Chapter 94: Scribe-Nine

"Flat," Torv added. "That includes the mounting flanges and the synchronization software..."

The silence in the machine shop landed like a dropped anvil.

Harper’s mouth hung open. Elena frowned sharply, and Jin-Ah said the number softly, as if reading out a sentence.

"Eighteen thousand."

They had ten thousand four hundred in the chest... If they spent every token from the ingots, the slugs and the vegetables, they’d still be seven thousand six hundred short for the coils alone, and they’d have nothing at all left for the fifteen-thousand-Zuni landing fee.

Leo let the number stand without a word of haggling.

He knew real hardware when he saw it, and Torv was a craftsman who’d laugh at market indices... The coils were worth every coin, and the old reptile knew it.

He straightened and stepped back from the bench with a calm nod.

"We appreciate your time, Torv. We’ll be back when our money’s heavier."

Torv dipped his snout in a low respectful bow and reengaged the case latches with his upper arms.

"They’ll be in the cradle, Captain... Good hardware doesn’t rot but it doesn’t wait forever either."

Outside on the gantry, Harper finally exploded.

"Eighteen thousand! For four rings! I could build those, Cap! Give me three weeks, a winding jig and some iridium..."

"We don’t have three weeks, and we don’t have iridium," Elena said crisply.

"...Did I ask you, Princess?"

"You asked the corridor and I answered on its behalf."

"Enough," Leo said, quiet, and they both stopped.

He looked at Jin-Ah. "We need to know what we’re up against before we figure out how to pay for it. The broker in the Kite’s files... Is it on this station?"

Jin-Ah checked her slate.

"Upper administrative ring... Two levels up to be exact."

Leo nodded and turned to the others.

"Harper, Elena, Camila, Chloe... You wait by the central concourse archway. Tight group, backs to the wall... nobody wanders. Aoi and Jin-Ah, you’re with me."

Harper opened her mouth to protest and then saw his face and closed it again.

Chloe’s fingers tightened on his sleeve for one moment, then let go as she went and stood next to Camila without being asked.

The upper ring was a different world.

The raw basalt walls were lined with flickering data cables and humming fiber-optic bundles, and low crimson warning strips bathed the narrow corridors in a dim underground gloom.

The hot metallic bite of the industrial tier was gone... In its place hung the dry synthetic tang of ozone and coolant, and a stale narcotic smoke that drifted in dense horizontal veils under the low ceiling.

This was Driftmark’s intelligence exchange.

They stopped in front of an unmarked blast hatch with a single optical scanner and a recessed transaction tray.

Aoi stepped up beside it with one hand resting lightly on her holstered sidearm, and the red light turned her glasses into two blank squares.

"This is the terminal from the Kite’s files," she said quietly. "The operator calls itself Scribe-Nine... An independent broker who collects navigational intercepts, bounty manifests and political shifts across the unaligned border."

"Keep your slate ready, Jin-Ah," Leo said, sweeping the empty corridor once before he stepped onto the scanner pad. "We want facts, not rumors..."

CLICK-HISS!

The lock disengaged, and the heavy hatch slid back into the rock to reveal a cramped circular vault lined floor to ceiling with glowing terminal arrays, humming server stacks and optical decoding towers.

In the middle of the room, in a suspended hydraulic chair, sat a being that was half flesh and half cold machine.

It belonged to some tall gaunt chalk-white species, but nearly half its skull had been replaced with a polished chrome housing fitted with lenses that clicked and refocused in fast mechanical twitches.

A thick bundle of fiber-optic cable ran from the base of its spine straight down into the floor, pulsing with white light as it drank in the station’s communications traffic.

Its single organic eye, a cloudy grey orb without a pupil, turned toward them while its three mechanical lenses whirred into focus.

BZZZZT!

"Ah..." A dry digitized voice came out of a speaker mounted on its throat, as flat as an automated ledger. "The terrestrial survivors... The unaligned Tier-1 corvette that refused docking inspection and dismantled a raider squad in the Boiling Belt... Scribe-Nine welcomes your currency. Information is priced by depth, precision and political volatility."

