The Ember Fox

The ship came in loud, in the specific way small, fast ships sometimes did when their pilots didn't much care who noticed them arrive, cutting a tight, showy arc past the docking ring before easing into an open berth with more flourish than the maneuver strictly required. Tomas, watching the approach from his console, gave a low whistle.

"Somebody's feeling themselves today," he said, and went to check the manifest, mostly out of professional habit, though the ship — sleek, russet-colored, a little battered along one flank in the way of something that got flown hard and maintained well rather than babied — wasn't on any schedule he recognized, which usually meant a private visitor rather than a paying customer.

The man who came down the ramp a few minutes later matched the ship exactly: broad-shouldered, dark-haired, wearing a flight jacket that had clearly seen better decades and didn't care in the slightest, moving through the corridor toward the restaurant with the loose, confident stride of someone who considered every place he'd ever landed to be, in some small way, already his. He pushed through the door of the Cosmic Bar and Grill like he owned a piece of it, grinning at the room in general before his eyes landed on anyone in particular.

"Well, would you look at this place," he announced, to nobody and everybody. "Still standing. I half expected it to have fallen into the docking ring by now."

"We get that a lot," Dani said, from behind the counter, eyeing him with immediate, open curiosity. "Can I help you, or are you just here to insult the architecture?"

"Little bit of both, if that's on the menu." He grinned at her, easy and unbothered, and glanced around the room again. "I'm looking for a cook. Goes by Sol. Tell me she's still terrorizing whoever's unlucky enough to share a kitchen with her."

"She terrorizes the produce mostly," Dani said. "Who's asking?"

"Tell her it's Rafe," he said, "and tell her I'm not leaving until she comes out here and says hello properly."

Dani, delighted by the sudden appearance of an unexplained plot development in an otherwise ordinary afternoon, went to relay this message with considerably more theater than it required, poking her head through the kitchen pass. "Sol. There's a man out here. Says his name's Rafe. Says he's not leaving until you come say hello."

There was a pause from the kitchen, brief but distinct, and then Sol's voice, several degrees more careful than her usual brisk register. "Rafe's here?"

"Apparently."

Another pause, longer this time, and when Sol came through the kitchen door a moment later, wiping her hands on her apron, she looked — Dani would later struggle to describe it precisely, but the closest she came was *caught*, the particular flustered self-consciousness of someone encountering a piece of their life they hadn't expected to run into today, here, in an apron, with flour on one sleeve.

"You could've commed ahead," she said, which was not, Dani noted with interest, anything close to hello.

"And ruin the look on your face right now? Not a chance," Rafe said, already crossing the room to catch her in a brief, easy hug that Sol accepted with a stiffness that suggested she hadn't quite decided how to hold herself yet. "You look good, Sol. Kitchen life agrees with you."

"Kitchen life is kitchen life. What are you doing out this way? Last I heard you were three systems over."

"Was. Picked up a run that put me through this corridor, figured I wasn't passing this close without stopping in." He held her out at arm's length, studying her with open, unhurried affection. "You cut your hair."

"Two years ago."

"I'm observant on a delay," Rafe said, entirely unrepentant, and Sol, despite herself, laughed, the sound loosening something in her posture that hadn't been there a moment earlier.

Nari, drawn out from the back by the general commotion, took up an unofficial post near the counter to watch this unfold with unconcealed interest, exchanging a glance with Dani that communicated, without either of them needing to say it aloud, that there was clearly a story here worth paying attention to.

"You two know each other," Nari said, mostly to confirm what was already obvious.

"Known each other since before either of us had any business flying anything," Rafe said. "We crewed together on a hauler run, must be — what, twelve years back now?"

"Thirteen," Sol said.

"Thirteen. She kept us all fed on a ship that had no business calling its galley a galley, and I kept us more or less on schedule. Between the two of us, we made a decent crew for a couple years before she decided cooking somewhere with a steady floor beat cooking in zero-g, and I decided the opposite."

