Page 5 of Reaper Said Mine

I pick up my compad and tuck it beneath my arm again. "Better than most."

No one says anything for several seconds. The station rotates silently above the table, all steel, shadow, and possibility.

Dawson breaks the quiet first because he cannot tolerate any silence he did not design. "Meeting adjourned. Jana, stay. Bellamy, I need your segment on the Alzhon subsidy fight rewritten before noon. Ursa, get with Travel and Legal before you do whatever grim little ritual you perform before walking into gunfire."

I turn toward the door.

"And Ramone?"

I stop, but I do not turn around.

His voice sharpens back into its usual shape. "Try to make yourself camera-ready before you board. If you are going to get killed by pirates, at least give us a decent thumbnail."

The laugh that follows is thin, nervous, and ugly.

I turn my head enough to meet his eyes. "If I get killed by pirates, Dawson, I promise my final thought will be whether my hair had enough volume."

Bellamy makes a strangled sound.

Dawson points toward the door. "Out."

I leave before anyone can see my hands shake.

The hallway outside the conference room is cooler and quieter, though not by much. Through the glass walls, the newsroom continues its frantic choreography. Anchors glide toward studios with makeup teams fluttering around them. Junior producers sprint between desks with the haunted eyes of people who have consumed too much caffeine and not enough sleep. A breaking feed from Tau Ceti splashes across the far wall, showing floodlights, riot shields, and a caption so bland it could have been printed by a machine with no concept of grief.

I make it twenty-seven steps before Bellamy catches up with me.

"Ramone."

"I am busy."

"You are always busy. That is not a personality."

"I am told neither is solemn intensity, so apparently I am running out of options."

He falls into stride beside me, tall, rumpled, and irritatingly likable in the way of men who can afford to be charming because the room already assumes they belong in it. He carries three styluses in his shirt pocket and loses all of them twice a day.

"That was either the bravest thing I have seen in months or the professional equivalent of jumping naked into a turbine."

"Could be both."

"Comforting." He glances over his shoulder, then lowers his voice. "Are you serious about getting Gnash on record?"

"No, Bellamy. I publicly fought Dawson for the privilege of filing atmosphere shots from a pirate dock."

"Fine, sarcasm received. I am asking because everyone who gets near that station comes back with the same answer. No access. No interview. No private audience. Half of them never even see Gnash except from a balcony."

"Then I will find a better balcony."

He exhales through his teeth. "You know what I mean."

We reach my desk, though calling it mine feels generous. It is a narrow workstation wedged between a dormant holo-ad sales terminal and a structural column that blocks half my wall display. I have decorated it with nothing except a small black stone from Horus IV that no one else recognizes and a row of meticulously organized data wafers. Sentimentality invites questions. Organization does not.

Bellamy leans against the column. "Ursa, the Badlands are not like covering a corrupt governor or a relief scandal."

"I know."

"Do you? Because there is regular danger, and then there is Reaper danger. Those bastards raid ships for fun."