Jin-Ah set a velvet pouch of exactly five hundred Zuni in brass tokens on the steel counter.

"We need three packets," She said. "First, how vessels like ours... I believe they’re called seeded terrestrial ships, are treated in this sector... Second, the hierarchy and reach of the pirate organization called the Federation... Third, the customs framework of the multi-race trade world three jump corridors out... Facts only."

A long skeletal hand swept the tokens into a slot.

CLINK-WHIRRR!

The server stacks behind the chair surged, and three dense amber data crystals unfolded in the air between them, turning slowly.

"Data delivered," Scribe-Nine said. "Query one... Seeded vessels."

The first crystal unrolled into a sweeping star map scattered with isolated sectors fenced in red.

"Your vessel is no anomaly, terrestrial," the broker rasped, its organic eye drifting up toward the ceiling. "Across the outer rim, the seeding of primitive worlds is an established cycle... When an inhabited world reaches the end of its designated epoch, the system executes a global harvest. The biomass is dissolved, the core collapsed, and a small fraction of the survivors is seeded into the outer sectors aboard standard unranked Tier-1 hulls, to serve as raw evolutionary material for the void."

Jin-Ah’s fingers froze on her slate.

The end of eight billion lives, of every city and every ocean and every ordinary morning she’d ever known, described by a cold machine voice as a harvest... The hair stood up along her arms.

"Seeded hulls launch with pristine core technology and baseline fabrication," the broker went on, indifferent to her stillness. "That makes them very high-value targets... They carry no registered faction protection under galactic law... In this sector, you are classified as unaligned biomass carrying military-grade salvage... Raider units track your arrival corridors systematically. To the powers of the border, you are floating containers waiting to be cracked."

Aoi’s jaw set. Leo stood perfectly still, listening with a stillness that was somehow more frightening than anger would have been.

"Query two... The Federation."

The second crystal resolved into a jagged three-pointed emblem drawn in pale bloodless white light, ringed by dozens of linked raiding squadrons, black-market drydocks and patrol corridors that choked the first two systems.

"The entity behind Contract eight-eight-four-delta is not a recognized government," Scribe-Nine said. "It is the Pale Federation, one of four rival pirate cartels that rule the lawless zone between the charted core and the unaligned rift... They hold seven deep-space refinery hubs, field more than two hundred armed corvettes and frigates and run a slave-labor operation that feeds heavy ore to the frontier smelters... They enforce their contracts through automated tracking frequencies. When a contracted unit goes silent, they don’t abandon the claim. They raise the bounty and send secondary pursuit wings."

Leo’s eyes narrowed slightly.

"Strike Unit Six was an auxiliary squad...?"

"A low-tier acquisition unit," the broker agreed. "Easily replaced... Its loss will reach their central fleet registry within two cycles. You haven’t ended their hunt, for now, you’ve only raised your value on their books."

Jin-Ah swallowed and committed the known patrol routes to memory, noting how much red lay between Driftmark and where they needed to go.

"Query three. The planetary hub..."

The last crystal bloomed into the turquoise and emerald world they’d seen in the Kite’s logs, wrapped in a web of pulsing white orbital lanes, customs platforms and sprawling continental cities.

"Nexus-Prime," the broker said. "An ancient unaligned trade world governed by a coalition of five merchant houses, and the only fully civilized trade hub within four jump corridors... Its skies are guarded by twelve Tier-4 orbital platforms capable of vaporizing heavy battlecruisers... The fifteen-thousand-Zuni tariff and the biometric spacefarer identification are legal requirements, designed to keep the border’s trash outside."

Its lenses rotated and focused with chilling precision on Leo’s chest.

"The distinction is total, Captain... Without certification, your vessel is an armed vagrant hull. You’ll be denied atmospheric entry, barred from every surface port and subject to impoundment or orbital liquidation the moment you cross their perimeter but once your command staff pays the tariff and submits to registry, you fall under the legal protection of the Merchant Coalition... The Pale Federation cannot touch you in their skies. In the void, you are hunted meat however on Nexus-Prime, with fifteen thousand Zuni in your account, you become a citizen of the stars."

