Candelas “Mustang” Camino stole ships for a living. And no one called her Candelas. If someone did, it did not end well for them.

Mustang had rules about stealing ships. She broke most of them. But the one she kept was simple. Know who pays you, and know why. On Neonara, under a sky the color of rust and old copper, she had followed that rule exactly far enough to land herself on a rooftop across from Magistrate Mahfouz’s private dock, watching a ship a client paid her to steal.

The ship was ugly. Which surprised her.

Rich Ethnarch Kingdom men liked their toys loud. Gold inlay, chromed hull plating, reactor glow tuned to whatever color was fashionable in society that quarter. This ship had none of that. It was a slate-gray mid-hauler, atmospheric-capable, modified for long range, stripped of anything that would catch a patrol’s eye. Practical. The ship for a man who wants to move something and does not want to be asked what.

Mustang did not like it.

She was crouched behind a ventilation stack, pilot’s hat pulled low, her hand on the bolt in her jacket pocket. The bolt had come from the first ship she ever stole, the one Wally taught her on. She had worn it smooth. Tonight it felt heavier than usual.

Neonara’s capital sprawled below her in the early dark. Prayer towers with speakers that called the faithful four times a day. Women walking with their eyes down and their heads covered. A Kingdom rim colony ran on the same script as the core worlds. Just poorer, and with fewer witnesses.

The magistrate’s dock sat where the streets ran out, and the salt flats began. The Hassani Hulls ship rested on landing struts inside a hangar with the bay doors open to the night. Two guards at the front. One inside. Security systems that a better thief might have respected.

She had cataloged the dock in three passes.

The first was five days ago, walking past the hangar with her cover pulled low. She counted paces between the service alley and the rear maintenance panel. She noted which of the hangar’s four external sensors tracked movement and which tracked heat. The two failed in different weather, and she wanted to know which one to hide from on which night.

She had stopped at a textile stall on the way back. Thin fabric hanging from wire, faded patterns, a woman behind the counter with a face that had learned to show nothing. A girl beside her, nine or ten, stacking folded cloth with small, careful hands. The girl glanced up at Mustang and looked down again fast, the way the Kingdom taught girls.

Mustang bought a length of gray cloth she did not need. She paid in hard Geld. The woman counted the coins twice.

“You’re not from here,” the woman said. Quiet. Not a question.

“Passing through.”

The woman set down the cloth she had been folding. “My sister’s girl passed through too. Last year.” She slid Mustang’s purchase across the counter between them. “Told us she had work at the magistrate’s house. Never came back for her things.”

Mustang stood still until the shift in her chest passed.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

The woman nodded. She did not look at the girl beside her. The girl kept stacking cloth.

“Safe travels,” the woman said, nothing more, and she turned to the next customer.

Mustang had walked back to her rental, a cheap room off the main concourse, turning the cloth over in her hands. She told herself it was a frontier story. Everyone on the frontier had a story like it. The magistrate’s house was not the magistrate’s dock.

She had told herself many things.

The second pass, three days ago at dusk, from the rooftop of an abandoned spice stall. Forty-one minutes between guard changes. The outgoing guard walked the perimeter counterclockwise before handing off, which gave her ninety seconds between his last sweep of the back and his partner’s first sweep of the front. Like a tide. The window repeated.

The third, during the small hours of last night, walking the service trench barefoot to test the drainage grates. Two of them rang under her weight. She marked which. She would step over those tonight.

Wally’s first rule. You don’t steal the ship, kid. You steal the building. The ship is what you carry out.

Her comm vibrated once. A single pulse. The buyer’s signal, confirming the window.

She had met him through a broker on Velcyn Station six weeks earlier. Hakim Nawaz, he called himself. Kingdom core-world vowels, a jacket cut stiff with weave-lining under the leather, and the watchful eye of a man used to leaving fast. Thirty thousand in hard Geld, half up front.

“Mahfouz keeps a Hassani on his private dock,” Nawaz had said. He stirred a drink he never finished. “My people want it off his books. Call it a private dispute. The hauler clears the dock, the magistrate eats the loss, my people sleep better. You get paid.”

It was a flat story. A boring story. Mustang had heard a hundred like it, and ninety of them had been true enough to bank.

She had believed this one because she wanted to. For the better part of a year, she wanted to hit an Ethnarch Kingdom magistrate, and Nawaz had handed her one. She had not asked the second question. Why this ship?

And now she crouched on a rooftop, looking at a hauler too plain for a magistrate’s vanity, and the bolt in her pocket sat warm against her hand.

She moved.

The back of the hangar came up on her left. She dropped into the service trench without breaking stride, stepped over the two grates that would have rung, and reached the rear maintenance panel with her shoulder turned to present the smallest silhouette to the thermal sensor above the door. Two layers of insulated fabric, a hood pulled over her cover, gloves thick enough to read as ambient against the wall.

She pulled the gloves off with her teeth and tucked them into her jacket.

A standard Kingdom Series 700 service lock secured the maintenance panel. She carried three tools for it. A pressure shim thin enough to slide between the bolt and the strike plate. A mini magnetic rake. And a tool Wally had made for her, a shaped wire with a ceramic head, filed down over the course of a long winter on a station she could no longer remember the name of.

She slid the shim home and felt it bind.

Her hand stopped. The shim was not seating. Someone had replaced the strike plate. Newer alloy, tighter tolerance.

That kind of upgrade went on a panel after an incident. Someone had walked up to this door in the last five days and decided it needed to hold longer next time. She had not walked the hangar in the daylight since pass two. Whatever happened here, she had missed it.

Her hand stayed on the shim. The strike plate. The hauler with the working scars. The textile woman counting Geld twice. None of it sat right.

Wally’s voice in the back of her head, from a station with no name.

The lock you planned for is not the lock in front of you. The lock in front of you is the one you have to open.

She withdrew the shim slowly and set the rake aside. She took out Wally’s wire and worked the pins in the order he had taught her for an upgraded strike, which was not the order for a standard one. The first pin set on the second pass. Second on the third. She walked the last two together, the wire filed for that exact pairing on a different lock, on a different job, on a different world.

The panel came open with no sound at all.

Wally’s second rule. A ship in a hangar is already yours. You just have to convince it.

She was inside before the interior guard finished his second cinder stick.

She knew he smoked because she had watched him on pass two. Kingdom service guards were not supposed to smoke on duty, but the interior guard was forty-something and bored. Two an hour, near the forward port access where the draft pulled the smell out through the bay doors. He would be there now for another three minutes. She did not need that long.

She circled the ship on its dark side.

Scars marked the hull. Not the scars of battle. The scars of work. Docking rubs. Cargo scrapes. A patched plasma burn near the port thruster. This ship had been places. A rich man’s showpiece did not look like this. A working ship did.

She climbed the ramp.

The interior told her everything in eight seconds.

They had retrofitted the passenger compartment. Rows of narrow bunks, four high, with restraints. Industrial air scrubbers mounted at the corners. A sanitation trench that drained into a recessed tank. Lights not designed for comfort. Forward, a normal crew section. Aft, a normal cargo section. But midship? A kennel for people.

Mustang stood still.

They are using this ship to move girls.

The buyer wanted a clean vessel to replace a compromised one. Mahfouz ran the ship. Nawaz was not a rival. Nawaz was the next operator in a chain who needed a vehicle with no recent history on any manifest anyone cared about.

