Locks rotated, old and wanting to be noble.The weight under his feet didn't move.
The inner ring twitched, argued with itself, decided to function. Somewhere in the throat of the collar, a pump coughed like a smoker who remembered stairs. A pressure bar crept from black toward indifference.
"Keep us sealed," the chief engineer said over the intercom, already unkind to any lever that thought it mattered. "We'll sniff their breath through a straw before we let it in our house."
[SYSTEM: Mobile node—baseline 2.0g. Training mode: sealed. External pressure change detected.]
Vegeta widened and narrowed his stance by a quarter shoe, feeling the bed's hum sync to the dock's mechanical mutterings without letting any of it inside his bones. The wrapped pod on the port rail stayed a quiet sin under the rude shroud.
The clerk read the gutter text because someone had to lend a mouth to bureaucracy before ignoring it. "Inner gate acknowledges chain token. Says: 'Custody lane open—present cargo for audit'."
"We present what we want," the engineer said, already spinning a small wheel above her board. A rigid borescope nosed out from the ring-arm through a pressure-sleeve—thin, jointed, with a light that didn't flatter.
The inner gate cracked. Not a door flung; a line of black with silver in it—a ribbon of ancient, cold air curling up the throat like a ghost deciding whether to be superstitious. Frost-dust glittered and died against their collar; it smelled, even through seals and filters, like metal and a long argument that never learned better words.
"Sniffer reads no toxins," the engineer said. "Oxidizers low, humidity insulting, particulates the size of a grudge. We keep it on their side." She pushed the borescope through the slit and flicked on the flood-bars.
The image bled across a secondary pane: a throat into a bigger throat—ribs, beams, the first of a thousand inventory stencils greyed by dust. Floor magnets dead. Gravity: none. The dust hung in slow filaments like a bad habit.
"Pan right," she told herself, and did. The light skated along a line of crates webbed into a pallet, each stamped with geometry and arrogance. Under the dirt: triangles and bars. Route 7-C. On one: FRAME LATTICE—C-LOAD. On another: ARMOR—BATCH 14. On a third, the letters had lost most of themselves, but you could still love what remained: MOUNT—DRIVER, BAND.
Vegeta's tail flicked once inside the sealed cockpit, saying yes in a person's language. "There."
"I see it," she said, the word a tool. "We do not step inside. We bring outside in. Hardware-only clamp. No chain. No data. If the dock's fingers twitch at us, we break them later."
"Make it move," he said.
The ship needed inches. He gave it inches. Hands barely on the yoke, he drifted the nose a hair deeper into the throat, kept the guidance ants as insult, not instruction. The driver bed under him did not change its mind about being two. The collar at the hatch stayed doctrine-red and rude as church.
"Coil out," the engineer said. A second arm telescoped along the ring, the same coil gun head they'd used on the pod now wearing a clamp jaw wider than its own dignity. "Clerk, ring lock on my mark, then reverse the come-along two centimeters a second. If anything lies, I make it regret literacy."
"Armed," the clerk said.
The borescope's flood-bar hit the pallet's binding grid. Close now, you could see the way dust had taken up residence in the corners like a tenant who thinks the landlord died. The MOUNT—DRIVER, BAND crate showed the corner of a stamped diagram—ring, braces, the sort of problem steel can solve if you insult it enough.
"Jaw on," she said. The clamp kissed the pallet's grid, found purchase, decided it had been born for this. "Pull."
The come-along began its slow rewinding hymn. The pallet twitched, lifted, protested by redistributing dust through the air like it had opinions. The borescope caught the movement of something else: a glass circle inset into the gate housing itself—flat, coin-small, an eye that had chosen boredom for a thousand days and found it interrupted.
"Eye," the clerk said, voice level by practice.
"I see it," the engineer said. "Bolt it shut."
The coil snapped its nose a degree and spat a magnetic staple the size of a thumbnail; the coin-eye blinked its last blink and became a memory under foil and steel. The pallet drifted toward them inch by yardless inch, their clamp humming a work song without a chorus.
"Baseline one-point-eight for thirty," she said, coldly generous. "You can have a breath while it moves."
[SYSTEM: Mobile node—baseline 1.8g.]
Weight eased a notch without ceding anything that mattered. He slid right half a foot to share bias. The ship obeyed physics; physics obeyed the law he brought with him. Dust fingered the flood-bar like a thief.
"Come-along steady," the clerk said. "Tension good. Dock doesn't know how to object."
"Because the dock expects a conversation," the engineer said. "We don't have one."
The pallet met their collar's hungry lip. The clamp walked it across the threshold, steel toes and patient profanity. Their hardpoint took weight and pretended it always had room. The pallet stuck with the right sound.
"Lock it," she said. "Jaw out. Jaw back. Jaw again. Good."
[SYSTEM: External pallet—secured (port rail). Emissions: null.]
Vegeta let one breath stretch longer than it needed and kept his bones from enjoying it. "Next pallet?" he asked.
