17. Ursa #2
Gnash pinches the bridge of his nose. “You will have your exchangers.”
“Two?”
“One and priority repair allocation.”
“Two.”
“One, repair allocation, and first claim on surplus docking heat coils.”
Narra considers. “Fine. Your face bargains better today.”
“My face is honored.”
She looks at me again, this time with a shrewd softness that makes me stand straighter. “You are the one he carried from the feast.”
“I am also a reporter.”
“So I heard.”
“I’m not here to make anyone look foolish.”
“Then you are unlike most outsiders.”
“That’s the plan.”
Narra studies me another moment, then grunts. “Eat before you leave. You look like you survive on spite and bad caf.”
Gnash turns toward me slowly.
I point at him. “Do not start.”
“I said nothing.”
“You were about to.”
“I was appreciating Narra’s accuracy.”
“I am wounded.”
“Politically useful scratch.”
Narra’s mouth pulls into a grin. “She bites. Good. He needs biting.”
“I keep hearing that,” I say.
“Because everyone knows it.”
Gnash looks up toward the ceiling with the patience of a man begging dead ancestors for restraint. “We are leaving now.”
Narra shoves a wrapped packet into my hand before he can move. “Stew bread. Eat it somewhere quiet unless you like being watched.”
The packet is warm through the cloth, and the smell of spiced meat and grain rises into my face. My stomach, which has been pretending to belong to someone disciplined, immediately betrays me with interest.
“Thank you,” I say.
She nods once. “Tell the truth about him.”
The words are not a request.
I look at the mess hall, at the crowded tables and the faces pretending not to listen. “I’m trying.”
Narra’s expression turns grave. “Try hard.”
We leave the hall through a side passage, and the noise fades behind us into a muffled roar.
I unwrap the bread as we walk because I am not stupid enough to refuse food from a woman who negotiates heat exchangers with a ladle.
The first bite is hot, salty, rich with fat and spice, and so good I make a small sound of surprise.
Gnash looks deeply satisfied.
“Not a word,” I say around the mouthful.
“I said nothing.”
“You are smiling with your entire terrifying skull.”
“I enjoy being right.”
“You were not right. Narra was right.”
“I approved her accuracy.”
“You’re impossible.”
“Eat.”
I do, because the bread is excellent and because my head still aches.
We walk into a quieter district where the walls are lined with plaques made from salvaged metal.
Names are etched into them by hand, hundreds of them, maybe thousands.
Some have dates. Some have ship names. Some have only symbols I do not know.
The air here is cooler and stiller, filtered with something herbal that smells faintly bitter.
People lower their voices as they pass through, and even the children who come racing around the corner slow when they see the wall.
My steps slow too.
“What is this place?” I ask.
Gnash’s expression changes before he answers. “Memory corridor.”
The words settle carefully in the hush.
I move closer to the plaques. Some names are Reaper.
Some human. Some Alzhon, Grolgath, Odex.
Ship names repeat in clusters: Ash Veil, Mourning Knife, Bright Hallow, Second Mercy, Kestrel Drowned.
There are objects mounted between the plaques.
A broken child’s cup. A twisted insignia plate.
A strip of cloth embroidered with stars.
A cracked piece of ship glass clouded white from heat exposure.
“These are your dead,” I say.
“Some.”
“How many?”
“Too many for one corridor.”
The answer is quiet, and because it is quiet, it hurts more.
Gnash walks to a section near the far wall. His massive body casts a shadow across a cluster of names etched into blackened hull plating. He touches one claw to the top name, not pressing, barely making contact.
“This came from the home-ship where I was born.”
I stop beside him, careful not to crowd.
The metal is warped at the edges, scarred by fire. The names are uneven, as if carved by many hands over many years. I do not recognize the language, but grief does not need translation.
“My parents?” I ask softly.
He nods. “Yes. And cousins. Crew. Teachers. A singer who threw shoes at anyone who interrupted morning lessons. A mechanic who let children sleep near the engine vents during cold cycles. The ship’s cook, who could make fungus taste like victory if no one asked what was in it.”
A faint smile moves over his mouth and vanishes.
“What happened?”
His hand lowers to his side. “Combine-backed raiders hit us near the edge of a mining claim. The official report called it an anti-piracy action against a hostile Reaper vessel. We had children aboard. Old ones. Sick ones. A cargo hold full of scrap and medicine. That did not matter. Our ship was Reaper, and Reaper meant target.”
