Mira Valen watched the Starfall rotate in the vacuum like a worded promise handed back with rusted edges. Years of scavenger jokes had made the derelict a spectral landmark in every run-down orbital bar between systems, a hull that paid out in parts if you were willing to crawl under its ribs. For Mira it was not sentiment but survival; credit runs were short and the Skylark's engines kept learning new coughs. She had carried the weight of too many losses to admire monuments. The salvage contract was clear and immediate: claim the starboard engineering arrays, tag the auxiliary capacitors, and bring whatever the insurance code still recognized for metal value. If the Starfall was legend, it was also a ledger she could close, a ledger written in bolts and fissures instead of names, and her crew's mouths needed bread and old debts needed quieting.
The boarding tether was a familiar tremor over skin and bone. Samir Kade—Patch since before he learned to swear well—moved ahead of her with the practiced calm of someone who had once rebuilt a reactor from scrap and guilt. His hands smelled of solvents and honesty, and his grin was the sort that meant he had a plan and it was probably dangerous. Mira felt the tug of old instincts and kept them at bay. There would be no speeches. There would be no vows. There would be profit, and enough to buy time. The Skylark's cutter clung to the Starfall's hull like a barnacle to a keel as they translated through the maintenance flange and into a corridor that smelled of long-circulated air and fried electronics. Emergency lighting sputtered in a slow, melancholy heartbeat; shadows pooled where panels had pulled away like flaps of dried skin.