The Docks

Morning in the Vaults brought no clarity. Just thinner light, and the same tight pull behind Cael's eyes.

It was still a few hours before departure, and though the Nadir had clearance to leave, they weren't being allowed down to the dock. Cael had tried the moment he left the Helix.

Excitement and nerves? Always before a job.

But this was more.

He put it down to the coming cryo-sleep. They were going deeper than anyone had dared in his lifetime. He'd never heard of a cryo-journey like it.

Nomi's knock at his private bunk came softer than Vetch's would have. He pulled on his boots, the neural thrum still curling behind his eye.

They all squeezed into the same vault, a central space with three private bunks. It was cheaper than renting separately and, with the Nadir locked down, the only way Cael knew to keep them from drifting apart. It was the best they could get without Helix privilege, and the less time they spent in zero-g, the better for their bones.

'I'll leave you two to work out the details,' Vetch said, already making himself busy. 'I'll fetch some wares. We're gonna be gone a while. Can't expect Solé to stock Monarian whisky, can we?'

They didn't know how long they'd be gone, and Vetch had his comforts. Cael would have bet whisky wasn't all he meant.

The timeline Solé had imposed on them still felt off. In the Drift, time moved strangely. You slept in cryo while the ship ran at near-relativistic velocities. Travel times were measured in years or decades, so what was the rush?

Shouldn't they spend more time preparing?

The cryo-units were still sitting in shipping crates in the hold. Installing them was a week-long job, and Solé had given them just eighteen hours. The rush made no sense, and an in-flight refit was risky.

Cael let Vetch leave without asking too closely what he was looking for. The truth was that he wanted to speak to Nomi alone. As soon as Vetch crossed the threshold, the door shut automatically with a swish and a clank.

Nomi turned to Cael, her nose scrunched in amusement.

'I know he can put them away, but he does realise we'll be sleeping there and back?'

Cael wanted to join the joke, but whatever had settled over him left everything flattened. His Resonator began to pulse again, as though it had taken over some buried stress response.

Nomi's expression softened. As she caught his discomfort, her eyes narrowed.

She reached towards the Resonator. Her Seer implants allowed her to interface wirelessly, a process she called harmonisation.

He'd long assumed that was just a metaphor, or else a ritual stack layered over something not so different from a neural mesh. The Resonator had always worked through impressions and sensations in his mind, never music.

At least, not until the signal.

The memory of finding it threatened once again to break open into sensation. Cael flinched, but Nomi placed her other hand over his to steady him, then moved her free palm in a slow circle over the exposed metal.

Her palm remained open and relaxed. Lights kindled in her hand and fingers, moving in a rhythmic dance to the same beat he felt in his head. Each time the two patterns were about to synchronise, hers changed slightly.

Deliberately.

'It's resisting me,' she said, intrigued. 'I've never seen it like this.'

Her gaze drifted. She closed her eyes to concentrate, as if weighing it against what she had seen yesterday.

'How long?' she asked gently, like a nurse speaking to a patient.

'A few months,' he admitted.

'Do you think…'

'No. It's a coincidence,' he interrupted, a little too quickly. 'It's been getting worse. Do you… do you think you can help this time?'

The Resonator had always been glitchy, an imperfect interface. Nomi had calmed it before, when it was overwhelmed or overwhelming.

But never like this.

'I barely understand this piece. It's older than anything I saw in Temple. I still don't know how you got it working with your core.'

Cael didn't know either.

He'd grown up in Virex Coil, a station that looked like it had been the epicentre of a war no one remembered. The local Remnant clans whispered over their reheated protein packs and moonshine that the habitat, if you could still call it that had once been a great archive and home to the greatest minds humanity had to offer, but to Cael it had only ever been a home of rust and forgotten echoes of childhood.

He didn't like recalling the day he found Resonator either, the memory was less a sequence of events than a scatter of fractured images that he'd given up trying to make whole years ago.

Remis, the Nadir's lead Hospitalier-Acolyte, held the missing pieces. She told him he'd been found in the deep marrow of the Coil, barely breathing and half-delirious.

She had helped Chellen stabilise him in the Nadir's surgical bay, working for more than thirty hours to keep his nervous system from rejecting the 'gift' he'd brought back from the dark.

Each time Cael reached for those hours in the bay, they receded, elusive and slick as oil on water. He mostly remembered the smell of antiseptic and Chellen's voice. Cael called it the Resonator because, in the memory that remained, Chellen had given it that name.

A thing of sleek stainless steel, pristine despite its impossible age. Untouched by corrosion, as though time itself had slipped past it.

Cael sometimes wondered whether it had truly whispered its name to him while he lay on Remis's table, drifting between consciousness and delirium.

Glitches were nothing new. It had always picked up stray signals others leaked without knowing. But these past weeks felt different.

Intense.

Screaming within the silence.

He hoped it wasn't terminal degradation setting in. The Resonator was his secret weapon, the key to his success as a Rem. Most of the time, those signals weren't ghosts.

