Kade Rellan kept his hands where Argos-9 could see them. Not that the ship's AI had any need for reassurance, but habits lived longer than circumstance in the Vesper's cabin. A coil of braided rope lay coiled on the workbench, the leather dull with salt and oil from the last unsupervised docking. Outside, the cargo bay breathed and groaned as the ship adjusted to microcurrents, a steady physiological sound for a vessel that had been more a partner than a possession for years.
He told himself the job was simple: a sweep, a lift, a payment. He did not expect the station at the rim to answer back. The route to Sable Terminal had been a rumor folded into a map, an old line in a courier's memory. The client, a nameless broker who paid in old-world credits and new-world promises, had stressed discretion and speed. Kade liked easy things that paid enough to buy more time. He liked the Vesper and the people who fit into its narrow corridors, and he liked the soft fiction that someday he'd close the accounts that sat at the edge of his life and finally go home.
Argos-9's voice filled the cabin, even when the AI wasn't strictly required to speak, as if habit and curiosity had been grafted into its operating parameters. 'Course correction calculated, three degrees port, five seconds burn. Atmospheric disturbances ahead consistent with residual gravimetry. Station signature is nonstandard.'
Kade rubbed his jaw and glanced at Selin, who preferred the light of consoles to the rawness of a day on a wet planet. She had her hair tied back in a way that to Kade looked like armor. Her hands hovered over a holoslate, fingers tracing a pattern only she could see. 'Nonstandard' in her mouth meant curiosity, and curiosity in her hands meant something she had to touch.
They were not pretending to be anything they were not when they docked with Sable Terminal. The station was a toothless relic, chassis pitted, lights dimmed to a melancholy glow. Opaque panels flapped in vacuum like petals; a maintenance shuttle still hung on the port ring, dark and dead. The docking interface responded with a slow shudder, the kind of shudder that said the station was old enough to remember being new. Kade felt the old hunger, the kind that had nothing to do with credits and everything with the notion of pulling something from the dark and making it useful.