5. Ursa #2
I stop the recording and thank her. She waves me off with the aggressive embarrassment of someone who hates gratitude but needs it more than she admits.
Vesk walks with me back into the market stream. "You handled that well."
"Handled what?"
"She stepped on your dead."
The phrase is blunt enough to hurt. Strange enough, the bluntness helps.
"She didn't mean to."
"Meaning matters less than weight."
I look at him. "Is that a Reaper saying?"
"No. That is a Vesk saying."
"It is not bad."
"I am full of wisdom."
"I have seen evidence of impatience and sarcasm."
"Wisdom often wears those clothes."
The next interview comes from a refugee clinic tucked behind an old loading station where the walls have been painted with bright colors that cannot quite hide old burn marks.
The clinic smells of antiseptic foam, nutrient broth, clean bandages, and the faint sour odor of fear that lingers wherever people wait to discover whether safety intends to last. I speak with a medic named Yara, a human woman from a failed Badlands colony whose right arm is mechanical from the shoulder down.
She moves between cots while we talk, checking vitals, adjusting blankets, and speaking gently to patients who flinch at footsteps.
"How many come through here?" I ask.
"Depends on the week," Yara says. "Thirty if things are quiet. Two hundred if some company relocates a labor site by abandoning everybody not useful enough to transport."
"And Gnash allows open intake?"
Yara gives me a look over her shoulder. "Allows? He built the ledger."
"What ledger?"
"The refugee ledger. Tariff penalties, contraband seizures, auction fines, docking violations, salvage percentages. A cut goes to resettlement, med care, food, and work placement."
"That is public?"
"It is public if you ask somebody who can read station accounts and isn't paid to misunderstand them."
A Reaper woman on a cot nearby opens one eye. Her left side is bandaged from shoulder to hip, and her voice comes out rough. "He came for us."
Yara moves toward her. "Salla, you should rest."
The Reaper woman ignores the instruction. "Helios had us in a labor pit near Vorn's Teeth. Said we owed transport debt. Said our children owed it too. Gnash hit the site with six ships and cut open the barracks himself."
I step closer, keeping my compad lowered. "Do I have permission to record your account?"
Salla’s eye focuses on me. "You will show my face?"
"Only if you consent."
"You will not make me look weak?"
"No."
"Then record."
I do.
Her story does not come smoothly. Pain interrupts her.
So does anger. So does the kind of memory that refuses to become neat for a stranger’s convenience.
She describes the labor pit, the air so dry it cracked children’s lips, the shock collars, the Company ration blocks that tasted like chalk and old blood, the way everyone stopped believing help would come because help is a story told by people who already have it.
Then she describes Gnash arriving.
"He was laughing," she says, staring at the ceiling as Yara checks her bandage.
"Not happy. It was worse than happy. He tore the gate out and laughed while they shot him.
The energy bolts hit his hide and burned, and he kept walking.
I thought he had come to kill everyone. Then he picked up my son and gave him to a warrior behind him and said, 'This one breathes free now. '"
My hand tightens around the compad.
"What happened to the guards?"
Salla looks at me, and the clinic feels suddenly smaller. "Do you need me to pretend mercy happened?"
"No."
"Good. It did not."
Yara’s mouth tightens, but she says nothing.
Salla closes her eyes again. "I sleep here without a collar. My son is in school today. If that makes Gnash a tyrant, then I have known worse freedoms."
I thank her quietly and end the recording.
Outside the clinic, I stand beneath a humming light fixture and let the noise of the corridor return gradually. Vesk waits a few steps away, pretending to inspect a wall panel.
"You have an opinion," I say.
"Several."
"About me?"
"Several more."
I tuck the compad against my chest. "Then pick one."
He turns. "You listened."
"That is the job."
"No. Many beings record suffering. They do not listen to it."
I do not know what to do with the approval in his voice, so I look down the corridor instead.
A group of children passes at the far end behind a teacher, all of them carrying battered learning slates.
One child skips. Another drags his feet with theatrical misery.
The teacher says something that makes two of them laugh and one of them straighten immediately.
"What is it like?" Vesk asks.
The question is so quiet I almost miss it beneath the clinic door sliding open behind us.
"What is what like?"
"Being known for the worst day you survived."
My breath goes shallow.
I look at him properly then. His face gives away little, but his eyes hold more than curiosity. Reapers are known by what the galaxy fears about them. I am known by what the galaxy pitied. Neither is the same as being understood.
"It is like having strangers walk into your house and rearrange your dead," I say.
His gaze does not move from mine. "That is a good answer."
"No, it isn't."
"It is an honest answer."
The corridor light hums above us. Somewhere nearby, someone drops a metal tray, and the clatter makes a patient inside the clinic cry out before Yara’s voice settles them. Vesk and I stand in the thin space between a question and whatever would come after it.
Then he clears his throat and becomes station security again. "You have one more permitted area before your access window closes."
"Which one?"
"Shipyard observation deck."
"I requested that two days ago."
"It was denied two days ago."
"And now?"
"I grew tired of watching you ask everyone else."
That is not the whole truth, but it is close enough to kindness that I do not insult it by naming it.
The shipyard observation deck is hotter than the market and loud enough that Vesk hands me ear dampeners before the door opens.
The deck overlooks three repair berths and one construction cradle where the skeletal cruiser I saw from the diplomatic lounge is slowly being skinned in scavenged plating.
Workers move across it in harnesses and mag-boots, their bodies haloed by welding light.
The view is stunning in the ugliest possible way, all sparks, smoke, hard labor, shouted warnings, and machinery heavy enough to crush a transport into decorative scrap.
Vibrations travel up through the soles of my boots and into my knees.
A Reaper foreman named Hakk meets us by the rail. He is pale gray, bald, and missing two fingers from one hand. He gives me ten seconds of contempt, then begins talking because Vesk tells him I have been less idiotic than expected.
"That cruiser ever going to fly?" I ask.
Hakk looks offended. "She already wants to."
"That is not an engineering answer."
"It is the only one that matters."
Vesk leans on the rail beside me. "Hakk believes ships have souls."
"Ships do have souls," Hakk snaps. "Some are lazy. Some are vain. Some are cursed because fools installed second-rate thrust harmonics and expected gratitude."
I look at the exposed ribs of the cruiser. "What is hers?"