Unknown Sender

The message came through on the ship's ordinary comm terminal, unremarkable in every way except for the fact that it made Jax go very still in the pilot's seat, cigarette forgotten halfway to his mouth.

SHORT-RANGE TEXT PACKET. SENDER ID: BUNNY. PRIORITY FLAG SET.

Need help. Now. Coordinates attached. Bring nothing but yourself. You'll know why when you see it. — B

Beneath the message sat a string of numbers, a station registry, and a short line of old shorthand that meant nothing to civilian eyes and everything to anyone who'd once worn a uniform: a callsign format, a grid reference style, a way of writing coordinates that no commercial pilot had used in fifteen years.

"Who's Bunny?" Rin asked, reading over his shoulder with the casual nosiness she brought to literally every piece of information that crossed the ship's systems, hers or not.

"Nobody," Jax said, and closed the message a half-second too fast.

"Nobody sent you a priority flag with your name on it."

"It's an old contact. Not important." He was already keying in a new heading, fingers moving with the particular careful precision of a man trying very hard to look like he wasn't doing anything unusual.

Mara leaned in from the copilot seat, reading the coordinates over his shoulder before he could close that window too. "That's two jumps out of our way. In the wrong direction, I might add, from the fuel depot we actually need to reach before we run dry."

"I know where the fuel depot is, Mara."

"Then you know we can't afford a detour for 'nobody, not important.'"

"It's not — " Jax stopped, jaw tight, and did not finish the sentence, which told Rin and Mara both considerably more than he intended it to.

Rin's eyes went wide with delighted, immediate understanding. "Oh my god. It's a girl."

"It is not—"

"It's absolutely a girl. Look at his face, Mara, that's not the face of a guy talking about an old supply contact, that's the face of a guy who just got a text from an ex."

"Bunny," Mara said, testing the name like she was turning over a suspicious coin. "That's not a callsign. That's a pet name. Somebody's pet name for you, or your pet name for somebody, and either way I want to know which."

"I'm not discussing this."

"You don't have to discuss it, we're just going to speculate loudly for the rest of the flight."

Henry, who had been quietly restocking the galley's meager supplies nearby, turned with an expression of complete, sincere interest that made the whole situation immeasurably worse. "Captain Mercer, if this is a matter of the heart, I would be glad to assist however I am able. I have some familiarity with the etiquette of reunions, formal apologies, and appropriate floral substitutes given our current lack of florists."

"Henry, there's nothing to assist with."

"Of course. I only wish to be useful, should sentiment require it."

"It doesn't."

"Noted, and filed away in case circumstances change."

Jax pinched the bridge of his nose, said nothing further, and did not correct a single word of it — not because the teasing didn't sting, but because the alternative meant explaining who Bunny actually was, and that was a door he had no intention of opening in front of an audience, least of all today. He simply set the new heading, locked it in, and reached for the yoke with the tight, controlled movements of a man who had already made up his mind and didn't care to discuss the decision further.

"We're going," he said. "That's the end of the conversation."

"Nobody said it wasn't," Mara said, though she was watching him now with something sharper than teasing, the particular attentive focus she reserved for moments when Jax's usual careless calm cracked just slightly at the edges. "Just tell me one thing. Is this going to get us shot at?"

Jax didn't answer right away, which was, in its own way, an answer.

"Great," Mara said. "Wonderful. Love this for us."

The station appeared on long-range scope an hour later, a squat, ugly industrial hulk hanging in orbit around a mining world nobody had bothered to name past its registry number — a freight transfer point, once, built to move ore and refined metal between surface haulers and deep-space carriers, the kind of facility that had been state-of-the-art three decades ago and had been quietly dying ever since.

"That thing's barely holding pressure," Mara said, studying the readouts as they closed the distance. "Half its docking arms are dark. This isn't just old, this is abandoned-old."

"It's not abandoned," Jax said. "Not entirely."

"How do you know that?"

He didn't answer, which by now had stopped surprising anyone and started simply accumulating, one more unanswered question in a growing pile.

Rin ran her own scan from the copilot seat, frowning at what came back. "I'm picking up faint power signatures scattered through the structure, not centralized — looks like somebody's running portable generators in a few sections rather than the station's main grid, which makes sense if the grid's mostly dead. And there's motion. Multiple heat signatures, moving in patterns that don't look like maintenance work." She glanced up. "Jax, those patterns look like a search grid. Like somebody's hunting for something specific through that station, section by section."