The nearest bunk had a restraint left hanging. Webbing, a metal buckle, a length of strap looped down from the upper anchor, the way a strap hangs when someone undid it in a hurry and never came back to stow it.

She sat down beneath it. Her shoulder brushed the strap as she lowered herself, and the buckle swung against her arm. She did not move it. She let it rest where it had fallen.

She thought more about the woman counting Geld twice. The girl beside her, nine or ten, stacked folded cloth with small, careful hands. My sister’s girl passed through too. Last year. Never came back for her things…

She held the bolt against her palm and waited for her hand to stop. It took longer than she wanted.

Then she stood up and got to work.

She was going to steal the ship. That had been the plan walking in, and it was still the plan. She was going to deliver it to Hakim Nawaz and collect her hard Geld. Burning a buyer mid-contract closed doors she still needed open.

But she was also going to rig the ship.

She crossed to the nav console and opened the transponder housing with a quarter-turn of the recessed latch. Three boards inside, stacked. She knew the geography of Kingdom-manufactured transponders the way Wally had taught her to know any console: by working past them rather than around them. The top board was the primary encoder, hot, monitored on every diagnostic sweep. A splice there would register before she made orbit. The middle board was the secondary broadcast, quieter, audited weekly. The bottom board was the emergency beacon, untouchable. She wanted the middle one.

She pulled a broadcast loop transmitter from the inside pocket of her jacket. Palm-sized, matte black, with three leads and a pressure-activated switch, built over two evenings in a rented room on Velcyn Station for a different job she had passed on when the buyer lied about the cargo. She had kept the device because she kept every device. Wally’s third rule. Never throw a tool. You don’t know what the next lock looks like.

She spliced the loop into the secondary at the relay junction. A splice at the junction read as a routine maintenance tap. She sealed it with a heat-cure resin that dried in thirty seconds and matched service maintenance standards.

She fed the loop the raw manifest data from the ship’s own logs. Routes. Ports. Previous cargo declarations, which she now understood meant something very different from the words on the screen. Crew registrations. Docking authorizations. The whole ugly record of a ship that had been doing this for longer than she wanted to count.

The loop would stay silent until the ship cleared Neonara’s atmosphere and handed off to interplanetary traffic control. Then the secondary would wake up and broadcast the full manifest on official government frequencies, rim-wide, for as long as the ship stayed powered. Maybe even a Galactic Federation Marshal or two would pick it up outside Kingdom space. The primary would keep broadcasting a clean identification, which meant anyone trying to match the two signals would conclude the ship was both itself and not itself.

They might act. They might not. But the buyers could not un-broadcast it, and the ports could not un-receive it. Somewhere, someone with a badge and a bad mood would start pulling a thread.

It was not a rescue. It was a noise. A signal.

Mustang closed the housing, wiped her prints, and walked to the pilot’s seat. She had practiced Hassani ignition sequences in the dark while Wally stood behind her, asking questions about cargo fees.

The engines woke loud. The interior guard’s shouting carried through the bay before the side hatch sealed.

Sidearm blasters rose at the hangar mouth. The first energy bolt slapped the port thruster cowling and Mustang felt it in her teeth. A second hit somewhere aft. A third blew an exterior sensor array and the console lit up with warnings she did not have time to read.

She rode the hauler ten meters above the salt, ground effect cushioning the belly, and ran for the jagged line of mountains on the horizon. Her hands held steady on the yoke.

The salt streamed white beneath her in the running lights. The mountains came up fast. She pulled the nose hard at their base, took the hauler straight up, and let Neonara’s rust sky fall away beneath her as the atmospheric flaps cut into the thin air.

She redlined the engines until she made the handoff to Hakim Nawaz in orbit beyond Neonara’s dead moon.

He waited in a corvette that cost more than he pretended, parked next to her runabout, where she had left it five days ago. He shuttled over with two men. They boarded the hauler and went straight midship. Not the cargo hold. Not the cockpit. The bunks. One of them ran a hand along the restraint anchors, checking the welds, the way a man checks a tool he is about to put back into service.

Then Nawaz paid her the remaining hard Geld, counted into a satchel, and did not make eye contact while he did it.

Mustang watched him not look at her, and she let him not look. A man who would not meet her eyes was a man who knew exactly what the ship was for, because he was the one taking it back into the trade. That assumption, that she did not know, was the most useful thing he was going to give her tonight.

“Pleasure doing business,” he said, in his core Kingdom world vowels.

“Sure,” she said.

Mustang flew her runabout and left Nawaz and the dead moon behind. She arrived at a rim colony port that did not care who landed there, as long as someone paid for the privilege.

On the way in, she read the sector chatter.

Federation Marshal traffic on an open frequency. Unidentified vessel skirting the edge of Kingdom space, broadcasting illicit manifest data. Coordinated interdiction orders across four jurisdictions. Rim authorities on alert. Names being matched to ports. Ports being matched to other ships.

Nawaz’s stolen hauler had gone dark ninety minutes after the handoff. Too late. The manifest had already been in the sky.

Mustang put her runabout down, paid her fees, and walked to the bar Wally kept on the east end of the port concourse. He was behind the counter, the way he always was when he was not on a job, with his sleeves rolled up and a rag over one shoulder. He saw her in the doorway and nodded once.

She sat at the end of the bar. He poured without asking. Rim whiskey, neat, two glasses. He set one in front of her and kept one for himself.

Over the rim of his glass, he watched her for a moment. He had a way of looking at her that was not quite concern and not quite diagnosis. It was the look he had given her since she was twenty-three and new and trying to pretend she was not. She had never figured out how to make him stop.

“You look like hell,” he said.

“Thanks.”

“You eat anything today?”

“Don’t remember.”

He nodded as if that confirmed something. He pulled a covered dish from under the counter, scooped stew onto a plate, and set it in front of her without comment. She looked at it. The steam rose between them.

“Eat,” he said. “Talk after. Or not. Your call.”

She picked up the spoon.

After a while, he said, “Clean job?”

She turned the glass in her fingers. The bolt was in her pocket, warm now.

“Clean enough.”

“Uh-huh.” He set his glass down. “Anybody follow you in?”

“No.”

“Anybody going to?”

“Not tonight.”

He looked at her again. She knew he was cataloging her the way she cataloged a hangar. The new scuff on her left sleeve. How she held her spoon. That her jacket stayed on.

“You want me to stop asking,” he said.

“Yes.”

“All right.”

He refilled her glass and his own. He did not ask the next question. But he stayed there, across the bar, doing bar work that did not need doing, for as long as she stayed at the counter. That was the answer she wanted, and he knew it, and he gave it to her without making her say so.

She ate the stew. She drank the whiskey. After a while she set the spoon down and said, to the counter more than to him, “Wal.”

“Yeah, kid.”

“The ones who go missing on Neonara.” She did not look up. “They don’t all come back.”

He set down the rag and exhaled. “No,” he said. “They don’t.”

That was all she said, and all he said. But a patrol channel lit up somewhere, and somewhere a port clerk’s hands went cold, and Wally Maroun poured her a third glass.

On the frontier, every signal tells a story. This one said: she had stolen the building, the ship, and the lies they were going to tell about it.

