The job listing had come through the same battered contract board every legitimate salvage crew on the frontier still checked, wedged between offers to clear minefields for less than minimum wage and a standing bounty on a shipment of stolen livestock that nobody had claimed in six months. Mara had found it while Jax slept off two days without much of it, scrolling through postings with the particular grim focus of someone doing math she didn't like the answer to.

"Independent hauler," she read aloud, more to herself than to anyone, "registry current, drive failure, drifting in the Coyle Belt, structurally sound, minimal hazard. Owner's offering forty percent of recovered cargo value plus a flat fee for the tow." She looked up. "Flat fee alone covers Vex. Cargo split covers the rest, if there's anything worth splitting."

"Minimal hazard," Jax said, from the pilot's seat, not turning around. "I've heard that before."

"You've heard everything before. Doesn't mean it's always a lie." She was already composing a reply on the terminal, thumbs moving with the brisk efficiency of someone who'd sent a thousand of these messages and expected to be disappointed by roughly half of them. "Owner's name is a Foss Calloway. Independent registry, not corporate, not a broker skimming a cut off the top. That's better than what we usually get."

"Independent's better," Rin said, from her hammock, not looking up from the small dim glow of her deck. She had her bruised ankle propped up on a crate of spare cable, an ice pack Henry had produced from somewhere pressed against it despite her repeated insistence that it was fine. "Independent means somebody who actually needs the help instead of a corporation trying to get us to do something illegal on the cheap."

"Independent also means nobody's checking their claims," Mara said. "No corporate compliance department keeping them honest. Just a guy with a busted ship and whatever story he wants to tell us."

"You're the one who found the job."

"I'm the one who's realistic about the job. There's a difference."

Jax finally turned in his seat, the green glow of the scope throwing hard shadows across his face. "We taking it?"

Mara looked at the number on the screen one more time, then at the ship's own status readouts glowing beside it — fuel reserves dropping toward a line she didn't like, the thruster housing patch holding for now but not indefinitely, a supply manifest that had more empty lines than full ones. "We're taking it," she said. "We don't exactly have the luxury of being picky."

The Coyle Belt was an unglamorous stretch of rock and ice drifting in slow procession around a gas giant nobody had bothered naming beyond a registry number, the kind of place independent haulers used as a shortcut between two more interesting systems and occasionally paid for the privilege by breaking down in it. Foss Calloway's ship showed up on the long-range scope right where the listing promised, a boxy old bulk hauler with the unglamorous silhouette of something built purely to move cargo rather than impress anyone, drive trail cold, running lights dim but present.

"That's a real ship," Mara said, studying the readout with something like relief. "Real registry, real transponder code, matches what he sent. Good sign."

"Low bar for good signs these days."

"Everything's a low bar these days, Jax, that's the whole economy."

Jax brought the Overdraft in close, matching drift with the practiced ease that made even a tricky approach look almost lazy, and keyed the comm. "Calloway, this is the Overdraft, Galactic Salvage Crew 99, responding to your listing. We've got you on scope. Requesting permission to dock and assess."

There was a pause, longer than comfortable, filled with the low static hiss of open channel, before a voice answered — male, older, roughened by something that might have been age or might have been stress, hard to tell over the comm.

"Overdraft, copy. Appreciate the quick response. Airlock's on the dorsal side, should still have power for the seal even though the main drive's dead. Come on aboard, I'll meet you at the lock."

"Copy that. What's your situation?"

"Drive failure, like I said in the listing. Coolant system failed about two days back, tripped an automatic shutdown before it could cook the whole reactor, which I'm grateful for, but it means I've been sitting dead in the water ever since. Cargo's intact, life support's holding, just need a tow and maybe some hands to help me get the drive stable enough to limp somewhere with a proper yard."

"We can do that," Jax said, and glanced at Mara, who was already pulling up the hauler's registry data on a secondary display, cross-referencing the ship's transponder code against public shipping records with the quiet diligence that made her better at contracts than either of them liked to admit out loud.

