EPILOGUE #3
"A pulse-capacitor rated for a Class-4 shuttle engine," I said. "That's what I need. And that star-chart is worth three of them."
Darro turned the data chip between his claws. Held it up to the sickly yellow light strip bolted above his workbench. His ears rotated forward, then back, a Felarii tell for I'm calculating how hard I can screw you.
"This chart covers one restricted corridor. One." He set the chip down on the bench like it smelled wrong. "Consortium patrols that corridor every nine hours. Anyone running these routes is either desperate or dead."
"Or both." I kept my voice flat. Bored, even. Desperation was a scent a Felarii nose could pick up from across a room, and Darro's nostrils were already flaring.
"The chart's accurate. I ran that corridor four times before the Consortium seized my ship. You'll sell it to the next smuggler who walks in here for ten times what I'm asking."
"If I can find a smuggler stupid enough to fly it."
"On this station? You'll trip over three before lunch."
His tail flicked against the leg of his stool. Annoyance. A Felarii's tail never lied, even when the mouth did.
I kept my own tail coiled tight beneath my flight suit, pressed flat against the small of my back where the fabric hid it.
On Aethel-Sky, showing a Felarii tail in the open was an invitation.
The dock workers grabbed them. The Consortium flagged them.
Better to keep it hidden, even though the compression ached after twelve hours.
Darro sucked his teeth. "I'll give you a half-charged capacitor. Salvaged. No warranty."
"Salvaged from what?"
"A hauler that lost pressure in the lower atmosphere. The crew didn't make it, but the parts are fine."
"The parts from a ship that crashed."
"The parts from a ship that experienced rapid unplanned contact with a gas giant. The capacitor wasn't the problem. Bad seals on the cockpit. Pilot error."
Everything about this deal was wrong. A half-charged salvage capacitor might hold for one burn, maybe two, before the coil degraded and left me floating dead in whatever shipping lane I was trying to cross.
But a dead capacitor in the hand was better than a functional one I couldn't afford, and I was running out of options faster than I was running out of credits. Which was saying something, because I had forty-seven credits left.
Forty-seven credits, no ship, and a genetic signature the Consortium had been scanning for since I'd escaped from a prison moon six weeks ago.
I leaned against the workbench, letting my weight settle, and while Darro turned to rummage through the bins stacked behind him, my tail uncoiled from beneath my suit.
The tip slid free through the gap I'd cut at my waistband, silent against the greased metal of the bench, and hooked the small multi-tool sitting next to Darro's elbow.
The tool disappeared under my jacket in the time it took him to pull out a dented capacitor housing.
My tail recoiled, and the ache of compression resumed.
He wouldn't miss it. He had six more on the rack behind him, and this one had a plasma-scoring attachment I needed for splicing conduit.
"Here." Darro set the capacitor on the bench between us. The housing was scorched along one side and the charge indicator pulsed a weak amber instead of the steady green of a full charge. Fifty percent capacity, maybe less. "The chart for the capacitor. Even trade."
It wasn't even. Not close. But I'd been on Aethel-Sky for six weeks, and in that time I'd learned the first law of the Soot Docks: take the deal, or starve.
"Done."
I slid the data chip across the bench. Darro palmed it with the practiced speed of a male who'd been fencing stolen goods since before I was born. The capacitor was heavy in my hands, warm from the ambient heat of the dock machinery grinding away on the other side of the wall.
I turned it over, checked the connector pins, ran my claw tip along the seam to test for micro-fractures. The housing held. The charge indicator pulsed its weak amber heartbeat.
It would have to be enough.
The Soot Docks earned their name honestly.
The lower industrial levels of Aethel-Sky sat beneath three miles of stratified city, stacked like layers of a rotting cake. Up top, the High Spires gleamed with Consortium money: polished alloy, climate-controlled walkways, air that tasted like nothing at all.
Down here, the air tasted like engine grease and burnt ozone, recycled through filters that hadn't been replaced in years.
Every surface was filmed with the residue of fuel processing and atmospheric scrubbers, a fine black soot that worked its way into fabric, into skin, into the lines of your palms until your hands looked tattooed with grime.
