The Eighteen Percent
The booth at the back of Greta’s mess hall had a curtain. The curtain was the reason five working captains were eating there on a Tuesday.
Anya took the inside seat. The bench was warm from the body of whichever crew had vacated it ten minutes earlier. Davit Kade had bought the booth for the night by the simple method of buying everyone in it dinner and a kindness, and the curtain had pulled closed behind them with the quiet authority of a man who had done this before.
The other three were already at the table.
Mauro Pereyra was the oldest. Argentine, ring-belt by way of Ceres, his face creased in the patient way of someone who had spent twenty years staring at debris fields and learning to wait. He ran the Bright Wedge. He had two skiffs, four crew, and a reputation for never reporting a salvage tonnage he could not back up with a hold inventory.
Klara Sjöberg was the loudest. Nordic, second-generation Titan, captain of the Coldstack. Forty-two and divorced from a man she still spoke of fondly because she had once almost been the woman who stayed in low orbit. She ate fast. She drank slower. She was the one most likely to walk away from the table.
Kunle Adeleke was the quiet one. Nigerian, raised on a Ganymede agro-platform, captain of the Slow Margin. Thirty-six. He had lost a brother on a salvage run that nobody at this table had been on, and he carried the loss the way Anya carried the Polaris fragment in her chest pocket. He spoke when something needed to be said. He had not said anything yet tonight.
Davit unrolled the napkin.
He did it like a gift. He smoothed the corners. He took a pen from his jacket and laid it on the table between the salt and a half-eaten bowl of fried protein. He looked at each of them. The look was friendly. The look was the look of a man who had already won the conversation in his head and was now letting them have it.
“I want to talk about commission,” Davit said.
The pitch was practiced and it was good.
Davit walked them through what the cooperative already gave them. Arbitration when two crews hit the same field. A courier chain that moved finished pieces from Saturn’s rings to Mimas to Pallas without a UEN signature touching the wrong sheet. Authentication backstops from Soo-jin’s lab when a buyer wanted a percentage stamp. Payment timelines that held. Documentation that did not break under an officer with a good year on her shoulder bar.
He did not say the Black Manifest run. He did not have to. Klara knew about it. Mauro knew about it. Kunle had been told about it by the only person at this table who had been there, which was Anya, who had said exactly two sentences about it and then changed the subject.
“The cooperative is real,” Davit said. “It is not free.”
He wrote on the napkin. The number was twenty-two.
Twenty-two percent of the gross sale price of any Vethrak component moved through Davit’s chain. Twenty-two percent of any inter-crew arbitration award. Twenty-two percent of any salvage authenticated by the cooperative’s labs.
“Twenty-two,” Klara said. She said it the way a freighter cook said salt. Flat. Final. Not a question.
“Twenty-two,” Davit said.
“You are out of your mind,” Klara said. She set her fork down. “Twenty-two is bigger than what my second skiff’s fuel runs me on a year.”
“It is bigger than the year you lost the second skiff in the field where the Coldstack almost lost the first,” Davit said. He said it without heat. He said it the way a man recites a price list. “What you lose to one bad week, in one bad field, with no arbitration backstop, is bigger than twenty-two percent. I am offering you an insurance product that pays out in the only currency that matters out here. The next breath.”
Klara picked the fork back up. She did not eat.
Mauro had the pen.
He drew a line through the twenty-two. He wrote fifteen.
“Fifteen is what the old Ceres expediter combines ran in the year before the invasion,” Mauro said. “Fifteen is what my father paid. Fifteen is what I will pay.”
“Your father paid fifteen for a courier whose worst case was a missed shipment,” Davit said. “I am offering you a courier whose worst case is a UEN cutter that does not open the seventh container.”
Mauro’s face did not move. The line he had drawn through the twenty-two stayed drawn.
Anya had the pen next.
She wrote twelve.
She wrote it without saying anything. She set the pen down. She looked at Davit, and she did not look at Klara or Mauro or Kunle, because the conversation was not with them.
“Twelve,” Davit said.
“Twelve,” Anya said.
“You ran the manifest last month.”
“I ran the manifest last month.”
“At twelve, I do not pay the print shop on the freighter four stations away from Officer Roux.”
“At twelve, you pay the print shop and you sleep less.”