"Registry checks out," she murmured. "Calloway Independent Hauling, licensed, no outstanding liens that I can see, no red flags." She frowned slightly at something on the screen. "Cargo manifest's listed as 'industrial components, mixed,' which is about as vague as a manifest can legally get without lying, but that's not unusual for an independent operator moving somebody else's freight."

"You trust it?"

"I trust the paperwork. Paperwork's not the same as trust." She closed the display and stood, already reaching for her jacket. "Let's go see the man in person. That usually tells you more than any registry ever will."

Foss Calloway met them at the airlock looking exactly like a man who'd spent two days alone on a dead ship worrying about his cargo and his margins in roughly equal measure — unshaven, hollow-eyed, wearing a jumpsuit with a company patch stitched crooked over one breast pocket, the kind of crooked stitching that spoke of a man who did his own mending because he couldn't afford anyone else to do it.

"Appreciate you coming," he said, shaking hands with Jax first, then Mara, with the slightly too-firm grip of someone trying hard to seem steadier than he felt. "Been sitting out here two days composing my own eulogy, if I'm honest. Was starting to think nobody'd bite on the listing before my air ran short."

"Life support's fine, you said."

"Life support's fine. Nerves aren't." He managed something like a smile, thin and tired. "This way. Drive's aft, but I figured you'd want to see the cargo hold first, given it's what you're partly working for."

Mara fell into step beside him, Rin limping along a few paces behind with Henry hovering close in the unobtrusive way he had of staying near her without quite seeming to hover, and Jax bringing up the rear, taking in the ship's interior with the particular assessing eye he'd developed over years of boarding vessels that were sometimes exactly what they claimed to be and sometimes very much not.

The hauler was old but well-kept, corridors clean despite the dead power running only emergency lighting, cargo webbing secured properly along the walls, the small unglamorous signs of a man who took actual pride in an unglamorous job. It didn't feel like a trap. It felt, if anything, like exactly what it claimed to be — which was, Jax reminded himself, precisely the kind of feeling that had gotten crews killed before.

The cargo hold, when they reached it, was stacked floor to ceiling with heavy crates, secured tight, stenciled with shipping codes that meant nothing without a manifest key to translate them.

"Industrial components," Calloway said, gesturing at the stacks with something between pride and exhaustion. "Contracted to haul this lot out to a processing station three jumps out. Not glamorous, but it pays, and it was paying fine until my coolant system decided otherwise."

Mara ran her flashlight along the nearest crate, reading the stenciled codes with the practiced eye of someone who'd spent years around exactly this kind of freight. "This isn't standard industrial shipping code," she said slowly. "This is a processing designation. You're not hauling finished components, you're hauling ore-adjacent material — raw refinery stock."

"Same difference, more or less."

"Not exactly the same difference. Refinery stock's regulated tighter than finished components, tariff-wise. Different paperwork, different liability if something goes wrong in transit." She looked at him, not accusatory, just noting a discrepancy the way she noted everything. "Manifest says industrial components, mixed. That's not technically accurate."

Calloway's smile flickered, just slightly, before steadying back into place. "Client's paperwork, not mine. I just haul what they load and ship what they tell me to write down. Not exactly my place to argue with the people paying my fee."

It was a reasonable answer. It was also, Mara noted privately, exactly the kind of reasonable answer a man gave when he either didn't know the whole truth or didn't want to say it out loud, and she filed the distinction away without pressing further, because pressing further wasn't going to fix his drive or get them paid any faster.

"Let's look at the coolant system," Jax said. "Sooner we know what we're dealing with, sooner we get you moving."

The drive compartment told a different story than the tidy corridors and stacked cargo had suggested, and Mara knew it the second she ducked through the access hatch and got a look at the coolant manifold.

"This wasn't a failure," she said, crouching beside the ruptured line, running her light along a seam that had split clean rather than corroded through. "This was a rupture. Recent. And it's not from age — look at the metal here, this is a stress fracture from overpressure, not wear."