"Yeah," Jax said quietly. "That tracks."

"That tracks with what, exactly?"

"With why Bunny needs help."

Mara had gone very still beside him, the last of her teasing finally burned away by the actual shape of the situation coming into focus. "Jax. Who is Bunny, and who's hunting them?"

"I'll explain after."

"You've said that about four things now and explained none of them."

"I know." He brought the Overdraft into a slow, careful approach toward one of the station's dead docking arms, the one furthest from the concentration of heat signatures Rin had flagged, cutting thrust to a whisper as he eased them toward a service airlock that hadn't seen legitimate traffic in years. "I'm asking you to trust me on this one without the whole story. I know that's not fair. I'm asking anyway."

Mara looked at him for a long moment — really looked, the way she looked at a cracked housing or a failing seal, assessing exactly how much danger she was about to walk into and whether the person asking her to walk into it deserved the benefit of the doubt.

"Fine," she said finally. "But I'm bringing the riveter, and you're telling me everything the second we're clear, and if this turns out to be some ex-girlfriend drama that gets us shot at, I am never letting you live it down."

"Deal."

They docked quiet and dark, running lights cut, and suited up in the cargo bay with the particular economy of two people who'd done this exact routine more times than either cared to count. Mara checked the plasma riveter's charge level twice, grimacing faintly at the readout — full charge, but not much reserve beyond it, every discharge from here on out a cost they'd feel later in a way that had nothing to do with the current crisis.

"Rin," Jax said, keying his comm as they reached the airlock, "talk to us the second we're inside. I want eyes on those search patterns the whole way."

"Copy that. I've got partial access to the station's old maintenance network — it's ancient, half the sensors are dead, but I can see enough to give you a rough picture. There's a service corridor about thirty meters past the airlock that should route you around the main search grid, assuming it's not blocked."

"Assuming."

"I said assuming for a reason, Jax, this station's been dying a slow death for years, I can't promise you anything's where it's supposed to be."

Henry's voice came through next, calm and precise. "I will maintain the docking connection and monitor for any station-side attempt to seal or disable it. Should you require immediate departure, the Overdraft will be ready the moment you return."

"Thanks, Henry."

"Please be careful, Captain Mercer. I would prefer not to explain your absence to Miss Aoki's inevitable emotional response."

"I'd prefer that too."

The airlock cycled with a groan that suggested it hadn't been used in longer than was reassuring, and Jax and Mara stepped through into a corridor lit only by the dim amber glow of failing emergency strips, air stale and cold, the whole structure creaking faintly around them with the particular groan of aging metal under uneven thermal stress.

"Charming," Mara muttered, riveter held ready in both hands. "Really glad we came here."

"This way." Jax moved with a confidence that made Mara's eyebrows climb, cutting left at a junction without hesitation, ducking under a half-collapsed support beam with the ease of someone who'd navigated exactly this kind of layout before — not this station specifically, she realized, but this kind of station, the standardized bones underneath the specific decay.

"You've been in a facility like this before."

"Once or twice."

"When?"

"Long time ago." He didn't elaborate, and something in the set of his jaw told her not to push, not yet, not with armed men somewhere in the structure and a clock they couldn't see running down toward whatever came next.

Rin's voice crackled through the comm, tight with focus. "Okay, I've got partial visual on two of the search teams. They're moving in a standard clearing pattern, section by section, methodical — this isn't a panic search, this is trained personnel doing exactly what they're supposed to do. Which is bad news for subtlety, but good news for predictability, because I can tell you roughly where they'll be in the next few minutes."

"Copy. Where's Bunny?"

"Working on it. The heat signature that's stayed mostly stationary, tucked into a maintenance section on the lower level, matches the coordinates from the message. But there's a search team converging on that section faster than I'd like."

"How fast?"

"Fast enough that I'd stop asking me questions and start moving."

They moved.

The maintenance passages beneath the station's main deck were narrower, danker, and considerably less structurally reassuring than the corridors above, pipes running overhead in tangled clusters, some hissing faintly with escaping pressure, others dead and frosted with decades of accumulated ice where coolant had leaked and frozen in the absence of proper heating. Jax led with the quiet, economical movement of someone conserving energy for a fight he expected to need it for, Mara close behind with the riveter's weight balanced easy in her grip.

"Door ahead's sealed," Rin reported. "Manual lock, not powered — looks like somebody wedged it from the inside, probably your friend Bunny trying to buy themselves some space. You're going to need to force it."

