapped over one eye looked up from whatever he was soldering.

“Void,” he said, using the old handle most of Wire Alley knew her by rather than her name. "You're back. That's either good news for me or bad news for you, and given your track record, I'm betting bad news."

"I need the isolated reader rig. The good one, not the one you try to fob off on tourists."

"The good one costs."

"Everything here costs, Ozzie, that's the whole business model of this hallway."

Ozzie set down his soldering iron, pushed the loupe up onto his forehead, and studied her for a moment with the particular assessing squint of a man deciding how much he could reasonably extract from someone he liked. "What are you reading?"

"Old military disk. Encrypted, corrupted, forty-plus years dead."

"Military encryption's a pain in the ass. That'll cost extra just for the headache."

Behind Rin, Jax leaned against a support strut with his arms crossed, letting her run the negotiation — one of the few areas where he trusted her judgment more than Mara's, mostly because Mara's negotiating style tended toward blunt-force intimidation, which worked on frightened dockmasters but not on people who'd built entire careers around not being intimidated by anybody.

Rin and Ozzie went back and forth for a few minutes, the price sliding down in small increments punctuated by mutual complaints about the cost of everything, until they settled on a number that was still too high and a loan of the reader rig for exactly two hours, "and not a minute more, Void, I mean it, I've got a buyer for that unit Thursday."

"Two hours is plenty."

"Two hours is barely enough time to boot the thing properly, but that's your problem, not mine."

They set up in the back corner of Ozzie's stall, behind a curtain of hanging cable that gave them at least the illusion of privacy, and Rin connected the disk to the isolated reader with the careful, precise motions of someone handling something that mattered. The rig was bulkier than her own equipment, a genuine relic with a monochrome CRT display and a keyboard so worn the letters had rubbed off half the keys, but it hummed to life with a depth and stability her forearm rig couldn't match.

"Okay," she murmured, mostly to herself, fingers moving across the keys. "Let's see what you're really hiding."

The screen filled with scrolling data, cleaner this time, the isolated processor grinding through the old encryption with patient, methodical persistence. Jax watched over her shoulder, Mara on the other side, Henry standing just behind them both with his sensor array angled down at the display, all four of them crowded into the small curtained space while the rest of Wire Alley's noise carried on obliviously around them.

"There," Rin said, after several long minutes. "Okay. I'm getting more of the route now. It's still broken — big chunks missing, whole sections just gone, not corrupted so much as deliberately stripped out — but what's left is a navigation path. Old colonial-era markers, the kind that predate most current star charts. And there's authorization data bundled with it. Like — clearance codes. Old ones. The kind you'd need to access something restricted."

"Restricted like the graveyard restricted?"

"More restricted than that. This isn't military restricted. This is—" Rin squinted at a fragment of text that had survived mostly intact, running it through a translation filter twice to be sure she was reading it right "—this is colonial administrative restricted. Like it belonged to an actual settlement authority, not a war department."

"A colony," Mara said slowly. "The Eden thing. You think this is an actual colony route."

"I think it's a route to somewhere somebody really did not want found, and I think whoever built this disk wanted to make sure that if it ever did get found, only someone with the right authorization could actually use it." Rin sat back, rubbing at her eyes, the strain of hours of close focus finally showing. "I can't get further than this without more time and probably better tools than even Ozzie's got. This thing's not going to give up its secrets easy."

"But it's real," Jax said. "Whatever it points to. It's a real place."

"It's real enough that somebody spent serious effort making sure nobody could just stumble onto it. That's not nothing."

Henry, who had been silent through most of this, tilted his head slightly, the small precise gesture he made when something in his processing didn't quite align with the data at hand. "If I may observe — the encryption schema, and the age of the authorization codes, suggests this predates most current corporate charter systems. Which raises a question I do not believe any of us have yet asked aloud."

"Which is?"

"If this route leads somewhere real, and someone encrypted it decades ago specifically to keep it hidden — who, precisely, benefits from it remaining hidden today? And why would that benefit still matter, all these years later, enough to send a corporate response team into a restricted graveyard within ninety seconds of its rediscovery?"

Nobody had an answer. The curtain of hanging cable swayed slightly in the draft from a nearby ventilation duct, and somewhere out in the main thoroughfare of Wire Alley, a vendor was loudly, cheerfully overcharging someone for a box of obsolete calculators.

They got their answer, in a roundabout way, less than an hour later, and it came from the last place any of them expected — Mae's, again, because information on the Rust-Ring flowed through that diner the way blood flowed through a body, whether anyone intended it to or not.

Jax had gone back to settle up what he could of his tab, mostly as a gesture of good faith given everything else that was currently frozen, when Mae set the coffee pot down hard enough to make the cup rattle and leaned across the counter with the particular low urgency of someone who'd overheard something she didn't like.