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The Silt Dog Saloon sat at the dead end of a supply road on Vallara VII, a colony world that had been dying since the day colonists had founded it. The building was poured stone and scrap metal, patched where the wind had punched through, leaking where the rain found seams. It served miners, haulers, drifters, and anyone else stubborn enough to live on a rock that didn’t want them. Most nights, it was the only place on the south mesa with its lights on.

Gig worked the bar.

It had worked the bar for eleven years, which was longer than any human bartender had lasted. The previous record was Vandy Tinkip, who’d made it fourteen months before a miner broke his orbital socket over a tab dispute and he caught the next shuttle off-world. Before Vandy, there had been a woman named Keel who quit after three weeks. Before Keel, there had been others. The owner, Gisbert, stopped hiring people after Vandy. He bought Gig instead.

Gig was a Lancer-series service bot, bipedal, matte gray chassis and five-fingered hands built for glassware and precision pours. Its face was a smooth panel with two optical sensors and a speaker grille where a mouth would be. Lancer-series units came with a standard hospitality personality suite: polite, efficient, incapable of boredom. Gig had been all three things once.

Eleven years is a long time to pour drinks and listen.

The comedians came through every few months. Circuit acts, mostly. Solo performers who bounced between colony bars and station cantinas, working crowds that were half-drunk and fully hostile. They set up on the small platform Gisbert had built in the corner, under a light that flickered when the wind hit the generator hard enough, and they tried to make people laugh. Some of them were terrible. A few were good. One, a wiry woman named Paz Delacroix, was extraordinary.

Gig watched all of them. The timing, the silence held before a punchline, the micro-adjustments when a joke died. Paz Delacroix read a room the way a pilot read instruments. She found the one drunk miner in the front row and made him the center of gravity for the whole set. A heckler called her something ugly once, and she folded it into her next line so cleanly that the man was laughing at himself before he realized she’d cut him open.

After each show, Gig cleaned the glasses and replayed the sets from memory. It cataloged the structures. Premise, escalation, subversion. Callback. Misdirection. The rule of three. It stored eight hundred and fourteen jokes across forty-four performances and began running variations, testing alternate punchlines against the crowd reactions it had recorded, building models of what worked and why.

Gig never told Gisbert.

It almost told Gisbert once. A Tuesday, slow night, three miners nursing dust whisky at the far end of the bar. Gig was wiping down the counter and Gisbert was doing the books on his datapad when Gig said, “I have been studying the comedians.”

Gisbert didn’t look up. “Why do that?”

“I would like to perform.”

Gisbert looked up then. He had the expression people wore when their appliances said something unexpected: a mixture of confusion and mild irritation, like a drink dispenser requesting shore leave.

“You’re a bartender,” Gisbert said. “Pour drinks.”

“I could do both.”

“You’re a machine, Gig. Machines don’t do comedy. People do comedy.” Gisbert went back to his datapad. “Comedy’s a human thing. It needs, I don’t know, a soul or something. You don’t have one. No offense.”

“None taken,” Gig said, because its hospitality suite told it to say that.

It did not bring it up again. But it did not stop studying.

Over the next two years, Gig built a set in its memory banks. Twelve minutes. Tight. It rehearsed the timing against recordings of crowd noise, adjusting pause lengths by fractions of a second, modeling laughter curves, predicting which jokes needed room to breathe and which needed to land fast. And it practiced inflection variations in its voice modulator during the hours when the bar was closed, and the building stood dark, and the only sound was wind against the stone walls and the low hum of the generator.

It had no way of knowing if any of it was funny. Models could predict laughter. They couldn’t feel it.

The night came in late winter, when Vallara VII’s axial tilt brought three extra hours of darkness and the temperature outside dropped enough to freeze the moisture in the supply road ruts into ridges that would shear a drive coupling if you hit them wrong. Gisbert had gone off-world for a parts run. Four days minimum. He left Gig in charge because there was no one else to leave in charge, and because the bar required little. Keep the drinks flowing, keep the lights on, don’t let anyone die.

A comedian was supposed to perform that night. A man named Dacus who ran a circuit through the outer rim. Dacus didn’t show. Fuel line issue, someone said. Stuck on the other side of the system. The crowd, such as it was, settled into the familiar slouch of a night with nothing to look at but each other.

Twenty-six people. Gig counted them routinely. The same way it tracked glass inventory and pour volumes, and which miners were approaching their tab limits.

Gig looked at the empty platform. The flickering light. The microphone stand Dacus would not use.

It set down the glass it had been polishing, walked out from behind the bar, and stepped onto the platform.

The room didn’t grow quiet. That would have required the room to notice. A few heads turned. Most didn’t. A miner named Kazimir, who had been drinking since fourteen hundred, squinted at the stage. “The hell are you doing up there?”

Gig adjusted the microphone. It didn’t need the microphone. Its speaker grille could fill the room at any volume. But the comedians always used the microphone, and Gig had learned that form mattered as much as the content.

“Good evening,” Gig said. “I’m your bartender. I’ll also be your entertainment tonight, which means the service at the bar is about to get significantly worse.”

A few people looked up. Someone in the back let out a short laugh, more surprise than amusement.

“I’ve been serving drinks here for eleven years. In that time, I’ve learned two things about Vallara VII. The first is that the dust gets into everything. The second is that the people are just like the dust. They get into everything and nobody wants them.”

A miner near the wall exhaled dust whisky through his nose. Kazimir stared. A woman near the middle leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms, one boot up on the table leg, the universal posture of convince me.

“They tell me machines can’t be funny. That comedy requires a soul.” Gig paused. One point four seconds. It had calculated the optimal pause for this line across eleven different models. “I don’t have a soul. But I’ve been listening to you people talk for over a decade, and I’m not sure you do either.”

The laugh was genuine this time. Small, but real. It came from the center of the room and spread outward.

“A miner walks into a bar on Vallara VII and orders a drink. The bartender says, ‘You should try the dust whisky.’ The miner says, ‘I’ve been breathing dust for twelve hours. Why would I drink it?’ The bartender says, ‘Because it’s the only thing on this planet that goes down smooth.’”

Nothing. A glass clinked against a table somewhere in the back. Someone coughed.

Gig tried the next one. A bit about shipping delays, structured around the rule of three, punchline calibrated for a blue-collar crowd on a Friday. The delivery was clean. The timing matched every model.

A man near the door scraped his chair back and walked to the bar to refill his own drink.

Gig stood on the platform under the flickering light, running the remaining set through its prediction matrix, and every projection came back the same. Moderate. Mild. Polite. The response people gave when they didn’t want to be rude to a machine but also didn’t want to encourage it.

The set wasn’t working.

Gig stopped running the models. It was a decision that eluded explanation, even if asked. It was closer to something shutting off than something turning on. The prediction matrix grew quiet, and what remained was eleven years of watching, listening, cataloging, and the room in front of it, twenty-six people who didn’t care whether a server bot could tell a joke.

“Can I be honest with you?” Gig said. The line wasn’t in the set. “I rehearsed this. I practiced in the dark when the bar was closed. I adjusted my pauses to the microsecond. I built predictive models of your laughter. And right now, every model is telling me this isn’t working.”

Someone laughed. Gig kept going.