I moved through the corridor with the capacitor tucked inside my jacket, my boots quiet on the grated flooring.
Felarii feet were built for silence. The pads absorbed sound, the retractable claws stayed sheathed unless I needed grip on a vertical surface, and my stride was naturally short and low.
On a station where the wrong kind of attention could get you sold, silence was a survival tool.
The corridor opened into the main dock concourse, a vaulted space filled with freight stackers, fuel lines, and the constant rumble of atmosphere processors keeping the lower levels breathable.
Neon signage flickered along the shopfronts, advertising repair services and parts dealers, and the kind of food stalls that didn't ask what species you were before they served you.
The crowd was the usual mix: Felarii dock workers with their ears pinned back against the noise, a cluster of heavy-gravity miners from one of the belt colonies built like compressed stone, two Velori officials moving through the crowd with the kind of space around them saying authority in any language.
I adjusted my trajectory to put a fuel stacker between the Velori and me.
Kept my pace even. My pupils contracted to narrow slits in the brighter light of the concourse, an involuntary response that any Felarii would share, but my spots were showing above the collar of my suit.
The tawny markings ran across my shoulders and up the back of my neck, and in the Soot Docks, they marked me as nothing special. A Felarii was a Felarii.
But the Consortium's scanning infrastructure didn't care about species markers.
It cared about the genetic anomaly buried in my blood, a dormant navigational mutation that occurred in maybe one out of every hundred thousand births across a dozen species, the researchers on Vexar-6 had explained with the clinical enthusiasm of people cataloging merchandise.
They called it the "Star-Gene." I called it the reason I couldn't stop running.
The researchers had not understood what it actually did. None of them had flown a ship. To them, the Gene was a marker on a chart, a genetic flag on a database entry.
I had felt it in the cockpit. A pull behind my sternum when a route opened. An instinct that turned the stick left half a second before my eyes registered the gap. It was how I had threaded corridors no other pilot would touch. It was how I had earned a name worth running from
I kept walking. Head down. Stride steady..
Six weeks since the breakout. Six weeks since the lights on Vexar-6 had gone dark and I'd fought my way through smoke and screaming to a docking bay where a ship with a cracked fuel coupling sat waiting for a pilot crazy enough to fly it. I'd flown it.
Because I'd fly anything with an engine and half a prayer, and that night the prayer had held long enough to get me off that moon and into the shipping lanes before the coupling blew and dropped me out of faster-than-light travel three sectors short of where I needed to be.
Three sectors short of Kira. Three sectors short of Raeth and the Star-Seeker, and the rebellion that was supposed to mean something.
I'd limped to Aethel-Sky on emergency thrust because it was the closest station with a breathable atmosphere. I'd planned to stay three days. Enough to patch the coupling, steal a fuel cell, and jump again.
That was six weeks ago. The coupling was still cracked.
The fuel cell was still locked in a Consortium depot I couldn't access without a security clearance I didn't have.
And every day I stayed, the probability the Consortium's scanners would flag my signature and put me back in a cell ticked up another fraction of a percent.
I was trapped on a station built on clouds, and the ground was a gas giant that would crush me flat before I reached it.
My ears rotated toward a sound behind me. Footsteps. Heavy. Not Felarii.
The gait was wrong, too slow and deliberate, and the weight was distributed across a frame bigger than anything the lower docks usually held.
I tracked the footsteps for six seconds, cross-referencing the rhythm against the ambient noise of the concourse, and dismissed them.
Miner, probably. Heading for the freight lifts.
The footsteps faded. I released the tension in my shoulders and turned down a service corridor toward the maintenance shaft I'd been using as a shortcut to my loft.
The corridor was narrow, unlit except for the blue glow of emergency markers set into the floor at ten-foot intervals.
Pipes ran along the ceiling, sweating condensation that dripped onto the grating, making the air damp and metallic.
The loft was four levels up, accessible through a ventilation shaft behind a wall panel I'd loosened with the same multi-tool model I'd lifted from Darro.
It was ten feet by eight, tucked into the dead space between two atmosphere processors, and it was the closest thing to a home I'd had since the Consortium took my ship.
A sleeping pad. A rigged power tap for charging equipment.