"We don't teach their house we're generous," the engineer said. She swung the borescope left; the flood-bar grazed aisles deeper in—more crates, more algebra. A shape on a ceiling rail nearer the far cross-beam had the wrong texture: not dust, not pipe. A small coffin with a muzzle—quiet now, pointed at nothing, standard-issue audit sentinel that watched for thieves with less doctrine.
"That," she said, marking it with a dot on the pane without telling her hands to shake. "Warmth in the rail. It's thinking about work."
"Will it sing if we pull again?" the clerk asked, precise, not scared.
"It will sing if it thinks it can afford to," she said. "We prevent that by making it poor."
"Baseline two-point-oh," Vegeta said, because you pay anything worth buying in weight.
[SYSTEM: Mobile node—baseline 2.0g.]
He reset his stance, felt the driver bed answer with the same law, felt the collar stay rude. The depot's inner lights flickered a degree brighter, not friendly—awake.
"Second pallet—not the mount. Lattice, left," the engineer decided. "We make the frame first, or you carry a ring with nowhere to live. Coil head—left, two degrees, forward ten."
The coil obeyed. The clamp kissed the second pallet. The come-along began to hum again.
A filament of heat ticked along the ceiling rail, crawling toward the audit sentinel like a fuse no one had asked to be lit.
"There," the clerk said, finger on the pane.
"I see it," the engineer said. "Clerk, arm hull coil—low velocity, broad head. We make noise in the right place. Vegeta, you do not improvise with my ship while I teach this ceiling to behave."
The ship did not need improvisation. It needed to learn that heavy was a thing it would always be from now on. His fingers stayed on the yoke like a man keeping a dog from remembering it has teeth.
"Coil armed," the clerk said. "Shot profile: one. You call it."
"On my mark," she said. The rail's heat reached the sentinel's belly; a little status light inside the casing tried to be brave. "Three. Two. Send."
The coil thumped, not loud; the staple hit the rail a meter to the right of the sentinel and chewed through decades of dust into metal. The shock ran the length of the line like an idea with bad manners. The sentinel's light flickered, went confused, decided life had always been a nap.
"Good," she said, keeping her voice from liking the shot too openly. "Again, farther down. Don't bruise my pallet."
"Second send," the clerk said, and the staple walked another insult down the rail. The heat filament lost the sentence it had been trying to form.
"Jaw tight," she told the coil at the collar. "Come-along—tiny bites."
The pallet slid; dust confetti revolved in small worlds. The borescope's flood-bar caught a second glass iris tucked deeper in the gate housing, a lawyer's eye that had never been brave. "Clerk."
"I see it." Staple. Blink. Blind.
The pallet entered their collar's throat. Their hardpoint bit. The jaw did its ritual of kiss, pull, kiss, pull, until the second pallet was their sin instead of the depot's.
"Lock," the engineer said. "Jaw home."
[SYSTEM: Second pallet secured. External emissions—quiet.]
The depot didn't like being taught. A deeper light stained a seam farther in—the long bar of a ceiling node warming: not a camera; a track motor thinking about waking its carriage.
"Third pallet is not worth a fight," she said without taking her eyes off the light. "We leave, and we come back heavy."
"Or we cut the motor out of its memory and keep shopping," Vegeta said, flat.
"You want to learn a new ceiling in a house that hates strangers while teaching your ship to be gravity?" she asked. "You can. I don't like paying twice for the same lesson."
He watched the thin bar of heat grow a color you don't see unless you're stubborn enough to stare at anger. The ship under his boots hummed the baritone he liked. The wrapped pod on the rail felt small all at once, because this was larger: a depot waking up to the idea of having opinions again.
"Third pallet later," he said. "We own what we have."
The engineer nodded once, consent shaped like refusal. "Clerk—retract borescope. Close inner gate to 'audit awaiting.' We will not be here when it remembers how to count to three."
"On it," the clerk said. The borescope slithered back through the sleeve, the flood-bar dimmed, the gate's slit narrowed a fraction, resentful.
The ceiling bar's heat crept another inch. The engineer's hand hovered over the coil's send again and didn't drop—discipline keeping her finger an inch above satisfaction.
"Back us out," she said. "An inch at a time. Baseline holds at two; pulse is no until we like our threshold better."
Vegeta drifted the ship a breath. Guidance ants along the throat did their bored dance. The collar stayed rude. The driver bed kept law.
"Come-along slack," the clerk reported. "Jaw home. Both pallets locked to port rail. Wrapped pod remains wrapped."
"Good," she said. "If that track motor coughs a drone into the aisle, we—"
The light bar brightened, a pulse that had nothing to do with her and everything to do with a machine rehearsing enthusiasm. A hatch along the ceiling track's belly ticked with a first intention of opening.
"Now it's trying to be a person," the engineer said, which in her language was grounds for violence. "Clerk, coil: head-on. Vegeta—you keep the load. You don't get clever because a ceiling woke up."
He didn't. He kept two in his bones and the ship in the line and the cockpit sealed. The track hatch's latch wiggled like a loose tooth trying to become a story.
"Send," he said.
"Send," she agreed, and her finger did what discipline allows when it sees the exact right target.