Chapter 108: Like Old Friends

The Mirage flew right alongside them, so close that it was almost reckless.

Through the starboard viewports, its iridescent purple hull looked near enough to reach out and touch.

Its razor-thin delta wing hung barely fifteen meters off the Wanderer-7’s slate-armored flank, and its six racing thrusters spat snarling ribbons of lilac plasma into the dark while the turquoise glow of the corvette’s exhaust danced across its violet skin like liquid neon.

BZZZZZT-CLICK!

The open channel hadn’t gone quiet for a single second since they’d cleared the basalt pillars.

"...and then you pulled that six-G yaw right over the crater lip!" Vexa’s voice practically sang through the bridge speakers sounding bright and bubbling over. "I was watching your thruster dispersion on my forward optics, Leo! Nobody uses cold-gas attitude jets to start an inverted snap-roll like that! The torque should’ve sheared your starboard stabilizer right off! How did you deal with the inertial lag?! Did you balance the pulses by hand, or did you just let the tail slide?!"

Leo sat back in the throne with one hand resting in a cradle and his other elbow propped on the armrest, and a relaxed smirk had crept onto his face without his permission.

’Man... she actually saw that? Nobody’s ever noticed the stuff I do with the jets before...’

"I didn’t calculate the slide, Vexa," he said. "The rock was spinning counterclockwise at about four degrees a second... If I’d fought the inertia, the nose would’ve drifted into the ridge, so I let the stern swing with the rock, dumped the port thruster for half a beat and let the ship find its own center."

"YES!" Vexa squealed, and the slap of her hand on her console came through loud and clear. "Yes! Exactly! You didn’t fight the stone, you let the stone push you! My instructors on Thyrra spent eight years trying to teach cadets to ride gravity shears like that, and every single one of them ended up in the emergency netting! They always try to muscle the yoke because they think a ship’s a tool... It’s not a tool, is it, Leo?! It’s part of your spine!"

"It’s just flying, Vexa..." Leo chuckled. "You point the nose where the void’s open and you trust your back to tell you when to pull."

"’Just flying’?! By the twin suns, you’re completely insane!" she laughed, rich and delighted. "The second we hit Nexus-Prime, I’m dragging you to the high-orbit circuits! I need to see what that chubby little gunboat can do when you’re not dodging space bugs!"

"She’s not chubby..." Leo said flatly, though the corner of his mouth twitched.

"Hmm... she’s a little chubby, Leo," Vexa sang back, dragging the word out like she was savoring it. "Look at all those plates hanging off her belly."

"She’s armored, Vexa... That’s what armor looks like."

"She’s armored AND chubby, and I love her," Vexa declared, with the total sincerity of someone announcing a scientific fact, and Leo had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing out loud.

They kept going like that, trading little details about plasma compression and pulse timing and the strange electric pull that guided their hands through the dark.

They sounded like two old friends who’d been flying the same skies for years.

...On the bridge of the Wanderer-7, the air had gone thick enough to cut with a plasma torch.

Harper sat frozen at the gunnery console with her calloused hands flat on her knees and her eyes fixed on the blank targeting monitor in front of her.

Every time Vexa’s bright laugh chimed through the speakers, her jaw tightened a little more.

’Twelve years... Twelve years of handing him wrenches and he’s never once talked to me like that... then this cat-girl shows up and gets it in forty minutes?’

She stared at the dead monitor until the edges of it went blurry, and she didn’t blink.

Beside her, Elena tapped her diagnostic slate in sharp irritated bursts with her lips pressed into a thin line.

Her eyes kept flicking to the proximity readout, where a red margin warning had been blinking for twenty minutes straight.

"Fifteen meters," she muttered under her breath. "Fifteen meters at cruise velocity... One twitch of her stabilizer and she’ll be wearing our starboard plates as a hat, and I welded those plates myself."