"Overpressure from what?"

"That's the question." She traced the coolant lines back toward the reactor housing, frowning at readouts that flickered dim and uncertain in the reduced power state. "If this thing was running standard loads for a bulk hauler, this line shouldn't have seen pressure anywhere near what caused this fracture. Either the reactor's been running hotter than it should for a while, or—" she paused, running her fingers along a secondary line feeding into the same manifold, one that didn't quite match the ship's other plumbing "—or somebody's been drawing more power than this ship's rated for, and the coolant system finally couldn't keep up."

"Somebody being Calloway?"

"Somebody being whatever that is," Mara said, nodding at the secondary line, which disappeared into a sealed panel bolted into the compartment wall with hardware that looked considerably newer than the rest of the ship. "That's not factory. That's an add-on, and it's drawing off the main reactor loop."

Henry, who had been quietly running his own sensor sweep of the compartment while Mara worked, tilted his head with the small precise gesture that meant he'd found something worth mentioning. "Miss Voss, if I may — I am detecting a faint electromagnetic signature from behind that panel consistent with active, if minimal, power draw. Whatever is behind it is not entirely dormant."

"Great," Mara said. "That's just great. Rin, you want to come make yourself useful?"

Rin was already limping over, cyberdeck swinging around off her hip with the eager, slightly manic energy of someone who'd been sitting still too long and desperately wanted an excuse not to. "What are we looking at?"

"A mystery panel drawing power off a coolant system that ruptured under pressure it shouldn't have seen. Figure out what's behind it without blowing us all up, if you can manage that."

"I can absolutely manage that. Probably." She crouched beside the panel, running her fingers along its edge, finding the seam and the small access port tucked discreetly at one corner — the kind of thing installed by someone who wanted access without wanting it obvious. She connected her deck's cable with practiced speed, forearm CRT flickering to life. "Okay. There's a lock on this, but it's not fancy. Somebody wanted this quiet, not necessarily secure."

While Rin worked, Jax straightened from where he'd been examining the reactor housing itself and looked over at the hatch they'd come through, weighing something.

"Where's Calloway?"

Mara glanced back. The man had followed them into the drive compartment corridor but hadn't come all the way in, hovering near the hatch with his hands in his pockets and an expression that had shifted, subtly, from tired-but-honest to something closer to tired-and-cornered.

"Calloway," Jax said, keeping his tone level, easy, the same tone he used talking down a nervous negotiation before it became a shooting one. "What's behind the panel?"

The man's jaw worked for a second before he answered. "It's not mine. The equipment. It was already installed when I bought the ship secondhand, and I never bothered ripping it out because it didn't seem to be hurting anything." He said it too fast, the words tumbling slightly over each other in the particular way lies did when a man hadn't had time to practice them properly.

"Rin," Mara said, without looking away from Calloway, "how's that panel coming?"

"Coming," Rin said, fingers flying, and a moment later the lock clicked and the panel swung open with a soft pneumatic hiss, revealing a compact, densely packed processing unit wired directly into the ship's reactor feed — not standard equipment, not decorative, definitely not something that came stock on a secondhand bulk hauler.

"That," Henry observed mildly, "appears to be an unlicensed signal relay. Quite a sophisticated one, for a piece of equipment installed on a vessel this age."

Rin was already running a diagnostic against it, brow furrowed in concentration. "It's not just a relay. It's been drawing reactor power to boost transmission range on something — looks like it's been broadcasting a beacon signal, low power, encrypted, probably designed to stay under the notice of anybody not specifically looking for it." She glanced up. "This has been running the whole time we thought this ship was dead in the water. It's not down. It's hiding."

The color had drained from Calloway's face by the time Jax turned back to look at him fully, and whatever was left of the tired-honest-hauler act crumbled entirely under the weight of four people staring at him in a drive compartment with the truth glowing on a screen between them.

"It's not what you think," he said.

