The slip bubble thinned, the light unwound, and space snapped back into stars. A new sun burned ahead—whiter than Helion, edged with a thin lattice of satellites that winked to the rhythm of someone else's clock. Liam eased the Astralis onto realspace thrust, hands steady on the yoke. He felt the faint tremor of the hull as if the ship were adjusting its shoulders after a long carry.
[Insertion complete,] Iris said. [No coil damage. No hull stress tears. Welcome to someone else's jurisdiction.]
The nav grid populated with local markers. The delivery beacon pulsed from a modest station that hung like a ring tossed around nothing. Its approach lanes were bracketed by tidy, low-yield defense buoys—not the kind that promised a fight, the kind that promised paperwork if you ignored them.
"Station control, this is Astralis, outsystem delivery under Contract Authority," Liam said. "Requesting approach vector and berth."
A woman's voice came back, clear, bored, efficient. "Astralis, you are clear on lane three. Transmit your CA stamp and cargo seal."
He passed the packet. The HUD flickered with a green checkmark that felt like the smallest, rightest sound in the world.
"Lane three acknowledged," Liam replied. "Approaching."
The station grew—stitchwork panels and thermal radiators, docking spines lit in white and blue. Guiding lights winked him inward. The clamps took hold with a civilized thump. Atmosphere seals called themselves true. The board went from amber to green as if it had never considered being anything else.
[No anomalies on the air mix,] Iris noted. [Leave the helmet on the rack. Vest stays.]
Liam unstrapped, checked the Kestrel-12 in its chest rig—chamber empty, mag seated, safety flicked safe—then sealed the hatch behind him. The station's air smelled like scrubbed copper and stale coffee, the universal scent of places built to be necessary rather than loved. He walked the corridor with the package's claim data pulsing quietly on his band.
The client was a middle-aged man in a crew-cut uniform and a rumpled jacket that tried to pretend it had shoulders. His eyes went to Liam's face, then to the band, then—seamlessly—back to professionalism.
"You're the captain?"
"I am," Liam said, and handed over the claim.
"Right." The man scanned the code and nodded to the waiting loader, who brought the sealed container forward on a low dolly. The case was no larger than a travel trunk, matte gray, its Authority seal emitting the slow heartbeat of a thing that had behaved itself all the way here.
"Break the seal," the man said, not quite a request.
Liam pressed his thumb to the pad. The seal blinked, asked Iris three questions only machines could answer, and died with a sigh. Inside: nested foam and a compact crate stamped with hazard glyphs so faint they could have been a rumor.
[Nothing illegal on our liability,] Iris said. [The glyphs are age-worn. This crate has been relabeled more than once.]
The client checked serials, cross-checked manifests, and grunted toward the console. "Condition perfect. Early by six hours." He tapped his pad. "Authority fee released. Bonus included."
Liam's wristband chimed. +50,000 credits. The sound was small; the number was not.
[Deposit verified,] Iris said. [New balance: 232,530 credits.]
The client held out a hand without ceremony. Liam shook it, professional and brief.
"You handled it clean," the man said. "If you're running again, we post into the CA queue daily."
"I'll be watching," Liam said.
He left the cargo office and drifted toward the public concourse because leaving a station without learning something felt like flying with one eye closed. The concourse was a ring of glass and alloy—vending machines, a tired plant in a pot that might have been plastic or might have decided to be. A low lounge bent around the outer curve, its windows giving a view of the docking spines and the distant glare of the system's sun. Liam ordered a bottle of water because he needed something for his hands to do and slid into a seat where he could listen without pretending to.
Two captains at the next table leaned toward each other with the privacy of people who didn't care who heard them.
"…told you this run's safe," one was saying, a scar down his jaw like a misplaced line. "They fly patrols out here every other day. You could smuggle a piano and no one would try you for it."
