The Fleet Crackdown
The cutter came up on her stern at full burn, and she had eight seconds to decide what to do with the manifest folder on the console beside her.
She did nothing.
The cutter was UEN. She had known the cutter was UEN the moment its drive flare resolved against the Saturn ringlight, and she had known Iso Pruvit was aboard the cutter the moment the hail came through on the frequency he used. The frequency was not a public channel. The frequency had been a courtesy, six months back, and the courtesy was the courtesy of a man telling her without saying it that he would hail her himself when he had to.
He had to.
“Underweight, this is UEN Cutter Halberd. Prepare for boarding and inspection. Hold position. Confirm.”
His voice. Flat. Procedural. Three sentences in the order the academy wrote them.
“Halberd, this is Underweight, confirming. Holding.”
She set the folder down. She did not open it. The folder held papers that would not hold up to Iso Pruvit, and she had known this since the day she had ordered them printed.
The Halberd came alongside in a long even approach. The match was a half-second slower than a quota-sweep match. The half second told her two things. The first was that the match was being conducted by the officer in charge himself. The second was that the officer in charge was not in a hurry, and a UEN officer who was not in a hurry was a UEN officer who already had what he needed.
The airlock cycled.
Iso came across first, three crew behind him. He wore the uniform of a Salvage Protocol lieutenant with a new pin at the collar she did not recognize. The new pin was small and silver and centered. Reassignment was coming. He had not told her. He had not needed to. The new pin had told her.
“Anya.”
“Iso.”
The crew behind him fanned out into the Underweight‘s cargo hold with the speed of people who had been briefed before they came across. They had been told which container to open. They opened it. The container was the second container, and it was clean.
It was clean because Davit’s chain set the order of every container, and the second container was always clean, and Iso Pruvit had been a Salvage Protocol officer for nine years and knew the convention.
He opened the second container himself. He did not look inside. He gestured for the crew to open the seventh.
The seventh held three crates of authenticated Vethrak alloy plate. Eighty-three percent. Soo-jin Baek’s signature on the assay slip beside the manifest.
Iso did not move when the crate was opened. He read the assay slip. He read the manifest. He read the slip again. He looked at her.
“Walk with me.”
“Where.”
“Mimas holding. We’re impounding.”
The holding office at Mimas had three plastic chairs and a counter the color of bone. Iso sat behind the counter. Anya sat across from him. The chair was older than she was. The chair smelled of every salvage operator who had sat in it, which was the smell of recycler grease and EVA seals and waiting.
Iso put the paperwork between them.
“Your skiff is impounded for fourteen hours. We are confiscating one crate of authenticated Vethrak alloy and entering it into a chain-of-custody log under your name as the recovered party of an unregistered claim.”
“Which crate.”
“Crate three.”
Crate three. The cleanest paperwork in the entire shipment. Crate three’s chain ran through Davit’s most-licensed broker, two cooperative co-signatures, and an assay countersigned by a Pallas certification she had paid for legitimately. Crate three would clear an audit. Crate three was the crate she could afford to lose because losing it cost nothing she had not already paid for.
He had not told her he was choosing crate three. He had not needed to.
“Thank you.”
“Don’t.”
She did not.
He turned a sheet toward her. He turned it at the pace he had always turned sheets, the pace she had described to Davit once as one breath each, the pace that meant the officer doing the turning was not missing anything. The sheet was a release notice. The release was conditional on the impound interval. The interval was fourteen hours, no longer, and the no-longer was the marker that told her he had a quota too and was not above using it.
She signed.
He took the sheet back. He set it on a stack. He folded his hands.
“Anya.”
“Yes.”
“I cannot keep doing this for you.”
The collar pin caught the office light when he spoke. The pin was small. The pin meant Tethys. The pin meant inner-system enforcement. The pin meant a posting where the math of his shift was a math she would not be able to walk slow through.
She did not look at the pin. She looked at his hands.
“I am not asking you to.”
He nodded once. The nod was not relief. The nod was acknowledgment, which was the thing he had given her every time he had given her anything, which was the only thing he had ever given her and the only thing she would have taken.
“The next sweep won’t be mine.”
“Understood.”
“You will need clean routes.”
“I know.”
“The cooperative will need them too.”
“I know.”
He stood. The stand was not dismissal. The stand was the close of a meeting between two people who had run out of the parts of the meeting that could be said aloud. He gathered the paperwork. He filed her impound notice into a drawer that closed with the sound of a drawer the UEN had ordered in bulk a decade ago and had not replaced since.
“Fourteen hours.”
“Fourteen.”
“Walk safe.”
“You too.”
The Underweight was on bay seven, tethered, hold seals lit blue under impound notice. The crate-three slot was empty. The space inside the cargo hold where crate three had been was the size and shape of a person.
She did not climb aboard.
She stood on the gangway and watched the bay lights cycle through their long even shift change, and she thought about Iso’s collar pin, and she thought about Tethys, and she thought about the four years it would take an officer like Iso Pruvit at Tethys to become the officer who would open the seventh container and the twelfth and the seventeenth without asking which container to open.
He would become that officer. The UEN had been losing officers like Iso to the inner system for eighteen months and had been replacing them at the rings with officers who did not yet know that the second container was clean by design. Iso would carry the knowledge inward. The knowledge would become a weapon. The weapon would be turned on her cooperative, and Iso would not be the one carrying it, because Iso would be running the room from which it was issued.
She watched the bay lights.
She thought of the Polaris fragment in her chest pocket. The fragment had ridden her chest for two years. She had not taken it out in the holding office, and she had not needed to, because Iso had read the same fragment off her in the way he had always read her, and Iso would not be there to read her the next time.
The fragment would have to ride her chest harder.
She climbed aboard. The hold cycled. The seal log read fourteen hours and counting, and she set the cabin chrono to wake her ten minutes before the impound expired so that she could be on the gangway and ready when Iso Pruvit cleared her, for what would almost certainly be the last time he ever cleared her himself.
She lay down on the bunk.
She did not sleep.
Author’s note: Day Nineteen of the Iron Wake Origins arc. Year 2, Month 11. The UEN cutter Halberd boards the Underweight in transit, and Lieutenant Iso Pruvit walks Anya Rask into a Mimas Station holding office. He impounds one crate. He chooses the crate she can afford to lose, because the cleanest paperwork in the shipment is the crate the chain-of-custody log will read most quietly. The collar pin he is wearing is new, small, and silver, and Anya reads it the way Iso has always read her: Tethys, inner-system enforcement, the end of a six-month arrangement neither of them ever named. They sit across two plastic chairs and a counter the color of bone, and the conversation lasts the three minutes it takes to sign a release notice and not say the things that cannot be said. The fourteen-hour impound is the last courtesy. The pin says so. Anya will walk back aboard the Underweight and know that the next officer to board her skiff will not know which container to open first, and will learn, and Iso will be the one teaching them.
If you enjoyed this story, you can follow the main story arc in The Exodus Rush, the first book in The Vethrak Requiem series.