"Then tell us what it is," Jax said, "before I start assuming the worst version, which, given the current state of my week, is going to be pretty bad."

The truth, once Calloway finally gave it up, was uglier than fraud but not quite as ugly as a trap, which Jax supposed counted for something.

"The cargo's stolen," he said, sitting heavily on an overturned crate in the corridor outside the drive compartment, hands hanging loose between his knees. "Not by me — I bought this run legitimate, thought I was hauling contracted refinery stock same as I've done a dozen times before. Found out three days in that the client who hired me isn't who they said they were. Found out because that beacon started transmitting the second we crossed into the Belt, and I only noticed because the power draw was screwing with my coolant regulation."

"Transmitting to who?"

"I don't know. That's the God's honest truth, I don't know who's listening on the other end. But whoever loaded this cargo onto my ship wanted it tracked, and wanted it tracked quiet, and didn't tell me a damn thing about it, and now I'm sitting out here with a busted drive and a hold full of stolen refinery stock that somebody very much wants back, and I panicked and posted a distress listing hoping I could get a tow and get gone before whoever's tracking that beacon caught up with their own cargo."

Mara's expression had gone flat and hard in the way it went when she was recalculating every risk assessment she'd made since boarding. "So the coolant failure wasn't sabotage. It was your own beacon frying your own systems."

"That's what I think, yeah. Wasn't built to run that long at that draw. Something in the design finally gave."

"And the actual owners of this cargo — the people who reported it stolen, assuming somebody has — do they know where it is?"

"If that beacon's still transmitting, then probably, yeah. Which is why I need it gone, and I need this ship moving, before somebody with a bigger gun than mine comes looking for their property."

Jax looked at Mara. Mara looked back at him with an expression that said, as clearly as words could, this is exactly the kind of job I was afraid this would turn out to be, and neither of them needed to say it out loud for Rin to catch the tone anyway.

"So to be clear," Rin said, from the drive compartment doorway, deck still connected to the offending relay, "we came out here to do a paid tow-and-repair job, and it turns out the cargo's hot, the client lied about basically everything, and there's an active tracking beacon that's probably already told somebody exactly where to find this ship."

"That's about the shape of it, yeah," Calloway said miserably.

"Great. Wonderful. Love this for us."

Jax rubbed a hand across his face, the particular gesture he made when a job had gone from merely difficult to actively worse than the situation they'd left the Anchor to escape. "Options," he said. "Give them to me straight, Mara."

"Option one, we cut him loose right now, fly away, let whoever's tracking that beacon deal with him and his cargo, and we lose the tow fee and the cargo split both, which puts us back to exactly where we started except we've burned fuel getting here."

"Option two?"

"Option two, we help him kill the beacon, patch the drive well enough to get this hauler moving under its own power, tow him to somewhere he can offload the cargo to whoever it actually belongs to before its rightful owners catch up with him violently, and hope that counts for enough goodwill or reward money to be worth the risk."

"Option three," Calloway said, hopeful, "you help me and I split what I've got left after this mess, which isn't much, but it's something—"

"Option three isn't really different from option two, it's just you trying to lower the price," Mara said, not unkindly. "Foss, I like you fine, but you brought a hot cargo problem into a job you advertised as minimal hazard, and I'm not inclined to be generous about the math."

Calloway had the grace to look ashamed rather than argue the point.

Henry, who had remained near the open panel through the entire exchange, spoke up in the mild, measured tone he used when offering an observation nobody else had quite gotten to yet. "If I may add a relevant consideration — the beacon has been transmitting for approximately two days at reduced power, given the coolant strain. If its intended recipients are anywhere within reasonable range, they have had ample time to plot an intercept course already. Whatever decision we make, I suspect we should make it with some urgency."

