Chapter 86: Preparing For Driftmark Station

The bridge went dead still.

Camila’s hazel eyes flew wide and her mouth fell open in a round breathless gasp.

Elena let out a soft delighted chuckle behind her manicured hand, and Harper looked as if someone had fired an uncalibrated rail-slug straight through her radiator.

"In your room?!" Harper shrieked, slamming both hands flat on the console rail. "You called him into your room in the middle of the night?! While the rest of us were asleep?!"

Before Aoi could produce a single syllable in her own defense, a small dark shadow rose from the secondary combat couch.

Chloe set her untouched mug of lemon water down on the console with great care, walked to the edge of the dais swinging her long sleeves and came to a stop at Leo’s side.

She rested her chin on his upper arm and looked out across the bridge with calm green eyes without a trace of color in her cheeks then she let out a soft smug little hum and pressed her cheek against his bicep, as if she were marking a border that had already been settled by treaty.

"He slept in his bunk," Chloe said sweetly. "With me... All night..."

She paused.

"He smelled like tea when he came back but I fixed it so you don’t need to worry."

THUD!

Camila dropped her napkin into her lap and buried her face in both hands.

"Ay, Dios mío..."

"You FIXED it?!" Harper’s voice cracked completely, her head whipping between Leo, Chloe and Aoi in frantic circles. "What the hell does ’I fixed it’ mean?! Leo, what the hell happens on this ship when the lights go out...?!"

Leo scratched the back of his neck, felt the heat climbing his cheekbones and held up both hands in surrender.

"Alright, hey! Settle down! Nobody did anything crazy... Aoi gave me a navigation charm, Chloe got hungry, and everybody went to sleep... That’s the whole story."

He pointed at Harper’s tray. "Eat your bread before it gets cold."

"A likely story," Harper grumbled, crossing her bare arms and slouching back against her seat.

The pout on her freckled mouth and the side-eye she aimed first at Aoi and then at Chloe made it very clear that the matter was nowhere near settled.

Elena shook her head with a wicked smile lighting her pale face.

"How terribly barbaric... A captain repelling midnight boarding actions while his command staff squabbles over territory. Truly, the majesty of deep space."

"If everyone has finished their domestic cross-examination," Jin-Ah said, turning her slate face-up again with a crisp tap. "I have the recommendation I promised the Captain..."

The chatter died at once.

Jin-Ah stepped up to the tactical well with her geometric bob swinging neatly and keyed the slate.

HUMMM!

The holographic well woke and swept the tension away with a projection of the local sector.

The web of glowing ports she’d been building for two days appeared, every red strike-through and amber circle in place, and then the projection collapsed inward until only one point was left blazing at the end of a pale blue vector.

The line uncoiled from their position, ran past the outer fringe of the Boiling Belt and tracked along a narrow clear drift corridor, and at its far end, tucked in the stable orbital shadow of a huge cracked planetary core... a complex structure turned slowly in the light.

"I sorted forty-one ports from the Kite’s commercial directories overnight," Jin-Ah said. "Thirty-three are under Federation charter or pay tribute to a syndicate... Five are too far for our fuel... Two refused the Kite outright, which I consider a point in their favor, but they’re also known to search incoming ships... This one is left."

She tapped the glowing point.

"Driftmark Station... An independent mining, refining and trading outpost, chartered to the Driftmark Mining Guild."

Leo leaned forward, and the sun-stone tapped against the console rim.

"What kind of setup?"

"A hollowed nickel-iron asteroid, about four kilometers long." Jin-Ah zoomed the wireframe. "A pressurized ring of habitat cylinders, commercial drydocks and heavy smelters is welded around its equator... According to the Kite’s logs, it’s the main refueling and ore exchange for independent prospectors, scavengers and unaligned haulers in the first two systems."

Aoi cleared her throat, and her composure snapped back into place as the last of the blush finally faded.

She stepped to her terminal and tapped the station’s defense perimeter.