Nomi's palm tensed, breaking him from his reverie. Her focus sharpened, and suddenly she clenched her fist.

'Tuned,' she said quietly.

Sweat beaded on her brow, and she was breathing hard. She closed her eyes as though waiting for a note to finish echoing, then caught her breath.

She opened them slowly, as if verifying something she'd always suspected.

'You're hearing it,' she said.

Not a question. Confirmation.

'The Song.'

That's what Nomi called it. The Temple taught that the minds of machines were encodings of that music. All Seer tech worked through pattern recognition, listening for resonance: not code, but harmony, sung more than spoken.

Cael didn't buy the mysticism. It was technology, governed by physics; esoteric, sure, but machines were still machines. The Choir was only impossibly old, impossibly advanced machinery.

For Nomi, though, it was as true as breathing. An elegant interface that demanded training and a certain musicality.

Looking at the sweat cresting her brow as she wrestled with the invisible signal, Cael found it hard to argue that it didn't work.

'Cael… I wish you'd come to me sooner,' she said. 'It's not healthy to hear a machine Song untrained.'

'I thought it was just a headache.'

She shook her head gently. Auburn strands, loosened from a braid, shifted around her shoulders.

'Months-long headaches still aren't normal, Cael,' she admonished.

He sighed, chastened.

Nomi adjusted the resonance band by another octave, and the signal dimmed a shade.

'Try it now,' she said. 'It's… crude. A layered harmony, nothing more.'

Cael blinked once to clear his vision, but the pressure in his skull didn't vanish, merely thinned.

A curtain over a storm.

'You're cancelling it?'

'No. I'm concealing it. It will come back if you don't learn to contain it yourself. All I've done is give you something else to hear.'

She picked up her pad.

'Watch this.'

She replayed the audio and showed him two waveforms dancing side by side: what he was hearing, and the signal from the meeting.

At first, they looked the same to him. But as the shapes moved, he began to see where they differed. Nomi's nose pinched with excitement.

'It's a variation,' she said. 'Whatever this is, as far as I'm concerned, that's not a coincidence. They have the same origin.'

'Do you know where from?'

She shook her head gently.

The Resonator pulsed at him, and for the first time since they'd met, he doubted her honesty.

Nomi didn't yet know how to tell Cael, but the pattern needled at something old in her Temple training.

A story told to aspirants, to uplift them or frighten those who refused the resonance.

The Cathedral.

Source of the Song. The first, from before their time. The one that had encoded intelligence into the Acolytes and taught them to conduct the forces of nature.

No human could match it.

Not magic. Nothing so trite. Though many in the Temple liked to argue over what difference such distinctions made.

Even for Nomi, machines were as bound to physical law as flesh. If true gods existed within the Song, they were elsewhere.

But before the Collapse, humanity had artifices like the Burn-Lens. A way to cross impossible distances in an instant.

That was physics. A shortcut through spacetime.

It required computation, vast, precise, beyond them.

Only the Choirmasters could play that Song, and they were all gone. Lost in the post-Collapse chaos.

At least, every Temple text agreed on that.

So if this signal meant what she thought it did, no. She couldn't say it.

Not yet.

A few hours later, Cael and Nomi floated into the docking-ring bay, where the Nadir had sat locked down for months. They found Vetch already loading gear aboard with the dock's Porter-grade Acolytes.

The docking bay sprawled outwards from the spine of Drift's Edge, a hollow cavern of cold alloy and drifting particulates. Harsh arc-lights cast stark, shifting shadows. A score of labour droids moved through the bay. Some floated. Others clamped themselves to the deck in zero-g, their magnetised limbs securing cargo and crates with methodical precision.

Above them, hanging in its magnetic slings, the Nadir rested with its engines powered down.

A dormant giant, waiting patiently.

Months without being able to get this close had left the ship feeling strangely alien to Cael. Its broad, once-elegant hull was scarred by the countless runs he and Chellen had taken it on. Old and new panels were welded together in patchwork harmony.

As a former luxury yacht, the Nadir wasn't the typical choice for a Remnant. As Cael remembered it, Chellen had modified it heavily. Where once it had held luxury quarters, conference rooms, and leisure spaces, its sleek forward lines were now broken by a boxy cargo bay and grapplers retrofitted from a haulier model.

A true chimaera. One of a kind.

And finally, now that the paperwork had come through, completely his.

Cael floated closer and reached out, his gloved fingers brushing lightly against the cool metal hull.

'Hello again, old friend,' he whispered.

The Nadir had a transparent dome for an upper deck, an echo of its past life. It shimmered beneath the reflected dock lights.

Old stories his mother had recited when he was young surfaced. Stories of how ancient humans had sailed on open decks beneath the stars, crossing oceans in ships propelled by wind or even human muscle.

He liked to imagine himself sailing those seas when the Nadir moved among the stars. It calmed him. Others were intimidated by the black.

For Cael, it felt like home.

Nearby, Vetch muttered instructions to a droid wrestling a rack of void suits aboard. His voice was a reassuring constant, cutting through the hum of machinery and the distant industrial clatter deeper in the dock.