"Mara."

"On it." She stepped up to the heavy pressure door, ran a quick assessment along its seam with practiced eyes, and set the riveter's muzzle against the weakest point of the frame. "This is going to cost us a full charge, just so we're clear on the math."

"Do it."

The discharge, when it came, was loud and violent in the enclosed space, a bright flash of superheated plasma tearing through the door's hinge assembly with a shriek of tortured metal, and the door groaned inward under Jax's shoulder a moment later, swinging free with the particular reluctant creak of something that hadn't wanted to move in years.

Beyond it, the passage opened into a wider maintenance bay, dark, cluttered with old freight equipment — a dead cargo loader hunched in one corner like a sleeping beast, stacked crates lashed down and forgotten, a service elevator shaft yawning open at the far end with its cage long since fallen or removed.

"Movement," Mara said sharply, riveter coming up.

"Not Bunny," Rin's voice cut in, urgent. "That's one of the search teams, they've adjusted their pattern, they're heading straight for your position—"

The first shot came without warning, a sharp crack that sent both of them diving for cover behind the dead cargo loader, sparks flaring off the metal where the round struck close enough to feel the heat of it.

"Rin, I need a way out of this bay that isn't the way we came in!"

"Working on it—there's a service elevator shaft at the far end, cage is gone but the shaft itself should still be intact, there might be a maintenance ladder—"

"Might?"

"I told you this station's a mess, I'm doing my best with forty-year-old sensor data!"

More shots, three or four in quick succession, chewing into the loader's housing hard enough that Mara felt the impacts through the metal at her back. She risked a glance around the edge of their cover and counted at least three shapes moving through the bay's far entrance, spreading out with the disciplined, unhurried confidence of people who had done this before and expected to win.

"They're not station security," she said. "That's not station gear."

"No," Jax said grimly. "It's not."

They moved low and fast between cover, Jax directing them toward the elevator shaft with the same unnerving familiarity he'd shown in the corridors above, Mara trusting the instinct even without understanding where it came from, until a fresh burst of fire forced them both down hard behind a stack of ancient crates with nowhere left to run and the shooters closing the angle with methodical patience.

"Pinned," Mara said, breathing hard. "Jax, I've got maybe one more charge in this thing before I'm swinging it like a very expensive club."

Jax didn't answer with words. He reached beneath his jacket, and Mara watched with something between surprise and dawning understanding as his hand came back holding the old revolver — the one that lived bolted into a locked case aboard the Overdraft, the one none of them had seen him carry outside the ship in longer than she could remember.

Their eyes met for half a second, just long enough for the question to pass between them without either of them saying it aloud: you brought that? For this?

Whatever answer he might have given stayed unspoken, because the moment demanded action rather than conversation, and Jax rose just enough to sight along the crate's edge, and fired.

The revolver's report was deafening in the enclosed bay, a sound with actual physical weight behind it, utterly unlike the sharp crack of the pursuers' weapons, and the round struck the housing of the dead cargo loader square in its hydraulic joint, blowing the ancient mechanism loose with a shriek of tearing metal that sent the whole unit lurching sideways directly into the path of the nearest shooter, who scrambled back with a shout of alarm.

Jax fired again, deliberate, unhurried despite everything, and the second round severed the cable holding a stack of crates in a precarious lean above the second shooter's position, sending them crashing down in a chaos of noise and dust that broke the search team's formation entirely.

"Go," he said, already moving, and Mara didn't need telling twice.

They reached the elevator shaft in the confusion, Mara firing the riveter's last reserve charge into the shaft's rusted access panel to tear it free rather than waste time forcing it by hand, and the two of them dropped through into the darkness below just as the search team began to regroup behind them.

The lower maintenance level was quieter, darker, and — mercifully — empty of pursuit, at least for the moment, and Rin's voice found them again the second they cleared the shaft.

"You're clear for now, but that search team's going to reroute the second they get their footing back. You're close, though — that stationary signature is maybe forty meters ahead, behind a heavy door marked for environmental controls."

They found it exactly where she said, a heavy pressure door with old warning stencils flaking off its surface, and Jax hammered his fist against it in a specific pattern — three knocks, pause, two knocks — that made Mara's eyebrows climb again despite everything they'd just survived.

"That a signal?"

"Old signal. Habit."