"The Guild maintains commercial neutrality," she reported, her voice steady again. "Zero tolerance for armed conflict inside a three-hundred-kilometer perimeter, enforced by automated rail-batteries and torpedo silos at both poles... They don’t care about Federation contracts, bounty warrants or unaligned flags, as long as visiting ships power down their weapons and follow docking protocol."

Harper squinted at the flight line, still sulking a little.

"How far?"

"Forty-eight hours at standard cruise," Jin-Ah said.

Elena folded her hands on the rail.

"A two-day diversion from our direct heading to the habitable planet... Captain, what’s our justification?"

Leo sat back in the throne and tapped a slow rhythm against the armrest.

"Four reasons," he said.

He held up a single finger.

"Rest... We’ve spent weeks running on adrenaline, sleeping in shifts and breathing recycled air. Even with Camila’s cooking, this crew needs real gravity, room to walk and twelve hours where nobody’s listening for a breach alarm... A tired crew makes mistakes, and out here, mistakes leave you floating in a frozen suit."

A second finger.

"Money... To land on that multi-race world, we need fifteen thousand Zuni for the landing fee, plus a biometric ID for every single person on this ship but we’ve got nothing... If we show up at their orbital grid broke, their defense platforms will scrap us before we finish hailing the tower so we start building a bankroll now."

A third.

"A faster drive... We survived those raiders because the rocks were thick and the harpoon caught their rudder. In open space, bigger gunboats will run us down, and three systems is a long way to crawl so we need accelerator coils. If Driftmark has a shipyard, it’ll have coils."

Finally, a fourth, and his eyes moved across each of them with calm certainty.

"Information... We don’t know a single thing about how this galaxy works. We don’t know who survived what happened to Earth, how the Federation operates, or what kind of bounties are floating around with our names on them... Driftmark is full of miners and travelers from dozens of worlds. We walk their concourse, we keep our ears open and we learn how things actually work before we fly blind into the deep."

The bridge fell into a brief unanimous silence.

The logic was airtight, and every one of them could feel the weight of the situation behind it.

Aoi nodded firmly, her fingers already moving across the astrogation interface.

"Laying in the burn for Driftmark Station... Corridor Alpha-Three."

"Engage when ready," Leo said, and an easy confident smile curled his lips. "Let’s go see what our first real port looks like."

WHOOOOOM!

The twin turquoise plumes flared bright against the void, and the corvette settled into a smooth accelerating burn that carried it away from the debris field and into the open lane.

For the next thirty-six hours, the ship became a hive of furious preparation.

If they were going to walk onto an alien mining station and ask seasoned traders for thousands of Zuni, they couldn’t show up empty-handed, so every compartment went to work turning the jagged spoils of their fights into clean, valuable goods.

...Down on Deck Two, the Foundry bay ran white-hot.

Elena stood at the consolidation terminal with her sleeves rolled to the elbow and her Mechanical Attunement rippling in iridescent waves around her hands.

Beside her, Leo managed the extraction feeds, drawing on the huge store of raw material the Foundry had swallowed from the Black Kite’s ninety-meter hull.

CLANK-WHIRRR!

The heavy compression rams engaged inside the sealed chamber and groaned under a pressure that would have crushed a submarine flat.

The machine purified the slate-composite, the structural titanium and the superconductive copper and pressed them into standardized trade ingots.

PSSH-CLANG!

The delivery chute cycled open in a plume of cold nitrogen vapor, and dozens of immaculate rectangular bars rolled out onto the steel staging table...

There were twenty heavy slate-composite ingots stamped with purity marks, fifteen dense bars of structural titanium and ten gleaming bricks of copper with every one of them cut to standard interstellar weights.

CHIME!

[Ingot production complete... This unit has never been a forge before however this unit finds it acceptable.]

Elena let out a soft amused scoff and pushed a strand of honey-blonde hair off her forehead with her wrist.

"A machine that finds heavy smelting ’acceptable.’ How gracious of you, Vela."