"You decided flying beat everything," Sol said. "That wasn't a hard call for you."

"It really wasn't," Rafe agreed, entirely without shame, and Dani, watching this exchange with the rapt attention of someone assembling a story out of fragments, leaned toward Nari.

"This is the best thing that's happened all week," she said, low, and Nari, grinning, didn't disagree.

Rafe stayed at the counter a while, trading news with Sol in the easy, overlapping shorthand of people who'd known each other long enough that half their conversation didn't need explaining — names Dani and Nari didn't recognize, ships that had apparently changed hands or been decommissioned, a mutual friend who'd settled down somewhere neither of them had expected. Sol relaxed further as it went on, the initial self-consciousness wearing off into something closer to her usual grounded ease, though there remained, underneath it, a warmth Dani hadn't seen from her before, not quite like this.

It was partway through this catching-up that Rafe glanced past Sol toward the window, where his ship sat visible in its berth, and got a look on his face that Sol apparently recognized immediately, because she said, "No," before he'd said anything at all.

"I haven't asked yet."

"You've got the look. I know the look."

"I don't have a look."

"You have absolutely got a look, Rafe, you've had it since you were nineteen and it means you're about to suggest something that sounds fun and is going to get somebody in trouble."

"Nobody's getting in trouble. I was simply going to point out," Rafe said, with the exaggerated patience of a man wrongly accused, "that I've got a few hours to kill before my next window opens up, and I've got a perfectly good ship sitting right there doing absolutely nothing, and it seems like a genuine waste to let a fast little ship and a free afternoon go to waste in the same place at the same time."

"You want to take me flying."

"I want to take you flying," Rafe confirmed. "The old way. No cargo, no manifest, no schedule. Just up, around, and back before anybody misses us. You used to love that."

Sol hesitated, and Dani, watching this hesitation with the focus of someone watching a sporting event, could see plainly that some part of her genuinely wanted to say yes, the same part that had lit up talking about the old hauler run a few minutes earlier.

"I've got a shift," Sol said, though it came out less certain than her usual flat practicality.

"I could cover," Chef said, from the kitchen doorway, where he'd been listening without comment for the last several minutes. "Just finished mine. Nothing pressing on the board for the next few hours."

"You just finished your own shift, Chef. You don't need to pick up mine on top of it."

"I don't need to. I'm offering."

"I know you're offering. I'm saying no," Sol said, though there was real warmth under the refusal rather than any actual irritation. "You've been on your feet all day. Go home, put your feet up, we'll talk later. I've got the kitchen. It's fine."

"You sure?"

"I'm sure." She looked at Rafe, something wistful crossing her face for just a moment before she set it aside with the same brisk practicality she brought to everything. "Go on without me. Take the girls, if they want it. I've got work."

"You're actually turning down a free ride to stay and cook dinner," Rafe said, though he said it fondly rather than as a real argument, the tone of someone who already knew, from long experience, that pushing wouldn't change her mind once she'd set it.

"Somebody's got to keep this place running while you're off showing off for an audience," Sol said. "Take Dani. Take Nari. Take Chef, since apparently he's got the afternoon free after all." She nodded toward Chef, a small private understanding passing between them that neither felt the need to explain out loud. "They'll have a good time. You'll show off. Everybody wins."

"You're really not coming?"

"I'm really not coming today," Sol said. "Next time you're through this corridor, though. I mean it."

"I'll hold you to that," Rafe said, and after one more moment of clearly weighing whether to push further, decided, evidently, that Sol's refusal was as firm as it looked, and turned his attention instead to the rest of the room with the immediate, easy pivot of a man who didn't waste energy arguing with a decision that had already been made. "All right. Who wants to come see what a decent ship actually feels like?"

Dani was already untying her apron before he'd finished the sentence. "Me. Obviously me."

"I'm in," Nari said, with rather more restraint but no less genuine interest.

"Chef?"

