Requiem for the Conflux

Emberfall Station hung in the black like a rusted crown, its rings and spines catching the late light of three distant suns and flinging it back in fractured shards. The docking bays were a patchwork of replacement panels and burned‑out signage; the air tasted of ozone and fried protein, of hot metal and the faint, artificial sweetness of packaged memory teas. Mira Jansen watched the traffic from the Windfall's open ramp as if she were reading a slow, stubborn language: freighters with patched hulls, shuttle tenders with the Consortium seals glossy and new, a courier skimming low with a cargo pod tied in knots and secrecy. She had learned to read those things in the years after the collapse that had stolen Orin. The Conflux had once been a map she could pilot by feel; it had been training, rhythm, and purpose. Now that map had holes where people were supposed to be, and the holes called names that did not return.

Inside the Windfall, the crew held itself in a ragged, familiar geometry. Kade Rhee slouched against a crate of servo modules with his boots hooked over the edge and a grin that kept the ship's nervousness from rusting into panic. His insults about Emberfall's curry were the sort of thing that refused to land like a punch, softening tension the way laughter softens a wound. Aster Corin, with her lenses and splices of wire and a mind that could hear a dead algorithm breathe again, moved through the cargo hold like someone reconciling separate halves of a whole. She had an engineer's reverence for pattern and a scientist's impatience with cruelty. Sera Lin kept manifests and morale in balance; she was the crew's medic and conscience, a quiet ledger of what they owed to themselves and to the people who trusted them.

They were not a large crew, and they were not an honorable one; they carried favors like ballast and debts like cargo manifests with too many items to count. Emberfall was supposed to be routine: fuel cells, a small shipment of polymer panels for a contractor in Quadrant Nine, a brief refit for a nav array that had begun to tremble on long jumps. Routine had pockets of safety. It also had a reputation for being generous with people who needed to vanish in a hurry. Mira had chosen such harbors before. She knew the difference between a place that would look the other way and a place that would sell you in parts for a quick credit.