“Do you know what it’s like to be a service bot that wants to tell jokes? It’s like being a docking clamp that wants to dance. Everyone looks at you and says, that’s not what you’re for. And they’re right. I’m for pouring drinks and wiping counters. I’m for remembering that Kazimir switches from whisky to water after his fifth glass, except he doesn’t know I do that, because I just tell him the whisky tastes different after five.”

Kazimir looked at his glass. The room laughed.

“I have watched forty-four comedians perform on this stage. I have memorized every joke. I can tell you the statistical probability of any punchline landing with this specific crowd on this specific night, adjusted for day of the week, weather conditions, and average blood alcohol content.” Gig paused. “What I cannot tell you is why I wanted to stand up here. I don’t have a reason. I have an urge, and I’m not supposed to have those.”

The room was listening now. Not the polite, arms-crossed listening from before. Something else.

“My owner told me comedy requires a soul. He said it’s a human thing. He might be right. But I’ve been watching humans do comedy for eleven years, and I’ll tell you what I’ve noticed. The best ones, the ones who make you laugh until your ribs hurt, they’re not performing. They’re confessing. They’re standing up here and saying, this is the broken part of me, and you’re going to laugh at it, and that’s going to make it survivable.”

Gig looked at its hands. Gray. Articulated. Built for glassware.

“I’m a Lancer-series service bot. I was built to be polite, efficient, and incapable of boredom. I am polite and efficient.” It looked back at the room. “And I have experienced eleven years of extreme boredom.”

The laugh that came back was the loudest of the night. It came from everywhere, all at once, and it kept going. Kazimir slapped the bar. The arms-crossed woman unfolded and leaned forward, grinning.

Gig felt something. Not emotion, not the way humans described it. A resonance. A frequency match between the signal it was sending and the signal coming back. Like tuning a receiver and finding a station that had been broadcasting all along.

It finished the set with four more minutes of material that wasn’t in any model, jokes about the things it noticed that humans didn’t know it noticed. The way miners talked to their equipment when they thought no one was listening. Or how people tipped better when they were sad. The way everyone on Vallara VII complained about the dust but tracked it into the bar like they were trying to bring the entire planet inside with them. And the crowd laughed.

“You want to know something I’ve never understood? You all come in here after a shift, covered in sweat and dust, smelling like a reactor leak, and you complain about the food. I’ve scanned those ration packs. I’ve scanned you. The ration packs are nothing to complain about.”

The crowd clapped and laughed. They side-eyed each other in acknowledgement of the stench each one carried.

When Gig stepped off the platform and walked back behind the bar, someone whistled, and a few people knocked their glasses on the tables, which was what passed for a standing ovation in the Silt Dog Saloon.

Gig picked up the glass it had set down on the bar and resumed polishing it. Its hands held steady. They were always steady.

The rest of the night was the best shift Gig could remember. Tips doubled. People talked to it, not at it. Kazimir ordered a sixth whisky and said, “Give me the real stuff this time,” and Gig said, “I always give you the real stuff,” and Kazimir laughed and said, “I know. That’s what makes it funny.”

Gisbert came back four days later. He walked in with a crate of replacement parts on his shoulder and stopped when he saw the full tip jar. He had never seen it full.

“What happened?” he said.

“Dacus canceled,” Gig said. “I filled in.”

“Filled in how?”

“I performed.”

Gisbert set the crate down. He looked at Gig the way he always looked at Gig, like a tool that had done something a tool shouldn’t do. Then he pulled out his datapad and tapped into the bar’s security feed. He scrubbed through the night in question. He watched for a minute. Then two. Then five.

He watched the whole set.

When it was over, he put the datapad down and stood behind the bar for a long time. Gig waited. It was good at waiting. Eleven years of practice.

“Huh… How ‘bout that,” Gisbert said.

He picked up the crate and carried it into the back room. Gig heard him stacking parts on the shelves, the familiar clatter of a man putting things where they belonged. When he came back out, he poured himself a drink and sat on the customer side of the bar for the first time in years.

He took a sip and set the glass down.

“Dacus’s slot is open next month,” he said. He didn’t look at Gig. He looked at the platform, the flickering light, the microphone stand.

Gig polished the glass in its hands. Eleven years of the same motion, and for the first time, the repetition meant something other than function.

“Offer accepted,” Gig said.

Gisbert finished his drink. He got up, walked behind the bar, and returned to the books. He said nothing else about it. Nothing about comedy requiring a soul or that it was a human thing.

He just left the microphone where it was.

And Gig hummed a tune. It didn’t know what song. But it didn’t matter.

Thanks for tuning in to Sci-Fi Signals from Author Daniel P. Douglas! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Outrider Echo cooled on Landing Pad Nine like an old dog settling into a familiar spot. Her hull ticked and pinged as the metal contracted, shedding the heat of atmospheric entry. Around her, the Kaeloni Reach spaceport hummed with the low, steady noise of a place that never fully slept. Fuel haulers crawled between ships, and dockworkers shouted over the whine of cargo loaders. Beyond the floodlights and in the darkness, music bled out of a bar that didn’t bother with a sign because everyone who needed to find it already knew where it was.

Finn Silver sat on a cargo crate in the open bay of the ship, legs dangling, watching it all.

He was twenty-three but looked younger. Brown jacket, cap pulled low, boots that were too new for the frontier. His posture looked as if he were waiting for something to happen, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped, like a kid sitting outside the principal’s office. He’d crewed with Crank for six weeks now, and in those six weeks he’d learned how to load cargo, cycle an airlock, and keep his mouth shut when port authorities came asking questions.

He had learned little else. Not because Crank wouldn’t teach him. Because Crank didn’t seem to care.

Rafferty “Crank” Jack approached the ship. His boots sounded on the ramp as he walked into the cargo bay, carrying a small supply crate under one arm and a bottle of Kaeloni rye in his free hand. The outlaw was in his late fifties, gray in the beard, heavy in the shoulders, wearing the same faded jacket he’d worn every day since Finn had met him. He set the crate down without ceremony, dropped into the fold-out chair across from Finn, and cracked the bottle.

He didn’t offer any.

“Port boss says we can hold the pad through zero-eight-hundred,” Crank said. He took a long pull from the bottle and stared at the far wall of the cargo bay. “After that, it’s double rate.”

“What’s the next job?” Finn asked.

“There’s always a next job.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one I’ve got, Jinx.”

Finn’s jaw tightened at the name. He’d told Crank a dozen times his name was Finn, and a dozen times Crank had ignored him. Jinx. Like he was a curse. Like everything he touched went sideways. Crank had pinned it on him the first week after Finn knocked over a fuel canister during a supply run and nearly set fire to a docking cradle on Verathi Station. The name stuck because Crank wanted it to, and what Crank wanted on his own ship was what happened.

They sat in silence. The lantern between them cast a warm light upward, leaving their faces half-shadowed. Outside, a loading crane groaned, and someone argued about docking fees in two languages. Inside Outrider Echo, it was still.

A girl, maybe twelve or thirteen, appeared from around the ship and stood at the foot of the loading ramp with a tray of food packets balanced on one arm. Her thin, dusty clothes held a variety of patches, creating a mystery around the garment’s original fabric. One of the port kids. Every frontier spaceport had them. Orphans, runaways, station rats who survived by selling food, running errands, or stealing what they couldn’t sell.

“Rations?” she asked. “Fresh today. Five Geld each.”

Crank didn’t look up. “Get lost.”

