Sci-Fi Signals

What is a man worth after you break him? Vance hunts bounties out of the Sump, the wet bottom of Gantry, a company city built up the side of a launch tower on Neonara. A clerk at Kaizen Asset Recovery hands her the bond on Tobiah Grell, a med tech who walked off shift with one company satchel. Thirty-eight thousand Geld, live and unharmed. Added to the three thousand in a tin behind her stove, it buys the last stamp on her Tier 3 residency and a life up where it never rains. She signs without reading the cover. Nobody who takes Kaizen paper ever does.

Three days later she finds Grell eating soup at the edge of a neon night market, and the chase is on: through the crowd, down a service alley, and over the container stacks where she grew up, on a knee that is giving out and a tether gun that reports every charge to the company. Grell is carrying medicine for a fourth floor burning with fever. Kaizen has other plans for it, written on a sheet Vance has not opened. A first-person story about a bond, a broken ankle, and the price of climbing out of the rain. Frontier noir from the Wild Frontier Chronicles.

Thanks for listening to Sci-Fi Signals. Be sure to check out The Intelligence Bulletin from Author Daniel P. Douglas on Substack for more podcasts, written articles, and links to all my books. And remember, fly smart and stay sharp. The frontier doesn’t give second chances.

Many thanks Midsummerr for their amazing cinematic production capabilities!

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Podcast Episode Summary

What is independence worth when the company holds the lease on everything, including the truth? Juno Duvall spent twenty years flying freight for Galleon Consolidated and converted every credit of it into Stonefist Station, the only fuel depot for six transit days in any direction, population one. Then a shot-up courier limps onto her docking clamp carrying Chiyo Solis, a wounded medic with a sealed container mag-locked to her thigh: proof that a mining colony full of families is being poisoned by the company’s own extraction method, sealed off and rebranded as a quarantine.

Soon behind her comes Inspector Ronin, a compliance officer with a clean suit, a polite smile, and the authority to take Juno’s license, her station, and the first thing that was ever hers. The gun on Juno’s hip stays holstered. The deadliest thing on the station turns out to be a log archive that uploads whether anybody lives to hear it or not. A gritty sci-fi space western about what honesty costs on a frontier where the company owns the paper, the fuel, and the air, and one operator who decides it doesn’t own the record.

Thanks for listening to Sci-Fi Signals. Be sure to check out The Intelligence Bulletin from Author Daniel P. Douglas on Substack for more podcasts, written articles, and links to all my books. And remember, fly smart and stay sharp. The frontier doesn’t give second chances.

Voices provided by Spoken AI

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Podcast Episode Summary

How much is a human life worth when the ledger says zero? Agent Quist is a reclamation specialist for Ardent Holdings, a company that doesn't accept excuses, only assets. Her latest assignment: repossess a Series 9 water reclaimer from a dying colony on the edge of known space. Without it, the nine residents of Sennet’s Reach won’t last a week. Quist soon discovers the 'delinquency' isn't an accident; it's a manufactured theft designed by the company to liquidate a desperate world. When a corporate enforcer arrives to ensure the job gets done, Quist faces a choice that will cost her everything. In the lawless frontier, justice isn't found in a courtroom. It's found in the remaining 31 percent of a water tank. A gritty, high-stakes sci-fi space western thriller about the price of a conscience in a galaxy owned by corporations.

My special thanks to Midsummerr - AI Audio Production Platform for providing the voices, music, and sound effects for this episode.

Thanks for listening to Sci-Fi Signals. Be sure to check out The Intelligence Bulletin from Author Daniel P. Douglas on Substack for more podcasts, written articles, and links to all my books. And remember, fly smart and stay sharp. The frontier doesn’t give second chances.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit authordanielpdouglas.substack.com

KULVIR SAKATA COUNTED his breaths the way he always did before a breach and board. Four in, four hold, four out. He’d learned it somewhere that no longer existed, in a life he no longer claimed. He did it now on principle, because the alternative was to stop counting and let something else take over.

The boarding tunnel pressurized with a sound like a chest cavity being opened.

“Thirty seconds,” Captain Sela said over comms. Her voice was flat the way a blade was flat. Precise. Clean. Not the absence of feeling, just the containment of it. Kulvir had worked under seven different crew leads in eleven years. None of them talked like Sela. None of them made him feel like the work was worth finishing.

“Copy,” Bando said, at Kulvir’s left shoulder. She was twenty-three, hair pulled back tight, and her face did something every time a breach was imminent, a kind of brightening, like combat switched on a light behind her eyes that nothing else reached. She went toward it the way some people went toward music.

“Copy,” Herrick said, at Kulvir’s right. He was broad enough across the shoulders that he blocked the corridor light when he moved up, a big rough-framed man who had learned to hate this work and kept doing it anyway.

Three more behind them. Six total, under contract to a farming colony called Relicos, three systems out from anything that mattered. The clients had called it a contract dispute. Kulvir called it what it was.

The Stygian Duster ship had tried to run when Sela’s privateer cut across its vector, a converted ore hauler called Greymantle, slow and heavy with the wrong cargo. The privateer’s gunner put two rail slugs into its drives before it could build speed, a precision shot, economical and final, the kind that came from someone who had stopped needing to think about it. Greymantle coasted now, venting atmo from a secondary port, guns still live but the crew already knowing how this ended.

