The Cold Manifest
The Mimas Station Salvage Protocol office sat on the third spoke of Ring Two, two corridors past a closed commissary and a public refresher that had been out of order since before the invasion. Anya Rask had walked the corridor four times in her UEN years. The lighting strip was the same. The smell was the same. Old solder, recycled air, the chemical tang of a ration paste somebody had reheated nine hours ago and not finished.
The intake counter was a slab of brushed alloy with a queue line painted on the deck in front of it. There was nobody else in line. The painted line was new. Three months ago the queue had run six deep on a quiet day. Now the office had the soft empty hum of a place nobody had figured out how to close yet.
The man behind the counter looked up. “Manifest?”
“Pulled it this morning.”
“Tag, please.”
She reached across and set the salvage-tag chip on the reader. The reader took two seconds to think about it. The screen on the man’s side rotated through a column of green text she could not read upside-down.
He was older than she had expected. Mid-forties, ring-belt thin, hair gone to grey at the temples. The Salvage Protocol patch on his sleeve was stitched, not printed. Pre-invasion stitching, kept current. His name tape said PRUVIT, I. and a service number she did not bother to read.
“Pre-conversion structural,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Saturn outer ring.”
“Yes.”
He read the rest of the manifest line by line without comment. The pace was not fast. The pace was the pace of a man who had read the same fields ten thousand times and was not going to stop reading them in order.
She set her hands flat on the counter and waited.
The valuation column resolved. Iso Pruvit looked at it. He did not blink, did not sigh, did not show her his face for it. He turned the screen on its swivel mount so she could see the number.
The number was the number she had known would be there. The Salvage Protocol’s published rate, applied cleanly, no holdback, payable on intake.
It was a quarter of what the freelance board had quoted at three in the morning in the Underweight’s cabin chair.
“That’s the assessed rate,” Pruvit said.
“I know.”
“I can flag it for second-tier review. That’s a four-week window. The number doesn’t move much. Sometimes it moves a little.”
“Doesn’t move much.”
“No.”
She stood at the counter for a slow count of three. Pruvit waited. He was not selling her the deal. He was not apologizing for the deal. He was a man who had stopped doing both of those things some number of months ago.
“I’ll take it,” she said.
He nodded once. The screen rotated back. He printed a thumbprint pad onto the counter and slid it toward her.
She put her thumb on the pad. The pad chimed. The transfer credit posted to her wrist comm with a soft acknowledgment tone she had heard a thousand times before, in a thousand smaller amounts, when she had still been somebody’s employee.
Pruvit logged the transaction and stamped a dispatch tag on the cargo manifest. The fragment was no longer hers. The fragment was a number on a Protocol ledger somewhere in the Mars-orbital data warren.
He looked at her over the counter. “You worked the Yard.”
“Nine years.”
“I remember the supervisor’s name.”
She gave him the supervisor’s name. He nodded.
“He was good,” Pruvit said.
“He was.”
“You’re working solo now.”
“At the moment.”
He read her face for a half-second. He had read a lot of faces across that counter. He did not push.
“The published rate is the published rate,” he said. “It is not what the work is worth. It is what we can pay.”
“I know.”
“You’ll see other numbers. The other numbers come with terms.”
“I know that too.”
He did not say be careful. He did not say don’t. He nodded once, the way a man nods when he has finished saying everything the system permitted him to say, and reached for the next manifest in his queue. There was no next manifest. The counter was empty behind her. He set his hand down anyway.
“Safe transit,” he said.
“Same to you.”
She walked out of the office.
The corridor smelled the same on the way back. The lighting strip flickered at the same junction it had flickered at three months ago. She passed the closed commissary, the broken refresher, the empty hatchway where a Yard recruiting board used to hang. The board had been taken down sometime in the last ninety days. The bolt holes were still in the bulkhead.
Her wrist comm chimed.
The ping came in on a private channel she did not recognize. The sender’s handle was a string of letters that was not a name. The message was five words.
Triple. Tonight. No questions. Confirm.
She stopped walking.
The corridor was empty in both directions. The hum of the station’s environmental loop pulsed in the deck plating under her boots. Mimas was a small moon. Mimas had a small population. The number of people on this station who knew what she had walked into the Protocol office carrying could not be large. The number of people who knew what she had walked out with could be larger by exactly one.
She did not answer.
She did not delete the message.
The comm screen went dark on its idle timer. She started walking again. Her thumb stayed on the comm cuff. The cuff was warm against her wrist.
The dispatch tag in her chest pocket said the fragment was Protocol property now, processed and bonded and on its way to a Mars-orbital data warren that would, in eight to twelve weeks, post a quarterly summary of recovered Vethrak assets.
The comm message in her notification queue said triple.
She passed Ring Two access and dropped into the dock spoke. The Underweight sat in slip nine, its battered hull plating caught in the cold wash of the dock floods. She climbed the boarding stair and cycled the airlock and sat down in the cabin chair without taking off her boots.
The wrist comm sat on the cabin slab where she set it.
The message preview was still in the notification queue. She did not open it.
She did not delete it either.
Outside the porthole, the rings of Saturn turned over the small horizon of Mimas, lit from below by a planet that did not, in any sense she could measure, care.
Author’s note: Day Two of the Iron Wake Origins arc. Anya Rask brings her first private Vethrak find through the official Salvage Protocol intake on Mimas Station. The system pays exactly what it is supposed to pay, which is a quarter of what the work is worth on the open market. Iso Pruvit is the man behind the counter, and he is not the antagonist of this arc. He is the version of Anya who chose differently. They will see each other again. The compromise curve continues. The shadow-market is patient.
If you enjoyed this story, you can follow the main story arc in The Exodus Rush, the first book in The Vethrak Requiem series.