The door groaned open from the inside, dragged by hands that were clearly working with effort, and behind it stood a man — mid-thirties, gaunt with exhaustion, a nasty gash along one temple crusted dark with dried blood, dressed in the tattered remains of what had once been serviceable work clothes, one arm cradled carefully against his chest in a way that suggested it wasn't working quite right anymore. He looked at Jax with an expression that mixed relief, exhaustion, and something harder and older underneath both.

"Took you long enough," he said.

"Good to see you too, Bunny," Jax said, and the name — spoken now, finally, in front of the person it belonged to — landed in the small room with the particular weight of every wrong assumption Mara had been carrying since that message first came through.

She looked at Jax. She looked at Bunny. She looked back at Jax, who had the good sense, for once, not to meet her eyes.

"We'll talk later," she said instead, because there wasn't time for anything else, and shouldered past him into the room to get a look at the man's injuries with the brisk, practical efficiency she brought to every crisis that wasn't strictly about the ship. "Arm's dislocated, not broken, I think. Can you walk?"

"I can walk," Bunny said, though the wince that accompanied the statement suggested walking was going to hurt considerably. "Not fast. Not gracefully. But I can walk."

"That'll have to do." Jax was already scanning the room, taking in the cramped space, the makeshift barricade of shoved equipment against a second door, the small metal case Bunny had clutched against his side even through the pain of his injured arm. "That the thing you mentioned?"

"That's the thing." Bunny's grip on it tightened, protective. "Damaged flight recorder. Pulled it off a wreck nobody was supposed to still be looking at, which is apparently a crime worth hunting a man down for, in case you were wondering how my week's gone."

"I wasn't wondering. I could guess." Jax's expression had gone flat and careful, the particular controlled stillness Mara recognized now as the sign of something old and painful being handled with great deliberate effort. "They know what's on it?"

"They know enough to want it back badly enough to burn a small fortune chasing me across two systems. Whether they know exactly what's on it, I couldn't tell you. I only got a partial read myself before my equipment died." Bunny looked at Jax with something that had gone harder, colder, underneath the exhaustion. "You want to guess what it references, or should I just say it and get the reunion over with faster?"

"Say it."

"Same restricted corridor. Same operation nobody's supposed to remember happened." His jaw tightened. "Same convoy."

Whatever that meant to Jax, it landed like a physical blow, something flickering behind his eyes that he shut down almost as fast as it appeared, and Mara — watching, missing nothing, filing every piece of this away for the conversation she fully intended to have the moment they were safely underway — said nothing at all, because now genuinely wasn't the time.

"We'll sort it out on the ship," Jax said. "Right now we need to move."

Rin's voice crackled back in the moment they started moving, tighter than before. "That search team's regrouped and they've got backup converging from two more sections. I'm rerouting you, but it's going to be tight — there's a freight elevator two corridors over that should get you up to the docking level fast, but I need you to hurry, because I'm reading at least six heat signatures now and they're all headed roughly your direction."

"Copy. Which way?"

"Left at the junction, then straight through the old sorting bay, then right at the — Jax, there's a door here that shows as sealed on my readout, I don't know if that's accurate or just old data, be ready for either."

They moved fast through the dark corridors, Bunny keeping pace despite his injuries with the grim, silent determination of a man who'd clearly survived worse, Mara's riveter dry now, held more like a club than a tool, and Jax's revolver back beneath his jacket but not fully forgotten, his hand never straying far from where it rested.

The door Rin had warned about turned out to be sealed after all, and this time there was no charge left to blast it open — Mara threw her shoulder against the manual release instead, grunting with effort, Jax adding his own weight a half-second later, until the ancient mechanism finally gave with a shriek and the door groaned open just wide enough for them to squeeze through single file.

"They're closing," Rin warned. "I can see two of them on a parallel corridor, they're going to hit the sorting bay right about the same time you do—"

"Then we don't stop in the sorting bay," Jax said, and didn't.

They burst through into the wide, cluttered space at a dead run, old sorting machinery looming dark on either side, conveyor lines frozen mid-motion decades ago, and the first shouts of pursuit erupted behind them just as Henry's voice cut through the comm, calm as ever despite the urgency underneath it.

"Captain Mercer, I have the airlock cycling in preparation for your arrival, and I have informed Miss Aoki I will personally launch this vessel the moment you are all aboard, invited or otherwise."

"Wasn't planning on making you wait, Henry."

"I am relieved to hear it."