My warm bread turns heavy in my stomach.
“How old were you?”
“Young enough to believe adults could stop the walls from burning.”
The corridor seems to tilt around that sentence.
I do not see the station for a moment. I see my mother’s hand over mine.
I smell smoke trapped in hair and plastic melting over concrete.
I hear a child’s voice that used to be mine explaining bodies in the road because if I stopped speaking, the world might vanish.
Gnash looks at me. “You know that age.”
“Yes.”
Neither of us says anything for a while.
The corridor hums softly around us, carrying distant machinery and footsteps kept respectful by memory.
I could ask another question. I could turn the moment into reporting, and maybe part of me still does, because I never fully stop watching.
But another part of me, the part that has spent years locked behind good questions and better posture, stands beside him in front of the names and lets silence do something gentler than avoidance.
After a long moment, he says, “I survived in a maintenance crawl with three others. Two died before rescue. One died after. Infection.”
“I’m sorry.”
He looks at the names. “People say that when there is nothing else to offer.”
“Usually, yes.”
“And you?”
“I say it because I know it doesn’t fix anything and I mean it anyway.”
His gaze comes back to me, red and deep and almost too honest to bear. “Then I accept it.”
We continue through the corridor, and he tells me stories in fragments.
Not a speech. Not a confession designed for effect.
Just pieces handed over while we walk past the dead.
A battle over a fuel moon where he lost his first command crew because he believed victory mattered more than withdrawal.
A boarding action against a Combine prison hauler where he freed sixty-seven captives and lost twelve warriors to a reactor trap because he ignored Skahar’s warning.
The first time his crew called him lord, not captain, and how the title felt less like triumph than another weight welded to his ribs.
“Did you want it?” I ask.
“The title?”
“The weight.”
He gives a low, humorless laugh. “No one sane wants weight. They want power and discover too late what holds it down.”
“That sounds like something Skahar would say.”
“It is. I hated it when he said it.”
“You hate a lot of accurate things.”
His mouth curves. “And yet I keep you near.”
The warmth that moves through me is dangerous and immediate. I look down at the remains of the stew bread because the floor is suddenly fascinating.
He notices, of course. “You are blushing again.”
“I am recovering from a head injury.”
“Your head injury colors your cheeks?”
“It is very advanced.”
“I should ask the medic.”
“I will deny everything.”
His laughter is soft this time, built for the corridor rather than command. It winds through me and finds places I have kept cold on purpose.
At the end of the memory corridor, a small observation alcove opens over the refugee district we saw earlier.
From here, the stacked housing modules glow like constellations trapped inside metal.
I can see people moving across bridges, carrying water, laundry, food, tools, children.
Life happening in patched layers. Not heroic.
Not clean. Not easily packaged into a segment Dawson would understand.
Gnash leans against the rail, his shoulder nearly brushing mine. “Now you.”
I glance at him. “Now me what?”
“I have shown you my ghosts.”
My chest tightens. “That doesn’t obligate me to parade mine out.”
“No.”
He says nothing else, which is unfairly effective. He does not demand. He does not coax. He simply leaves the truth between us and lets me decide whether to touch it.
I look down at the district lights. “Horus IV was ugly before it became famous.”
Gnash remains still.
“It was a colony town with bad drainage, decent schools, and too many arguments about whether the new transit spine would ruin local businesses. Nobody outside the system cared about us unless they needed a quote about frontier resilience or a backdrop for military investment. My mother worked relief logistics. My father repaired agricultural drones. We had a neighbor who made terrible plum wine and gave it to everyone anyway because he believed persistence would eventually become skill.”
My throat tightens, but I keep going.
“When the fighting reached us, the official feeds said there were limited engagements near strategic assets. That phrase still makes me want to throw things. Strategic assets. As if the bakery, the school, the clinic, and my friend Lina’s apartment building were pieces on a board instead of places where people kept shoes by the door. ”
Gnash’s hand closes slowly around the rail. “You streamed it.”
“I didn’t understand what I was doing at first. I thought if people saw us, someone would come. My mother told me to keep recording. She said witnesses mattered.”
I swallow, and the taste of stew spice and old grief sits bitter on my tongue.