Page 89 of Warrior’s Mate

He waited.

Maelis looked at him. The bond made his presence easier to feel, but it did not make his question unnecessary. She was glad of that.

"No," she said. "I don't regret it."

"Neither do I."

A message arrived from the surface registry before they cleared orbital traffic.

CENTRAL RECORD REQUEST: CONFIRM DETACHMENT MANIFEST ON NEXT CHECK-IN. MULTIPLE FAMILY LINKAGES PENDING.

Maelis acknowledged it and added the request to her task queue.

Kaiven glanced over. "Already working?"

"There are eight hundred people aboard three ships whose records are a disaster."

"Of course there are."

"Try to contain your admiration."

"Impossible."

The transport shuddered as it changed vector. Far below them, Farseek turned slowly beneath clouds of smoke and sunlight.

Maelis thought of the old man with his granddaughter's blue coat. Of the twenty-eight people who had walked out of the irrigation channel. Of the names still listed as missing. Of the people already carried beyond Farseek against their will.

A registry could not rescue them. But it could refuse to let them become numbers. Beside her, Kaiven touched his forehead to hers.

"Next check-in," he said.

"Next check-in," Maelis agreed.

The relief detachment accelerated toward its assigned corridor.

Behind them, on Farseek, the first organized survivor registry continued to grow. Local command preserved the names, transport traces, and raw communication records for the officers and dreadnought crews still trying to return to a wounded world.

There would be searches. There would be rescues. There would be names carried across systems until someone answered them.

For now, however, Maelis watched her planet recede with Kaiven's hand in hers and chose not to imagine farther than the next message. The newborn cried somewhere deeper in the transport, a thin, indignant sound that made two exhausted evacuees near the observation port smile. Maelis listened until the cry faded beneath the engines. Farseek had lost people that day, perhaps more than any of them yet understood, but loss had not become the only truth available to them. People were still finding one another. They were still choosing one another. They were still making records for children who had arrived after the lists of the missing had already begun. The detachment made its scheduled departure transmission. Then the stars opened ahead.

Epilogue — After the Fall

At Central Relief, the departure transmission entered the registry automatically. The next required check-in did not.

At first the delay was marked as a communications fault. Other channels were failing across Farseek, and relief traffic was being rerouted faster than exhausted operators could track it. A second check-in window passed. Then a third.

The three vessels were not declared destroyed. No wreckage had been found. No verified distress call had been received. No one knew enough to turn uncertainty into fact.

Their shared status changed by one line:

UNACCOUNTED FOR — CONTACT PENDING.

And there it remained.

***

By the time the first returning dreadnoughts finally broke into Farseek orbit, the fires over Wasaytu had burned low enough for smoke to hang in layers instead of columns. No one at Central Relief tried to reduce the interval to a neat number of days. Time had become relief rotations, failed check-ins, burial shifts, repaired relays, and lists that changed every hour.