"Statistically, she won’t twitch," Jin-Ah said from station three without looking up from her slate. "I’ve been logging her micro-corrections for the last twenty minutes... Her flight path hasn’t deviated more than eleven centimeters in either direction, It’s honestly a little frightening."

"That is not the reassurance you think it is, Park," Elena said through her teeth. "...A pilot that precise who chooses to fly fifteen meters from our hull is doing it on purpose."

"Yes," Jin-Ah agreed calmly. "I believe she’s showing off."

Elena’s slate let out an offended little beep as she jabbed it harder than she needed to.

Camila poured another cup of mint tea and set it down beside Harper’s elbow without a word, but Harper didn’t even look at it.

...Only Chloe was unbothered.

She sat on the mezzanine step behind the throne with a mug of lemon water held in both sleeves, watching the purple ship through the glass with calm unimpressed eyes.

’Loud,’ she thought. ’Very loud... but she can’t bite him as only I do that.’

Leo glanced over his shoulder, caught Harper’s stillness and tapped the private console channel.

"Harper? You okay over there? Your turret readings look kind of cold... Did the feed jam again or something?"

She didn’t look around.

She cleared her throat, and her voice came out flat and tight with none of its usual brassy fire.

"Readings are fine, Cap... Just watching the drift," she said. "Somebody on this ship has to keep their eyes on it instead of chatting."

Leo frowned.

’Okay, that’s not fine... That’s definitely not fine.’

He opened his mouth to push, and before he could, Vexa’s voice bounced back onto the main channel.

"Leo! Leo, look at that rock coming up on your port side! Doesn’t it look like a duck?!"

He looked, and sure enough, tumbling slowly past the bow was a lump of grey basalt with a round head, a flat bill and a fat little body.

"Yeah... okay, it kind of looks like a duck," he admitted, shaking his head.

"I KNEW it!" Vexa squealed, and they could hear her tail thumping against her seat. "I’m naming it! It’s Gerald now, and nobody can change it because I saw it first!"

When Leo glanced back at the gunnery seat, Harper had turned her face away completely.

Vexa’s voice went quieter after that, in a way none of them expected.

"Hey... Leo? Can I ask you something? About where you’re from?"

He hesitated for a second before answering.

"Sure... go ahead."

"What was it like? Your world, I mean, before everything." The bounce had gone right out of her voice. "You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to... I’ve just never met anybody whose planet doesn’t exist anymore, and I keep thinking about it... I don’t know how you’re all still standing."

The bridge went very still, and Camila’s teacup stopped halfway to the counter.

Leo looked out at the stars for a long moment before he answered.

"It had a blue sky... most of the time anyway. Clouds you could lie under and watch for hours," he said finally. "My dad hauled sheet metal at a foundry and came home every night smelling like hot iron and telling the worst jokes you’ve ever heard, and my mom ran the manifests at a logistics yard and could out-argue anybody alive... My little sister used to steal my hoodies and swear she didn’t."

He let out a small breath that was almost a laugh, and for a second he could almost smell his mom’s kitchen on a Sunday morning.

"It was a pretty normal place, honestly. I just never noticed how much I liked it until it was gone..."

For a while, there was nothing on the channel but the soft whir of the Mirage’s cooling fans.

"Your sister sounds like me," Vexa said at last, very softly, and Leo could hear the small smile in it. "I steal my mechanics’ jackets all the time... Thank you for telling me... I’m going to make sure you see a real sky again, I promise... Nexus-Prime has the best sky in forty systems, and it turns purple at sunset."

"Purple, huh?" Leo said, and found he was smiling properly now.

"The purplest," she said, and some of the bounce crept back into her voice. "Obviously... Everything good is purple."

Behind him, Camila had turned to face the galley wall, and her shoulders were shaking very slightly then the shadow of Driftmark Station swallowed the canopy.

The hollowed nickel-iron asteroid rose ahead of them like a huge industrial fortress, its ring of habitat modules and smelting chimneys blazing with yellow and amber sodium lights.