Chef considered this for a moment with his usual unhurried deliberation, glanced once at Sol — who gave him a small nod that said, plainly, *go, I mean it* — and then shrugged, in the manner of a man deciding an unexpected afternoon off was worth taking when it was offered. "Why not."

"Excellent," Rafe said, clapping his hands together. "Sol, I'll have them back in one piece. Mostly."

"Mostly is not the reassurance you think it is," Sol said, though she was smiling now, and shooed the three of them toward the door with the particular satisfaction of someone who, despite turning down the offer herself, was clearly pleased to see her friend's ship put to good use.

The ship, once they were aboard, turned out to be considerably nicer inside than its scuffed exterior suggested, a compact, well-kept little vessel with worn leather seats and instrument panels that had clearly been maintained with real care despite the ship's evident age.

"Her name's the *Ember Fox*," Rafe said, settling into the pilot's seat with the ease of a man who'd sat in it ten thousand times. "Bought her secondhand a long time ago, rebuilt half her guts myself. Fastest thing this side of the corridor, pound for pound, though I'll deny saying that if you repeat it to anyone with a faster ship."

"How fast is fast?" Nari asked, taking the seat beside him with open curiosity.

"Fast enough that you'll feel it in your stomach the first time I open her up, and not in a bad way, if I do it right." He glanced back at Dani and Chef, settling into the two rear seats. "Everybody buckled? Good. Let's go show you the neighborhood."

The *Ember Fox* eased out of her berth with none of the showy flourish of her arrival, Rafe apparently more interested in a smooth departure with passengers aboard than in impressing the docking ring a second time, and once they'd cleared the station's immediate traffic pattern, he opened the throttle in a way that pressed everyone back gently into their seats and pulled a delighted whoop out of Dani that she didn't even attempt to suppress.

"There it is," Rafe said, grinning at the sound. "That's the reaction I fly for."

"Do it again."

"Patience. We've got a whole afternoon. I'm not blowing my best moves in the first thirty seconds." He banked the ship in a long, easy curve, bringing into view a stretch of open space Nari hadn't had reason to look at closely before, a scattering of rock and ice further out along the local traffic lane, catching the light in a way that made the whole field glitter faintly. "That's the debris field the old surveys never bothered clearing. Mostly harmless, moves slow, makes for a nice view if you keep enough distance, which I will, because I'd rather show off than actually clip a rock and have to explain that to your friend back at the counter."

"She'd never let you hear the end of it," Chef said, the first thing he'd said since boarding, watching the drifting field through the viewport with quiet, unhurried interest.

"She'd never let me hear the end of anything. That's sort of her whole personality," Rafe said, fondly. "Known her thirteen years and she still finds new ways to give me grief about decisions I made a decade ago."

"She mentioned you were on a hauler crew together."

"Best two years of my working life, before I got smart and bought my own ship. She kept that whole crew fed on rations that shouldn't have been possible to make edible, let alone good, and she ran that galley like she owned the ship outright, which, functionally, she did, because none of us dared cross her." He eased the ship into a gentler cruise, giving the debris field time to drift past the viewport. "I always figured she'd end up running her own kitchen somewhere eventually. Didn't figure it'd be a little waystation restaurant, but it suits her. She always did like taking care of people more than she ever admitted to."

"That tracks," Dani said, from the back. "She pretends she doesn't care about anything and then quietly does something incredibly thoughtful and denies it happened."

"That's Sol exactly," Rafe said, delighted. "Glad to hear thirteen years hasn't changed the essentials."

He took them further out along the local lane after that, pointing out a cluster of small, icy moons caught in a loose orbital dance around a larger rock, their surfaces catching the distant light in soft, uneven patches. "Locals call those the Sisters, though I couldn't tell you which one's supposed to be the oldest or why they bothered naming them individually, since they all look about the same to me."

"They don't look the same," Nari said, leaning closer to the viewport. "That one's got a ring of ice around the equator. The others don't."