"There was a courier through here twenty minutes ago," she said. "Corporate. Kessler-branded, official seal and everything, not the usual maintenance drone type. Delivered a notice to the dockmaster's office. I only caught part of it because the courier wasn't exactly discreet about reading his own manifest out loud to himself while he waited for a signature, bless his thick head."

"What kind of notice?"

"A bounty notice. Sort of. Framed real official, like a recovery request — 'Kessler Dynamics seeks the return of proprietary salvage material, registry unknown, believed recovered from restricted Fleet Reserve space, reward offered for intact recovery, no questions asked.'" Mae's eyes flicked toward the door, then back to Jax, and there was something almost apologetic in her expression, like she hated being the one to say it. "Reward number was big, Jax. Big enough that half the scrap runners on this station are probably already asking around about who's been in restricted space lately. Big enough that it's not really about the money value of whatever this thing is. That's fear money. That's pay-anything-to-make-a-problem-disappear money."

Jax sat very still, cigarette forgotten between his fingers, the warm noise of the diner suddenly feeling very far away.

"They don't know we have it," he said, mostly to himself. "Not for certain."

"They know enough to start throwing that kind of money around a station where you happen to be docked, three days after you happen to come back from restricted space. You do the math on that, sugar, because I already have, and I don't like the answer."

They reconvened aboard the Overdraft rather than risk another word of it in a public diner, crowding into the cockpit while Henry sealed the cargo hatch behind them and ran a quiet internal check to confirm — as much as any of them could ever confirm anything on a station like the Anchor — that nobody had slipped a listening device aboard during the hours they'd spent scattered across the ring.

"No questions asked," Mara repeated, arms crossed, pacing the narrow space between the console and the hatch in the tight, controlled way she paced when she was furious and trying not to be. "That's not a company that wants navigation data back because it's valuable. That's a company that wants a problem to disappear before anyone gets a good look at it."

"Could still just be a salvage dispute," Jax said, though he didn't sound like he believed it. "Corporate claiming rights over old military assets, wanting their property back—"

"Kessler Dynamics doesn't operate military salvage, Jax. Kessler operates atmospheric processors and water synthesizers and the little metered boxes on every colony's air recyclers. Since when do they care about a forty-year-old courier wreck in restricted space?" Mara stopped pacing, fixed him with a look. “Since the graveyard’s security network logged our breach and made them scared enough to send a ship within ninety seconds. That’s since when.”

"So we sell it to them," Rin said, from where she'd settled cross-legged in the copilot seat, disk cradled in her lap like something that had suddenly gotten a great deal heavier than its physical weight suggested. "No questions asked, big reward, we clear every debt we've got and then some, and this whole problem just — stops being our problem."

Nobody answered right away. Henry, standing near the hatch, shifted his weight slightly, the small gesture he used in place of clearing a throat he didn't have.

"If I may," he said. "Whatever this disk contains, Kessler Dynamics has demonstrated they are willing to expend considerable resources to recover it intact and to prevent its contents from becoming known. That suggests the information is either extremely valuable to them, or extremely dangerous to them, and in my limited experience, corporations of Kessler's scale rarely distinguish meaningfully between the two categories. If we return it, we resolve our own difficulty. We do not know what difficulty we create for whoever, or whatever, this route was originally meant to protect."

"Henry, with respect," Jax said, "we've got a repair bill we can't pay, a frozen account, and forty-some hours before Vex starts selling pieces of this ship out from under us. I don't know that we can afford a conscience right now."

"I understand that, Captain Mercer. I am not suggesting you can. I am merely noting that we do not yet know what we would be selling, only that someone wants it badly enough to frighten an entire station on our behalf. I would prefer we make that decision with full information rather than out of necessity alone. Necessity has a way of resolving itself into regret, in my experience."

Jax looked at him for a long moment, then at Mara, who had gone quiet in the particular way she went quiet when she was doing the hardest kind of math — not the kind involving numbers, but the kind involving what she could live with afterward.

"If we sell it," she said slowly, "and it turns out to be something that matters — something real, something somebody's been hiding for a reason — we're not just cashing a check. We're handing Kessler Dynamics whatever tool they need to make sure it stays hidden. Permanently. However they decide to do that." She exhaled, long and slow, rubbing at her temple where a headache had clearly been building since the dockmaster's counter. "I want to be debt-free as much as anybody standing in this cockpit. I'm not about to pretend I don't. But I've spent enough of my life watching Kessler decide what's convenient for them at somebody else's expense that I don't love the idea of being the one who hands them the decision this time."

"So we don't sell it," Rin said.