"Yeah?" the other said. "Try Ventari then. Patrols haven't touched it in months. Pirates breed there like vermin. Strip a freighter in the lanes and sell the bones to whoever brings the biggest bag."
"Federation'll push a fleet in eventually."
"Eventually's a long time when you're paying out repair bills."
Liam kept his face without expression and took a slow sip. His eyes went to the docking spine where the Astralis sat, a dark mark among a dozen brighter ones. He didn't join the conversation. He didn't need to—he had what he came for: a line between safe space and everything else.
[They are correct,] Iris said. [This system's security rating is high. Patrol density is predictable. Outer corridors have gaps—Ventari is one gap. There are others.]
"We stay in the lanes we can afford," Liam murmured.
[Prudence is not cowardice. It is a multiplier.]
He finished the water and tossed the bottle with a clean arc into a bin. On the way back to the Astralis he glanced at a news crawler stuttering across a wall: ore futures, a corporate dispute over satellite orbits, a weather warning for someone else's atmosphere. It was a reminder that the galaxy didn't care who you were. It cared that you filed the right form and didn't get in its way.
Back aboard, he ran a quick check of the clamps and seals the way he always did—habit wasn't drama, it was how people kept their names. He strapped in, eased the ship clear, and threaded the outbound lane. The station fell behind in a neat sequence of lines until it was only another bright ring in a head full of them.
[Slip corridor alignment window in two hours,] Iris said. [Anchor point is stable. Recommend departure then.]
"You're the worst kind of mother," he said, but he did as told—ration pack, water, a slow minute looking at the new sun and letting the fact of it rest in the place where pride and fear made friends.
The jump home was clean. Aligning with the Erevos corridor felt easier the second time, as if knowledge itself shortened the distance. Docking, fees, a night's sleep in his own berth with the hum of familiar gravity—then out again. The board favored him now, not because it liked him, but because it liked results.
The next month was motion.
He learned the shapes of neighboring suns the way people learn faces. He learned which station clerks cut syllables off your name and which added them like small burdens. He learned that Authority docking fees could be argued down if you filed early and paid on time. He learned how long he could run before the coils' voice changed from hum to complaint—and how to stop before complaint became bill.
Contracts stacked like neat cards:
A sealed tech crate to this system's research loop—45,000 base, 5,000 early. A medical shipment under cold seals to another—38,000 base, no bonus, the clerk's thanks delivered like the word had been measured and weighed. Ore assay cores packed with more caution than weight—22,000, clean. Back-hauls that weren't glamorous but kept the ship from running empty—12,000 to 18,000 depending on who wanted what where.
He kept count because numbers were the kind of story you could audit. Four outsystem deliveries at 50,000 each: 200,000. Four smaller runs between systems at 22,000 each on average: 88,000. Gross in a month: 288,000 credits.
Fuel wasn't free. The slip coils earned their keep, and he paid them back: fuel and reserves, 28,000 across the month; coolant and consumables, 12,000; port fees and lane filings, 18,000; wear parts, shop time, calibrations, 10,000. Ammunition barely moved—he didn't have to fire the Kestrel or the Warden at anything but a safe target to keep his hands honest. Total costs: ~68,000 credits.
[Net earnings: approximately 220,000,] Iris said, a little pleased and pretending not to be. [Your balance has increased despite your habit of buying tools as if they are charms.]
"Tools are charms," he said, and felt the truth of it in his fingers.
He wasn't alone the way he had been at the start. Not really. Iris was constant, slicing through comm queues and filings with the same cold blade she used for diagnostics. Station crews began to nod to him as he passed. A clerk who had never smiled softened an inch. A loader with arms like cables called him "Captain" with the kind of respect that belonged to the job and not to the age of the person doing it.
The Astralis changed too, in the small ways that meant a ship was being lived in properly. The nick on the cockpit's edge was still there; he didn't fix it because it told the truth and didn't hurt anyone. The med kit's latch developed a sound he could hear across the room; the sound told him whether it was seated or not. The drones learned his routes so well that when he launched them they took the first curve of their grid without a prompt and came home with a smug little chirp Iris refused to admit she'd coded for them.