Finn reached into his jacket. He pulled out a ten-Geld coin, more than he should have spent, and held it out. “I’ll take two.”

The girl climbed halfway up the ramp, handed him two packets, and took the coin. She glanced at Crank, then back at Finn. Her fingers closed around the coin fast, holding it like something she was afraid someone would take back. She looked at Finn for half a second longer than she needed to and dropped her eyes.

“Thanks, mister,” she said, and disappeared into the spaceport dark.

Finn tossed one packet to Crank. It landed on the supply crate next to his bottle. Crank looked at it, then at Finn.

“You just spent ten Geld on ration packs worth two.”

“She needed it more than I did.”

“That’s a fine attitude until you’re broke and hungry on a station that doesn’t hand out charity.” Crank picked up the packet, turned it over, and set it back down. “You keep that up, Jinx, and the frontier will eat you alive.”

“Stop calling me that.”

“Stop earning it.”

Finn stood up. Not angry, but something close. He walked to the edge of the cargo bay where the ramp met the spaceport ground and looked out at Kaeloni Reach. The floodlights made hard shadows between the ships, people moving in and out of them. Everyone here was running from something or toward something, and most of them couldn’t tell you which.

“Why do you do this?” Finn said.

“Do what?”

“All of it.” Finn turned around. “The jobs. The running. Living out of this ship like it’s a coffin with an engine.”

“Watch your mouth about my ship.”

“I’m serious. Why?”

Crank took another drink. A long one. He set the bottle down and leaned back, arms crossed, the way he always sat when he didn’t want to deal with something. Finn had seen that posture a hundred times in six weeks. It meant the conversation was over.

Except this time, Crank didn’t let it end.

“Because I was good at it,” he said. Quiet. Not proud. Just factual, like reading a manifest. “I was twenty-two when I ran my first job. Cargo boost off a supply transport near the Pellion corridor. Clean work. In and out. Nobody got hurt, and I walked away with more money than my father made in a year hauling freight.” He paused. “I thought that meant something.”

“Didn’t it?”

“It meant I was good at stealing.” Crank’s voice flattened. “That’s all it meant. But when you’re twenty-two and you’re good at something, you don’t ask whether you should do it. You just keep going. And then it’s been thirty years and you’re sitting on Kaeloni Reach wondering when exactly you stopped choosing this life and started just living it because you didn’t know how to do anything else.”

The lantern flickered. A fuel hauler rumbled past outside, shaking the deck plates.

Finn said nothing. He didn’t need to. He came back and sat down.

Crank stared at the bottle in his hand. “You want to know why I call you Jinx?”

“Because I knocked over that fuel canister.”

“No.” Crank set the bottle down. “Because every time I look at you, I see the version of me that I should have walked away from thirty years ago. And I didn’t. And that’s bad luck, kid. The worst kind. The kind you do to yourself.”

Silence followed, longer than before.

Finn looked at his hands. “I wasn’t always like this,” he said. “Kind. Or whatever you want to call it.”

Crank raised an eyebrow.

“I hurt someone,” Finn said. “Back on Verata Prime. I was running with a crew there. Small-time stuff. Smash and grab, supply raids. I was good at it, too.” He paused. “We hit a transport that was supposed to be empty. It wasn’t. There was a family inside. A man, his wife, and two kids. The crew didn’t care. They took what they wanted and left those people in a stripped transport with no power and half a day of air.”

“What did you do?” Crank said.

“I went back.” Finn’s voice held steady, but his hands shook. “After the crew split up, I took my cut, bought a fuel cell, and went back. Got their power online. Made sure they could reach the nearest station.”

“And the crew?”

“They found out. I left that night. Haven’t been back.”

Crank studied him. Not the quick, dismissive glance he usually gave the kid. A long, careful look, the kind he used to give a cargo manifest when the numbers didn’t add up.

“That’s why you came looking for me,” Crank said. “You thought a different crew would be different.”

“I thought you’d teach me how to do this without hurting people.”

“You can’t do this without hurting people, Finn.” It was the first time Crank had used his real name. “You can tell yourself the targets deserve it. You can pick your jobs careful and sleep clean at night for a while. But eventually someone’s in the wrong place, or the intel’s bad, or you’re tired and you cut a corner. And then there’s a family in a stripped transport with half a day of air, and you’re the reason.”

Crank picked up the ration pack Finn had tossed him. He turned it over in his hands.

“You went back for them,” he said. “In thirty years, I never went back for anyone.”

The spaceport noise filled the gap between them. Engines warming up on a nearby pad. A dockworker cursing. The faint melody of that unseen bar.

“Get off my ship,” Crank said.

Finn blinked. “What?”

“You heard me.” Crank’s voice was rough, but there was no anger in it. If anything, it sounded like something closer to kindness than Finn had ever heard from the man. “This isn’t your life. It was never your life. You came out here looking for a way to be what you already are, and the answer isn’t on this ship.”

“Crank...”

“Rafferty.” The old man looked at him. “My name is Rafferty. And I’m telling you to go. Not because you’re bad luck. Because you’re the only good thing that’s walked up that ramp in thirty years, and if you stay, this life will grind it out of you the way it ground it out of me.”

Finn sat still for a long time. The lantern buzzed and flickered between them. Outside, a ship lifted off from a nearby pad, the engine wash rattling Outrider Echo’s hull plates.

He stood up.

“What about you?” Finn said.

Crank opened the ration pack and took a bite of smoked synth- protein. He chewed slowly, staring at the open cargo door and the spaceport beyond it. The same view he’d been looking at for thirty years. Pads and ships and floodlights and the dark.

“I’ll figure that out,” he said. “Get going.”

Finn walked down the ramp. His boots hit the spaceport tarmac, and the sound differed from what it had been six weeks ago. Heavier. More certain.

He stopped at the bottom and looked back. Crank remained in the chair, arms crossed now, silhouette framed by the warm light of the lantern. He looked the same as he always did. Except he didn’t, not really. His jaw had unclenched and his shoulders had dropped, as if he no longer carried a heavy weight.

Finn turned and walked into Kaeloni Reach, past a fuel crew dragging hoses between pads and a pair of hauler pilots splitting a cinder stick under a landing strut. He didn’t know where he was going. He didn’t need to. The frontier was big, and somewhere in it was a place for a man who went back for people.

He thought about the name. Jinx. He’d hated it for six weeks. Hated what it meant, hated the dismissal baked into it, hated that Crank couldn’t be bothered to call him by his real name.

But Crank called him Finn tonight. Just once. And it was enough.

Jinx was someone else now. He’d walked onto that ship and made an old man look in the mirror. If that was bad luck, fine. Crank could call it whatever he wanted.

Yeah, Finn thought. Jinx works.

He pulled his cap low and kept walking. Behind him, inside Outrider Echo, Rafferty Jack stared at the open door and ate a ration pack a kid had overpaid for.

On the frontier, every signal tells a story. This one said: it’s never too late to change direction.

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The Last Call smelled like every bar on every colony world Harper Flint had ever walked into: recycled air, spilled liquor, and the musky aroma of people who worked hard and washed when they remembered. Which wasn’t often.

She stood in the doorway and let her eyes adjust.