"Fair point. I stand corrected. That one's clearly the fancy sister," Rafe said, and Nari laughed, something in her posture loosening the way it did when a place surprised her with more detail than she'd expected to find in it.

They cruised past a wider stretch of open traffic lane after that, with a handful of freighters making their slow, patient way along the established route. Rafe kept up an easy commentary throughout: which routes carried which cargo, which stretches got congested during certain seasons, and which captains were best avoided.

One story involved a near-miss years ago with a freighter captain who still, apparently, held a grudge. Rafe told it with enough self-deprecating humor that it was obvious the story had improved considerably in the retelling.

"Was it actually a near miss," Chef asked, "or is this the kind of story that gets bigger every time you tell it?"

"It was a near miss the first three times I told it. Somewhere around telling number forty it became a near catastrophe, and by now it's basically the reason that entire stretch of lane has updated traffic protocols, which is not remotely true, but it's a better story that way," Rafe said, entirely unbothered by being caught at it, and Chef, watching him with the same dry, unhurried attention he brought to most things, allowed himself something close to a smile.

"You want to try the controls?" Rafe asked, a while later, glancing at Dani in the mirror. "Nothing complicated. Straight line, gentle curve, I'll be right here the whole time and the ship won't let either of us do anything genuinely stupid even if we tried."

Dani was out of her seat before he'd finished the offer, wedging herself into the copilot's chair Nari vacated for her with visible eagerness. "What do I do?"

"Hands here, and here. Gentle. She's responsive, so you don't need to muscle her around, just nudge and let her follow." Rafe kept one hand hovering near the secondary controls, watching Dani's grip with easy attention rather than anxiety. "Try banking left, nice and slow."

Dani eased the controls, and the *Ember Fox* tilted obediently, the stars outside sliding in a slow, graceful arc across the viewport.

"Oh, I love this," Dani said, delighted. "This is so much better than driving a cargo skiff."

"Cargo skiffs are built for hauling, not for feeling good under your hands. This girl's built to feel good. Different job entirely." He watched Dani level the ship back out with a satisfied nod. "Nice. You've got decent instincts. Try easing the speed up a touch, right there, that dial."

Dani nudged the throttle, and the ship picked up speed smoothly, the debris field falling further behind them.

"This is the best thing I've done all month," Dani announced.

"High praise for a job that mostly involves waiting tables," Rafe said.

"I stand by it."

Nari's turn came a while later, once Dani had reluctantly ceded the seat, and she approached it with rather more careful deliberation than Dani had shown, testing the controls in small, cautious increments before committing to anything larger.

"You don't have to be gentle with her," Rafe said, watching Nari's careful, minimal inputs with open amusement. "She's not going to bite you for pushing a little harder."

"I'd rather not find out the hard way."

"Fair enough. Cautious pilots live longer, statistically. Try the marker up ahead — see that beacon blinking off to the right? Line up on it, ease toward it, nothing fancy."

Nari found the marker, guided the ship toward it with steady, deliberate care, and when she reached it and glanced back at Rafe for confirmation, got an approving nod that clearly pleased her more than she let show.

"Good line," Rafe said. "You've got a careful hand. Different style than your friend back there, but just as good in its own way."

"I like knowing what I'm doing before I do it," Nari said.

"Nothing wrong with that. Some of the best pilots I've ever flown with were the careful ones. The reckless ones mostly end up as cautionary tales somebody tells at a bar," Rafe said, with the easy authority of a man who'd clearly told a few of those stories himself, and Nari, satisfied, eased back out of the seat to let him take the controls again as they curved back around toward the station.

Somewhere in the middle of Nari's turn at the marker, Dani, still buzzing from her own turn, leaned forward between the front seats to get a better look at the instrument panel, pointing at a dial she didn't recognize. "What's that one do?"

