Corsine’s transport sat in the primary cradle, long-hauled, sleek, and broken, an access panel hanging open above the cracked fuel coupling that somebody had abandoned mid-repair. Behind it, squat in the secondary cradle, sat the supply hauler that serviced the trafficking runs. Mid-range. Built for cargo, not people. The registry plate beside the ramp read STAR-SEEKER, a name some Consortium clerk had wasted on a mule.
Tessara stood on the hauler’s ramp with her claws out and her tail lashing. “Good news. The hauler flies. I pre-burned the engines, and the cells read full.”
“And the bad news?”
“The transport’s nav-lock is live. It’s been pinging the patrol grid every ninety seconds since the power died. The second anything lifts out of this bay, every picket ship in the sector converges on the signal.”
Raeth’s scales banked to a flat, hard red. “Then we disable it.”
“It’s hardwired into the drive core, big male. You’d need a day. You have minutes.” Tessara’s amber eyes moved from the broken transport to the hauler and back, and I watched her run the same math I was running. Somebody had to fly the loud ship. Somebody had to wear that signal and pull the pickets off the lane while the hauler went out dark.
“The coupling blows inside two jumps,” I said.
“One jump, if I baby it.” She was already moving toward the transport. “And I fly anything with an engine and half a prayer. You said you’d take that as a yes.”
“Tessara.”
“Decoy work is threading work, and nobody on this rock threads a picket line except me.” She flashed her teeth. On a Felarii, the expression involved more teeth than a human smile and twice the confidence. “Kelas Drift. Third refueling shadow. Smugglersuse it, and Consortium maps pretend it doesn’t exist. Burst it to your nav core and get your people on that hauler.”
I coded the coordinates with hands that were steady while my chest was not. “We’ll wait for you.”
“Don’t wait past six days. And don’t come looking. I find routes.” Her tail flicked once, the nearest thing to a salute her species owned. “It’s what the blood is for.”
The last I saw of Tessara was her tail disappearing through the hatch of a broken ship she had chosen on purpose, so the rest of us could fly out quietly.
The Star-Seeker’s engines were warm when we boarded. Nia strapped the three prisoners who had followed her into the cargo webbing, her braids half-undone, a bruise darkening her jaw, and when I passed her, she gave me a single nod that held two years of waiting. Raeth folded himself into a pilot cradle built for a smaller species, knees against the console, and brought the drive up with the grim competence of a male who had flown station craft for three years and hated every minute of it. I took the engineering bench because the hauler was a wreck with a pretty registry name, and somebody had to keep it breathing.
The transport lifted first. Loud, blazing, its nav-lock shrieking its position to every Consortium picket in the sector, and through the bay doors I watched her drive flare cut across the dark, and the pickets turned after it like sharks after blood.
The docking clamps released. The Star-Seeker lifted from the bay, cleared the station’s outer shell, and punched into open space.
Tessara’s voice crackled across the stolen guard frequency, bright with adrenaline. “Four pickets on my tail and not one of them can fly. Kelas Drift, six days. Tell the big male he owes me a ship.” A pause, and under it a tone I knew from failing systems.“Coupling’s running hot. Punching out early. See you on the other side.”
Static.
No wreckage signature on the scope. No debris bloom. She had jumped. That was what I told myself, in the voice I used for systems I could not reach to fix. She jumped, and a jump can land short and still land. Through the viewport, Vexar-6 fell away below us, a scarred gray sphere orbiting a gas giant, its surface pocked with industrial vents and the sealed dome of the Communication Tower, where a woman in a white coat sat on the floor, her empire in ruins.
I watched it shrink. Twenty-one days. That was all it had taken for a prison on a dead moon to become the place where everything changed.
Raeth’s hand found mine. His fingers engulfed my hand, his skin furnace-hot against my cooler palm, and the bond hummed between us with the steady resonance of a system running at optimal capacity.
The stars spread before us. Cold. Infinite. Full of people we hadn’t found yet.
I held his hand, and we flew.
EPILOGUE
POV: Raeth | One Month Later
She was asleep when I found the file.
The Star-Seeker had settled into a stable orbit around an uninhabited moon in the Kelas Drift, far enough from Consortium-monitored space to breathe, close enough to the trade routes for Nia to trade for supplies at the drift depots. One month of free space. One month of sleeping beside a woman whose heartbeat I could track through the Link from any point on the ship, whose emotional state was a constant warmth at the edge of my consciousness, whose hands still smelled of machine oil and clean skin.
One month, and I had not grown accustomed to any of it.
Kira lay curled on the bunk in the quarters we shared, the ship’s recycled air cool against her brown skin. Her dark curls were longer than they had been on Vexar-6, growing out from the practicality of prison into something softer. The scar on her left forearm caught the low light from my data terminal. The Claiming mark on her neck was healed, a faint impression visible only if you knew where to look. On the shelf above the bunk sat the stone from Zethara, where she had placed it the day we boarded. She had carried it out of Vexar-6, tucked beside the evidence. When I asked her why, she said some systems were load-bearing. I had stopped trying to improve on her engineering.
Through the Link, her emotional signature was the deep blue of dreamless sleep. The same frequency I had felt through the wall in my quarters on the nights before everything shattered, and every time I registered it, the thrum in my chest settled into a resonance that I had stopped trying to name and started understanding as home.