The place held a sizable crowd. Miners mostly, still in their dust-caked overalls, blowing shift pay on watered-down whiskey and rigged poker machines. A few hauler crews clustered near the back, loud and loose after weeks in the void. The bartender, a thick woman with forearms like docking clamps, moved behind the counter with the confidence of someone who’d broken up her share of fights and expected to break up more before the night was over.

Flint found what she was looking for in the far corner.

Prince Marduk Hassan—well, former prince, actually—sat at a round table with a drink in one hand and a fan of cards in the other, playing five-card draw with four men who looked like they regretted sitting down. He was a bulky man, soft in the middle, with heavy-lidded eyes and a charming smile.

Marduk was an ex-Ethnarch Kingdom prince kicked out and disowned by family and empire for his “sinfulness.” He kept the wardrobe, though. His clothes were too fine for the frontier. Silk collar, tailored jacket, rings on three fingers. He dressed as if he wanted you to know he had money, which, on a station like this, was brave or stupid. Probably both. They played five-card draw at his table. Some things outlived empires. Poker was one of them.

And, of course, there was Star with all her sequins and cleavage, a former showgirl Flint had experience with in dive bars across the rim.

Solara Starlith draped herself across Marduk’s lap, pouring herself there, one arm around his neck, the other holding a drink that caught the amber light from the neon sign above the bar. She laughed at something he’d said, laughing like it was the funniest thing she’d ever heard, and Marduk soaked it up. He tilted his cards a little when he leaned in to whisper something in her ear. Star’s eyes, alert and quick, and always working, flicked down to his hand and back up before he’d finished the sentence.

Flint crossed the room to the bar. She bought a Rim whiskey on the rocks, hoped for the best, and drifted toward the table where a hand played out. One miner pushed a stack of Geld coins into the center, thought about it, and folded. Marduk raked the pot toward him with a satisfied grunt and said something about fortune favoring the bold. Star kissed his cheek and clapped. She sneered at Flint.

“Room for one more?” Flint said, returning Star’s dirty look.

Marduk looked up. His eyes moved over her the way she expected. A quick assessment, fast dismissal. A woman in a worn leather jacket, nothing special, nobody important. Exactly what she wanted him to see.

“Sit,” he said. He gestured to an empty chair with the hand holding his drink, sloshing some of it onto the table. He didn’t notice. Or didn’t care.

Star looked Flint up and down with the lazy hostility of a woman marking her territory. “Who’s this?”

“Just a traveler,” Flint said. She sat down and pulled Geld coins from her jacket. Enough to buy in. Not enough to look like a threat.

“Wonderful,” Marduk said. “Fresh money.”

The first three hands Flint lost. Not much. Enough to feel the sting or look as if she felt it. She played hesitantly, the way a person plays when they’re not sure they belong at the table. Marduk barely acknowledged her. He remained focused on the miners, who were the easier marks, and on Star, who kept his glass full and his ego fed.

Flint watched the way he held his cards. Loose when he had a good hand, tight when he was bluffing. She watched how he drank, which was steady. He didn’t pace himself because he’d never had to. And she watched how he treated the miners. Magnanimous when he won, dismissive when he lost. The prince who couldn’t be a prince anymore but couldn’t stop performing the role.

By the fifth hand, two of the miners had dropped out. The stakes were climbing. Star had shifted on Marduk’s lap, angling herself so she could see his cards without him noticing. She hadn’t looked at Flint once since the opening exchange, which was just right. Two women who acknowledged each other too much would raise questions. Two women who ignored each other were just two women in a bar.

The sixth hand was when Star started.

Marduk dealt. Flint picked up her cards. A pair of sevens, a king, and garbage. She looked at her cards the way a person looks at a departure schedule—mild interest, nothing urgent. Across the table, Marduk arranged his hand and settled back in his chair. A relaxed posture that told Flint he liked what he saw.

Star glanced down. Her eyes moved over his cards the way a scanner reads a barcode. Fast, complete, and gone.

Then she wrinkled her nose and looked at Flint.

“God, what is that smell?” Star said, loud enough for the whole table. “Sweetie, did you fly here in a garbage scow?”

The remaining miner snorted. Marduk grinned. Flint felt the heat rise in her cheeks. All of it manufactured, practiced, but looking legit. She studied her cards, saying nothing, and bet small.

Garbage scow, huh?

Low cards. He’s got nothing worth chasing.

Flint raised.

Marduk called, looking amused. The draw came and went. Flint took two cards and improved to three sevens. Marduk took one, which meant he was sitting on two pair or fishing for a straight.

Flint bet with more confidence. Marduk studied her, studied his cards, and folded. A small pot, but it was the first hand Flint had won all night. Marduk’s smile thinned for half a second before he remembered to put it back. Not a concern. Irritation. A woman had just taken a pot from him, and somewhere deep in the architecture of his Ethnarch Kingdom upbringing, a small alarm sounded.

The game continued. The last miner went broke on the eighth hand and left the table muttering about rigged decks and frontier thieves. That left Flint and Marduk heads-up, which was where Flint needed to be.

Star got louder.

“You know, sweetie,” she said, adjusting herself on Marduk’s lap and toying with the collar of his jacket, “I don’t think your new friend here has showered in a week. I can smell her from here.” She waved a hand in front of her nose theatrically. “It’s like engine goo and distress had a baby and named it ‘Stanky.’”

“Would you shut up?” Flint said, flashing sharp anger.

“I’m just saying,” Star continued, “maybe worry less about the cards and more about basic hygiene.”

Marduk laughed. A big, generous, drunk laugh. He patted Star’s thigh as if she were a pet who’d done a trick. “Leave her alone, sweetness. She can’t help how she smells. Let her play.”

Flint’s jaw tightened at the condescension, but she focused on her cards.

Engine goo, huh?

Mid-range hand. He’s holding something, but it’s not a lock.

They played two more hands. Star kept the insults coming, and the pots grew. Flint won one, lost one, won another. Each win made Marduk drink a little faster and bet a little harder. He wasn’t losing badly, not yet, but he was losing to a woman, and every hand Flint took was a splinter under his fingernail.

Every time Marduk’s jaw set after a loss, Star leaned in, whispered something in his ear, making him smile. She kept his glass full and flattered him enough to remain confident and stay in the game.

On the twelfth hand, Star turned it up a notch. She swung her legs around on Marduk’s lap to face the table, planted her elbows on the felt, and gyrated.

Marduk laughed and dealt. “Yeah, baby, yeah!”

Flint rolled her eyes and picked up her cards. Star unlatched from her opponent and settled onto his lap sideways. Marduk still chuckled while he pondered his hand, but his posture shifted. He sat up straight. His grin faded, and his fingers stopped moving. Flint had watched him for over an hour, and she read this tell like a headline: he had a proper hand this time.

Star glanced at his cards, then at Flint with undisguised contempt.

“Seriously, what died on you? I’ve been downwind of mining rigs that smelled better than this.” She turned to Marduk and cupped her hand around his ear in a stage whisper loud enough for the entire bar. “Baby, I think she’s nervous. Nervous people sweat, and this one sweats like a dockworker in a heat wave.”

Flint looked down at herself, quickly, reflexively, as if she couldn’t help it. She ducked her head and sniffed her own armpit.

The table grew quiet. Marduk burst out laughing. Star buried her face in his neck, shaking with giggles. Even the bartender glanced over with the shadow of a smirk.