They hit the docking corridor at a full sprint, Bunny stumbling once and catching himself against the wall with a grimace that Mara didn't have time to address, and the Overdraft's airlock stood open ahead of them, warm light spilling out into the cold dark of the dying station like the most welcome thing any of them had seen in an hour.

They tumbled through together, Henry sealing the hatch behind them with immediate, practiced efficiency the instant the last boot cleared the threshold, and the ship was already moving before anyone had fully caught their breath, Jax half-crawling back toward the cockpit to take the yoke while the station's search teams spilled uselessly onto the docking level behind them, too late, too far, watching a battered freighter with one thruster disabled pull away into the dark with considerably more grace than its damaged frame had any right to manage.

Nobody spoke for a long while after the station shrank to a point of light behind them and finally vanished entirely.

Mara had gotten Bunny settled in the galley, his dislocated shoulder reset with a sharp, practiced motion that made him swear with real feeling, his various scrapes cleaned and dressed with the same brisk competence she brought to every piece of damaged machinery aboard the ship, human or otherwise. Rin hovered nearby with undisguised curiosity, and Henry had produced, without being asked, a mug of his terrible coffee, which Bunny accepted with the particular gratitude of a man who hadn't eaten or drunk anything decent in longer than he cared to admit.

"So," Rin said finally, unable to hold it in any longer, "you're Bunny."

"I'm Bunny," he confirmed.

"You're not — " She gestured vaguely, encompassing the entirety of the assumption she and Mara had built over the past several hours. "We thought—"

"I know what you thought." A tired, humorless smile crossed his face. "Jax does that. Lets people assume whatever's easiest instead of correcting them. It's very on brand."

"I didn't lie to anybody," Jax said, from the cockpit doorway, arms crossed.

"You didn't correct anybody either," Mara said. "Which, given the last several hours, feels like a pretty significant omission."

"Would it have changed anything?"

"No," Mara admitted. "But I still would've liked to know I was risking my life for a guy named Bunny instead of your tragic secret ex-girlfriend."

"It's a callsign," Bunny said. "From back when we flew together. Long story, don't ask, it's not flattering to either of us."

"We flew together," Jax repeated quietly, and something in the way he said it made the room go a little more careful, a little more still.

"We flew together," Bunny agreed, and the look he gave Jax then had nothing soft in it at all. "Same squadron. Same operation nobody's supposed to remember. I was on that convoy, Jax. The one you decided to save." His voice had gone low, controlled, the particular flat calm of old anger that had been sitting untouched for years rather than burning fresh. "Funny thing about saving people. Sometimes you don't finish the job, and the ones you leave behind get to spend a long time wondering why."

Jax didn't answer right away. Whatever moved behind his eyes, he kept it there, locked down, though the tightness in his jaw told its own story to anyone paying close enough attention.

"I came when you called," he said finally.

"You did," Bunny said. "Eventually. That's more than some people managed, back then." He looked down at the battered metal case still resting against his hip, the flight recorder he'd risked everything to keep out of the wrong hands. "This has a partial reference to the old corridor. The one we were supposed to be protecting, before everything went sideways. It's corrupted, mostly — whatever's left is fragments, coordinates without context. But it's real, and it's the same restricted navigation data everybody's suddenly desperate to keep buried." He glanced up, something almost wry cutting through the exhaustion. “You still digging through the old operation, Jax, or did you finally find something worth actually chasing?”

"Working on it," Jax said, which wasn't an answer, and everyone in the room seemed to understand it wasn't meant to be one.

Rin looked between the two of them, then at Mara, then finally settled on the simplest observation available. "This is not remotely who I thought Bunny was going to be."

"Nobody asked," Jax said.

Henry, refilling Bunny's mug without being prompted, offered the observation in his usual mild, unhurried tone. "In fairness, Captain Mercer, the crew's assumption was statistically unsupported by any actual evidence you provided. I do not say this to assign blame. I say it purely in the interest of accuracy."

"Thank you, Henry."

"You are welcome, Captain Mercer."

Bunny managed something that was almost a laugh, tired and rough around the edges, and took a long pull from the coffee before grimacing at the taste. "God, that's terrible."

"Yes," Henry agreed serenely. "It generally is."

The Overdraft pushed onward through the dark, carrying one more passenger, one more piece of old buried history dragged reluctantly into the light, and one more fragment of a puzzle none of them yet understood the full shape of — and behind them, the dying station and its search teams fell further and further away, until there was nothing left in the rear viewport but stars, and the long silence of a conversation that had only just begun.