Davit smiled. The smile was the part of him that Maren had warned her about on the second week of the cooperative’s existence. The smile was not the lie. The smile was the place the lie lived.
“Twelve is honest,” he said. “Twelve does not hold.”
He picked up the pen.
He wrote eighteen.
Kunle was the one who broke it.
He had not spoken in twenty minutes. He had eaten slowly. He had watched the napkin the way a man watches a fuse.
“Eighteen with a ceiling,” Kunle said. His voice was quiet enough that the curtain swallowed it. “Eighteen on transactions over a number we set tonight. Twelve on anything under. A crew working bad fields for low-yield scrap does not pay the same rate as a crew working a Vethrak engine block.”
Mauro nodded once.
Klara, who had been ready to walk, set her fork down a second time and did not pick it up.
Davit looked at Kunle for a long second. The smile was still there. The smile had shifted into something Anya had not seen on him before. Something that was not quite respect, and was not quite calculation, and lived in the space between.
“What is the number,” Davit said.
“Fifteen thousand UEN-equivalent,” Kunle said. “Per piece. Above fifteen, you take eighteen. Below fifteen, you take twelve. Arbitration awards stay flat at eighteen, because arbitration does not care what the prize is, it cares what the bleed was.”
Davit wrote it on the napkin. He underlined the fifteen-thousand mark twice. He wrote arbitration: 18 flat. He wrote tier ceiling: 15K UEN-eq. He wrote floor: 12. He capped the pen.
He raised his glass. The glass was a chipped mess hall thing with the Mimas Station logo half-worn off the side. The liquid inside was a reconstituted ration brandy that no one at the table loved.
“To the eighteen percent,” Davit said.
He said it as a joke. The corner of his mouth was set in the joke. The joke was the cover for the thing he had done, which was to walk into a Tuesday dinner at a mess hall behind a curtain and walk out the architect of a tax structure that would, in a way none of them said aloud, outlive every captain at the table.
Anya raised her glass.
The brandy was bad. She drank it anyway.
Walking back to the Underweight, the corridor lights at the C-deck junction were on the long ten-second cycle that Mimas Station used during the third shift to save power. She walked the dark side of the cycle. She did not check her chest pocket for the Polaris fragment. She had stopped checking for it three months ago.
The fragment was there. The fragment was always there.
She walked.
The math on the napkin had been clean. Eighteen flat for arbitration. Eighteen above fifteen-thousand UEN-equivalent. Twelve below. A floor. A ceiling. A structure.
She thought of Maren, who had said the voice is the manifest, and who would have looked at the napkin and said nothing for three seconds and then changed the subject.
She thought of Iso Pruvit, who was on Tethys, who was good, who would never sit at this table.
She thought of Davit, who had walked into the dinner with twenty-two on the napkin and had walked out with eighteen on the napkin, and who had wanted eighteen the whole time.
She turned the corner at the C-deck airlock.
The Underweight sat in its bay, listing slightly to port the way it always listed, the running lights on the low pulse the night-cycle protocol called for.
We have made ourselves into a thing that has a name we haven’t picked yet.
She keyed the airlock.
The cycle began.
Author’s note: Day Fourteen of the Iron Wake Origins arc. Year 2, Month 6. Anya Rask, Davit Kade, and three founding captains meet in a curtained booth at a Mimas station mess hall. Davit opens the negotiation at twenty-two percent. Anya counters at twelve. Mauro Pereyra writes fifteen on the napkin. Kunle Adeleke, who has not spoken in twenty minutes, brings the structure that holds: eighteen above a fifteen-thousand UEN-equivalent ceiling, twelve below, eighteen flat on arbitration awards. Davit raises his glass and calls it the eighteen percent. He means it as a joke. The eighteen percent will become the spine of the Iron Wake economy, the commission line that runs from this Tuesday dinner all the way to the protocol document signed in Year 3 and the Year 14 black-market clearinghouse the cooperative does not yet know it is becoming. Anya walks back to the Underweight on the dark side of the corridor’s power-cycle and knows the cooperative she has been calling a cooperative has made itself into something else. She does not have the name for it yet. Davit does. He has been holding the name for months.
If you enjoyed this story, you can follow the main story arc in The Exodus Rush, the first book in The Vethrak Requiem series.