Far overhead, a few other ships hung from struts, their hulls scarred by exposure to the black. Through the smoke-filled distance, arc-welders flared against void-scarred alloys, casting ripples of blue-white sparks.

Drones moved in a semi-synchronised ballet. Magnetic grapples clicked softly as they guided drifting cargo from point to point.

The place carried a faint but pervasive scent of lubricant, burnt circuits, and ionised air. It reminded Cael of countless prior runs, successful and otherwise.

Nomi called it the spacer's perfume.

Reassuring, but grim.

Beneath his boots, the deck plating had once been textured for grip, but decades of foot traffic and heavy machinery had worn the most travelled routes smooth. He pressed one foot down experimentally. His mag-boot answered with a subtle clunk against the deck.

Magnetised boots were the only real anchor in the docks. Zero-g felt natural enough to Cael after all his years in the black, but he welcomed the small reassurance of solid metal beneath him.

Especially before a long haul into uncertainty.

The sounds of Vetch engaged in a tugging match with one of the droids caught Cael's attention. He let out a sharp whistle.

'Let it do its work,' he called.

'It's my gear,' Vetch grumbled, then relented. 'Just be careful with it.'

The Acolyte continued up the Nadir's cargo ramp as if nothing had happened, setting the case beside the rest of Vetch's equipment.

A heavy loader suit taller than any human. Weapons, of course, plus explosives, safely inert unless combined in a particular way.

Vetch had that down to an art.

Nomi was also busy checking her equipment, though she carried nowhere near as much as Vetch. She always travelled lightly.

Their familiar routines steadied Cael against the pull of the unknown.

The Nadir wasn't built to get you there fast. But it would get you there.

With a working cryo-sleep module available, assuming they could get the damn thing installed before the window closed, that was what mattered.

Cael hesitated at the threshold of the ramp, one hand resting on the metal frame. His implant pulsed gently.

Reassurance, or warning?

He didn't know.

Either way, they were committed.

He stepped forward, up the ramp and into his ship.

Just inside, a woman he didn't know stood waiting.

Spacer-tall like Cael, she was scrolling through a control screen at the rear of the Nadir's cargo hold. Vetch fell into line beside him as Cael approached. His jaw tightened, but he kept quiet, making sure to stand with Cael as they approached the waiting woman.

'Who's this?' Cael asked quietly, expecting Vetch to have introduced himself.

'No idea, boss,' Vetch replied. 'She strode in all in charge-like twenty minutes ago. Passed all the Nadir's security filters, but didn't say a word. Carrying herself like Syndicate, if ya ask me.'

Vetch stole a quick glance at the strange woman as he marched with Cael.

'I kept clear,' he continued. 'I ain't crossing no wires before a payday, after what we've been through.'

A tremor brushed Cael's consciousness.

Nomi was joining them, though he couldn't have said how he knew.

He stepped forward, opening his mouth to speak. The woman turned to him and held out a hand.

'Lira.' She smiled. 'Just Lira.'

He took the hand she offered. She shook it hard.

'Cael,' he replied, thrown by the force of it. 'What are you doing on my ship?'

Nomi began to circle them, keeping her distance, each slow step deliberate.

She moved like a predator assessing the newcomer, unsure whether what she faced was prey or threat.

Lira held her stare, calm and unblinking, then turned her attention back to Cael.

'Captain Solari, I've been assigned to your crew. It's all above board. You'll need an extra pair of hands on this extraction. Ensuring success is my speciality.'

'If it were above board, it would've been in my briefing.'

'It is,' she said.

Her smile stayed wide, then tipped lopsided, promising more surprises.

Cael flipped out his pad and scrolled to the crew manifest. He knew it by heart. He'd read it the night before until his eyes could bear no more.

There it was.

ADDITIONAL REPRESENTATIVE: LIRA

He stared at the name. It hadn't been there last night.

But there it was now, in standard font, sitting innocently at the bottom of the list. No tags or timestamps to mark a recent update.

I must have been tired, he told himself.

The excuse rang off-key against the Resonator. The echo of its count almost seemed to laugh inside his skull.

'You work for Solé, then?' Cael asked.

'No,' she said at once.

He caught an emptiness in her tone. A simple answer, but not a straightforward no.

The name meant nothing to her.

'So who do you work for?' Nomi asked.

Lira looked between them and smiled.

Calm. Certain.

'I'm a representative of Drift's Edge. I'm here to ensure you succeed. That's all you need to know.'

Vetch's hand drifted towards his sidearm.

'Boss, say the word, and I'll put her back on the dock.'

Cael looked past Lira. At the Porter-Acolytes loading Syndicate crates into his ship. At the altered manifest glowing on his pad. At the security system that had already accepted her.

'And then what?' he said.

Cael said nothing more.

Something shifted.

As he watched Lira size Vetch up, the Resonator plucked at him. Not harder, but cleaner.

Like it approved.

Then she turned, and the Nadir welcomed her aboard as though she were already part of the crew.