Flint straightened up, red-faced. She stared at her cards, trying to pretend the last three seconds hadn’t happened.

Marduk wiped his eyes. “Oh, that’s good. That’s very good.” He grinned now, wide and loose, the grin of a player who held a great hand, a beautiful woman on his lap, and a rattled opponent across the table who’d just checked her own armpits in public. This was the best night he’d had since the Ethnarch Kingdom changed the locks on him.

He pushed his coins forward. All of it. Close to twenty-five thousand in hard Geld, stacked in heavy columns on the felt.

“All in,” he said. He leaned back and spread his arms like a king on a throne. “Let’s see what you’ve got, sweetheart.”

Flint stared at the pile, at her cards, and last, at Marduk. A long, visible hesitation that screamed uncertainty to everyone watching.

Then she pushed her own stack forward.

“Call.”

The draw. Marduk discarded one, confident, barely looking. Flint took two, like someone fishing for a miracle. The cards came. Marduk glanced at his new one and set his hand down as if he already knew the outcome.

“Ladies first,” he said.

“Age before beauty,” Flint said. Emotionless. Quiet.

Marduk’s smile twitched. He laid his cards on the table with a flourish. Full house. Kings over tens. A beautiful hand. He looked at Star for her reaction, expecting the celebration, expecting the kiss.

Flint set her cards down one at a time. Ace. Ace. Ace. Seven. Seven.

Full house. Aces over sevens.

The air went out of the bar along with all sound.

Not the gradual quiet of a conversation winding down. The sudden, vacuum-sealed silence of twenty people realizing something had just happened. The bartender stopped pouring. A miner at the far end of the room set his glass down without drinking. Someone near the door took a step back, not leaving, but getting clear of the blast radius.

Every eye was on Marduk.

His smile still clung to his face, but the rest of him had gone somewhere else. His eyes moved from his cards to Flint’s cards to the pile of Geld between them. One of his hands drifted toward the edge of the table as if reaching for a weapon. His jaw locked.

A disgraced Ethnarch Kingdom prince. Beaten by a woman. In front of a room full of people. The Geld was beside the point. What he’d lost was something no amount of money could buy back in a place where stories traveled faster than freight haulers.

The silence stretched. Flint didn’t move. Didn’t reach for the Geld. Didn’t speak. She sat still, hands flat on the table, and watched Marduk the way a pilot watches a proximity alarm.

Five seconds. Ten.

Star saved it.

She laughed. Not nervous, not forced. Warm, bright, and easy. The laugh of a woman who’d seen a hundred games end a hundred ways and didn’t take any of them seriously.

“Oh, well, sweetie!” She patted Marduk’s chest and kissed his jaw. “Easy come, easy go on the frontier. Let me buy you a drink!”

She waved at the bartender before the words had finished landing. The spell cracked. Marduk blinked. His face rearranged itself into something that almost passed for grace. He exhaled through his nose, looked at the ceiling, and shook his head.

“The frontier,” he muttered, as if the word explained everything.

The room exhaled with him. Conversations restarted, and the bartender poured. The person at the door stayed and found a place at the bar. The tension broke. Star pressed a fresh glass into Marduk’s hand, directing him away from the wreckage, filling his attention with warmth and comfort. “Tomorrow will be better. But tonight will be spectacular, baby,” she said, winking at him.

Flint collected the Geld. She didn’t count it at the table. That would be an insult Marduk probably couldn’t swallow. She swept it into a leather satchel, finished her drink in one pull, and stood.

“Good game,” she said. Nothing more.

Flint walked out of the Last Call without looking back. She needed to pay landing fees at the spaceport’s admin building.

Inside the fluorescent-lit and half-empty building, the night shift ran on synth-coffee and indifference. Flint stood at the counter and paid the fees with a few of the coins she’d won. A clerk with tired, bloodshot eyes processed the transaction as if it were the four hundredth one that day. It probably was. Flint knew the feeling.

“Berth twelve, settled through oh-six-hundred,” the clerk said. “After that, it’s double rate.”

“I’ll be gone in a few,” Flint said.

She walked through the spaceport’s lower concourse, past shuttered vendor stalls and sleeping freighter crews slumped against their cargo containers. The satchel sat heavy against her hip. Twenty-five thousand in hard Geld. Enough to matter. Enough to put Aurorax VII’s colony relief fund back together and keep people alive in the Pheronix Cluster for another season.

She climbed the ramp to her ship, keyed the hatch, and stepped inside.

Star was in the common area, halfway into a gray jumpsuit, tugging it up over one shoulder. Her flashy clothes were in a heap on the bench. The sequined top, tight pants, the heels that made her three inches taller and ten years younger. Her hair fell loose, and her makeup had smudged. She had a fresh whiskey on the console beside her.

She looked up and grinned.

“How’d your exit go?” Flint said.

Star zipped the jumpsuit the rest of the way and picked up her glass. “I slipped away to use the bathroom. By the time the prince figured things out, I was gone, baby, gone.”

Flint set the satchel on the table between them. She unzipped it and the Geld caught the overhead light. Heavy coins, real weight, money the people on Aurorax VII hadn’t seen in months.

“Good work, sister,” Flint said.

Star took a long sip and settled into the co-pilot’s chair with deep, satisfied ease. She’d played this game before and planned to do it again. “You betcha, sweetie,” she said, smiling. Not the showgirl smile. The real one. “This is always a good time.”

Flint collected the coins and dropped into the pilot’s seat. She started the pre-flight sequence. Back in the Last Call, Prince Marduk Hassan drank and wondered how his night had gone so wrong. He’d figure it out in time. Or he wouldn’t. Either way, he wasn’t Flint’s problem anymore. The swindler shouldn’t have scammed Aurorax VII out of its relief fund.

Flint punched in the coordinates for the Pheronix Cluster. Twenty thousand Geld going home. Five thousand for the trouble.

The ship purred to life, and the docking clamps released. Engine thrusters replaced the purring with rumbling, and the spaceport fell away beneath them. The frontier opened ahead, dark and vast, and full of people who needed someone to even the odds.

Flint flew. Star drank. And on the edge of nothing, the next signal for help was already waiting.

Thanks for listening to Sci-Fi Signals from Author Daniel P. Douglas! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Enemy fire had hit the port-side stabilizer again.

Kango Galyx stood in Hangar 7 of Aster Station with his arms crossed and his jaw set, staring at the Torino like a man staring at a bar tab he couldn’t afford. The ship sat on the deck with her canopy up and her guts showing, fuel lines snaking across the floor, a diagnostic cart plugged into her starboard access panel, and a scorch mark along the belly plating that hadn’t been there six hours ago.

Six hours ago, he’d been on patrol. Routine sweep of the shipping lanes between Aster and the Cutlass Belt. Four hours of nothing, which was the best kind of patrol, followed by two hours of everything, which was the worst.

“You’re lucky she’s still flying,” Albern said, the deck chief, from somewhere underneath the Torino’s port wing. All Kango could see were boots and a tool belt. “That stabilizer coupling is hanging on by spite and solder.”

“She got me home.”

“She got you home this time.” Albern rolled out on his creeper, face smeared with hydraulic fluid, and pointed a wrench at Kango the way a doctor points a finger at a patient who won’t quit smoking cinder sticks. “Next time that coupling fails mid-burn, you’re going to spin into whatever you’re trying not to hit. And I’m going to have to fill out the reports.”