"That one tells me how much fuel I've got left, which is a question I try to answer honestly with myself at all times," Rafe said. "That one there's the shield status, that one's comms, and that one, the little one with the chip in the casing, doesn't do anything anymore. Used to control a sensor array that stopped working years ago. I keep meaning to pull it."

"Why haven't you?"

"Because it's been broken exactly as long as I've owned her, and at this point pulling it out feels like it'd be bad luck. She's flown fine with it broken this whole time. Why tempt fate." He said this with total seriousness, as though it were the most reasonable position in the galaxy, and Dani, delighted, decided not to argue with a superstition that seemed to be working.

"That's not how superstition works."

"It's exactly how superstition works. You don't test the things that are currently going well," Rafe said, and Chef, from the back, made a small sound that might have been agreement.

"He's got a point," Chef said. "I've got a spatula I've used for six years I refuse to replace for the same reason."

"See," Rafe said, delighted to find an ally, "the quiet one gets it."

Chef, throughout most of this, mostly watched, offering the occasional dry observation but content, in his usual way, to let the enthusiasm belong to the people who wanted it, though when Rafe glanced back at him near the end of the flight and asked, "You want a turn, or are you happy just watching us have all the fun," Chef considered it for a moment and shrugged.

"I'll pass. I like knowing where my feet are."

"Fair enough. Not everybody needs to fly to enjoy a good flight," Rafe said, unbothered, and brought the *Ember Fox* around in a final wide loop that gave them one more clean view of the station itself, small and worn and steady against the dark, before easing her back toward the docking ring with the same smooth control he'd shown leaving it.

Back at the restaurant, Sol had spent the intervening hours exactly the way she'd said she would, working the kitchen with her usual brisk efficiency, though anyone who knew her well enough to look might have noticed her checking the door more often than the evening's business strictly warranted. Chef, coming in ahead of the others to wash up, caught this immediately.

"They'll be back soon," he said, tying his apron back on. "Go on. I've got it from here."

"You just got off a flight, Chef."

"I got off a flight I didn't have to work for. This is different. Go sit with your friend before he flies off again for another thirteen years." He nodded toward the door, where Rafe's voice could already be heard approaching, still recounting some detail of the flight to an enthusiastic Dani. "I mean it, Sol. Go."

Sol hesitated only a moment before untying her own apron, some tension she hadn't quite realized she was carrying easing out of her shoulders. "You're sure."

"I'm sure. Go," Chef said again, simply, and that settled it, the way it usually did when Chef said something plainly rather than arguing it.

Rafe came through the door with Dani and Nari trailing after him, all three of them talking over each other about the flight. Dani recounted her turn at the controls with considerably more drama than the maneuver had involved, while Nari supplied quieter, more precise corrections. Rafe grinned through the whole thing, clearly having enjoyed the afternoon every bit as much as his passengers.

"You should've seen Dani banking that thing like she was born to it," Rafe said, catching sight of Sol and crossing toward her. "And Nari lined up on that beacon marker cleaner than half the actual pilots I've flown with. Good crew you've got here."

"They're not my crew, they work here," Sol said, though she was smiling.

"Same thing, basically," Rafe said, and Sol, deciding not to argue the point, gestured toward one of the quieter booths near the back.

"Sit. Tell me everything, before you disappear on me again for another decade."

They settled into the booth together, and something in Rafe shifted almost immediately. The loud, easy energy that had carried him through the afternoon softened into something quieter and more settled. With Sol, he no longer seemed to feel any need to fill the room.

"It's not a decade," he said, mildly. "It's been two years since I came through last."

"Feels like a decade. You don't write."

"I write. You just never answer in under a month."

"I'm busy. Some of us have actual jobs that don't involve flying around admiring our own reflection in the viewport," Sol said, and Rafe laughed, low and genuine, nothing like the big performative delight he'd shown the girls an hour earlier.

"How's the kitchen, really?"