"We’ve crossed the station’s outer threshold," Aoi reported, crisp and professional as she cut through the chatter. "...Traffic control has our approach vector, and they’re assigning us Berth Forty-Four."

"Acknowledge it, Aoi." Leo brought the burn down to an approach crawl. "Vexa, you need to pull back to standard separation... The Guild won’t give us clamps if you’re riding my paint like that."

"Awww, you’re no fun, Captain," Vexa purred, but through the starboard glass the Mirage peeled away in a wide, elegant and slightly showy turn toward the next pylon. "I’m taking Forty-Five, right next door! Don’t you dare cash that contract without me!"

CLANK-WHIRRR!

A heavy familiar shudder ran through the frame as the docking arms of Berth Forty-Four reached out and locked their magnetic pads onto the corvette’s hardpoints.

THUD-CLANG! HISS-PULL!

The boarding tube extended from the mooring collar and sealed against the starboard airlock with a sharp hiss of equalizing air.

Twenty meters across the gantry, the Mirage settled into its own berth with feather-light precision, and its canopy was already sliding open as Vexa popped her helmet off and waved at their viewport with both arms.

Their hold was packed with six thousand four hundred Zuni worth of void-platinum, and the dead Matriarch’s confirmation beacon was already transmitting to the Guild’s registry to unlock their twenty-thousand-Zuni bounty.

’That’s coils money... and landing fee money,’ Leo thought, and something in his chest finally loosened. ’We actually pulled it off.’

He unbuckled his harness, stood up and rolled his shoulders, and the sun-stone settled warm against his chest.

"Alright, crew," he said, grinning. "Let’s go collect our fortune."

Harper was first off the bridge, and she didn’t wait for him. Leo started after her, and a hand settled lightly on his forearm.

Aoi had stepped up out of the cartography well, and she was shaking her head very slightly.

"Not now, Leo," she said quietly. "Not on the way to the Guild with the whole station watching... Give her a little time."

"Something’s wrong with her, Aoi."

"I know." Her dark eyes held his. "And when you do go to her, it shouldn’t be in a corridor between two errands... She’s carried whatever this is for a long time, Leo, I think she deserves more than five minutes and a pat on the shoulder so trust me on this one."

"You know what it is, don’t you?" he asked quietly.

Aoi only gave his arm a small squeeze and let go. "...It’s not mine to tell."

He looked at the empty hatchway for a long moment, then nodded slowly.

’Okay... later then but I’m not letting this go.’

Two hundred meters across the docking ring, hidden deep in the oily shadows of a stacked cargo container, a solitary figure stood watching.

It was a massive reptilian biped two and a half meters tall, with scarred olive-green chitin and four upper fangs jutting over a wet sneering snout.

The captain of the Blood-Drift Prospectors.

His slit yellow pupils narrowed as he watched the Wanderer-7 settle into its clamps.

He’d spent the last two hours listening to the chatter on the Guild’s private bands, report after report confirming that the nest in Delta-Nine had been wiped out by a single unaligned Tier-1 corvette.

’That soft-skinned whelp... He made me crawl back to my table in front of the whole hall, and now he gets the bounty too?’

His clawed tail twitched against the steel grating, and his snout flared with a hot sulfurous wheeze.

He looked at the seven slate plates welded along the corvette’s flank, and at the sleek purple racer docking right beside it then he stepped deeper into the dark between the containers and pulled an encrypted long-range comm-link out of his tactical webbing, stamped with a small three-pointed emblem in pale bloodless white.

STATIC-CLICK!

"Driftmark node," a flat synthesized voice answered from somewhere far out in the void. "State your intelligence..."

The reptile bared his fangs in a jagged vicious sneer.

"Get me the Federation relay... I’ve got the corvette with the slate plates, and she’s sitting in Berth Forty-Four right now."