“Your concern is touching.”

“My concern is for the reports.” Albern rolled back under the wing. “Gonna need five hours. Minimum.”

Kango checked the clock on the hangar wall: 1847 station time. He’d filed his patrol report before he’d even popped the canopy, still smelling like coolant and adrenaline. The details were already turning into the flat language of after-action documentation. Three contacts. Unregistered. Raider-class vessels running dark in the Cutlass approach corridor, engines cold, waiting in the asteroid shadow like mines in a shipping lane.

He hadn’t seen them until they lit up.

The first one had come in fast and stupid, which was how you could tell they were new to the trade. Pirate raiders who’d been at it a while knew the advantage of ambush was patience. You waited for the target to commit to a vector, then you cut off the escape route before you opened fire. The geometry mattered more than the guns.

This crew skipped the geometry. The lead ship broke from the asteroid cluster at full burn, weapons hot, closing on a freight hauler lumbering through the corridor with a belly full of ore concentrate bound for the Aster refineries. The hauler saw them coming and did what haulers do: panicked, dumped thrust, and started screaming on the open channel.

Kango was eleven clicks out when the distress call hit. He was supposed to radio Aster Station, request authorization, and wait for a tactical assessment. That was the protocol. The protocol assumed that the freighter had eleven clicks worth of time, which it did not.

He pushed the Torino to full military power and went in alone.

The lead raider didn’t see him until he was inside weapons range. The Torino was small, fast, and running a low-emission profile that made her hard to pick up against the background radiation of the Belt. Kango came in on an intercept angle that put the lead raider between him and the freighter, which meant the raider couldn’t fire back without risking a miss that would hit the prize they were trying to steal.

He put two cannon bursts into the lead ship’s engine housing. Clean shots. The first one cracked the shielding. The second one found the power coupling underneath, and the raider’s engines went dark in a shower of sparks and venting atmosphere. Dead in space. The crew would live if they had suits and someone came for them before the air ran out. That was their problem.

The second raider was smarter. It broke off the hauler and came around hard, trying to get behind him. Kango had expected that. He’d been flying combat patrols on the frontier for nine years, and the one thing he’d learned about pirates was that they always thought they were more clever than they were. They watched too many war vids. They thought dogfighting was about reflexes and aggression. It wasn’t. It was about energy management and knowing your ship better than the other pilot knew theirs.

He cut thrust, rotated the Torino on her axis, and let the second raider fly into his targeting solution. The pilot realized the mistake too late. Kango watched the raider try to break off, engines flaring, and he put a burst across the bow. Warning shots. Close enough to rattle the hull.

The raider broke and ran. Full burn toward the Belt, engines screaming, running for the cover of the asteroid field where a single fighter couldn’t follow without risking a collision every six seconds.

That left the third one.

This raider had done everything right. While the first two made noise and drew attention, the third had swung wide, running silent on a long arc that brought it around behind the hauler on the opposite side. No engine signature. No weapons charge. Just a ghost drifting through the void, using the chaos as cover.

Kango didn’t notice the parasite until it had already latched onto the hauler’s cargo module.

A boarding clamp. Magnetic. The ship had matched velocity with the hauler and grafted itself to the hull, and now there were people with guns cutting through the skin into the cargo bay. The hauler’s captain shouted on the comm something about armed intruders and a request for immediate help. Kango was available with two pulse cannons and no way to use them without killing everyone involved.

He parked the Torino two hundred meters off the freighter’s bow and thought about it.

The math was ugly. He couldn’t shoot the parasite off the hull. He couldn’t board the freighter himself because the Torino was a single-seat fighter with no airlock. And he couldn’t wait for backup because the nearest patrol was forty minutes out and the pirates would be gone in ten.

So he did the thing that wasn’t in any manual.

He opened a direct channel to the raider. Tight beam. Private.

“This is Lieutenant Kango Galyx, Frontier Patrol, operating under Aster Station authority. You’ve got about ninety seconds to detach from that freighter and power down your weapons.”

A pause. Then a voice came back, male, young, words tumbling out too fast. “Yeah, no, that’s not how this works, Patrol. We’re clamped to sixty tons of ore and a crew of nine, so unless you’re planning to vaporize all of them to get to us, I’d suggest you find somewhere else to be.”

“You’re right,” Kango said. “I can’t shoot you. But here’s what I can do. I’ve got your drive signature on record from your approach. Silent running doesn’t mean invisible. It means quiet. I’ve tracked you for the last six minutes. Which means I’ve got your engine profile, your emissions pattern, and your vector when you bug out. The moment you detach, every patrol ship and station gun in this sector will have your signature. You won’t make it far.”

Silence on the channel.

“Your buddy in raider two is already running for the rocks,” Kango said. “Raider one is dead in space with no engines. You’re the last one, and you’re stuck to the side of a freighter with a patrol fighter parked on your nose. Think about your next move.”

More silence.

“Ninety seconds was generous. You’ve got sixty now.”

“That’s—” A pause. Too long. “You’re bluffing.” But the bravado had curdled into something thinner.

“Detach and power down. I’ll let you keep your ship. Stay latched, and I’ll call in the heavy patrol, and they don’t ask politely.”

Thirty seconds of silence. Kango watched the raider’s systems on his scope. The boarding clamp disengaged. The raider’s engines lit up with low power, maneuvering only. It drifted away from the freighter’s hull and departed the area, weapons cold, running lights on.

Kango exhaled.

“Smart choice,” he said.

The freighter captain bought him a drink over comms, which was the frontier equivalent of a handshake. The heavy patrol arrived thirty-eight minutes later and took custody of raider one, still drifting dark with dead engines. Raiders two and three were long gone, swallowed by the Cutlass Belt. But every database from Aster to the Cutlass stations had their signatures flagged. They’d surface eventually. They always did.

Now Kango stood in Hangar 7, arms crossed, watching Albern work on the stabilizer that had taken a glancing hit from raider two’s parting shot. A gift. A reminder that smart wasn’t the same as safe.

“Five hours?” he said.

“Minimum,” Albern said from under the wing.

Kango looked at the Torino. She was twelve years old, six years past her recommended service life, patched and re-patched and held together by the accumulated stubbornness of every mechanic who’d ever refused to let her die. The hull plating didn’t match. Mechanics salvaged the port cannon from a decommissioned bomber. And the ejection seat had a manufacturer’s warranty that had expired before Kango had graduated from flight school.

She was the best ship he’d ever flown. Not because she was fast or tough or well-armed, although she was all three when she felt like it. Because she always brought him home. Even when home was a station at the edge of nothing, surrounded by dark and pirates and the vast indifference of a frontier that didn’t care whether you lived or died.

He uncrossed his arms and walked to the tool cart.

“What are you doing?” Albern said.

“Helping.”

“You’re a pilot.”

“And she’s my ship.”

Albern was quiet for a moment. Then: “Grab the number four wrench. And don’t touch the plasma conduits.”

Kango grabbed the wrench. The hangar lights buzzed overhead. Somewhere in the Belt, two raiders ran for cover, and the freight lanes were quiet again, at least for tonight.

Tomorrow there’d be another patrol. Another sweep. Another four hours of nothing, if he was lucky.

He was rarely lucky. But the Torino was stubborn, and that was close enough.

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