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A seasoned seamworker reluctantly reintroduces an improvised joining technique to dock a fleeing barge. As she stitches polymer to metal and trains new hands, a small station remaps its routines—finding ways to hold wounds and people without erasing independence.
The Outer Dock never pretended to be elegant. It was a skeleton of girders and tubing, a scaffold for ships and stubbornness, and it smelled like radiator oil, fried algae, and someone’s earnest attempt at cardamom coffee. Asha moved through that smell like a surgeon through steam—clean, precise, and always with a rag in her back pocket. Her torch, nicked and blackened at the handle, hung from her belt like an old dog; technicians joked it had earned its own berth. She called it Old Hoss and, privately, thanked the metal thing every time it bit a bead into stubborn seam.
On a shift that began like any other, chisels and torque wrenches singing in the background, the dock's comm croaked her name. “Verne?” said Dockmaster Halen with the sort of empathy that arrived in five-second bursts over low-band. Halen kept a steady tenor to his announcements even when the docking bays themselves shivered. He had the voice of the canteen’s kettle: always on the verge of a complaint. “Unscheduled approach on bay three. Nonstandard hull. Requesting inspection.”
Asha wiped her hands on her coveralls and glanced at the line of berths. The bay lights blinked like tired stars. She tightened the strap on her glove and swung herself up a catwalk, boots clapping on metal. The dock’s routine was a choreography of small violences—wedging clamps into place, prying corroded plates, coaxing lifeless seals to bite—and Asha liked it that way. Work gave her a rulebook she could follow, not a conversation she had to have.
She moved with economy: a lock, a torque, a bead. Her fingers found familiar places on frames, the same way a musician finds fretwork. Around the dock, people left traces of lives that had nothing to do with hull joint tolerances. A string of tethered plants bobbed against a maintenance panel—a ridiculous, dexterous thing in zero-g that the engineers swore helped morale. Someone had tucked a small paper fan into the garden’s soil brick; the fan spun lazily when the system cycled humidity, and Asha caught herself smiling before she could stop it.
She clipped her comm, “Verne here.” The voice on the other end was clipped and efficient. “Captain's override cleared for port approach. Old weave, maybe. Step aboard for inspection?”
Asha hesitated only a moment. Rules told her to evaluate, not to volunteer. Her hands, however, had other ideas. She clipped across the gang, the metal of the bridge ringing underfoot.