Leo picked up one of the slate ingots.

It was dense and cool, finished smooth as a mirror, and it felt heavy in a way that meant money. "Any outpost with a working repair dock will snap these up."

"Refined composites fetch a premium on the frontier, where raw ore takes weeks to smelt," Elena said, leaning against the bench with a proud elegant smile. "By the Kite’s trade tables, we should clear six thousand Zuni for the lot..."

Thirty meters down the corridor, the armory was practically vibrating to the rhythm of the lathe.

CLACK-WHIRRR-SCREEECH!

Harper was in her element, her freckled arms bare and gleaming with sweat and cutting fluid, her Kinetic Tuning guiding the carbide toolhead with a sensitivity no human hand should have had.

A continuous ribbon of smoking blue-tinted shavings spilled into the recycling bin while she worked through the run she’d promised him, sixty helical rounds pressed one after another in the reinforced slate housing.

She caught the last one in her gloved palm and held it up to the inspection lamp.

Forty centimeters of tungsten, the nose polished to a tenth of a micron and her hand-drawn grooves etched around its waist with microscopic perfection.

"Sixty," she said, her face splitting into that wild armory grin as Leo walked in. "Thirty go in the sale crates and thirty go in our magazines... Any merc gunboat at that station with a working mag turret is gonna drool on its boots for these."

Leo hefted one, felt the dense weight pull at his forearm and nodded with deep respect. "What’re they worth?"

"Sixty Zuni a round, easy... That’s eighteen hundred for the sale crates."

She wiped her brow with her forearm. "Nobody out here makes ammo this clean, Cap... Nobody."

In the garden off the mid-deck, the air was warm and rich with soil.

Camila knelt among the beds with her hair pinned behind her ears and her leather apron over her green skirt, gently laying the best of the harvest into four moss-lined crates.

Fifty kilograms of golden potatoes, thirty kilograms of deep red tomatoes, twenty of sweet green peppers and baskets of tender beans.

"The miners eat rehydrated paste and protein bricks for months," she said softly, as Leo crouched to hand her another crate. "Real vegetables grown in soil are almost unheard of in a belt... Jin-Ah thinks twenty-four hundred Zuni for these four alone."

She looked up at him with a soft warmth in her eyes. "I saved plenty for our galley so you won’t run out of root bread."

"You’re a lifesaver, Camila." He squeezed her shoulder, and she leaned into it for half a second before she went back to her crates.

Late that night, Harper came up to the galley for water and found Aoi there alone, sitting at the counter in her robe with a cup of tea going cold between her hands.

They looked at each other for a long moment.

Harper filled her flask at the tap without speaking. The water ran loud in the quiet.

When she turned off the tap, she stayed where she was with her back to Aoi and her shoulders tight under the tank top.

"So it’s a protective ward," she said at last.

"It is..." Aoi said evenly.

"Three days on my bench, and you never asked me to help with the bevel." Harper screwed the cap on hard. "I’d have done it, you know... I’d have made it look even better."

Aoi’s fingers tightened slightly around her cup. "I know you would have... That’s why I didn’t ask."

Harper turned around then. Her grey-blue eyes searched Aoi’s face for something, and whatever she found there made her jaw work once.

"He’s never once come to my room at midnight," she said quietly. "In all of the twelve years I’ve known him."

Aoi held her gaze and didn’t look away, and for a long time neither of them said anything else then Harper pushed off the counter and walked out with her flask, and Aoi sat alone in the galley until the tea was completely cold.

’Maybe because you never asked...?’

By the morning of the second day, the Wanderer-7 was carrying a real war chest.

There was six thousand two hundred Zuni in refined ingots, eighteen hundred in custom slugs and twenty-four hundred in fresh produce, ten thousand four hundred in all... more than two-thirds of the landing fee waiting for them at the end of the road.

The ion engines purred at a steady seventy percent... The bridge was calm, the charts were clear and Driftmark Station was barely twelve hours away then the void shifted.