He made mistakes—quiet ones he caught before they could bill him. A cable mis-routed then corrected. A filing he almost sent to the wrong queue. A day when he nearly ran himself too thin and had to choose to skip a job because he wasn't special, he was tired. That choice felt like defeat in the moment and like competence in the morning.
He slept strangely better in slipspace than under a station's steady lights. In slip, the ship hummed in one voice. In port, a hundred other voices crowded his head, each with its own hunger. He wrote that down in his pad because knowing what kind of quiet you could live inside might matter later.
Once—just once—a patrol cutter slid past him in the lanes, their lights washing the cockpit in blue. They didn't stop him. They didn't need to. He was registered, current, clean. He watched them go and felt the way safety had a shape, and the way it also had a price: the longer you wandered away from it, the more likely something would try to collect.
On the twenty-seventh day since his first outsystem contract, Liam sat at the cockpit with a ration bar and the Astralis idling on auxiliary. The familiar glow of Erevos's anchor beacons pulsed against the dark, guiding traffic into predictable arcs.
He brought up the ledger because endings ought to be counted when they could still be put in a pocket.
Starting balance after the big prep: 182,530.
Chapter 5 first payout: +50,000 → 232,530.
Month gross: +288,000.
Month expenses: −68,000.
Net month gain: +220,000.
Ending balance: 452,530 credits.
[Verified,] Iris said. [If you decided tomorrow to spend like a fool, you could do it for a week before I stopped you.]
"You would stop me?"
[Yes. I am not just here to witness your life. I am here to keep it.]
He cracked the bar's seal and took a bite that tasted like someone else's idea of fruit. Outside, a freighter rolled into the lane and disappeared at the corridor anchor, its bubble taking it away with the indifference of weather.
"Put the board up," he said.
The Contract Authority grid blossomed across the canopy—off-system runs, neighboring hops, station-to-station carries he could do in his sleep. Two high-paying contracts blinked on the edge of his range like bright coins just outside his reach. Their lanes bent toward names he'd only heard in other people's stories. Ventari was one. Another had fewer letters and more teeth.
[We can take the safe loop again,] Iris said. [Or we can lengthen the line. Safe loop builds reputation. Longer line builds you.]
He thought of the captains in the lounge, their voices cut with scorn and warning. He thought of patrol cutters and the way their lights had painted the cockpit. He thought of the weight of the Kestrel at his chest and the way his name had started to mean something to strangers who did not give names lightly.
"We'll keep the loop," he said finally, and then, because he could feel her listening harder than she ever said: "For now."
[For now is a strategy,] Iris said. [Not a sentence.]
He smiled, small and private. "Good."
He stood, stretched the edge out of his shoulders, and looked down at a world he had left and returned to enough times that it felt like a hinge, not a home. Beyond the hinge, other systems waited, some with patrols and lights, some with shadows that would never admit they were anything else. He would get there. He didn't need to rush to prove it.
The Astralis pulsed through the panels under his hand, steady and content, a ship that had started as purchase and had become practice. He stowed the pad, checked the clamps, and set their next line: a tidy arc to a neighboring sun, the kind of job that paid honestly and didn't ask for heroics.
[Filed,] Iris said. [Departure in twenty minutes. You have time to eat like a human.]
He made a face at the remainder of the bar and ate it anyway. In the canopy, the corridor anchor flashed its steady, patient light.
This was work. It was also the beginning of what he wanted. Both could be true. He watched the lane clear and thought about how sometimes the bravest thing wasn't chasing the farthest signal; it was drawing the next small line as straight as you could and letting the map change because you had earned it.
"Let's go," he said.
[We will,] Iris replied.
The clamps released. The Astralis rose. The station doors opened on the same black they always did, which somehow never managed to be the same twice.