"Henry's right," Jax said. "We're not debating this in a vacuum. Somebody could already be inbound." He looked around at the crew, at Calloway's miserable, hopeful face, and made the decision the way he made most decisions — quickly, and with the understanding that he'd probably regret at least part of it later. "We kill the beacon, we fix what we can fix, we get this ship moving. We're not leaving a man to get boarded by whoever he stole cargo from, even if he did it accidentally. Rin, can you shut that thing down without frying the reactor feed it's tapped into?"

"Give me ten minutes and don't distract me."

"Mara, drive?"

"I can stabilize it enough to limp, not enough for a real jump. We tow him out of the Belt at minimum, get him somewhere with an actual repair yard once we're clear."

"Henry, help Calloway get his cargo secured properly for towing stress, we don't need crates breaking loose halfway through this."

"Understood, Captain Mercer."

"And somebody keep an eye on long-range scope, because if Henry's right about the timeline, I'd like some warning before whoever's coming actually arrives."

Rin worked the relay with the focused, muttering intensity she brought to any system that had annoyed her by existing, cable connected, forearm CRT scrolling code while she traced the beacon's transmission architecture back to its source.

"It's not just broadcasting a location," she said, mostly to herself, though Mara had drifted close enough to listen while she waited for a coolant seal to cure. "It's relaying a full telemetry packet — location, cargo manifest, even a rough count of personnel aboard. Somebody built this to give a very complete picture to whoever's listening. This isn't just tracking. This is a setup for a very informed boarding."

"Can you kill it without triggering some kind of dead-man alert? Sometimes these things are built to scream louder if you try to shut them down."

"Already checking for that." Rin's fingers slowed, careful now, testing rather than committing. "There's a failsafe, yeah — if I just yank power, it sends a burst transmission before it dies. Kind of a last gasp. I need to spoof the shutdown sequence so it thinks it's going into scheduled standby instead of getting murdered."

"Can you do that?"

"I can absolutely do that. Whether I can do it before whoever's listening finishes their coffee and decides to come collect their property is a different question." She bent back to the work, tongue between her teeth in concentration, and Mara left her to it, moving on to check the coolant seal one more time before turning her attention to the reactor stabilization Jax needed for the tow.

The ten minutes stretched to fifteen, then twenty, the kind of slow, grinding tension that came with knowing a clock was running somewhere you couldn't see it, and Jax split his attention between the long-range scope in the cockpit and the drive compartment corridor, cigarette unlit and forgotten between his fingers.

"Got it," Rin called finally, and the faint electromagnetic hum Henry had detected earlier dropped away to nothing. "Beacon's dead. Clean shutdown, no burst transmission, no dead-man trigger. Whoever's listening just thinks their cargo went quiet on schedule."

"Nice work," Mara said, and meant it, though there wasn't much time to celebrate before Jax's voice came through the corridor, tighter than before.

"Company," he said. "Got a contact on long-range, inbound, matching a heading that lines up exactly with where this ship's been sitting. Small profile, moving fast. Could be nothing. Could be exactly the somebody we were worried about."

"Timeline?"

"If they hold current speed, twenty minutes, maybe less."

Mara swore, quietly and with real feeling, and turned back to the reactor readouts. "I can get the drive stable enough to move in fifteen. Not fast, not pretty, but moving."

"Then we move in fifteen," Jax said. "Calloway, get anything loose in that cargo hold locked down now, we're not going to have time to be gentle about acceleration."

"On it," Calloway said, already moving, and for the first time since they'd boarded he looked less like a nervous liar and more like a man who genuinely, desperately wanted this to go right.

Fifteen minutes felt considerably longer with a countdown attached to it, but Mara delivered, more or less — the drive coughed to grudging, unstable life with a groan that made everyone in the compartment wince, running rough and hot but running, enough for Jax to establish a tow line from the Overdraft and begin the slow, careful process of hauling a dead-weight bulk hauler out of a debris field without shredding either ship in the process.

It was not, by any measure, an easy piece of flying. The Coyle Belt's drifting rock and ice made for a navigational headache even under ideal conditions, and towing an unresponsive hauler through it while watching an unidentified contact close the distance on long-range scope pushed the difficulty into territory that made even Jax's hands tighten on the yoke.