The crystal dissolved in a shower of amber sparks and left the vault in heavy crimson silence.

Earth had been harvested... The void was crawling with raiders who saw them as scrap and meat and the only place they could sleep without a weapon in reach was locked behind fifteen thousand Zuni and a set of coils they couldn’t afford.

"We got what we paid for," Leo said. "Thank you, Scribe..."

He turned toward the hatch and gestured for Aoi and Jin-Ah to follow.

"A moment, Master Captain."

The digitized voice stopped them three paces from the threshold. Leo turned his head.

Scribe-Nine hadn’t moved in its chair, but all three lenses had zoomed to maximum and were clicking in quick erratic spasms, fixed on the line of Leo’s jaw and the gold stone glowing on his chest.

"A minor data point," it rasped, casually, with an icy predatory undertone that raised the hair on Jin-Ah’s neck. "Two cycles ago, an encrypted inquiry reached Driftmark’s secondary relay from an auxiliary station in the outer belt... Agents of the Pale Federation are offering two thousand Zuni for any confirmed sighting of a fifty-meter Tier-1 corvette... with seven fresh slate-composite battleplates along its starboard armor belt."

The air in the vault dropped to zero.

Aoi’s hand tightened on the grip of her sidearm, every muscle in her body ready for violence, and Jin-Ah’s heart slammed into her ribs.

Leo turned around slowly.

His shoulders stayed loose, and his breathing stayed even.

He walked back into the middle of the vault with easy unhurried grace, and his face was a mask of complete composure, the face of a man who’d survived the vacuum with no suit and torn a pirate ship apart with his turret.

He reached into his pocket, took out a single heavy brass token worth one hundred Zuni and set it gently on the edge of the counter.

CLINK!

Then he leaned down until his eyes were level with the broker’s cloudy organic eye and its whirring lenses, and his voice dropped into a low quiet whisper that seemed to vibrate up through the floor.

"Driftmark’s a neutral port, Scribe," he said, smooth as silk and cold as an iron grave. "And neutral brokers live long, profitable lives because their data only flows in one direction... That corvette with the slate plates hasn’t docked here... You haven’t seen its crew and you’ve definitely never logged its captain’s face. Keep it that way."

The broker stared at the token.

For three long seconds its lenses ticked through frantic micro-adjustments, and its organic eye twitched as the pressure rolling off the young human pressed down on it.

A skeletal finger slid the token into the slot as the broker bowed its half-metal head.

CLICK!

"Scribe-Nine maintains absolute confidentiality with paying patrons," it said very formally. "No inquiries have been received and no corvettes have been logged... Safe transits, Captain."

Leo gave a single curt nod and led them out into the crimson corridor.

They went down the gantries in silence and found the others waiting at the concourse archway, exactly where he’d left them, in a tight group with their backs to the wall.

Together they started the long walk back toward Berth Forty-Four.

Jin-Ah’s slate had updated the moment they left the vault.

...Nine thousand eight hundred Zuni.

They needed fifteen thousand for the tariff and eighteen thousand for the coils, and they were twenty-three thousand two hundred Zuni short of safety, in a station where raiders were already paying for their description.

"We’ll find a way, Leo," Camila said softly, walking at his elbow, her hazel eyes full of quiet unshakeable trust. "We have the garden, and the Foundry, and each other. We won’t give up..."

Leo looked down at her, and his face softened into the warm smile that always steadied the ship.

"We’re not giving up, Camila. Not even close. We just need..."

"...Cap. Stop."

Harper’s voice cut through the corridor, rough and urgent, and the whole group halted.

They were standing in the vaulted vestibule outside the main hall of the Driftmark Mining Guild.

A huge three-tiered holographic board covered the sheer basalt wall, crowded with glowing postings.

Most were pale green or dull amber, ore-hauling contracts, maintenance runs and salvage claims that paid fifty to two hundred Zuni for days of grinding labor.

...Harper wasn’t looking at any of those.

She stood frozen in the middle of the walkway with her thumbs hooked in her pockets and her eyes wide, staring at the very top of the board, where a single high-priority contract pulsed with violent crimson light and bathed all of them in a deep bloody glow.