"We don't sell it yet," Jax said. "Not until we know what it actually is. Not until we're the ones with the information instead of the ones just holding a box somebody else wants."

"That's a nice principled stand for a man who can't currently pay his bar tab."

"I contain multitudes, Rin."

"You contain a repair bill and a bad attitude."

Despite everything, despite the weight sitting heavy in the cockpit, Mara almost smiled at that, and even Jax's mouth twitched around the edges before he schooled it back into the careful, weathered calm he wore like armor.

"Okay," he said. "New plan. We don't sell the disk. We don't advertise we've got it. We get Vex's patch job on credit, we quietly liquidate whatever we can from the last few runs to buy ourselves breathing room, and we get off this station before Kessler decides asking politely isn't working and switches to something less polite. Rin, anything else you can pull off that disk before we go?"

"Not without Ozzie's rig, and I already burned my two hours."

"Then we go with what we've got. Which is a route to somewhere, half a name, and a very expensive reason to keep our mouths shut about both."

The forty-eight hours that followed felt considerably shorter than forty-eight hours had any right to feel.

Vex extended the patch job on credit with considerably more grumbling than grace, muttering the whole time about idiots who brought trouble into his bay and then expected sympathy on top of repairs, though he worked with the same careful competence he always did, and by the time he finished, the thruster housing looked ugly but solid, patched with salvaged plating that didn't quite match the surrounding hull but would, in his professional opinion, "hold together better than your entire life plan, which isn't saying much."

Mara sold off two crates of salvaged parts they'd been hauling since a job three months back, parts she'd been saving for a rainy day that had apparently, finally, arrived, and the money bought enough fuel and enough goodwill with the dockmaster's office to buy the Overdraft a few more hours of grace before the frozen account triggered impound proceedings.

Rin spent what little remained of their time in Wire Alley trying, without much success, to find anyone willing to talk more specifically about the size and shape of Kessler's sudden interest, and came back with nothing more than rumor — a name, whispered more than once, attached to a face nobody in the Alley particularly wanted to describe in detail. Commander Kaelen. Hound handler. The kind of name that made even Wire Alley's usual bravado go quiet for a beat before the conversation moved pointedly elsewhere.

Henry, for his part, spent the hours doing the small, unglamorous work of keeping the ship functional and the crew fed, brewing the same terrible coffee he always brewed, running diagnostics on systems nobody else remembered existed, and standing quiet watch near the cargo hatch during the hours the others slept in shifts, sensor array patient and unblinking in the dim emergency lighting.

They lifted off the Anchor with less than six hours to spare on the dockmaster's clock, the account still frozen, the repair job holding by the grace of Vex's patchwork and nothing else, and as the station fell away behind them — crooked, rust-scarred, indifferent — Jax found himself watching the long, swinging pendulum of that loose dish antenna one last time through the rear viewport, wondering distantly whether it would still be swinging the next time they came back, and whether they'd be welcome when they did.

"Course?" Mara asked, settling into the copilot seat, the tired, wired energy of the last two days finally beginning to show in the slump of her shoulders.

"Anywhere that isn't here," Jax said. "We'll figure out the specifics once we're not staring at a Kessler compliance flag every time somebody runs our registry."

Behind them, Rin had already curled into her hammock among the server racks, disk secured in a lockbox welded to the frame, her CRT casting its familiar green glow across the ceiling of the cargo bay as she muttered half-asleep instructions to a diagnostic routine that would keep running long after she'd stopped watching it.

Henry moved through the cabin one last time, checking latches, checking seals, checking — in the quiet, thorough way he checked everything — that all of them, ship and crew both, were as secure as circumstances allowed. He paused near the cockpit doorway, teal shell catching the low green light of the console.

"For what it is worth, Captain Mercer," he said, "I believe you made the correct decision back there. Whatever comes of it."

"Ask me again in a month, Henry. See if I still agree with myself."

"I generally find that most decisions worth making don't feel correct until considerably after the fact. Sometimes not even then." He inclined his head, the small formal gesture that was as close as he came to a bow, and withdrew toward the galley to see about salvaging something edible from what remained of their supplies.

Jax watched the Anchor shrink to a point of light behind them, then to nothing at all, and turned his attention forward, toward the dark and whatever waited in it. Somewhere behind him, in a lockbox in a hammock full of cables, sat the answer to a question they didn't yet fully understand how to ask, and somewhere ahead of them — closer now than any of them wanted to admit — a very patient, very well-funded organization had already started looking for it.

He reached for the cassette deck, one-handed, without looking, and let the old jazz fill the cockpit the way it always did before a long, uncertain flight.

"Buckle in," he said, to no one in particular, and pushed the throttle forward into the dark.