"Talk to me, Rin."

"Contact's still closing. I'm getting a partial transponder read now that they're in range — private registry, not corporate, not military. Could be independent recovery, could be exactly the kind of people who don't ask nicely for their stolen cargo back."

"Helpful. Very helpful."

"I'm working with what the universe gives me, Jax."

The Overdraft's patched thruster housing groaned audibly under the strain of towing a ship several times its own dead weight through a debris field, a low grinding vibration Jax felt through the yoke that he did not love the feel of at all, and Mara's voice came sharp over the comm from the drive compartment where she was babysitting Calloway's unstable reactor feed.

"Whatever you're doing up there, do it gentler. That housing patch is not rated for this."

"I'm aware, Mara, I can feel it."

"Feel it less aggressively."

He threaded them between a slow-tumbling ice fragment the size of a small building and a jagged rock spur that would've torn the tow line clean through if he'd misjudged the gap by even a few meters, easing the Overdraft's angle with the kind of precise, economical correction that came from years of flying machines that punished carelessness, and behind him the hauler followed, sluggish and unwilling, like a reluctant dance partner being dragged across a floor.

"Contact's matching our vector," Rin called. "They know exactly where we're headed."

"Of course they do." Jax's jaw tightened. "Henry, how's the cargo holding?"

"Secure, Captain Mercer, though I confess Mr. Calloway is somewhat distressed by the turbulence."

"Tell Mr. Calloway that distressed is an improvement over dead, and dead is what we're all going to be if that housing patch fails at the wrong moment."

The edge of the Belt came up faster than Jax would have liked and slower than he needed, the debris field thinning into open space, and the moment they cleared the last drifting rock he opened the throttle as far as the tow line would tolerate, dragging Calloway's dead ship behind them like an anchor while the unidentified contact closed the gap with the confident, unhurried speed of something that expected this to be easy.

"They're hailing," Rin said. "Audio only, no video."

"Put it through."

The voice that came over the comm was flat, businesslike, entirely without the drama the situation seemed to call for. "Overdraft, you are towing property belonging to Fennick Recovery Solutions. Release the tow and stand off, and this doesn't need to become a problem for anybody."

Jax keyed the comm, matching the flat businesslike tone with one of his own. "Fennick Recovery Solutions, this cargo's currently under contract to an independent hauler who bought it in good faith. You've got a dispute, take it up through proper salvage arbitration instead of running down two civilian ships in restricted debris space."

"The cargo was stolen from a Fennick client. Salvage claims don't apply to stolen property, and neither does good faith, if your hauler friend didn't check his manifests before he loaded somebody else's freight." A pause, just long enough to feel deliberate. "Release the tow, Overdraft. We're not interested in you. We're interested in what you're dragging."

Mara's voice cut in over the internal comm, sharp and fast. "Jax, don't release the tow. If they're legitimate recovery, they'll want it verified through proper channels, not seized mid-flight by a ship running an intercept pattern in a debris field. That's not how legal recovery works, that's how theft works."

"You think they're lying?"

"I think it doesn't matter whether they're lying, because either way we're not just handing over a man's ship and cargo to whoever shows up with a fast hull and a confident voice. If they've got a legitimate claim, they can prove it dockside."

Jax keyed the comm again. "We'll bring the cargo and the hauler to the nearest station with a proper arbitration office. You want to follow us there and make your case through channels, that's your right. We're not releasing anything mid-flight to an unverified claim."

The response, when it came, had lost some of its businesslike patience. "That's a mistake."

"Wouldn't be my first this week."

The contact's engine flare brightened on the scope, closing distance with sudden, aggressive intent, and Jax's hands tightened on the yoke as the ship's weapon systems came up hot on Rin's readout.

"They're arming," Rin said, voice climbing. "Jax, they're actually going to shoot at us over a cargo dispute?"