The tunnel clacked. The hatch unsealed.

“Move,” Sela said.

Kulvir moved.

The first corridor was dark, lit red by Greymantle’s emergency strips. Smoke from the drive damage hung in a low ceiling above them, and the deck vibrated underfoot in a way that meant the atmo scrubbers were losing ground. The smell was recycled air gone stale, charred insulation, and underneath both of those the thin copper bite of blood, recent enough to still be warm.

Kulvir went left at the first junction, Bando on his flank. Two Stygian Dusters came around the corner with weapons raised and Kulvir put them down, two blaster bolts each, center mass. He was already moving past them before they hit the deck.

Not fast. Not slow. Just efficient.

That was the thing people misread about him. They saw the outcome and assumed there had been violence. What there had been was geometry. Angles and timing and the knowledge that hesitation was its own kind of cruelty.

“Three hostiles, forward bay,” Sela said. She was running a parallel corridor, feeding the crew positioning from Greymantle’s own sensor net. She’d pulled the access codes from the Relicos colony records. The Dusters had used the same codes for two years. Nobody had bothered to change them.

“I see them,” Herrick said.

The forward bay was a staging area, crates of extracted ore stacked along the walls, some still marked with colonial lot numbers that had no business on a Duster ship. The Stygian Dusters had bled Relicos dry, collecting protection money and delivering nothing, not protection, not peace, just the slow drain of people who had no other options. The ore was the proof. Evidence nobody would ever process, because there was no authority out here to process it.

That was why people like Kulvir existed.

The three hostiles broke cover before the team was fully through the door. Kulvir took the first with a bayonet strike to the throat and used the man’s momentum to put him into the second. The third raised a scatter pistol and Kulvir stepped inside the barrel’s arc, close enough to feel the heat when it discharged past his shoulder and broke the man’s wrist with a short downward strike. Sidearm. Disarm. Step. Fire.

Three seconds. Maybe four.

“Clear,” he said.

“Crew quarters next,” Sela said. “Sakata, on me.”

Kulvir fell in beside her at the corridor junction. For a moment, before they moved, she glanced at him sideways. Not an assessment. She didn’t need to assess him. It was something else, something closer to acknowledgment, the way two people who have worked in the dark together for long enough learn to see each other without needing light.

Kulvir said nothing. He was good at saying nothing.

The crew quarters were three compartments off a central passage. Sela took point on the first. Kulvir had the second. Herrick and Bando took the third.

The Duster in Kulvir’s compartment was already on his feet, holding a colonist boy, maybe ten years old, against his chest with a blade at the kid’s throat. The boy was rigid with the terror of someone who knew exactly how bad this was and couldn’t do anything about it.

“Back up,” the Duster said. “Back up or I open him.”

Kulvir backed up one step. He kept his hands visible. He watched the Duster’s eyes, the blade grip, the boy’s feet, the door frame.

“You’re a hired gun,” the Duster said. His voice had the sound of a man who’d been telling himself something wasn’t going to happen and had just run out of road. “Walk away. Tell the client the ship was empty. We’ll be gone in two days.”

“How many colonists are on this ship?” Kulvir asked.

The Duster’s jaw tightened.

“How many,” Kulvir said again. Not a question this time.

From the adjacent compartment, a hatch screeched open. Then Sela’s voice, low and controlled. Then a shot.

Then nothing.

“Sela,” Kulvir said into comms.

Static.

“Sela.”

The Duster in front of him smiled with half his face. “Sounds like your boss ran into some trouble.”

Kulvir counted his breaths. Four in.

A shift behind his sternum. That feeling. Still there, intact, like it had never gone anywhere at all.

Four hold.

The Duster still talked. Stupid, desperate words. Something about leverage. Something about deals. The boy cried without making a sound, the way children learned to cry when crying had stopped being safe.

Four out.

Kulvir stopped counting.

What came next, he couldn’t have described to anyone who hadn’t been built the way he was built. There was no anger in it. No heat. Heat was what you endured when you were fighting. This was more like a door opening onto a room that had been sealed for a long time, and on the other side of that door something had been waiting with the patience of a thing that had no concept of time passing. It simply waited. And now it waited no more.

The Duster died before its corpse hit the deck. The boy was unhurt. Kulvir did not remember the specific sequence.

He was through the compartment door and into the passage before his breathing had changed. Sela’s compartment. The hatch stood open. A Duster was down inside, and another one stood over Sela with a weapon pressed to the back of her neck, and there were two more behind him, and Kulvir felt nothing except the geometry of what needed to happen.

He was aware, distantly, that he was moving very fast.

He was aware, distantly, that he had the scatter pistol he’d taken from the forward bay and that it discharged twice before he was fully through the door.

He was aware, distantly, that the three Dusters in the compartment were no longer standing.

He was aware, distantly, that Herrick and Bando had appeared in the corridor behind him and had stopped moving.

He was aware, distantly, that Herrick had said one word, low and slow, the word a man uses when the only honest thing left is to name what he is looking at.

Then, silence.

Kulvir stood in the center of the compartment. His hands hung at his sides. He was breathing, though he hadn’t been counting. The scatter pistol was on the deck. He didn’t remember dropping it.

Sela was on her feet. She’d been hit in the shoulder, the fabric of her jacket dark and wet on the left side, but she was st…

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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 r…

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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 expl…

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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 pac…

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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 o…

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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…

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