Starloom Reckoning

The morning came to Hespera like a slow ignition. Light bled from the arc-lattice over Dock Two, and the air tasted faintly of ozone and frying copper. Janek Rhyse worked with his back to it, elbows deep inside a starboard vent where a scavenged scrubber coughed and spat a fog of black motes. His fingers moved by habit—thumb against plate, wrench finding a rounded bolt, breath measured. The workshop smelled of cold metal and sea-salt memories imported from orbital rain farms. He kept one window open to the hangar; the dock noises—hydraulic sighs, the slap of cargo on composite, the distant chatter of freighters lining up like tired beasts—threaded through the room.

He loved the small things: the soft click the vent made when a seal seated properly, the way the wrench fit his palm, the map of scars on his knuckles that told stories no one asked for. On the bench beside him, an old transit chart was taped in ten places, an accidental sunburst of lines traced by too many hands. Janek glanced at it and felt a brief, inconvenient tug—routes he could no longer take, mistakes marked by months of avoidance.

A voice pulsed from the comm pinned to the wall: terse, high, and private. "Janek?" It was Rin.

He wiped grease on a rag and pushed the harness wire aside. "Rin. You're early."

She appeared in the holo above the bench with the immediacy of a message loop—short hair tucked under a thermal hood, her brow still wet from a dawn wash. Her lips were thin with worry. "There's a problem at the anchor. We got a rise in the tidal variance. The stabilizers down at the Tethered Spoke—" She stopped, searching his face. "We can't patch it here."

Janek frowned. The Tethered Spoke was a chain of mass dampeners that kept Hespera's position steady relative to the Sector Gate. If one faltered, the entire anchorage could sway, and low-orbit traffic would lose its corridors.

"How bad?" he asked, more steady than he felt.

She tapped the holo; blueprints unfolded in a scatter of light. "Core misreadings. Something pulled a harmonic node. It's like a missing tooth in a gear. Cargo is backed up, power cycles are uneven. If the anchor slips we lose docking priority for days—ships stalled, life support stressed. People will get hurt."

Janek listened to the clink of a loose panel on the vent, the ordinary creak of the world that never stopped. He had spent years keeping things from breaking. That was simpler than preventing what people did to keep them from breaking: hoarding, cutting lines, selling away parts meant for emergency. He thought of the small clinic on Level Three where Rin volunteered, of the infants with lungs like paper who needed the air scrubbers to be perfect. He thought of the price boards at the exchange, the way a single regulator could buy a month's medicine.

"What do you need me to do?" he asked.

Rin's eyes—always the color of the dock lights at midnight—tightened. "They say a regulator's gone. Stolen. Someone masked the signature. The syndicates are sniffing. We need it back, or we patch the anchor with jury rigs and pray."

The word "stolen" fell into the shop like a weight. Janek straightened, feeling the old restlessness iron into him. You didn't sit idle when something vital slipped away. He had left the routes once and come home with hands full of other people's danger. He had sworn to stay put. But the bench under his palms hummed with familiar promise: tools, hands, action. He pictured the face of the clinic's matron and the thin-lidded infants who watched the vents as if they were altars.

"I'll come down," he said.

Outside, Dock Two shifted with the rhythm of deliveries. A corroded harvester turned its bulk away, leaving a smell of sweetfuel in its wake. Janek reached for the wrench, then for the leather satchel he'd kept since the nights when he ran dark routes between stations. He had never been a hero in the stories—only a man who could stop a leak before it drowned someone else. But the anchor was a tether for everyone; once a tether began to fray, the whole web threatened to unspool.