"People shoot at all kinds of things they've decided are worth shooting at." He pushed the throttle further, feeling the tow line strain and the Overdraft's whole frame groan in protest, the thruster housing patch flaring an angry warning light across the console that he did not have time to address properly. "Mara, I need everything that ship's got, right now."

"You have everything it's got, that's the problem, we're already past what it's rated for—"

The first shot went wide, a warning more than an attack, but the second came close enough that the Overdraft's hull rang like a struck bell, and the patched thruster housing screamed a warning through the ship's error buzzer that made every hair on Jax's arms stand up.

"Housing's failing," Mara shouted. "Jax, if you push that thruster any harder it's going to go, and if it goes while we're under tow load it's going to go badly—"

"I know! I need a plan that isn't 'push harder,' Mara, because that's currently the only plan I've got!"

It was Henry, calm and unhurried even with weapons fire lighting up the scope, who offered the answer nobody else had quite reached yet. "Captain Mercer, if you release the tow line at the correct moment, rather than under duress, the hauler's own residual momentum combined with our current vector should carry it clear of the debris field on a stable trajectory. We do not need to maintain tow all the way to open space. We need only clear the densest portion of the Belt, at which point Mr. Calloway's vessel, even without functional drive, will coast free long enough for us to draw pursuit away."

"Calloway's ship becomes a decoy."

"Calloway's ship becomes a distraction, temporarily, while we ensure the pursuing vessel's attention remains divided. I would not recommend abandoning him entirely, but a controlled release at the correct vector serves both purposes at once."

Jax didn't love it, but he didn't have anything better, and the housing's warning light had gone from angry amber to a color that suggested imminent, expensive failure. "Calloway, brace for release, we're cutting the tow in ten seconds, your ship's going to coast on its own for a bit while we draw some heat off you."

"That's — okay, that's not what I wanted to hear, but okay—"

"Ten, nine—"

The release, when it came, sent the hauler drifting free on exactly the trajectory Henry had calculated, and the sudden loss of tow weight let the Overdraft leap forward with a burst of speed that nearly threw everyone against their restraints, thruster housing screaming its complaint the entire way. Jax cut hard across the pursuing ship's vector, close enough to force a collision-avoidance correction, and in the two seconds that correction bought them, hauled the Overdraft into a tight roll around a tumbling ice fragment that put solid rock between them and any clean shot.

"They're breaking off pursuit of the hauler," Rin reported, breathless. "They're coming after us instead, I think we made ourselves the more interesting target."

"That was the idea," Jax said through his teeth, though it hadn't been a comfortable idea to execute.

What followed was ten minutes of the ugliest flying Jax had done since the graveyard, weaving the wounded Overdraft through the Belt's remaining debris with the thruster housing patch shedding sparks and warnings the entire way, the pursuing ship never quite able to get a clean firing angle through the rock and ice but never quite giving up the chase either, until finally — with the housing readout screaming red and Mara shouting something about imminent catastrophic failure that Jax chose, in the moment, not to fully process — he found a gap in the Belt's density dense enough to hide their exit vector and cut the engines to a bare crawl behind the cover of a slow-tumbling asteroid twice the size of the ship.

Silence, but for the ship's own complaints.

"They lost us," Rin said finally, watching her scope. "Or they gave up. Either way, they're not on our tail anymore."

Jax exhaled, long and slow, and let his hands finally unclench from the yoke. "Housing?"

"Housing," Mara said, arriving in the cockpit doorway with grease up to her elbows and an expression that suggested the news wasn't going to improve his mood, "is done. Not damaged. Done. That patch is finished, we cannot fly on that thruster again until it's properly replaced, and I mean properly, not Vex's field patch, an actual replacement housing, which is going to cost more than we've got and take longer than we can currently afford."

"Great."

"And before you ask — no, we don't have a spare, and no, I can't fabricate one out of spite, no matter how much I clearly want to right now."