"Good. Better than good, most days. It's steady work, decent people, nobody shooting at anybody, which is more than I could say for some of our old runs." She glanced toward the kitchen, where Chef could be seen working the grill with his usual unhurried focus. "Chef's solid. Good to work with. Doesn't talk much, but neither do half the good ones."

"He offered to cover your shift for you earlier. Didn't even hesitate."

"He does that." Sol shrugged, though something in the gesture suggested she'd noticed, and appreciated, more than she was letting on. "We look out for each other around here. It's a small place. You get to know people fast when there's only a handful of you keeping it running."

"Sounds a lot like the old hauler crew, honestly."

"It's not that different," Sol admitted. "Smaller ship. Same general idea."

"How's the rest of it? The place, the route, all of it."

"Same as ever, mostly. Slow season, then busy season, then some kind of chaos every few months that everybody talks about for a year afterward." She smiled, thinking of something she didn't elaborate on. "We had a theater troupe stranded here a while back. Rehearsed in the old common room. Whole thing turned into an event."

"That sounds like exactly the kind of story you'd have loved being in the middle of."

"I was in the middle of the kitchen, mostly. Kept everybody fed. That's usually where I end up in these stories."

"Story of your life," Rafe said, fondly. "You feed everybody and pretend you're not the reason half of it goes as well as it does."

"I don't pretend anything. I just do the job."

"Sure you do," Rafe said, unconvinced and clearly not planning to argue the point further, and reached over to steal a piece of bread off the small plate someone had left on the table between them, an old, easy habit that neither of them commented on.

"How's the *Ember Fox* holding up? You said you rebuilt half her guts."

"Runs better now than she did new, if I'm being honest, though I'd deny that to anyone trying to sell me a newer model." He glanced toward the window, where the ship sat visible in her berth, catching the last of the docking ring's light along one battered flank. "Picking up mostly small runs these days. Nothing glamorous. Enough to keep fuel in the tank and keep me moving, which is really all I've ever wanted out of any of it."

"Same old Rafe."

"How's Bram doing, anyway? Last I heard he'd finally settled down somewhere."

"Bram's fine. Married now, if you can believe it. Runs a small parts depot two systems over, sends me a message every few months just to remind me he's got a normal life and I don't." Rafe shook his head, fond and a little rueful. "Keeps telling me I should try it. Settling somewhere. I keep telling him the *Ember Fox* doesn't take well to being parked."

"You've been telling him that for how long now?"

"Long enough that I'm fairly sure neither of us believes I'm going to change my mind, and we've both made peace with that." He glanced toward the window again, the ship catching the light. "It's not the worst life. I like waking up somewhere different most weeks. I like not knowing exactly what I'll be looking at out the viewport until I get there. Some people need the floor under their feet. I need it to keep moving a little."

"I remember," Sol said, not unkindly. "You were like that even back on the hauler. Always the first one wanting to take the long way somewhere if it meant seeing something new."

"Guilty as charged."

"You ever miss it? The flying, I mean," she added, a beat later, turning the question back around. "Not the ration bars. Nobody could miss the ration bars."

Sol considered this for a moment, turning her water glass slowly between her hands. "Sometimes. Not enough to go back to it, though. I like having a floor under my feet that isn't going to shift on me. I like knowing where the walls are." She glanced toward the kitchen again, at Chef and the low, familiar hum of the restaurant settling into its evening rhythm around them. "This suits me better than I expected it to, when I first landed here."

"Good," Rafe said, simply, with none of his earlier performance in it, just plain, quiet warmth. "That's all I ever wanted to hear, honestly. Just wanted to see you were doing all right."

"I'm doing all right," Sol said, and meant it.

For a while after that, they didn't talk about much of anything in particular. They simply sat together in the easy quiet of two people who'd known each other long enough not to need every conversation to be about something.

Around them, the restaurant settled into its evening rhythm. Dani's voice was still audible near the counter, recounting the flight to anyone who would listen, while Chef worked the grill without comment.

It was an ordinary evening, carrying on exactly as it always did, just a little warmer for the company.