They found Calloway's hauler drifting exactly where Henry's calculation had promised, coasting slow and undamaged on the edge of the Belt, and towed it the rest of the way clear on the Overdraft’s remaining functional thrusters — a slower, more careful process than Jax would have liked, but one that didn't demand anything the ship's remaining systems couldn't provide.

Calloway met them at the airlock again once they’d docked properly at a small independent way station near the edge of the Coyle system, looking considerably more shaken than he had back in the Belt, and considerably more grateful than his bank account apparently allowed him to demonstrate.

"I can't pay the full rate," he admitted, standing in the cargo bay with his hands shoved deep in his pockets. "Cargo's not mine to sell — turns out Fennick's claim wasn't entirely wrong, even if the way they went about it was. Once I got a proper look at the manifest here at the station, with an actual clear head, I found the original shipping documentation buried under the fake overlay. This was stolen, just not by me. I'm required to surrender it to whoever can prove rightful ownership, and that's apparently not nobody, given how hard Fennick was chasing it."

"So the cargo split's worthless," Mara said flatly.

"The cargo split's worthless, yeah. I'm sorry. I know that's not what you signed on for."

"And the flat fee?"

Calloway's face did something complicated, somewhere between shame and genuine regret. "I've got about a third of what I promised. The rest was contingent on the cargo delivery bonus, which obviously isn't happening now that I've got to hand the whole load over to whoever Fennick's actually working for. I know that's not fair to you. I know you saved my life out there, both of you did, all of you did." He looked around at the four of them — Jax, arms crossed, expression carefully neutral; Mara, jaw tight with the particular fury of someone doing math that refused to add up in her favor; Rin, still favoring her bruised ankle, watching with weary resignation; Henry, standing quiet and patient near the hatch. "I'll pay the rest the second I've got it. I mean that. You've got my word and my registry number, and unlike Fennick, that's actually real."

"Your word doesn't fix a busted thruster housing," Mara said, not cruelly, just tired.

"No," Calloway agreed. "It doesn't. I'm sorry."

Jax looked at the third of the promised fee sitting in Calloway's outstretched hand, thought about the housing that needed replacing, the fuel reserves running low, the account still frozen back on the Anchor, and the long list of debts that had only gotten longer in the course of trying to pay off the ones that already existed.

"Take it," he said to Mara, who took it with the particular grim efficiency of someone banking a small loss against a larger one, and Jax reached out to shake Calloway's hand anyway, because the man had been honest once the truth actually mattered, and that counted for something on a frontier where it usually didn't.

"Get that manifest sorted," Jax said. "And next time you buy a run secondhand, check what's already wired into the reactor feed before you fly it into restricted debris fields."

"Yeah," Calloway said, with a weak, exhausted laugh. "Yeah, I think I've learned that lesson about as hard as a man can learn it."

They limped away from the way station with one thruster disabled and a third of the payment they’d been promised, the Overdraft's damaged housing groaning its complaint every time Jax so much as breathed near the throttle, fuel reserves dipping further into the red than any of them wanted to look at directly.

Rin sat in the cockpit doorway, ankle propped up again, watching the way station shrink behind them through the rear viewport. "So to summarize," she said, "we saved a guy's life, dodged a ship full of armed recovery agents, blew out our only working thruster patch, and got paid a third of what we were promised for the privilege."

"That's about the shape of it," Jax said.

"Love this job."

"Nobody loves this job, Rin, that's not why we do it."

"Then why do we do it?"

Jax didn't answer right away, watching the stars slide past through the scratched canopy glass, the low hum of the ship's overworked systems filling the silence where an answer might have gone.

"Because the alternative," Mara said finally, from where she'd settled into the copilot seat with a fresh assessment of the housing damage already scrolling across her display, expression grim, "is being the kind of people who leave somebody stranded in a debris field because helping wasn't profitable enough. And I'd rather be broke than be that."

Nobody argued the point, though nobody looked especially happy about it either, and the Overdraft carried them onward through the dark, wounded and underpaid and, for now, still theirs.